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| Categories | Genre Fiction |
| Author | Matt Haig |
| Publisher | Penguin Books; Reprint edition (June 11, 2019) |
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 352 pages |
| Item Weight | 2.31 pounds |
| Dimensions |
5.05 x 0.87 x 7.73 inches |
I. Book introduction
“She smiled a soft, troubled smile and I felt the whole world slipping away, and I wanted to slip with it, to go wherever she was going… I had existed whole years without her, but that was all it had been. An existence. A book with no words.”
Tom Hazard has just moved back to London, his old home, to settle down and become a high school history teacher. And on his first day at school, he meets a captivating French teacher at his school who seems fascinated by him. But Tom 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. Tom has lived history–performing with Shakespeare, exploring the high seas with Captain Cook, and sharing cocktails with Fitzgerald. Now, he just wants an ordinary life.
Unfortunately for Tom, the Albatross Society, the secretive group which protects people like Tom, has one rule: Never fall in love. As painful memories of his past and the erratic behavior of the Society’s watchful leader threaten to derail his new life and romance, the one thing he can’t have just happens to be the one thing that might save him. Tom will have to decide once and for all whether to remain stuck in the past, or finally begin living in the present.
How to Stop Time tells a love story across the ages—and for the ages—about a man lost in time, the woman who could save him, and the lifetimes it can take to learn how to live. It is a bighearted, wildly original novel about losing and finding yourself, the inevitability of change, and how with enough time to learn, we just might find happiness.
Soon to be a major motion picture starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
Editorial Reviews
- “Matt Haig’s latest book, How To Stop Time, is marvelous in every sense of the word. Clever, funny, poignant, and written with Haig’s trademark blend of crystalline prose and deft storytelling, this is a book that stirs the heart and mind in equal measure. A hugely enjoyable read.” —Deborah Harkness, author of The All Souls Trilogy
- “Inventive and heartfelt and unusual. . . . [How To Stop Time] made for a great summer read.” —Kristin Hannah, New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale
- “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
- “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, author of American Gods
- “Haig remains a keen-eyed observer of contemporary life. . . his dialogue has snap and charm.” —The New York Times
- “A wry, intriguing meditation on time and an eternal human challenge: how to relinquish the past and live fully in the present.” —People
- “[How To Stop Time] is fantastic” —Brad Thor, New York Times bestselling author of Spy Master
- “A quirky romcom dusted with philosophical observations….A delightfully witty…poignant novel.” —The Washington Post
- “Time is all about the moments, not the space between them. Haig has done a fine job of capturing a few beautiful ones like butterflies in a jar — instants of love or rage or heartbreak. And one of them is even the night that Tom Hazard spent drinking ale with Shakespeare.” —NPR
- “The central character of the poignant new novel How to Stop Time is 41-year-old Tom Hazard, a man who has been alive for centuries, and who moves every eight years in order to avoid detection. As he settles into a new life in London, he realizes that the one thing that would derail his (very long) life—falling in love—might just be worth it.” —Southern Living
- “A time traveling love story… [and] a coming-of-age tale that continues for centuries. It’s The Time Traveler’s Wife meets The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, yet manages to be even more unique.” —HelloGiggles
- “How to Stop Time is a clever, beautifully crafted novel about love, history, and the tangled mess that comes with trying to live a human life of any length.” —Bustle
- “Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.” —Jeanette Winterson, author of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
- “Haig has been gifted with a rare ability, which is to make the far-fetched – and even ridiculous – seem believable. His books tickle your mind and tug on your heart, and their pages slip by with beguiling ease. . . How to Stop Time will provoke wonder and delight.” —The Guardian
- “But How to Stop Time is also a considered, heartfelt document, as you might expect from an author who wrote an internationally bestselling memoir of depression, Reasons to Stay Alive. It unfolds its secrets carefully: an action-packed but often sad story for slow, long-term thinkers. Wrapped inside this sci-fi school sitcom premise is a poetic manifesto of what really matters in the long run. One that Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg would do well to read.” —Mashable
- “The lively creativity of Matt Haig continues to delight and enchant readers. In How to Stop Time, he offers a well-drawn cast of vivid characters embroiled in an inventive, fast-paced story that successfully blends fantasy, romance, comedy and adventure.”—Shelf Awareness
