Reversal Causality - Kim Aronson

Eli Kaplan is seventy-two years old, living alone in a duplex in St. Paul, and he has just published a novel that knows something it shouldn't.

Told in reverse, from the quiet discipline of old age back through the collapse of a marriage, a breakdown that left doctors with no explanation, and a love that may not have been freely chosen, Reversal Causality unravels a life shaped by an extraordinary secret: Eli can change the world by wanting to. A parking spot opens. A fever breaks under his hand. A book deal arrives at exactly the right moment. But every gift has a cost, and the cost is always paid by someone else.

This is the story of a man tracing his own footprints backward through life, discovering who was walking behind him all along. It is a novel about the difference between luck and theft, between love and influence, and about the slow, devastating work of learning that the life you built was financed by people who never knew they were paying.