Everything Happens So Much

by Andrew H. Murray

Genres: General Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Humorous sci-fi

Synopsis

TheMidnightLibrarymeetsEverythingEverywhereAllatOnceinthisunputdownableadventureaboutawomanwhosefantasiesofescapingherhumdrumlifeinadvertentlydisruptthefabricofreality.

Esme Good is an unremarkable young woman working a dead-end job in an unremarkable city. Her only escape is The Elsewheres: tiny potions that allow you to disappear for fifteen minutes into alternate versions of yourself. Sadly, these only confirm her suspicion that she is, in a cosmic sense, living her worst life.
 
Then, after a workplace incident that could have happened to anyone, Esme unintentionally becomes the most important person in this—or perhaps any—universe. We don't have time to get into exactly why this is, but to remedy it, Esme must find an uncharted land and fulfil a prophecy that has been on hold since the dawn of time.
 
She has spent her whole life trying not to become a main character. Now, a lot of things are about to happen to her: in fact, everything, and so much.

Release date: November 10, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 272

Sample

Esme was having a great evening.

She was standing on the deck of a beautiful, clean-lined pleasure yacht, holding a brightly coloured drink. The drink was in a weighty crystal tumbler, and the tumbler had a small umbrella poking out of the top. The timbers of the deck smelled of fresh pine; the drink smelled of oranges. The two smells complemented each other perfectly.

She was dressed in a flattering silken garment that accentuated all the bits of her she might want accentuated, and discreetly vanished all the bits of her she didn’t. And, not that Esme spent all of her time thinking about this, but her body felt much firmer beneath the garment than normal. She had placed a hand on her stomach earlier on and nearly broken a finger on a surprisingly solid abdominal muscle.

The yacht itself was moored a little way outside a pleasant harbour, presumably because the vessel was too big for any of the available parking places (berths? She was pretty sure they were called berths).

Beyond the crisp lines of the harbour was a row of attractively colourful squat buildings, which were just starting to turn on strings of charming low-wattage light bulbs for the evening’s visitors. And beyond the buildings stood white stucco blocks that must house the residents of the harbour city – prosperous residents, from the look of it. Above the scene, a couple of gulls hovered back and forth, giving the impression that there was nowhere they’d rather be.

The sun was sinking towards the horizon, and had just reached an angle that could have been expressly calculated to give Esme and her companions a warm, gleaming look, a look of youth and vitality that implied that a lot of the partygoers currently on deck would not wait long before pairing off and taking advantage of the luxurious cabins below.

The other guests were being so deferential that Esme had the distinct impression she owned the whole yacht. Even if she didn’t, she was certainly hosting the party, from the solicitous looks the tall young waiting staff were giving her as they glided past. A few minutes ago, one of them had asked in a discreet murmur if she was happy to open the next case of champagne, so she must be the host. She had nodded, which was another clue.

Around her, a few of the other guests had gathered in a small, appreciative semicircle, and were eagerly agreeing with whatever she said. So far, she had mostly heard herself remarking how beautifully the sunlight was hitting the buildings of the small harbour town. This was not an original observation, not by a long way, and yet when she had made it, the people around her had all nodded and told her what an interesting thought that was, as if she was the first person ever to spot that the sunset light hitting a small touristy harbour town bounces rather prettily off the stonework.

Canapés were being offered around. Esme had eaten a few, and they had the combination of delicacy, intricacy and actually-containing-a-decent-mouthful-of-foodiness that she knew marked them out as extremely expensive.

A small amber light flashed twice in the corner of Esme’s vision. She ignored it.

She turned back to the young man who was speaking, not because he’d thought of anything worth saying but because he clearly craved her attention. She couldn’t help noticing that he was good-looking, with a clear, tanned brow and the sort of muscular features that would look cruel if he wasn’t currently shaping them to be as gentle and puppyish as possible.

‘… that’s just it,’ he was saying. ‘And it reminded me of something I often think, which is that what you’ve done for all of us has been so important. So important.’