- “Matt Haig is astounding.” —Stephen Fry
- “Inventive, exciting, moving and bursting with insight about history, time and what it is to be human.” —Kate Williams, author of Becoming Queen Victoria
- “I loved How to Stop Time, it’s 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, author of The Woman Who Stole My Life
- “I am in concert with Haig’s fans as I read the book, turning pages for the story but also stopping to underline passages. I want to remember the lines. I want to read out loud to someone. Nothing like a love that lasts 400 years.” —Publisher’s Weekly
- “How to Stop Time is a bittersweet story about the meaning of life.”—Kirkus
- “An addictive, time-travelling tale which unfolds at a cracking pace” —The Bookseller, Book of the Month
- “An engaging story framed by a brooding meditation on time and meaning.” —The Austin American-Statesman
- “Full of Haig’s trademark humour and humanity, this is a wonderfully entertaining ride through centuries of adventure. Gloriously heart-warming.” —Sunday Mirror
- “A story you’ve been longing to read . . . Haig’s proficiency in writing for children has lent a gentleness that cuts to the very heart of this work and its readers.” —Evening Standard, “The Best Books to Read This Summer”
- “How to Stop Time is a worthy addition to the time-travel canon, hugely entertaining, quietly funny and, at its best moments, contemplative and brooding.” —John Boyne, Irish Times
About the Author (Matt Haig)
Matt Haig is an author for children and adults. His memoir Reasons to Stay Alive was a number one bestseller, staying in the British top ten for 46 weeks. His children’s book A Boy Called Christmas was a runaway hit and is translated in over 40 languages. It is being made into a film starring Maggie Smith, Sally Hawkins and Jim Broadbent and The Guardian called it an ‘instant classic’. His novels for adults include the award-winning How To Stop Time, The Radleys, The Humans and the number one bestseller The Midnight Library.
Matt Haig was born on 3 July 1975 in Sheffield. He grew up in the Nottinghamshire town of Newark and later went on to study English and History at the University of Hull.
As of 2015, Haig is married to Andrea Semple, and they live in Brighton, Sussex, with their two children and a dog. The children were homeschooled.
Haig identifies as an atheist. He has said that books are his one true faith, and the library is his church.
Some of Haig’s work — especially part of the non-fiction books — is inspired by the mental breakdown he suffered from when he was 24-years-old. He still occasionally suffers from anxiety. He has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism.
II. Reviewer: How to Stop Time by Matt Haig
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1. BABA reviews How to Stop Time
Tom Hazard has just got the job as a history teacher as a school in a less privileged area of East London in the early 21st Century; despite knowing that he’s absolutely not allowed to connect with people, he feels a sense of interest and desire towards one of his fellow members of staff. Why is that an issue? Tom Hazard is over 400 years old and belongs to a secret organisation of very long lived anomalies, called the Albatross Society!
Matt Haig captures the plight of the long-lived quite well, and through countless flashbacks appears to give us some really well researched snippets of English and Empire history over the last 400+ years. The book also manages to stay very much protagonist focused whilst still able to look at the wider issues through his lens – what makes us who we are, and how should we live? This is my favourite Haig read so far, but ultimately for the concept, the speculative fiction reality and the detailed jaunts to the past than the main meat of the story itself. Still, a solid 8 out of 12.
2. PHRYNNE reviews How to Stop Time
I am giving this five stars because I enjoyed it enormously and I finished it in one day! I love time travel and although this was not that really, it had the same effect and was just as pleasing.
Tom Hazard has a condition which means he ages very slowly indeed and in this story he is well over four centuries old. How to Stop Time alternates chapters from the present with others from his extensive past. When I was reading the past I had to keep reminding myself he was living it at that time and not visiting it from the present. It was intriguing.
I was pleased that the present chapters and the past were equally interesting. Tom’s experiences teaching and his relationship with Camille were able to compete with him meeting Shakespeare and Charlie Chaplin. The ending was satisfactory and even optimistic. I closed the book with a smile on my face and went straight to Amazon and bought The Humans
3. ANNET reviews How to Stop Time
You have to choose to live…
Exceptional story, out-of-the-box subject: 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… Imagine, living in times of Shakespeare, Napoleon, up to today…. And try to be invisible, as people may be looking for you…. And whatever happens, don’t fall in love.
A story about love and making choices. I like this writer.
Recommended!
