The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger

Retrieved from: the library
(015602943X), 2004
Suggested by: reviews, possibly Entertainment Weekly?

Very good book. If you like librarians and time-travel, you'll appreciate this book. The premise is that Henry, a librarian at the Newbery Library in Chicago, pops around in time at random, apparently because of a genetic mutation. The traveling is triggered by stress or emotion, or by nothing at all; he compares it to epilepsy at one point. Mostly he goes back in time--there are hints that he returns to times before his birth although we don't see those trips--but occasionally he is able to go forward with great effort. What we do get to see is his trips to 'visit' people in his current, future or past life (time is a little tricky to discuss here): his mother, his wife, himself...

Clare first meets Henry when she is six years old and he is about 30 years older than her. Over the next 12 years she sees him in varying situations and places and ages, and eventually she falls in love with him without him telling her that they are married in the future.

This is a luminous book, especially at the beginning when we are caught up in trying to figure out this confusing world Henry lives in. Once the reader is firmly enmeshed in the story, the problems of this life begin to appear. Henry really has an awful life: ever-present witness, returning again and again, to awful events he can't change. [Although, this is confusing, since he does turn his knowledge of the lottery and the stock market to his own ends.] Clare, conversely, is relatively protected from the horror, but has to deal with his constant disappearances of varying lengths of time. She too knows what is going to happen, sometimes before Henry, and must deal with the genetic effects of his 'condition' on their reproductive life.

I almost want to go back and reread this while charting out their lives, as Niffenegger must have done, to see all the points of intersection. It's quite complex. Which is part of the joy of this book.

The key book discussion question: why is this entitled The Time Traveler's Wife, not just The Time Traveler?