Matt Haig - How To Stop Time
4⭐
Genre: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Time Travel, Science Fiction, Fantasy
Pages: 345
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Canongate
Date Published: 6th July 2017
Huge thank you to Canongate for sending me a copy of this book and for inviting me to be a part of #CanongateReadalong on Instagram
Book Blurb:
"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 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 behaviour 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.
My Review:
How to Stop Time has a very interesting
premise and explores the meaning of life through someone who ages but doesn’t age
as quickly as an average person. Very enjoyable writing and narrative, especially
the alternating chapters that explore the main characters' lives throughout the
last 400 years and now. Very original and interesting book!
The story follows Tom, who has
this very rare condition that makes him age at a much slower rate than a normal
person would age. Although he only looks like a forty-year-old, in reality, he
is over 400 years old. Being alive since the late 1500s means that he needs to
be constantly on the move, changing his identity. This also means that he can’t
fall in love, connect with people, stay long in one place, or have a home or a
family. Even though over the years he met famous people, travelled all over the
world, saw the world change, and had loads of amazing adventures, he just wants
to stop running and wants to have a quiet life. However, the secret society,
Albatross Society, which looks after people like Tom is not convinced that Tom
should have a simple human life but allows him to have a go for eight years. That’s
when Tom goes back to London and starts working as a history teacher in one of
the secondary schools. There he meets a beautiful French teacher who reminds
him of the love of his life, but also recaps his memory that somewhere out
there is his daughter that needs to be found and who Tom hasn’t seen for more
than 300 years…
I loved the writing of this book,
especially the beautiful inner monologues Tom has about life and what it means
to him. He also explores the pros and cons of living for so long, including
loss, grief, adventures, chance to see the change and history playing out in front
of him. I liked how Tom compared places and societies together from different
historical periods, highlighting similarities and differences in personalities,
beliefs, traditions and cultures. The book itself explores the best and worst
of life and displays to us that we should live for this moment and enjoy ourselves
as much as we can because the world and we are constantly changing and that the
time never stops no matter what.
This book was quite a slow burner
and although I enjoyed this story, I hoped for more action and romance. Especially
I hoped for more romance as the first rule of Tom’s was not to fall in love and
this premise would have made a great forbidden love story together with things
that are already explored in this book. I also think some of the chapters were unnecessary,
especially one where Tom meets F Scott Fitzgerald or goes on a boat to Tahiti…These
chapters didn’t add much to the overall story of this book.
Overall: It was my first Matt
Haig book and I really enjoyed reading it. It was a book with a very unique and
interesting concept, exploring the purpose of life from a very different
perspective. The writing also is very good. My only downside of this book was
the fact that there was an amazing opportunity and premise for exploring a
forbidden romance but it was not taken. However, it is a very unique book and I
would be definitely interested in reading other Matt Haig books to see whether
I would enjoy those, too.
About the Author:
Matt Haig is an author for
children and adults. His memoir Reasons to Stay Alive was a number one
bestseller, staying in the British top ten for 46 weeks. His children’s book A
Boy Called Christmas was a runaway hit and is translated in over 40 languages. It
is being made into a film starring Maggie Smith, Sally Hawkins and Jim
Broadbent and The Guardian called it an ‘instant classic’. His novels for
adults include the award-winning How To
Stop Time, The Radleys, The Humans and the number one bestseller The Midnight
Library.
http://www.matthaig.com/
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