4. CHERI reviews How to Stop Time
4.5 Stars
If you were to call him by name, you could call him Tom Hazard, but the truth is that over the years, he’s been known by many names, having to change his identity before the truth catches up with him, reveals him to be who he is. Reveals what makes him different than any other man who appears to be around forty. The truth is slightly more than that.
In “this life” Tom teaches history in London at a comprehensive school (a secondary, state school) to young men and young women, teaching these young people lessons of history, some of which he lived through. The wars of old, famous men and woman, such as Shakespeare. There are more than a few famous names you will recognize as this story talks about the changes in time and place throughout his life. The things he’s seen. The witch hunts of old, and those of more modern times.
There is an organization that looks over, looks out for these people, anagerians, those whose internal “clocks” have a much different timeline than your average person. There are always people who will look for what is different in others, feel they must force them out of society, must alienate others from accepting them; they must be kept from co-existing with the “normal” world. This organization, ‘The Albatross Society’ has rules, but the primary rule is saying no to love.
”You are, of course, allowed to love food and music and champagne and rare sunny afternoons in October. You can love the sight of waterfalls and the smell of old books, but the love of people is off limits.”
Life is change; it is one of the few constants of life. Change can be welcome or unwanted, exciting or forbidding, and time goes by, bringing change with it, regardless if we are ready or not, or if we wish the change to come sooner. Times passes, as it will, on its own.
Capturing moments, a lifetime of them, seems daunting at times, for each moment you spend capturing another moment, yet another moment is lost. You can’t spend your life this way, either, we must live in the here and now or we are just revisiting the past, but we can’t – or shouldn’t – stay there.
Before I began reading this, I’d just finished the third book of Matt Haig’s books that I’d read, the other three were a series of Christmas stories aimed at children, but charming enough for adults to enjoy, especially parents reading them to their children. I wasn’t sure what to expect from an adult novel by him, but this shares his ability to spin a tale and keep your attention. I suspect I will be thinking about this story for a long, long time.
Published: 06 Feb 2018
Many thanks for the ARC provided by PENGUIN GROUP Viking
5. BRANDI reviews How to Stop Time
My favorite book ever!
This is currently my favorite book I have ever read. This book is historical fiction with a gentle touch of sci-fi, and just enough romance woven throughout it’s pages, enough to make you feel something but not enough to make it feel like a true romance novel (which is a huge plus for me – I do not like strictly romance novels but I enjoy some romance along the way if it helps build the story). My favorite thing about this book is the witty, relatable, poetic writing style, with a fresh story from a quirky perspective. This book is witty, poetic, relatable and truly captivating. I could not put this book down. The character development was done very well, the story was very captivating, and the insights from the main character make you really stop and think about your own life and things you probably have never thought about.
SPOILER FREE – The only reason I did not rate this book 5 stars is in regard to the end. The end was satisfying and I wouldn’t say it was bad, but it certainly felt very rushed, forced, and a bit of a stretch even within the realm of the reality within the universe of the book. The ending was wrapped up within about 30 pages, so to me the book felt like it went from a really good pace to 500 miles an hour in the last 30 pages, and while it did wrap up pretty much everything you want it to wrap up, it does so in such a quick way that is feels like whiplash. This book still remains my favorite story I’ve ever read, despite there being other books I have rated 5 stars, but with the very rushed ending I just couldn’t give it the perfect score as much as I so badly wanted to.
Overall this book is AMAZING and my favorite read so far. I highly recommend it!!
6. JP reviews How to Stop Time
Eminently quotable, a lot of fun, full of heart.
Tom Hazard, a man who appears to be in his 40s, has rather inconveniently been alive for over 400 years due to a rare condition that slows his aging. While everyone he knows bustles about living and dying, Tom just…doesn’t. While the world spins on, Tom lives a life of history and solitude. He’s hobnobbed with some historical greats, sure, but immortality-ishness comes with its own set of problems—chief among them being found out, but also the agony of loving and losing and living with for centuries. This isn’t a novel about history so much as a look at time—how it moves, how we cling to it, and how hard and how necessary it is to live in the present.
This book is like a slow, deliberate sip of whiskey—smooth, then burn. The timeline jumps the author makes put us in Tom’s shoes as he increasingly “slips” back and forth in memory. You feel his disorientation as time plays tricks on him, causing him memory headaches. This novel does not shy away from THE BIG STUFF: resilience, fear, regret, mortality, the urgency and blessing of a lifespan. And in the end, it’s the stubborn optimism of it all. It’s a gentle nudge toward living our best lives in this very moment.
