The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

Written by Audrey Niffenegger
Read by Fred Berman
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: HighBridge
Release date: April 19, 2011
Duration: 17:38:22

This bestselling and innovative debut novel from explores the perfect marriage, one that is tested by challenges the couple can neither neither control nor predict.

An imaginative extension of everyday life, the story asks: What if two people who loved each other deeply, married, and faced a life in which one person remained constant while the other slipped fluidly in and out of time?

It is a modern love story with a twist that invites us to linger over questions of how life and love change over time.

Publishers Weekly said it best…
Niffenegger has written a soaring love story illuminated by dozens of finely observed details and scenes, and one that skates nimbly around a huge conundrum at the heart of the book: Henry De Tamble, a rather dashing librarian at the famous Newberry Library in Chicago, finds himself unavoidably whisked around in time. He disappears from a scene in, say, 1998 to find himself suddenly, usually without his clothes, which mysteriously disappear in transit, at an entirely different place 10 years earlier—or later. During one of these migrations, he drops in on beautiful teenage Clare Abshire, an heiress in a large house on the nearby Michigan peninsula, and a lifelong passion is born. The problem is that while Henry’s age darts back and forth according to his location in time, Clare’s moves forward in the normal manner, so the pair are often out of sync. But such is the author’s tenderness with the characters, and the determinedly ungimmicky way in which she writes of their predicament (only once do they make use of Henry’s foreknowledge of events to make money, and then it seems to Clare like cheating) that the book is much more love story than fantasy. It also has a splendidly drawn cast, from Henry’s violinist father, ruined by the loss of his wife in an accident from which Henry time-traveled as a child, to Clare’s odd family and a multitude of Chicago bohemian friends. The couple’s daughter, Alba, inherits her father’s strange abilities, but this is again handled with a light touch; there’s no Disney cuteness here. Henry’s foreordained end is agonizing, but Niffenegger has another card up her sleeve, and plays it with poignant grace. It is a fair tribute to her skill and sensibility to say that the book leaves a reader with an impression of life’s riches and strangeness rather than of easy thrills.