How to Stop Time

Americans today are mesmerized with the idea of living a long life. The world average life expectancy in 1900 was 31 years. By 2014, it was 71.5. Somehow, it seems, we fight death even when we're in our 90s.

Matt Haig has explored the theme of long life in his recent book How to Stop Time.

But it's not what you think. The main character, sometimes known as Tom, is currently working as a history teacher in East London. Over the course of his life, he has been a pianist in Paris, an explorer with Captain Cook, and a musician in Globe Theater during the days of Shakespeare. Tom is not immortal. He can die, although he and people like him ("Albas") are less susceptible to plague and infections and viruses. He does, however, age much less slowly than the rest of us. At age 40, he looks barely 24. By age 497, he looks 41. It's called hyperlongevity.

Heindrich, the man in charge of the Albatross Society, has one rule everyone like Tom must follow: don't fall in love. Not only would they have to endure loss when that loved one died, but their own lives would be in danger. The more "normal" people, called Mayflies, who know about them, the more likely it is that people in Shakespeare's day would call them witches and the scientists of the modern era would kill them slowly for the sake of science. And, of course, if Albas love someone, they will get close enough to see Tom and the others aren't ageing.

It's a lonely life, one always lived on the edge, and Tom would have ended it a long time ago if it weren't for Marion. His daughter. See, Tom did fall in love once, with a Mayfly, and they had a daughter. To protect them both from witch hunters, Tom fled and learned only twenty years later that Marion, too, doesn't age. Rose says as she lay dying, "Marion is like you."

Tom has a purpose now, a reason to live his unrooted life. He is on a search for Marion.

But what will happen when he finds her? Worse yet -- when the Albatross Society and paranoid Heinrich find her?

"There is a world in which he lives and there is a world in which he is dead. And the move between the two happens with no greater ricochet than the whisper of waves crashing into distant rocks. And just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live."

These days I don't buy many books. The library is my budget's friend. But this is one I want to keep. To hold onto. To read again and again. To remind myself "time can surprise you sometimes."