7. DJ reviews How to Stop Time
Deeper, more complex, and darker than I expected
“It occurred to me that human beings didn’t live beyond a hundred because they simply weren’t up for it. Psychologically, I mean. You kind of ran out. There wasn’t enough self to keep going.” (p32)
“People believed in witches because it made things easier. People don’t just need an enemy, they need an explanation.” (p56)
This book is deeper, more complex, and somewhat darker than I expected. I thought it would be a Benjamin Button drama-romance – little more than a touching love story about a relationship doomed by unfortunate circumstances of chronology. There are certainly elements of that storyline here, but at its core this is the chronicle of one man’s struggle to find meaning in a long, lonely, dangerously misunderstood life. There’s also a decidedly sinister component to the story, including a powerful secret society that hovers ominously over the action, able and willing to go to considerable lengths to protect the interests of its insiders. But there’s also plenty of humor and hope, and poignant moments that will stick with you.
I liked this book better than “The Midnight Library”. The latter is a little too predictable for my tastes – you can see the broad outlines of the ending coming long before it arrives. “How to Stop Time” has more mysteries and surprises, which made it more satisfying for me.
8. KEN KARCHER reviews How to Stop Time
A brilliant love story from the most amazing viewpoint
I have a fondness for stories dealing with time travel or immortality, so reading this was a no-brainer on my part. I’m glad i did; this is a fresh take on the genre and a very well written book. Tom was born in France in the late 1500’s and is still alive today. He’s not alone in his “affliction,” and he shares what he sometimes feels is his curse with others who have formed a society for their own protection. The poignant points made by the author show that living seemingly forever is not as simple as not dying but finding a way to go on as all the people you love do. The idea of living throughout history and having first-hand knowledge of what the rest of us can only read about in history books lends for an amazing story. Tom suffers through one tragedy after another, showing us that life is terrible and spectacular all at once and that none of us were ever meant to live it alone. I am anxious to see if this will be translated well to the movie screen, which I hope it will. This is written well enough that I will be looking forward to reading more from this author. Hopefully, his talents only get better with time.
9. LIZ BARNSLEY reviews How to Stop Time
How To Stop Time is a beautiful work of fiction – you know I read a lot of books (this is actually book 120 for me of 2017) and I don’t think I have ever read an author that just grasps and conveys the vagaries of human nature quite like Matt Haig does – in a way that makes you feel like he is writing just for you. The emotional sense of his writing is enduring and never anything less than compelling no matter the story being told or the premise that starts it.
So there is that – and How To Stop Time falls firmly under page turner, with a dash of passionate prose, a smattering of emotional trauma and a big hit of poignant insightful commentary on the human race. Pretty much what this author does in a nutshell.
Tom is one of those characters that will stay with you long after you have finished reading his story – and what a story it is. He is old, plagued (or blessed maybe that will be subjective) with a condition that means he ages at a much slower rate. Not immortal but feeling that way, he is part of history and an observer of it – we see him over time, at his best and his worst, this is a love story with a touch of mystery and is hugely gripping from the very first page until the tear inducing poignant finale.
I won’t give away much, this is one of those books that everyone will come to in their own way and will take from it different things – but Matt Haig manages to bring history alive on the page here through Tom and what he experiences, it almost feels as if you are living it with him. The characters he and we meet along the way all come with their own peculiarities and sense of self, the story weaves somewhat of a magic spell on the reader, or it did on me at least I was totally immersed into this one all the way.
The thing about stories is that they transport you to other places, make you think about other things. When you have a master storyteller at work it becomes so much less about construction and literary merit and all of those bookish things that as a reviewer I’m supposed to be perhaps commenting on – and just becomes about you, as a reader, in those few short moments of time you are living in that other world. Matt Haig is simply, when you remove the white noise, a master storyteller.
I loved this book. Just that.
Highly Recommended.
10. RON reviews How to Stop Time
The answer is in there. How to stop time, I mean. Somewhere in the middle of the story, and then a little differently at the end. What is said may not be what you expect, but it’s a good saying for sure. True and meaningful. It evokes feeling. So did this book. I get the impression that when Haig writes he is thinking about real life as much as how the words placed on a page speak to the reader – not simply to the story. Therefore, they say a little more. They have meaning. I’m not saying that this book is philosophy. It’s still just a work of fiction, but I think it will stay with me a little longer for the words.
