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Up the Creek Book Club



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The Time Traveler's Wife

by Audrey Niffenegger

April 2005

Synopsis

Time Traveler's Wife"A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant."

"An enchanting debut and a spellbinding tale of fate and belief in the bonds of love, The Time Traveler's Wife is destined to captivate readers for years to come."

(Publisher)

Reviews

  • "... Niffenegger, despite her moving, razor-edged prose, doesn't claim to be a romantic. She writes with the unflinching yet detached clarity of a war correspondent standing at the sidelines of an unfolding battle. She possesses a historian's eye for contextual detail. This is no romantic idyll." (USA Today)

  • "... what The Time Traveler's Wife does best is to show the inner life of an enduring relationship as only its protagonists can know it." (The Washington Post)

  • "Young lovers often believe themselves crossed by fate or by time, but those in Niffenegger’s spirited first novel have more reason than most. Henry suffers from Chrono-Impairment—a quasi-medical condition that catapults him, unwillingly, from one random point in time to another. Clare first meets him in 1977, when she is six and he materializes near her parents’ garden as a 36 year-old from 2000; he returns regularly throughout her childhood from different times in their shared future. At last, when Clare is twenty and Henry twenty-eight, they meet in his present, and the relationship begins in earnest. But romance proves even trickier than usual when one person keeps vanishing to distant, and occasionally dangerous, times. Niffenegger plays ingeniously in her temporal hall of mirrors, but fails to make the connection between the lovers as compelling as their odd predicament." (The New Yorker)

Book Club Rating and Comments

Most of us loved this book. It was a very interesting premise. The time line followed Clare's life with Henry coming and going, past and present. A wonderful first novel. We look forward to Ms. Niffenegger's future books.

If you or your book club has read this book and would like to share your comments, please email us at upthecreekbc@yahoo.com.