How To Stop Time
A Novel
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4.2 • 186 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A novel about love, loss and living in the moment, from the bestselling author of The Humans
The first rule is that you don’t fall in love. There are other rules too, but that is the main one. No falling in love. No staying in love. No daydreaming of love. Because otherwise, of course, you slowly lose your mind . . .
Tom Hazard has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary forty-one-year-old, but he was born in 1581. Owing to a rare condition, he’s been alive for centuries. From Shakespeare’s England to Jazz Age Paris to voyaging the Pacific alongside Captain Cook, Tom has seen a lot, and he now craves an ordinary life.
Always changing his identity to stay alive, Tom now has the perfect cover—working as a history teacher at a London school. Here, he can teach the kids about wars and witch hunts as if he’d never witnessed them first-hand. He can try to tame the past that is quickly catching up with him. The only thing Tom can’t do is fall in love.
How to Stop Time is a wild, bittersweet, time-travelling story about losing and finding yourself, about the certainty of change, about the mistakes humans are doomed to repeat.
And about the lifetimes it can take to learn how to live.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
How good is this book? Benedict Cumberbatch was signed to star in the film adaption even before its release. Matt Haig has updated a fairly familiar idea—a band of immortals battling their extraordinary fate—and carved a deeply affecting, totally charming novel. The story's lead, Tom Hazard, is a man who's been alive for centuries and lived everywhere (we particularly loved the pages spent in Elizabethan London), but he has always struggled to get over a forbidden love from Shakespearean times. Tom's plight had us bewitched from start to finish.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tom Hazard doesn't age. Or, he does, but very, very slowly. He was born in France in 1581, but like other "albatrosses" (those who carry the burden of living forever), a century to him passes like a decade or less. In this enthralling quest through time, Haig (Reasons to Stay Alive) follows his protagonist through the Renaissance up to "now," when Tom works as a history teacher in London. As Tom goes on various recruiting missions for the Albatross Society, the setting of the story moves from Shakespeare's Globe to F. Scott Fitzgerald's Paris to Bisbee, Ariz., and other far reaches of the earth. The main rule of the Albatross Society is that, in order to stay protected from a group of scientists who want to study and confirm the existence of the albatrosses, an albatross cannot fall in love. And yet, all the while, Tom nurses a broken heart and searches for his long lost daughter, Marion, who is also an albatross. "Humans don't learn from history" is one of the lessons Tom learns, and, despite everything he witnesses over the expansiveness of history, nothing can cure him of lovesickness. His persistence through the centuries shows us that the quality of time matters more than the quantity lived.
Customer Reviews
Amazing!
I loved the story and the writers style. Beautifully written. Poignant and heart felt.
Great read
Really liked this book. Not as much as Humans but a great read. Better than The Midnight Library.
Really great fiction
I want to give this 5 stars but it’s just so near incredible I’ll give it one off. I have few bad things to say about it. It’s what you expect, but with a self-reflection twist that really makes it great overall.