This is a Guardian book review of Chloe Benjamin's third novel, Under Story, which imagines a parallel "duoverse" where time runs backwards, joining a small literary tradition of reverse-chronology fiction that includes Martin Amis's Time's Arrow and Ian McEwan's The Cockroach. The reviewer finds the concept intriguing but argues the novel's execution is clumsy, saying Benjamin's constant over-explaining of her invented world's rules undermines the story rather than deepening it.

The novel follows Laurel and Eli, a grieving couple mourning their son Silas, who travel through a portal beneath Antarctic ice into the duoverse, where the dead are born from the earth and age backwards while the living grow younger before eventually being "unborn". Despite the grotesque, body-horror premise—complete with cancers unblooming and toddlers in dementia clinics—the 500-page book unfolds as a sentimental melodrama about parental devotion, which the reviewer likens to "Orpheus and Eurydice meets Interstellar" but finds bogged down by unnecessary exposition, such as explanations of how Christmas still exists in a world where Jesus hasn't yet been born.