A general murmur of assent scurried around the semicircle surrounding Esme.

‘I’ve hardly done anything,’ she heard herself saying. ‘I wish I could have done more by now.’

The young man shook his head. ‘I mean… where can I even start? You’ve erased a dozen diseases, which between them were killing hundreds of thousands of people a year. And you did so in a way that practically ensured they’d never come back, never even evolve. You permanently ended the war with an entire family of horrible conditions.’

‘You’re very kind,’ she said. So I profiteered my way onto this yacht, she thought. Typical.

‘And then,’ the young man continued, ‘you gave away the cures. I mean, you could have made so much money if you’d decided that was what you wanted. But you decided to forgo billions. Maybe trillions. Because you knew it was the right thing to do.’

Oh. ‘Well, it was only—’

‘But in spite of being determined to give so much away, your innovations in other spheres have made our company – your company – a world leader. And yet you spend so much of your energy giving to others, rather than taking for yourself. It’s humbling.’

Another murmur of enthusiasm confirmed that the handsome young man was speaking on behalf of all those present.

The small amber light flashed again in the corner of Esme’s vision, now not twice but three times. Damn.

‘I’m flattered,’ she said. ‘But it’s just what anyone would have done, given the circumstances.’

Someone touched her on the elbow to announce their presence, quite gently, and she looked around.

At her side, giving her a benevolent smile, was the most handsome man she’d ever seen. ‘My wife’s being modest again,’ he said, and the semicircle laughed. He turned to her, and in his eyes Esme saw the kind of true, timeless adoration that can build cities, tear down walls, a love that creates families, that lasts a lifetime, that conquers death itself. ‘Darling, you know it’s true.’

She smiled back at him. She couldn’t remember anything more perfect than this moment. She wanted to stay here for ever.

The words SESSION ENDING flashed across her field of view, in harsh, unfriendly letters. In her ears, a sickening metallic beep sounded.

‘Darling, are you all right? Darling?’

SESSION ENDING

SESSION ENDING

The distant orb of the sun vanished first, and its light hovered uncertainly in the air, not knowing where it was heading because suddenly it couldn’t remember where it had come from. It was followed into oblivion by the horizon, which started disappearing, a wave of nothingness racing towards the yacht. The harbour town rolled itself up into a pinprick of light, hoovering the gulls up with it. The beach curled up like an old Rizla.

In another fraction of a second, the waiters had gone, the semicircle of hangers-on, the smart young man. The timbers of the yacht slid over each other like a collapsing house of cards. The second last thing she remembered seeing was the umbrella in her silly orange drink, and the very last thing was the face of her husband, now completely in isolation. His grin disappeared first, and then the rest of him, which was just as horrible as it sounds.

SESSION ENDED

And then Esme blinked, and when she opened her eyes, she was once again sitting on her squeaky cheap yellow sofa, and looking ahead at the off-white unadorned wall of her undersized rented flat.

The beeping, which had been coming from inside her own head, stopped. The words COME BACK SOON played across her field of vision.

Well, she thought, that was an unusually good one. Time to head to work.

Consider Esme Good, walking along a city street on a hot July evening, dodging the puddles left by a recent summer rainstorm, walking with a customary slouch that might in anyone else be the result of a temporary low mood, but which in her case has settled in for the duration. She is walking from the train towards her office; almost everyone else is walking from their offices towards the train. Say what you like about working nights, you get an easier commute.

Despite her heading the opposite direction to the crowd, she is managing somehow to go unnoticed. Anyone who does notice her has put her from their mind before their foot next hits the pavement.

Esme Good. Average height, average build, average hair. She would have made a great spy, but for the twin facts that a) she was so unobtrusive nobody had ever noticed her long enough to ask if she’d be interested, and b) she had never shown an aptitude for languages, analysis, pattern-forming or any of the other skills that might have complemented her unobtrusive presence.

A few hours from now, a police sketch artist will be asked to draw a picture of her, and is going to struggle to pin her features down, not because they’re bad-looking or mismatched but simply because they don’t seem to be in the same room as the rest of the world.