So how do you stop time? You have to venture into the book of course. But the hint is, it involves other people, as most things do. Try as the main character Tom does to avoid others, whether to protect them, or keep his secret hidden, he cannot live as an island. The past holds painful memories for him, but within those same memories is joy. I’ll leave it off with one character’s quote from the story that says so much for a short sentence: “You have to choose to live.”
III. How to Stop Time Quotes by Matt Haig
The best book quotes from How to Stop Time by Matt Haig
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
“Everything is going to be all right. Or, if not, everything is going to be, so let’s not worry.”
“‘Anxiety,’ Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘is the dizziness of freedom.’”
“And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live. You just close your eyes and let every futile fear slip away. And then, in this new state, free from fear, you ask yourself: who am I? If I could live without doubt what would I do? If I could be kind without the fear of being fucked over? If I could love without fear of being hurt? If I could taste the sweetness of today without thinking of how I will miss that taste tomorrow? If I could not fear the passing of time and the people it will steal? Yes. What would I do? Who would I care for? What battle would I fight? Which paths would I step down? What joys would I allow myself? What internal mysteries would I solve? How, in short, would I live?”
“Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don’t expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer.”
“That’s the thing with time, isn’t it? It’s not all the same. Some days – some years – some decades – are empty. There is nothing to them. It’s just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.”
“People you love never die. That is what Omai had said, all those years ago. And he was right. They don’t die. Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters.”
“Everything is going to be all right. Or, if not, everything is going to be, so let’s not worry.”
“To talk about memories is to live them a little.”
“Music doesn’t get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn’t necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts.”
“It made me lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the kind of loneliness that howls through you like a desert wind. It wasn’t just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.”
“She laughs. It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realise, to make someone you care about laugh.”
“A problem with living in the twenty-first century….. we are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have only been to ten other countries. To feel old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photo shopped and filtered.”
“The key to happiness wasn’t being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.”
“The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here.
Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?”“Human beings, as a rule, simply don’t accept things that don’t fit their worldview.”
“Maybe that is what it takes to love someone. Finding a happy mystery you would like to unravel for ever.”
“History was, is, a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards, but you don’t always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.”
“Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it.”
“There is only the present. Just as every object on earth contains similar and interchanging atoms, so every fragment of time contains aspects of every other.
In those monents that burst alive the present lasts for ever, and I know there are many more presents to live. I understand you can be free. I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be?
The future is you.”“This is so often the way with life. You spend so much time waiting for something – a person, a feeling, a piece of information – that you can’t quite absorb it when it is in front of you. The hole is so used to being a hole it doesn’t know how to close itself.”
“It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you. Strange how every object or word can house a ghost.”
“She gave me peace just by looking at her, which might explain why I looked at her for too long, and with too much intensity in my eyes. The way people never look at people anymore. I wanted her in every sense.”
“Everything in life is uncertain. That is how you know you are existing in the world, the uncertainty. Of course, this is why we sometimes want to return to the past, because we know it, or think we do. It’s a song we’ve heard.”
“I have been in love only once in my life. I suppose that makes me a romantic, in a sense. The idea that you have one true love, that no one else will compare after they have gone. It’s a sweet idea, but the reality is terror itself. To be faced with all those lonely years after. To exist when the point of you has gone.”
“I loved her, instantly. Of course, most parents love their children instantly. But I mention it here because I still find it a remarkable thing. Where was that love before? Where did you acquire it from? The way it is suddenly there, total and complete, as sudden as grief, but in reverse, is one of the wonders about being human.”
“That is one of the patterns: when nothing is happening, nothing continues to happen, but after a while the lull becomes too much and the drums need to kick in. Something has to happen. Often that need comes from yourself. You make a phone call. You say, “I can’t do this life anymore, I need to change.’ And one thing happens which you are in control of. And then another happens which you have no control over. Newton’s third law of motion. Actions create reactions. When things start to happen, other things start to happen. But sometimes it seems there is no explanation as to why the things are happening – why all the buses are coming along at once – why life’s moments of luck and pain arrive in clusters. All we can do is observe the pattern, the rhythm, and then live it.”
