This bestselling and innovative debut novel from Audrey Niffenegger explores the perfect marriage, one that is tested by challenges the couple can neither control nor predict.The novel tells the story of Henry DeTamble, a librarian, and his wife, Clare Abshire, an artist from a wealthy family who makes paper sculptures. Henry has a rare genetic disorder, which comes to be known as Chrono-Displacement, that causes him to involuntarily travel through time. When 20-year-old Clare meets 28-year-old Henry at the Newberry Library, he has never seen her before, although she has known him most of her life. Clare's past is still in Henry's future. Henry begins to experience the events in Clare's childhood at the same time that he experiences life with the adult Clare in the present. In the novel, the future cannot be changed, and many tragic events are foreshadowed in the past.
Niffenegger uses time travel as a way of expressing the sense of slippage that you get in any relationship - that you could be living through a slightly different love story from the one your partner is experiencing. And she certainly weaves her plot well. This is one of those books that makes you want to eat it up from start to finish, eager to see how the twisted curves of time will be straightened out.
