The Time Traveler's Wife

Author: Audrey Niffenegger

Ever since H.G. Wells, time travel has been one of the staples of science fiction. Yet with rare exceptions, such as the surreal comedy of Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse Five, it has remained something of a specialist taste. Non-sf readers seem to be made uncomfortable by the notion that time might be fluid, that we might literally go out to encounter the past or the future. But in her debut novel Audrey Niffenegger solved that conundrum, writing a time travel story that enjoyed massive popularity, mostly outside science fiction. Her secret was to take the central conceit of Slaughterhouse Five, the idea that the central character is cut loose from time, travelling helplessly backwards and forwards along the length of his life, and put it to the service of a romance. The narrator, our point of identification with the story, is a woman living her life normally as we do; her lover, her husband, is a man travelling helplessly backwards and forwards in time whose wild journey might intersect with her life at any point, at any age. How can a romance be sustained when its ending is known even before it begins? How, as you get older, can you sustain a relationship with someone who might be an old man or an infant the next time you lay eyes on him?It is hard to do something original with time travel, but Niffenegger managed it, producing an international best seller in the process.