The Time Traveler's Wife

The recap

Clare Abshire first meets Henry DeTamble when she is six and he is a grown man who has turned up, naked and slightly sheepish, in the meadow behind her family's house. Henry first meets Clare when he is twenty-eight, working at a Chicago research library, and a young woman he has never seen before greets him like the love of her life. The reason is a rare genetic condition that yanks Henry unpredictably through time, dropping him into his past and future without warning, clothes or money. Told in alternating voices and stamped with dates and ages, Niffenegger's debut builds a marriage out of fragments: secret visits across Clare's childhood, ordinary domestic happiness, and the constant strain of loving someone who can vanish mid-sentence. It is a clever puzzle of a novel, but its real subject is patience, fidelity and how lovers live with what they cannot control.