A national survey of senior secondary English curriculum content has confirmed that contemporary literature predominates among set texts, being seen as an "essential" category for study because of its "relevance" in helping students "understand the world in which they live." Perhaps uncontentious -- depending on the meaning of that phrase "contemporary literature": is it what's written in our own time, or also set in our own time? Too much of the latter could mean that students' reading confines them narrowly to the here and now. Part of our responsibility as educators is to help our students go beyond the familiar, and to reframe their experience of the world in which they live by introducing them to worlds elsewhere. Their understanding needs to move across time as well as across different places. In considering what these principles imply in practice for the selection and interpretation of texts, this article combines the perspectives of teacher, curriculum designer and fiction writer.