Holly Smale

Holly Smale brings her comic timing and interest in characters who feel out of step with the world to Cassandra in Reverse. The novel follows Cassandra Dankworth, a highly structured, candid woman whose carefully ordered day collapses when she is dumped, fired, and denied her usual café treat. She then discovers that she can move backward through time and repeatedly tries to repair what went wrong. The speculative device gives Smale room to explore habit, communication, family, self-knowledge, and the limits of treating life as a problem with one correct solution. Penguin identifies it as Smale's first novel for a general readership after the bestselling Geek Girl and The Valentines books for younger readers. Smale was diagnosed as autistic at thirty-nine and discusses neurodiversity publicly, context that informs her work without reducing Cassandra to a lesson or case study. The book first appeared in the United Kingdom as The Cassandra Complex and was later issued there under its American title.