Monday, January 25, 2010 07:00 PM
Staff Pick
"Inspired by her grandparents' love story in which the grandmother outlived her husband by nearly three decades, Niffenegger has invented Henry and Clare, and their unique and complicated love story involving the ability to live in the past and future in an unpredictable parallel. Delightful, imaginative, with an unforgettable conclusion."
Recommended by Donna, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review:
"A powerfully original love story." People
Review:
"Spirited...Niffenegger plays ingeniously in her temporal hall of mirrors." The New Yorker
Review:
"[A] highly original first novel....[A] soaring love story illuminated by dozens of finely observed details and scenes....[L]eaves a reader with an impression of life's riches and strangeness rather than of easy thrills." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Review:
"[C]leverly executed and tastefully furnished if occasionally overwrought....A Love Story for educated, upper-middle-class tastes...it could have some of that long-ago book's commercial potential, too." Kirkus Reviews
Review:
"The premise may sound strange, but Niffenegger infuses her love story with such bittersweet tenderness that it becomes credible." Orlando Sentinel
Review:
"In Audrey Niffenegger's debut novel,
The Time Traveler's Wife, we have the time-travel love story par excellence, with a remarkable new twist on this seductive but often predictable genre."
Chicago TribuneReview:
"[A]n unabashed homage to love, a tear-jerker of the first order which also happens to be an absorbing existential exploration of 'being' and temporality." Literary Review
Review:
"This is Niffenegger's first novel. It's amazing and wonderful (except for a trickle of sap at the end), and I wish I could go back in time to the day I started reading it and read it all over again." Detroit Free Press
Review:
"At turns playful, wearisome, and moving....Yet this lengthy novel is not all it could have been; at times, Niffenegger seems to be working out an idea rather than shaping a story." The Boston Globe
Review:
"As
The Time Traveler's Wife heads toward its immensely moving inevitable conclusion, this promising author leaves us with much to ponder about the nature of fate, memory, death and love."
The Oregonian (Portland, OR)Review:
"Accomplished as this novel often is — Niffenegger is especially dexterous in handling multiple domestic events common to relationship novels...one hopes to see what she will do next using more recognizable forms of storytelling." The Washington Post Book World
Review:
"Ms. Niffenegger alternates the voices of Clare and Henry telling the story...so that the reader gets to know both characters intimately....It's not the plot but how it works itself out that makes this novel a delight." Dallas Morning News
Review:
"Niffenegger's beautiful prose and sure-handed way with character development lifts
The Time Traveler's Wife beyond the realm of romance potboilers and into the mainstream of literature that will last."
Denver PostReview:
"Niffeneger takes the stuff of science fiction and makes it so real that the reader moves past the premise of time travel to become emotionally involved in the lives of the characters....[It] pulls the reader into its world and doesn't let go until the last page." South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Review:
"Though the book remains a kick throughout, Henry and Clare, from any angle and at any time, gleam with unapproachable, off-putting perfection; imagine, say, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston." San Diego Union-Tribune
Review:
"[M]ore magical realism than sci-fi, and above all it's a surprising and compelling love story....Niffenegger avoids the drag of sentimentality and keeps it soaring with genuine emotion." St. Petersburg Times
Synopsis:
Audrey Niffenegger's innovative debut,
The Time Traveler's Wife, is the story of Clare, a beautiful art student, and Henry, an adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry thirty-one. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself misplaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity in his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable, alternately harrowing and amusing.
The Time Traveler's Wife depicts the effects of time travel on Henry and Clare's marriage and their passionate love for each other as the story unfolds from both points of view. Clare and Henry attempt to live normal lives, pursuing familiar goals — steady jobs, good friends, children of their own. All of this is threatened by something they can neither prevent nor control, making their story intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.
Synopsis:
A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of a passionate love affair that endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap.
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About the Author
AUDREY NIFFENEGGER is a professor in the M.F.A. program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts.This is her first novel, which in hardcover was a selection of Today’s Book Club. She lives in Chicago.
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