What Is The Book, The Time Traveller's Wife About?

This book, written by Audrey Niffenegger, is love story with a unique twist. This book tells the story of Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire who have a soulmate-type deep relationship. Henry has a rare genetic condition, chronodisplacement, which means he drops out of the present time and backwards and forwards into different periods of his life, just for a few hours. His relationship with Clare means that when he drops into a time when she is alive, he seeks her out. The first time Clare meets Henry is when she is a schoolgirl and he is already middle aged.

The intricacies of the time travel take a little time to grasp but it is an interesting concept. Near the start of the book, Henry and Clare meet in real time – when she is 20 and he is 28 and they marry two years later. As you read the first part of the book, events are told from Clare's perspective as she is in real time. As the book progresses, as Clare gets older, the events are told from Henry's perspective and this builds up a really interesting picture of a relationship.

Henry's encounters with himself at different ages and is particularly sad when he drops back to a time when Clare does not yet exist. He takes himself, at the age of 5, into a natural history museum and visits himself as a sexually maturing teenager. The scenes are thought provoking and unusual because of the time travelling twist.

For most of the time, Henry drops back into his life with Clare always knowing more about their future. He cannot help slipping up sometimes, as he does when he refers to Clare's mother in the past tense, hinting unintentionally to Clare that she has already died in the time from which he has just come. This sort of knowledge is hard to take and Henry continually feels guilty and worries about making changes that will impact on their future. When Clare and Henry meet for the first time in real time, however, the tables are turned. While Clare knows Henry intimately and has been visited by his future self all through her childhood, Henry has no knowledge of her at all. Their first date and few hours together are very well written.