New Yorker: The Time Traveler's Wife

Most love stories consist of two people meeting and then falling in love. Niffenegger’s novel The Time Traveller’s Wife, is no usual love story. The two characters, Clare and Henry, first meet when Clare is six and Henry is thirty-six. However, in reality the two are only eight years apart in age. How is this possible? Henry, we find, has a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel unpredictably. He visits his future wife when she is a child, watches his own mother die many times over from different angles, and eventually learns his own peculiar fate. Although at times a little creepy, Niffenegger does a brilliant job of combining both science fiction and romance into one novel. With effortless switching between time and perspective, the novel never gets trapped by its chaotic narrative.