Ever wondered what your life would be if you married your high school sweetheart, or that person you met on the train in Europe?

First-time author (and game designer) Holly Gramazio takes this speculation to the furthest, and most enjoyable, extreme, with her debut novel, The Husbands.

I love this book on every conceivable level. It is flawlessly executed, and an enjoyable read throughout.

A woman returns home to find she has a husband waiting, surprising given that when she left the house, she was single. Even more surprising, she soon finds the husband can be exchanged simply by having him pop up into the attic, for some arbitrary reason. One goes up, another comes down.

It’s to Holly Gramazio’s credit that she doesn’t try to explain how, or why, this peculiar husband-exchange works. A lesser Sci-Fi author might have been caught up explaining the impossible (and in this instance somewhat creaky) mechanism at play here.

But here it just happens and the novel’s protagonist, Lauren, just rolls with it. It’s a post-quantum physics novel, where people’s actions create multiple virtual worlds.

In Lauren’s world, each new husband brings (a slightly) different version of her own life. What would life be if she chose to marry the rich guy, the swinger, the abuser?

Soon, she learns how easy it is to exchange them.

The men are non-the-wiser, assuming the world they occupy is the only one that exists. “She is massively over promising the explanatory power of the attic,” Gramazio writes, explaining how Lauren lures another husband into the space simply by promising a vague surprise up there.

Why commit to a lifetime with someone she just met? At first she rotates through them, in search of a decent husband for an upcoming wedding (Her friends, with minor variations, continue to be in her life in various forms). Then, she tries to find the perfect husband.

Many, she returns instantly. Nose hair? Gone. Chews with his mouth open? Outta here. Hell bent on self-improvement? OK, for a short while, then too exhausting. One texted updates on his bowel movements. Some barbequed things incorrectly. One went running with his ex-girlfriend four times a week. One was rich, but disconnected. Some embarked on DIY projects only to abandon them halfway through.

Though she churns through husbands in the dozens, but can find no pattern beyond “Men she might have liked, and who might have liked her.”

“Every husband, she is pretty sure, is someone she might have met somewhere, somehow if she done things a little differently. Every husband is someone she might have enjoyed spending time with, and who might have enjoyed spending time with her,” Gramazio writes. Which is not to say they all would make for good husbands.

Along the way she starts to understand herself better. “She doesn’t always like the new versions of herself, but they help her understand the edges of who she might be,” Gramazio writes.

And there are secondary advantages to switching worlds. She can take all the vacation time and spend as much of her savings she wants each time out, knowing they will replenish when she hits reset.

“If she keeps changing husbands every couple of days, she thinks, she’ll never have to work again. She can coast forever on the diligence of her past selves, constantly dodging to new worlds where she hasn’t used her sick leave yet,” Gramazio writes.

Perhaps inevitably an existential sadness creeps in. Each time a world vanishes, all the memories of that place vanish for everyone, except her.

New photos appear in her phone of each fresh marriage. But what soon becomes apparent to Lauren is that each wedding ceremony is different. She wears different types of dresses – sun dress, sari, a white jumpsuit. The weddings are held in different spots – a church a community center a bandstand. Even the dinner menu changes up each time.

“As far as she can tell, there’s nothing that has been there through every wedding, nothing that every version of her past self has wanted,” Gramazio writes. Oddly enough, one of the more consistent items in her life is a rubber tree plant that she bought in so many lives that it just started showing up on its own in later husband-verses. It's the very many details like this that makes Gramazio's world so fascinating.

Of course, with the quick swipe nature of Lauren’s world, the reader is reminded of Tinder, Hinge and other dating services that reduce potential partners to a collection of traits. In a world of near-infinite choices, how do you know the one you make is the right one? Or even a good one? And there are deeper philosophical questions at play as well. How much does meeting someone change our life? And how much of our life stays the same due to who we are? Is it possible to have a soul mate, or is falling in love just a result of some random life choices.

She finds one husband, Carter, whom she has a strong connection, but he wanders into the attic when she is out, and poof! He is gone like the rest. She becomes convinced he is her soul mate. But in a subsequent edition of her life, she tracks him down, and tries to get to know him again, only for him to get creeped out by her stalker-ish behavior.

In the end Lauren, and the reader, learns that a life of limitless choices offers no choice at all. And -- spoiler alert -- only when Lauren decides to irrevocably stick with the latest husband does she come to trust her own judgement, for better or worse.