The Life of the World to Come - Paperback

The Botanist Mendoza is stranded in the distant past with only her experiments on corn cultivars to pass the time. Such is the punishment for immortals who defy the Company, as she did when she killed six mortal men for the murder of her lover, Edward--who, though he didn't remember their past, seemed to be a precise copy of her first lover, Nicholas, who also died violently. Time slips away from her in fits and starts as three thousand years pass, until the monotony is broken by a timeship crashing into her cornfield, piloted by a man who resembles her dead lovers exactly . . . but has no idea who she is.

Alec Checkerfield, the seventh earl of Finsbury, was born in the wrong time. Raised on a sailing ship by his artificial intelligence companion Captain Morgan and his servants rather than his distant mother and alcoholic father, he dreams of piracy and rebellion on the open seas instead of living in a puritanical future society where all pleasures of the flesh are distasteful, if not illegal. Alec's search for meaning leads him from Mendoza to the secrets of his own nature.

With the Captain helping him, he discovers his path has pitted him against the Company, and that the rebellion he longs for may require a price he is unwilling to pay.