Description
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is a romantic science fiction novel about Clare and Henry, whose relationship is complicated by Henry’s involuntary time travel. Henry has a rare genetic condition that causes him to disappear from the present and reappear unexpectedly at different points in his own life. Clare first encounters Henry when she is six and he is thirty-six, while Henry meets Clare for the first time when he is twenty-eight. Their relationship develops across different points in time, eventually leading to marriage when Clare is twenty-two and Henry is thirty.
As Henry’s condition repeatedly disrupts their lives, the couple must find ways to build an ordinary relationship around circumstances they cannot control. The novel moves between different periods of their lives rather than following a straightforward chronology, exploring love, marriage, family, loss and the effects of time on a relationship. Blending romance with a speculative science-fiction premise, The Time Traveler’s Wife focuses less on the mechanics of time travel than on what it means to love someone when you can never be certain when — or where — you will encounter them.
