Published 2004 / Length 518 pages
The Time Traveler’s Wife is a beautifully written, totally original love story. Despite its title, it is not rooted in science fiction, but rather in its protagonists’ lifelong romance. Henry and Clare met when Clare was six and Henry thirty-six, and married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. The reason for this skewed chronology is that Henry suffers from so-called ‘chrono-displacement disorder’, a condition whereby he time travels: without warning, he leaves his present and arrives in the past or future. Through this uncertainty comes one truth: his love for Clare, and hers for him, as she waits time and time again for him to return to her. While their situation is extraordinary, the evolution of their relationship is strikingly universal: their joys, hopes and fears are hauntingly familiar and poignantly evoked. It is a story of soulmates; an intelligent foray into fate and determinism; a convincingly written book that lifts the spirits, even as its ominous undertones threaten to overwhelm both the characters and the reader.
‘How should we read Henry’s slips and tumbles through time? As a metaphor for addiction or recurrent illness; a symbol of imagination taking flight; or a woman writer’s sly parable about the eternally absent nature of men?’ – The Independent
• The title places Clare as the eponymous character – yet defined only in terms of her relationship to Henry. Do you think this accurately reflects Clare’s character throughout the book?
• Think about the different responses to grief in the book. How does loss inform who the characters eventually become?
• Why do you think Niffenegger chose to tell the story from both Henry’s and Clare’s viewpoints? How successful is she in capturing their fluctuating ages?
• The book raises questions of free will and determinism. Can Henry and Clare do anything to change their fate? Can any of us?
• Is time-travelling ultimately seen as a blessing or a curse?
• The Time Traveler’s Wife started life as a title. It took four and a half years to complete.
• Niffenegger is an American art professor who has written and published her own visual-art books since she was a teenager. This is her first traditional novel.
• The book was selected for the Richard & Judy Book Club and won the Popular Fiction prize at the 2006 British Book Awards.
• Wuthering Heights by EMILY BRONTË – depicts two lovers tied to each other through adversity; and disparate reactions to, and the long-term impact of, grief.
• Pygmalion by GEORGE BERNARD SHAW – this play examines the influence of an older man on a younger woman. Does Henry mould Clare in a similar way?
• Woman on the Edge of Time by MARGE PIERCY (see here) – another time-travel narrative scrutinizing free will and determinism.