It triggers an avalanche of dread that comes plunging over Polly, and her ears and airways fill with it, and for a second she is too heavy to move. A woman in line beside Polly suddenly breaks down: “It is an unacceptable noise.

Information is thin on the ground and all around the airport, people are regretting their decisions. The sense of panic among the time travellers, who are herded from one bureaucratic nightmare to another, is clear. Lim’s lucid language establishes Polly’s predicament from the off as she leaves Frank in quarantine in Texas and heads to Houston (one of many neat references) for take-off. The country, meanwhile, has split in two – a self-contained north and a plague riddled south – a world where soulless officialdom and aggressive policing contrasts with the scale of human grief, a new nightmarish America that is horribly recognisable. Given visas based on their skills, they carry out years of work for pittance in order to gain their freedom. The time travellers are prisoners in everything but name.

In 1998, the year which Polly travels to, conditions are equally grim. In 1981 people are dying in such numbers that the value of a single life has lost all currency. Families are rent apart because of momentous world events. Like the best dystopian worlds, Thea Lim’s debut resonates with the present.

The TimeRaiser initiative she signs up to hopes to mitigate the virus by sending people into the future to prevent further outbreaks and rebuild a broken country. Enter Polly Nader, a 23-year-old heroine from Buffalo, who chooses to participate in a sketchy time travel programme in order to save her fiancé Frank. Medicine to stop the virus is so rare that those who want it must have someone in their lives willing to make a huge sacrifice. In 1980s America, a deadly pandemic has gripped the country.

An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim