• An Ocean of Minutes

  • A Novel
  • By: Thea Lim
  • Narrated by: Lisa Rost-Welling
  • Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
  • 4.0 out of 5 stars (8 ratings)

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An Ocean of Minutes  By  cover art

An Ocean of Minutes

By: Thea Lim
Narrated by: Lisa Rost-Welling
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Publisher's summary

An unforgettable love story of two people who are at once mere weeks and many years apart, for fans of Station Eleven.

America is in the grip of a deadly flu pandemic. When Frank catches the virus, his girlfriend Polly will do whatever it takes to save him, even if it means risking everything. She agrees to a radical plan. Time travel has been invented; if she signs up for a one-way trip into the future to work as a bonded labourer, the company will pay for the life-saving treatment Frank needs. Polly promises to meet Frank again in Galveston, Texas, where she will arrive in 12 years.

But when Polly is re-routed an extra five years into the future, Frank is nowhere to be found. Alone in a changed and divided America, with no status and no money, Polly must navigate a terrifying new world to find Frank, to discover if he is alive, and to see if their love has endured.

An Ocean of Minutes is a gorgeous, devastating novel about courage, yearning, the cost of holding onto the past - and the price of letting it go.    

©2018 Thea Lim (P)2018 Viking

Critic reviews

Shortlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Longlisted for the 2019 CBC Canada Reads

Longlisted for the 2019 Sunburst Award

“Amidst the breathtaking world Thea Lim has created in An Ocean of Minutes is a profound meditation on the inhumanity of class and the limits of love. It takes immense talent to render cruelty both accurately and with honest beauty - Lim has pulled it off. This is a story about the malleability of time, but at its core lives something timeless.” (Omar El Akkad, author of American War

“The premise Lim sets up here allows for the most multifaceted examination of time’s value. Time is Polly and Frank’s shared past and the promise of a shared future.... The tragedy that the people we love don’t get to live forever is the subject of some of our oldest stories. And also, it seems, our stories of the future.” (The Globe and Mail

“Lim has it all; she’s fearless, smart, and writes like a dream. This is a novel I’ve been waiting for...extraordinary.” (Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and This Is How You Lose Her

"Lim’s enthralling novel succeeds on every level: as a love story, an imaginative thriller, and a dystopian narrative." (Publishers Weekly)  

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So beautiful

I absolutely loved this story until the last word. It was way more striving then I was expecting

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