An explosive new novel brimming with love, secrets, and enchantment by Jandy Nelson, Printz Award–winning and New York Times bestselling author of I’ll Give You the Sun.
Abandonment, sexual assault, child abuse, addiction.
The Fall siblings live in hot Northern California wine country, where the sun pours out of the sky, and the devil winds blow so hard they whip the sense right out of your head.
Years ago, the Fall kids’ father mysteriously disappeared, cracking the family into pieces. Now Dizzy Fall, age twelve, bakes cakes, sees spirits, and wishes she were a heroine of a romance novel. Miles Fall, seventeen, brainiac, athlete, and dog-whisperer, is a raving beauty, but also lost, and desperate to meet the kind of guy he dreams of. And Wynton Fall, nineteen, who raises the temperature of a room just by entering it, is a virtuoso violinist set on a crash course for fame . . . or self-destruction.
Then an enigmatic rainbow-haired girl shows up, tipping the Falls’ world over. She might be an angel. Or a saint. Or an ordinary girl. Somehow, she is vital to each of them. But before anyone can figure out who she is, catastrophe strikes, leaving the Falls more broken than ever. And more desperate to be whole.
With road trips, rivalries, family curses, love stories within love stories within love stories, and sorrows and joys passed from generation to generation, this is the intricate, luminous tale of a family’s complicated past and present. And only in telling their stories can they hope to rewrite their futures.
Don't just take our word for it...
“Sublime, intricate, and dazzling, When the World Tips Over kept opening and opening before me like a glorious map of treasures. I loved all of its delightful, flawed, sensitive characters, and the magic inside each of them. Jandy Nelson has created an epic and intimate tale. I adored it.”
– Helena Fox, award-winning author of How It Feels to Float and The Quiet and the Loud
“In this multigenerational epic sprinkled with magic, Nelson (I’ll Give You the Sun) tackles grief, love, and the ways in which history commingles with the present. . . . Intricately rendered [and told] via myriad alternating perspectives . . . Nelson takes readers on a whirlwind journey toward a profound and satisfying destination.”
– Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[A] complex family saga about self-understanding, relationships, secrets, and passed-down family trauma. . . . Traversing a wide range of topics and emotions through multiple perspectives and formats, World contemplates each with due attention and nuance, [achieving] a quilt-like story both in its warmth and in its patches coming together to make a beautiful narrative.”
– Booklist
Taste the very first page
Encounter #1 with the Rainbow-Haired Girl
The morning of the day twelve-year-old Dizzy Fall walked into the path of the speeding eighteen-wheeler and encountered the rainbow-haired girl, everything was going wrong. In the divorce with her best friend, Lizard, who now went by his real name, Tristan, Lizard-now-Tristan had been granted popularity, a cool haircut, and a girlfriend named Melinda.
Dizzy had been granted nothing.
They’d been a twosome since first grade, wandering around in each other’s innermost secrets, baking through the list of Pastry Magazine’s most ambitious desserts as well as their mutual favorite activity: surfing the inter- net for pertinent information regarding existence. Lizard’s area of expertise was weather and natural disasters while Dizzy’s was all cool things.
Lately those cool things had been stories about saints who rose into the air in fits of ecstasy, Himalayan yogis who could turn their bodies into stone, Buddha, who’d made duplicates of himself and shot fire from his fingers (yes!). Reading about these woo-woo things made Dizzy’s soul buzz and Dizzy wanted a buzzy soul. A buzzy everything.
Also, recently, pre-divorce, Dizzy and Lizard had kissed for three seconds to see if they’d feel the endorphins Lizard learned about online or the spontaneous internal explosions Dizzy read about in the romance novels her mother kept behind the literary ones on the shelf, particularly Live Forever Now starring Samantha Brooksweather, which was Dizzy’s favorite. Lizard thought romance novels were totally useless, but Dizzy learned so much from them. She wanted the door of her wild femininity…
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