“Maybe Shakespeare was right. Maybe all the world was a stage. Maybe without the act everything would fall apart. The key to happiness wasn’t being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.”
“That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.”
“There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous.”
“Places don’t matter to people any more. Places aren’t the point. People are only ever half present where they are these days. They always have at least one foot in the great digital nowhere.”
“As far as I can see, this is a problem with living in the twenty-first century. Many of us have every material thing we need, so the job of marketing is now to tie the economy to our emotions, to make us feel like we need more by making us want things we never needed before. We are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have been to only ten other countries. To feel too old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photoshopped and filtered. No one I knew in the 1600s wanted to find their inner billionaire. They just wanted to live to see adolescence and avoid body lice.”
“I drink some water and eat some cereal and then I take Abraham for a walk. He had spent the night eating the arm of the sofa but I don’t want to judge him. He has enough issues already.”
“But people get over grief. They get over even the most serious grief in a matter of years. If not get over then at least live beside. And the way they do this is by investing in other people, through friendship, through family, through teaching, through love.”
“It may seem strange, falling in love with someone because of a gesture, but sometimes you can read an entire person in a single moment. The way you can study a grain of sand and understand the universe. Love at first sight might or might not be a thing, but love in a single moment is.”
“And yet we had done what so often happened in the proud history of geographic discovery. We had found paradise. And then we had set it on fire.”
“For years now I had convinced myself that the sadness of the memories weighed more and lasted longer than the moments of happiness themselves. So I had, through some crude emotional mathematics, decided it was better not to seek out love or companionship or even friendship.”
Excerpted from How to Stop Time by Matt Haig
PART ONE – HOW TO STOP TIME
Life Among the Mayflies
I am old.
That is the main 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.
I am old – old in the way that a tree, or a quahog clam, or a Renaissance painting is old.
To give you an idea: I was born well over four hundred years ago on the third of March 1581, in my parents’ room, on the third floor of a small French château that used to be my home. It was a warm day, apparently, for the time of year, and my mother had asked her nurse to open all the windows.
‘God smiled on you,’ my mother said. Though I think she might have added that – should He exist – the smile had been a frown ever since.
My mother died a very long time ago. I, on the other hand, did not.
You see, I have a condition.
I thought of it as an illness for quite a while, but illness isn’t really the right word. Illness suggests sickness, and wasting away. Better to say I have a condition. A rare one, but not unique. One that no one knows about until they have it.
It is not in any official medical journals. Nor does it go by an official name. The first respected doctor to give it one, back in the1890s, called it ‘anageria’ with a soft ‘g’, but, for reasons that will become clear, that never became public knowledge. The condition develops around puberty. What happens after that is, well, not much. Initially the ‘sufferer’ of the condition won’t notice they have it. After all, every day people wake up and see the same face they saw in the mirror yesterday. Day by day, week by week, even month by month, people don’t change in very percep- tible ways.
But as time goes by, at birthdays or other annual markers, people begin to notice you aren’t getting any older.
The truth is, though, that the individual hasn’t stopped ageing. They age exactly the same way. Just much slower. The speed of ageing among those with anageria fluctuates a little, but generally it is a 1:15 ratio. Sometimes it is a year every thirteen or fourteen years but with me it is closer to fifteen.
So, we are not immortal. Our minds and bodies aren’t in stasis. It’s just that, according to the latest, ever-changing science, various aspects of our ageing process – the molecular degeneration, the cross-linking between cells in a tissue, the cellular and molecular mutations (including, most significantly, to the nuclear DNA) – happen on another timeframe.
My hair will go grey. I may go bald. Osteoarthritis and hearing loss are probable. My eyes are just as likely to suffer with age-related presbyopia. I will eventually lose muscle mass and mobility.
A quirk of anageria is that it does tend to give you a heightened immune system, protecting you from many (not all) viral and bacte- rial infections, but ultimately even this begins to fade. Not to bore you with the science, but it seems our bone marrow produces more hematopoietic stem cells – the ones that lead to white blood cells – during our peak years, though it is important to note that this doesn’t protect us from injury or malnutrition, and it doesn’t last.
So, don’t think of me as a sexy vampire, stuck for ever at peak virility. Though I have to say it can feel like you are stuck for ever when, according to your appearance, only a decade passes between the death of Napoleon and the first man on the moon.
One of the reasons people don’t know about us is that most people aren’t prepared to believe it.