Esme Good: crossing the road against the flow, walking the sprawling concrete canyons where a thousand things might happen but where in her case very few actually have. Esme Good, wearing a coat that has never been in or out of fashion, scruffily comfortable trainers that she’ll be glad of before long, and leading a life that up until now biographers might describe as ‘private’, in the biographers’ code that translates as ‘a nightmare to research’.

This, of course, is the day everything changes, and while you already know that, Esme is wholly unaware that she’s about to be hoicked out of her drab daily routine as easily as an oyster is removed from its shell.i She doesn’t have a clue yet, and it feels kinder to let her labour on in ignorance for these last few hours.

Also, before we go any further, I’ve forgotten to mention that Esme is in a completely different universe to you and me. Sorry. That’s a rookie error.

Esme’s world is like yours and mine. Very like it. There are cities, and towns, and rolling hills and fields, and beautiful wild landscapes, and you would recognise most of the flora and fauna. It’s basically the same. But there are a few very minor differences too – really, they’re nothing to worry about, just a couple of tiny things here and there. I won’t explain them just yet, as there’s no sense in getting things out of order, but I suspect you’ll notice them as they crop up.

But as I say, you don’t have to worry about it for the moment. It turns out that office jobs are more similar across realities than you might believe. And while the above all sounds a bit science fiction, this book is about a sensation common to you, me and everyone we know: the feeling of having absolutely no idea how to proceed with your life.

Back we go to Esme, before she gets lost and wanders out of her own story. Zoom back in as she walks from the bus stop through the centre of her home city. Zoom further in as she reaches the street she works on, an old-fashioned cobbled one just off the main shopping street; further in as she enters a dingy foyer.

She put her bag on the conveyor belt to be scanned by security, only to realise she’d left her pass in the bag for the second time this week. She pled briefly with the guard, retrieved the bag, retrieved the pass, re-scanned her bag, went through the gate, subjected herself to a metallic-wand-waving that ascertained she was carrying nothing more dangerous than half an old baguette in her left coat pocket, and grabbed her bag on her way to the lift.

Esme got into the lift, saw that someone had already pressed the button for her floor, looked again, realised they’d pressed the button below the one she needed, started to lean forward, halfway through the movement doubted herself and leaned back, then, when someone asked her if she was all right, muttered ‘yes’, and spent the next fifteen seconds with a slow pinkish feeling of embarrassment spreading across her brow, before getting out at the floor the other people in the lift were getting out at, pretending to see a message on her phone, and then walking into the stairwell and climbing two flights of stairs.

As far as she could tell, this sort of thing happened to Esme more than to most other people.

At the time all this started, Esme was in her late twenties, although any observers would have noted that she just sort of felt a little older than that. This might have been due to a look she wore of very slight but constant panic. It was a look that suggested that she knew things in general weren’t meant to be like this, but that she couldn’t define either how they were meant to be, nor – even if she could have done that – what steps were required to get herself to that happier place.

It was the look of someone permanently wrestling with the question of whether they had left the oven on as they left the house. It was the look of a deer that thinks it’s heard a twig snap but isn’t sure in which direction, or for that matter whether it definitely heard it, and which would feel mortified running for no reason so might just let itself get eaten instead out of sheer awkwardness.

This look had been lurking in and around Esme’s eyes for such a long time it was now a permanent part of her facial features, and whenever she spoke to someone else for any length of time, they were eventually consumed by a slight worry that they too might have left the oven on before leaving their own house.

She procrastinated a lot, and she dreamed of how things might be different, but she’d never quite managed any of it, for various reasons we’ll get into shortly. She made a lot of notes, of beaches and mountains to visit, interesting little cocktails to mix, hobbies to take up. But all the beautiful beaches and mountains had gone untravelled-to. The interesting cocktails had gone un-shaken, the late-night conversations about the meaning of it all un-had.

