You wake up and the world is different. Not in the disaster movie sense, but much more painful and purposeful—almost sinister.

Michael Marshall Smith's Time Out is a novella of displacement and unease. Imagine waking up, as normal, but today the world is different: There aren't any people in it.

“Somewhere between 1am and 6am, everybody had disappeared.”

How do you behave? What do you do? How do you change?

That disagreement you had with your wife yesterday doesn't freight so heavily now that the whole slate has been wiped…does it? Should it?

Are you prepared to cope with real emptiness?

Maybe the entire world hasn't changed. Maybe you have.