All Our Wrong Todays is on the Canada Reads 2019 longlist. Canada Reads 2019 is about finding one book to move you. The final five books and the panellists defending them will be revealed on Jan. 31, 2019.

The 2019 debates will take place March 25-28, 2019 and will be hosted by Ali Hassan.

You know the future that people in the 1950s imagined we'd have? Well, it happened. In Tom Barren's 2016, humanity thrives in a techno-utopian paradise of flying cars, moving sidewalks and moon bases, where avocados never go bad and punk rock never existed... because it wasn't necessary. Except Tom just can't seem to find his place in this dazzling, idealistic world, and that's before his life gets turned upside down. Utterly blindsided by an accident of fate, Tom makes a rash decision that drastically changes not only his own life but the very fabric of the universe itself. In a time-travel mishap, Tom finds himself stranded in our 2016, what we think of as the real world. For Tom, our normal reality seems like a dystopian wasteland.

But when he discovers wonderfully unexpected versions of his family, his career, and — maybe, just maybe — his soulmate, Tom has a decision to make. Does he fix the flow of history, bringing his utopian universe back into existence, or does he try to forge a new life in our messy, unpredictable reality? (From Penguin Random House)

"There were three main sources of inspiration for this book, spread out over decades. The first comes from my grandfather, who was a chemist. He really believed in his core that science was the answer to all the problems of the future. He also had an extensive collection of 1950s and 1960s sci-fi novels. I loved staring at these garish paintings of robots and rocket ships and futuristic cities. But I was aware of this disconnect — that our reality, our world, didn't happen the way the books depicted it to be.

"The second main inspiration was Expo 86 in Vancouver. Expo 86 was the last World's Fair ever hosted in North America. The expos really defined our vision of the future, but it feels like after Expo 86, we stopped dreaming of the same futures, or at least they started to seem a lot less likely. Those ideas were very present for me. I think as I got older, I was wondering what happened to that future we were promised.

"Then in more recent years, I noticed the rise of dystopian pop culture, whether in YA novels or TV or films. Part of the genesis of this idea was thinking of someone from my grandfather's generation arriving in 2016 and being horrified that the science-first, utopian future they were imagining was just around the corner never happened. It occurred to me that I could combine these ideas: someone from this utopian version of the present coming to our actual present."