Esme’s lists grew and grew – languages to learn, societies to join, musical instruments to try – but as each year drew to a close, she couldn’t help noticing that she generally ended up with nothing more than a slightly longer list. Even the entries that you might think would be easy – ‘change hall light bulb’, that sort of thing – even they tended to creep somehow from one list to the next.

Because of all the time she spent making firm resolutions to start living, most of Esme’s conversations were shorter than they should have been, which is a shame, because a few good long conversations might have gone some way towards clearing the look from her brow. But those conversations had never happened, so she had kept on working away, and nothing much had changed, and the moment at which everything would change shuffled closer, so carefully that not even a twig snapped beneath its feet.

And to be fair to Esme’s subconscious, in a cosmic sense, she absolutely had left the oven on.

Nonetheless, she was in her office now, and, to her credit, she was about to try and change something big in her life. Something that, like a second-tier light bulb, had been broken and in need of alteration for a very long time, and which would – if remedied – make her life much better.

And if it didn’t go according to plan? Esme reflected that even if it didn’t, even if today turned out just like all the other inadequate days she’d lived through, even if the next nine hours would be boring, and draining, and that halfway through she’d be dying for a bit of chemical stimulation, at least she was in one piece and in a safe place. At least the odds were that nothing actively bad would happen in here, compared with the sea of troubles she might fall into out there.

Sorry, Esme.

i In other words, it’s going to take special equipment, she’s going to suffer terribly, and at the end of it, everyone involved will wonder if it was worth the effort and resolve not to do it again, no matter how much they’ve had to drink.

10.17 p.m., and the coffee machine was undergoing one of its periodic crises of confidence.

During these spells, it would refuse to produce anything except a thick, tarry gunge, which it would grudgingly ooze into the base of your cup. If you insisted for long enough that you wanted something else, after a lengthy delay the machine would eventually serve up its alternative: a large cup of lukewarm water that smelled as if it might have been spritzed a few days ago, just once, with a coffee-scented room spray.

Esme, sitting at her desk and looking at the machine as it maintained its constant quiet burble of discontent, reflected that she and the coffee machine were leading pretty similar lives, with the potential difference that she relied on the machine for coffee, where it didn’t rely on anyone else for anything at all.

She opened her notebook and scribbled in it: Pharmaceutical billionaire. Take course in chemistry/take up philanthropy/try to learn sailing?

As if in response to her half-formed wish, there was a grinding noise at the side of her cubicle. A poster of her favourite film, Attack of the Fifty-Foot Man, was being winched upwards by a little roller-blind mechanism, operated from the other side.i Eventually, a face poked through. It was a friendly face, and while it looked mildly pleasant, it also gave the impression that there was a lot going on beneath the mildly pleasant exterior that might surprise you.

‘Coffee?’

‘I don’t think it’s going to play ball tonight.’

‘No, you’re probably right. I could go to the one upstairs.’

‘It’s all right. I’m trying to cut down.’

‘Suit yourself. Back in a minute.’

Talmeck had already been at his desk when she arrived. He was usually at his desk when she arrived, doing something complicated with the spreadsheets displayed across his multiple screens.

Esme had been in this job twelve years, and was still using the single screen she had started with. Talmeck had turned up three years ago, and in the intervening time the number of screens at his desk had mushroomed to five.

He had become Esme’s closest friend in the place, not least because he was actually near her age, unlike most of their co-workers. He was also a nice person, and furthermore he was a rare colleague because you could tell him about the mad thing that had just happened without worrying that he would respond with something even madder, therefore blunting your original mad anecdote and instead giving you an extra one that you would then have to hold on to until you could confide in someone else later.

In fact – although she would never mention it to him – since they had met, Talmeck had become her closest friend in the world. The reason she didn’t mention it was that even despite that, they didn’t see a huge amount of each other, and she’d be rather embarrassed to say how close she felt they were, because there were still enough spare hours in the week for him to be much closer to plenty of other people. Not only that, but she was aware that for all their friendship, she didn’t really know much about his inner life. He was the person she would choose to confide in, but to be honest she had no idea if she was his.

