Liz Hall

Liz Hall is the fifteen-year-old protagonist of Gabrielle Zevin's novel Elsewhere — a girl who is killed in a hit-and-run accident and wakes up on a ship heading to Elsewhere, the afterlife where everyone ages backwards from the age they died until they are babies again, and are then sent back to Earth to be reborn. Liz's challenge is to accept her death, come to terms with the life she won't get to live, and find meaning in an existence that runs counter to everything she understood about how time works.

Zevin — who later wrote Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — brings to Elsewhere the same interest in how people find meaning across unconventional timelines that characterizes her more recent work. Liz's grief for her own lost future, and her eventual acceptance of and engagement with the world she has arrived in, is handled with genuine emotional intelligence rather than easy comfort.

Elsewhere is a young adult novel with philosophical ambitions beyond its genre conventions — it takes seriously the question of what matters in a life, and what it means to love people you will eventually have to leave. Published in 2005, it remains one of Zevin's most distinctive early works.