Discovering A New Literary Term

While browsing the New Fiction section of the public library on 124th Street in Harlem, I came upon a novel called Tenderness by Alison MacLeod (Bloomsbury, 2021). According to the flap jacket copy, it is the story of D.H. Lawrence and the writing of his 1928 novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover. (I must confess, I've never read the Lawrence novel, but Tenderness may change that.)

On the back of the book were advance praise blurbs, one of which was from novelist David Leavitt who referred to Tenderness as being part of a literary form called "uchronia."

I'd never seen that word before and since I couldn't find it in any of my dictionaries, I consulted the Internet. Wikipedia defined "uchronia" as "a hypothetical or fictional time period of our world, in contrast to altogether-fictional lands or worlds....Some, however, use uchronia to refer to an alternate history."

Two novels said to fit the alternate history description are The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick and The Plot Against America by Philip Roth.