Book cover for How to Stop Time: A Novel by Matt Haig

How to Stop Time

A Novel

2018 Released
352 Pages
5-6 Hours
★ 3.78 95,675 ratings
Audiobook Unavailable
Hardback Unavailable
Penguin BooksISBN 9780525522881

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Midnight Library.

“A quirky romcom dusted with philosophical observations….A delightfully witty…poignant novel.” —The Washington Post

  
“She smiled a soft, troubled smile and I felt the whole world slipping away, and I wanted to slip with it, to go wherever she was going… I had existed whole years without her, but that was all it had been. An existence. A book with no words.”

Tom Hazard has just moved back to London, his old home, to settle down and become a high school history teacher. And on his first day at school, he meets a captivating French teacher at his school who seems fascinated by him. But Tom has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but owing to a rare condition, he's been alive for centuries. Tom has lived history--performing with Shakespeare, exploring the high seas with Captain Cook, and sharing cocktails with Fitzgerald. Now, he just wants an ordinary life.

Unfortunately for Tom, the Albatross Society, the secretive group which protects people like Tom, has one rule: Never fall in love. As painful memories of his past and the erratic behavior of the Society's watchful leader threaten to derail his new life and romance, the one thing he can't have just happens to be the one thing that might save him. Tom will have to decide once and for all whether to remain stuck in the past, or finally begin living in the present.

How to Stop Time tells a love story across the ages—and for the ages—about a man lost in time, the woman who could save him, and the lifetimes it can take to learn how to live. It is a bighearted, wildly original novel about losing and finding yourself, the inevitability of change, and how with enough time to learn, we just might find happiness.
 
Soon to be a major motion picture starring Benedict Cumberbatch.

Matt Haig

MATT HAIG is the author of the internationally bestselling book, The Midnight Library. He is also the author of the novels The Humans, How to Stop Time, and The Life Impossible, which was a Canadian national bestseller and a New York Times bestseller. He has also written a number of children’s books, including A Boy Called Christmas, which became a feature film, and three non-fiction books for adults.

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