The Time Traveler's Wife

By: Audrey Niffenegger

Narrated by: Fred Berman, Phoebe Strole

Length: 17 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

Clare and Henry have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was 36. They were married when Clare was 23 and Henry was 31. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself misplaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable, alternately harrowing and amusing.

Clare and Henry's story unfolds from both points of view, depicting the effects of time travel on their marriage and their passionate love for each other. They attempt to live normal lives, pursuing familiar goals: steady jobs, good friends, children of their own. All of this is threatened by something they can neither prevent nor control, making their story intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.

©2003 Audrey Niffenegger; 2005 HighBridge Company (P)2003 BBC Audiobooks Ltd.

Critic reviews

• Alex Award Winner, 2004

"Highly original first novel....Niffenegger has written a soaring love story illuminated by dozens of finely observed details and scenes....It is a fair tribute to her skill and sensibility to say that the book leaves a reader with the impression of life's riches and strangeness rather than of easy thrills." (Publishers Weekly)

Love this book!

What an incredible, well constructed story with beautiful characters. Narration was spot on! I cannot imagine how smart you must be to be able to construct this story, but I am thankful that Ms. Niffenegger is!

Fabulous tale

A wonderful story you hope never ends. You want to know more always more. Like Claire we want to know what is to come even as we try like Henry to live in the now & appreciate it. Great book.

What love and marriage is like with a twist

Niffenegger brings a feeling of realism with this novel. Yes, there is the almost sci-fi like disorder of going into the future, but it is the same feeling one gets when a husband is deployed while in the military or you are in a long distance relationship. The feeling of longing as she described is so beautiful and the moments where the two characters are together are filled with true passion. The moments that Henry witnesses are sometimes hilarious or beautiful or horrifying, Each are significant to the story and overall purpose. The only thing about the story that I would critize is the sometimes droning on of Henry or droning on of the narrator... Beyond that, the narration of both actors was wonderful and immersive. I highly reccomend this read! (:

It had great potential

I was looking forward to this book. Time traveling has always intrigued me, even as a kid I loved The Time Machine and A Wrinkle in Time. This book, though, did not wow me. There were interesting parts, but I wanted to love it and didn't. I also was annoyed that some parts seemed to not make sense at the end. Oh well, I know many people love this book, and I guess I am glad I gave it a listen. The narrators were good. I agree with other reviewers about being surprised that the author chose to use such raw language in the sexual parts. The language didn't really bother me, but I didn't think it fit or even see the point of it.

Moving and all-encompassing

I expected this to be more of a the "chick-flick" book equivalent, and I love a good light book now and then, but it was more.

Disapointing

This started out with such potential. It dragged and got progressively less interesting. Audio was well done

Lovely... but

Overall, I really enjoyed this audiobook but OH! The mispronunciations!! Seemed like every 40 mins or so there was some truly cringe-worthy mispronunciation by one of the narrators. Some of the offenders I remember were "dahlia" "Vicodin" "renaissance." Many others. The audio equivalent of proofreading would have helped a lot prior to release.

Not worth 17 hours - cute short story, no novel

This book takes a very interesting premise and turns it into evenly paced irrelevance. It is pleasant, but absolutely not worth 17 hours. It could have made a great, much shorter story, but it does not sustain this length.

There is hardly any arc, story or character wise - with the exception of getting older, neither Clare not Henry change very much at all during their relationship. Or if they do, we wouldn't know - there are no choices for them to make, so personal growth wouldn't be discernible. The premise of the story, though fervently denied, is predetermination. There are no difficult decisions to test them.

Yet the book does not deal with the existential questions it poses, the way good science fiction should, but stipulates them away. Clare and Henry rebel once, early on, but pull back at the last minute. We are mysteriously warned of a huge calamity averted, but we never find out what that calamity might be. So why care?

The novel turns out to be a series of vignettes which may be moving, funny, sometimes sad, but you don't look back and see a masterful whole. The time travel doesn't propel the story forward at all, it is random and the episodes hardly even tie into each other. So much time is spent on establishing its marvel, yet, most of the time, it is just a prop, a nuisance they live with. And that's what the book feels like - "living with it". Shrugging along.

Even the characters' unquestioned love for each other, which is at the center of the book, seems to have no basis in their characters or personalities. It was (pre)determined by Henry's travels to Clare's childhood while he is already married to her... and this loop settles it. Their love is beautiful and convincingly written, but in its essence, it remains a random, meaningless coincidence, because there is no alternate path, but no discernable design either.

The narration though is absolutely EXCELLENT and the split between the two voices works extremely well.

(Minor point, the books is completely PG-13, except for a number of entirely unnecessary vulgarities. I have no problem at all with strong language, but here the author uses four letter words suddenly and without any reason, where something more poetic would have been much more appropriate and consistent with what we are to believe of their relationship.)

Believe it or not, the movie was better!

Never read a book where I really felt the movie was better. It was because in listening to this book I didn't like having to try and keep track of all the different times. By the end I hated it and was forcing myself to finish it. Then the movie came out and I actually watched it because I love stories about time travel. The movie wasn't bad at all and I thought was much more enjoyable than the book.

About time traveling, but not

I was initially reluctant to try out this book. I’m not into sci-fi or fantasy. This, to me, seemed to be more of a literary novel, with time travel more of a device through which to tell the story of Claire and Henry. The prose was beautiful throughout, the stories within the stories told with great care and eventually crafted into the larger story of the intricate intertwining of their lives. The narrators were amazing. From the moment they began speaking, they were Henry and Claire to me.