Have you got time for a great novel? (The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger)

Member Name: leetemplar

Product:	The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Date:	05/01/09 (77 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A fantastic, brave and original novel

Disadvantages: The time-hopping can be initially confusing

Time travel is a familiar plot device in fiction from Mark Twain's late 19th Centure satire 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court', via HG Wells's 'The Time Machine', and right up to Doctor Who and Back To The Future.

Audrey Niffenegger's 'The Time Traveler's Wife' puts a whole new spin on time travel, showing the human cost and strain on relationships the non-linear life of a time traveller would have. Henry is the time traveller of the title, a man with an unknown condition that sees him transported through time and space without warning, with him turning up naked and cold in seemingly random locations.

Claire is his wife. She meets Henry when she is a small child, and he is an adult. Henry doesn't meet Claire until she is an adult, and he is in his late 20s. The book is about their bizarre and complicated relationship, and their life coping with Henry's condition until the story reaches a dramatic climax.

Confused? Well the book is so well written that the time-hopping and varying age difference of the characters becomes second nature to the reader. It really is a brilliant novel, a science fiction story that even science fiction-haters will enjoy, and is at times funny, poignant, devastating and sexy.

It is a testament to this novel that its themes have heavily influenced recent episodes of Doctor Who, itself a TV series that helped forge the time travel subgenre.

Summary: A brilliant novel all round.