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ishouldreadthat 's review for:
How to Stop Time
by Matt Haig
See the full review on I Should Read That
I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This review is spoiler-free.
I recently read and loved Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive, a moving memoir about living with depression, but had never read any of his fiction. How to Stop Time immediately caught my eye because it combined two of my favourite things: historical fiction and science fiction. I was hoping it was just as poignant and funny and moving as his memoir, and he once again blew me away with his skills as a writer.
I am old. That is the first thing to tell you. The thing you are least likely to believe. If you saw me you would probably think I was about forty, but you would be very wrong.
Tom Hazard 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. From Elizabethan England to Jazz Age Paris, from New York to the South Seas, Tom has seen a lot, and now craves an ordinary life. Always changing his identity to stay alive, Tom has the perfect cover – working as a history teacher at a London comprehensive. Here he can teach the kids about wars and witch hunts as if he’d never witnessed them first-hand. He can try and tame the past that is fast catching up with him.
The only thing Tom mustn’t do is fall in love.
How to Stop Time is a wild and bittersweet story about losing and finding yourself, about the certainty of change and about the lifetimes it can take to really learn how to live.*
Tom is a man who lives a life that many of us would think as a blessing. He is 439 years old. He is not immortal, but he ages incredibly slowly. He is incredibly resistant to disease. He has seen mankind grow and evolve since the Middle Ages, he has worked with Shakespeare, fought in famous battles, drank with the Fitzgeralds, and lived through some of the most fascinating periods of time. Tom suffers from anageria, an extremely rare condition that manifests during puberty and slows the ageing process to a snail’s pace. Haig turns the immortality dream in to a nightmare, dooming Tom to struggle with loneliness and hundreds of years of heartbreak...
*Copy courtesy of Goodreads
I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This review is spoiler-free.
I recently read and loved Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive, a moving memoir about living with depression, but had never read any of his fiction. How to Stop Time immediately caught my eye because it combined two of my favourite things: historical fiction and science fiction. I was hoping it was just as poignant and funny and moving as his memoir, and he once again blew me away with his skills as a writer.
I am old. That is the first thing to tell you. The thing you are least likely to believe. If you saw me you would probably think I was about forty, but you would be very wrong.
Tom Hazard 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. From Elizabethan England to Jazz Age Paris, from New York to the South Seas, Tom has seen a lot, and now craves an ordinary life. Always changing his identity to stay alive, Tom has the perfect cover – working as a history teacher at a London comprehensive. Here he can teach the kids about wars and witch hunts as if he’d never witnessed them first-hand. He can try and tame the past that is fast catching up with him.
The only thing Tom mustn’t do is fall in love.
How to Stop Time is a wild and bittersweet story about losing and finding yourself, about the certainty of change and about the lifetimes it can take to really learn how to live.*
Tom is a man who lives a life that many of us would think as a blessing. He is 439 years old. He is not immortal, but he ages incredibly slowly. He is incredibly resistant to disease. He has seen mankind grow and evolve since the Middle Ages, he has worked with Shakespeare, fought in famous battles, drank with the Fitzgeralds, and lived through some of the most fascinating periods of time. Tom suffers from anageria, an extremely rare condition that manifests during puberty and slows the ageing process to a snail’s pace. Haig turns the immortality dream in to a nightmare, dooming Tom to struggle with loneliness and hundreds of years of heartbreak...
*Copy courtesy of Goodreads