How to Stop Time

‘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 to tame the past that is fast catching up with him. The only thing Tom must not 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.

Reviews of How to Stop Time

Matt Haig has an empathy for the human condition, the light and the dark of it, and he uses the full palette to build his excellent stories — NEIL GAIMAN Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin — JEANETTE WINTERSON How to Stop Time is a beautiful, and necessary book. I feel very lucky to have read it. It is magical, intriguing and at times, very sad. A triumph — MARIAN KEYES Matt Haig is astounding — STEPHEN FRY Compelling and full of life's big questions, How to Stop Time is a book you will not be able to put down — GRAEME SIMSION, author of THE ROSIE PROJECT Strange and brilliant and heartfelt — JENNY COLGAN It's not easy to write a book that's simultaneously fun and serious and gripping and simple and profound, but Matt Haig manages it again and again. How to Stop Time is just brilliant — GAVIN EXTENCE, author of THE UNIVERSE VERUS ALEX WOODS Goodness. What a stunning book. Brilliant, beautiful and mindbendingly magnificent — JILL MANSELL My favourite book of this year, and most others. A dazzling read. Time stopped still — DANNY WALLACE Inventive, exciting, moving and bursting with insight about history, time and what it is to be human — KATE WILLIAMS, author of THE PLEASURES OF MEN