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First Published:
Feb 2018, 336 pages
Paperback:
Jun 2019, 352 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Lisa Butts
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A love story across the ages - and for the ages - about a man lost in time, the woman who could save him, and the lifetimes it can take to learn how to live.
"The first rule is that you don't fall in love,' he said… 'There are other rules too, but that is the main one. No falling in love. No staying in love. No daydreaming of love. If you stick to this you will just about be okay.'"
Tom Hazard has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but owing to a rare condition, he's been alive for centuries. Tom has lived history - performing with Shakespeare, exploring the high seas with Captain Cook, and sharing cocktails with Fitzgerald. Now, he just wants an ordinary life.
So Tom moves back his to London, his old home, to become a high school history teacher - the perfect job for someone who has witnessed the city's history first hand. Better yet, a captivating French teacher at his school seems fascinated by him. But the Albatross Society, the secretive group which protects people like Tom, has one rule: Never fall in love. As painful memories of his past and the erratic behavior of the Society's watchful leader threaten to derail his new life and romance, the one thing he can't have just happens to be the one thing that might save him. Tom will have to decide once and for all whether to remain stuck in the past, or finally begin living in the present.
How to Stop Time is a bighearted, wildly original novel about losing and finding yourself, the inevitability of change, and how with enough time to learn, we just might find happiness.
PART ONE
Life Among the Mayflies
I am old.
That is the main thing to tell you. The thing you are least likely to believe. If you saw me you would probably think I was about forty, but you would be very wrong.
I am old – old in the way that a tree, or a quahog clam, or a Renaissance painting is old.
To give you an idea: I was born well over four hundred years ago on the third of March 1581, in my parents' room, on the third floor of a small French château that used to be my home. It was a warm day, apparently, for the time of year, and my mother had asked her nurse to open all the windows.
'God smiled on you,' my mother said. Though I think she might have added that – should He exist – the smile had been a frown ever since.
My mother died a very long time ago. I, on the other hand, did not.
You see, I have a condition.
I thought of it as an illness for quite a while, but illness isn't really the right word. Illness suggests sickness, and wasting away. ...
The love story aspect of the novel is not its greatest strength. For history lovers, however, there is a lot more to admire. In flashbacks to Tom's many former lives, Haig takes readers to Elizabethan London, where Tom evocatively captures his surroundings, "The competing shouts and cries of traders. The drunken laughter of the ale-sozzled. The grunts and moos and hisses of assorted animals."..continued
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(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
Deborah Harkness, author of The All Souls Trilogy Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project
Compelling and full of life's big questions, How To Stop Time is a book you will not be able to put down. Jeanette Winterson, author of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin. Kate Williams, author of Becoming Queen Victoria
Inventive, exciting, moving and bursting with insight about history, time and what it is to be human. Marian Keyes, author of The Woman Who Stole My Life
I loved How to Stop Time, it's a beautiful and necessary book. I feel very lucky to have read it. It is magical, intriguing, and at times, very sad. A triumph. Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods
Matt Haig has an empathy for the human condition, the light and the dark of it, and he uses the full palette to build his excellent stories. Stephen Fry
Matt Haig is astoundingIn 1599, the early days of Tom Hazard's long life, his quasi-immortality results in a charge of witchcraft leveled against both himself and his mother, and he is forced to witness the harrowing ordeal of her trial. The belief in witchcraft was common in England at this time, upheld both by Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603) and her successor King James 1 (1603-1625). This belief is evident in a number of plays from the period, most memorably in Shakespeare's Macbeth, in which the prophecies of the three witches drive the action. James I had a history of persecuting those believed to be witches, and even wrote a book about them called Daemonologie in 1597 when he was King of Scotland, though he grew to question these beliefs in his later years.
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