Still. Tonight was the night things were going to change. She couldn’t stay here for ever just because of Talmeck. They’d still be friends tomorrow, she knew it. And, she hoped, for the rest of her life.

Talmeck got back to his desk, holding two coffees.

‘You drinking both of those?’

‘Well, I know you’re trying to cut down.’

‘Not to nothing, though.’

He passed one through the hole in the cubicle wall.

‘Thanks.’

Talmeck blew on his froth. ‘So, is tonight the night?’

‘That’s the plan.’

‘When are you doing it?’

‘Before first break. I’ve told David I need a word with him.’

‘Well, let me know before you go in, and I’ll light a candle and say a prayer.’ He looked back to his many screens, and Esme thought she may as well do a bit of work in her last night in the job, before she had her word with David and left this place for ever.

Coffee here; system cued up; next call ready to deliver. She pressed the green tile on the screen and waited for the crackle.

Esme’s job was simple. Headphones on; press button to connect her to caller; listen to people’s complaints; ensure complaints went no further. Her office was the GMCL, the General Municipal Complaints Line, and Esme was on the night shift, meaning she got the complainants who were sleepless as well as angry about their general municipal services.

Her desk was, as she was frequently reminded, the city’s principal means of taking the temperature of its citizens, ensuring the authorities were doing everything possible to help them and being clear with them about what assistance the city could and (more often) couldn’t provide. At other points she had been told her desk was ‘the front line’, ‘the trenches’ and ‘the last redoubt’, along with a number of other inappropriate military metaphors, which did at least convey the fact that she spent most of her time bored and the remainder with strangers wanting her dead.

Everyone who rang had a story. Bins not emptied; bins blown away in a storm; bins too small; bins subject of dispute with neighbour. About a third of the calls on any given night would be unrelated to bins, and these were a little more interesting: dispute with landlord; dispute with tenant (Esme had fielded calls from both ends of a landlord – tenant dispute within the same hour on more than one occasion); taps not working; taps impossible to turn off; taps producing sinister brown gel; sinister brown gel had dried up. On and on it went.

She had read once about a small sea creature that fed itself by swallowing enormous amounts of seawater hundreds of times its own weight each day, and filtering out the tiny morsels of nutrition from the ocean of dross passing by. Soon after getting the job, she had realised this was exactly her position in the world, except – and this was crucial – she wasn’t allowed to do any filtering.

Her role was to prevent any callers from getting through to the management team, who lurked in private rooms at the far end of her floor. They didn’t seem to be doing very much, but Esme had been privately assured that their work was so vital to keeping the city functioning that more than two or three interruptions in a night and the whole place would fall apart, so it was vital she kept callers away under almost every circumstance.

Most callers didn’t even get through to her level, due to a triage system that informed them that Esme and her colleagues were experiencing unprecedentedly high call volumes, but when they did, few were put off by her usual inability to help. Many of them, she sensed, just wanted to stay on the phone to her. It was in some ways like being a therapist or a social worker, except without the pay of the former or the glamorous jet-setting lifestyle of the latter.

Still, she had her method. The basics had been handed down from head office, but she had made her own improvements over the last dozen years. For every call, people needed something. Even if Esme couldn’t provide exactly what they needed – a new bin, say – they still needed to be heard. And she had worked out how to listen like nobody else. Above her desk, her own personal guide on how to have a successful call was taped up, in a neat bullet-point list:

And finally, the most important one:

She didn’t know it, but a lot of people came away from their call with Esme encouraged, ready to make changes in their lives. As Talmeck watched her, he had often reflected what a pity it was that she wasn’t able to apply those lessons to herself.

None of Esme’s particular unhappiness about her work seemed to affect Talmeck, who had spent less than a week on General Complaints when the management had realised he had more talent than anyone else on the floor, and had promoted him to a role Esme never understood, in the City Story division, in which he was helping to communicate the city’s narrative in a convincing and upbeat way. He still took the occasional call, but as he told Esme, it was only for practice, and t. . .