The Whitbread Prize–winning author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit delivers a novel that “transports us to something like the future of our own planet” (Washington Post Book World).

On the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet—pristine and plentiful, as our own was 65 million years ago, before we took it to the edge of destruction.

Off the air, Billie Crusoe and the renegade Robo sapien Spike are falling in love. Along with Captain Handsome and Pink, they're assigned to colonize the new blue planet.

But when a technical maneuver intended to make it habitable backfires, Billie and Spike's flight to the future becomes a surprising return to the distant past, and they discover that “everything is imprinted forever with what once was.”