Human beings, as a rule, simply don’t accept things that don’t fit their worldview. So you could say ‘I am four hundred and thirty- nine years old’ easily enough, but the response would generally be ‘are you mad?’. ‘Or, alternatively, death.’
Another reason people don’t know about us is that we’re protected. By a kind of organisation. Anyone who does discover our secret, and believes it, tends to find their short lives are cut even shorter. So the danger isn’t just from ordinary humans.
It’s also from within.
Sri Lanka, three weeks ago
Chandrika Seneviratne was lying under a tree, in the shade, a hundred metres or so behind the temple. Ants crawled over her wrinkled face. Her eyes were closed. I heard a rustling in the leaves above and looked up to see a monkey staring down at me with judging eyes.
I had asked the tuk-tuk driver to take me monkey spotting at the temple. He’d told me this red-brown type with the near bald face was a rilewa monkey.
‘Very endangered,’ the driver had said. ‘There aren’t many left. This is their place.’
The monkey darted away. Disappeared among leaves.
I felt the woman’s hand. It was cold. I imagined she had been lying here, unfound, for about a day. I kept hold of her hand and found myself weeping. The emotions were hard to pin down. A rising wave of regret, relief, sorrow and fear. I was sad that Chandrika wasn’t here to answer my questions. But I was also relieved I didn’t have to kill her. I knew she’d have had to die.
This relief became something else. It might have been the stress or the sun or it might have been the egg hoppas I’d had for break- fast, but I was now vomiting. It was in that moment that it became clear to me. I can’t do this any more.
There was no phone reception at the temple, so I waited till I was back in my hotel room in the old fort town of Galle tucked inside my mosquito net sticky with heat, staring up at the pointlessly slow ceiling fan, before I phoned Hendrich.
‘You did what you were supposed to do?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said, which was halfway to being true. After all, the outcome had been the one he’d asked for. ‘She is dead.’ Then I asked what I always asked. ‘Have you found her?’
‘No,’ he said, as always. ‘We haven’t. Not yet.’
Yet. That word could trap you for decades. But this time, I had a new confidence.
‘Now, Hendrich, please. I want an ordinary life. I don’t want to do this.’
He sighed wearily. ‘I need to see you. It’s been too long.’
Los Angeles, two weeks ago
Hendrich was back in Los Angeles. He hadn’t lived there since the 1920s so he assumed it was pretty safe to do so and that no one was alive who would remember him from before. He had a large house in Brentwood that served as the headquarters for the Albatross Society. Brentwood was perfect for him. A geranium-scented land of large houses tucked behind high fences and walls and hedges, where the streets were free from pedestrians and everything, even the trees, looked perfect to the point of sterile.
I was quite shocked, on seeing Hendrich, sitting beside his large pool on a sun-lounger, laptop on knee. Normally, Hendrich looked pretty much the same, but I couldn’t help notice the change. He looked younger. Still old and arthritic, but, well, better than he’d done in a century.
‘Hi, Hendrich,’ I said, ‘you look good.’
He nodded, as if this wasn’t new information. ‘Botox. And a brow lift.’
He wasn’t even joking. In this life he was a former plastic surgeon. The back story was that after retiring he had moved from Miami to Los Angeles. That way he could avoid the issue of not having any former local clients. His name here was Harry Silverman. (‘Silverman. Don’t you like it? It sounds like an ageing superhero. Which I kind of am.’)
I sat on the spare lounger. His maid, Rosella, came over with two sunset-coloured smoothies. I noticed his hands. They looked old. Liver spots and baggy skin and indigo veins. Faces could lie easier than hands could.
‘Sea buckthorn. It’s crazy. It tastes like shit. Try it.’
The amazing thing about Hendrich was that he kept thoroughly of the times. He always had done, I think. He certainly had been since the 1890s. Centuries ago, selling tulips, he’d probably been the same. It was strange. He was older than any of us but he was always very much in the current of whatever zeitgeist was flowing around.
‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘in California, the only way to look like you are getting older is to look like you are getting younger. If you can move your forehead over the age of forty then people become very suspicious.’
He told me that he had been in Santa Barbara for a couple of years but he got a bit bored. ‘Santa Barbara is pleasant. It’s heaven, with a bit more traffic. But nothing ever happens in heaven. I had a place up in the hills. Drank the local wine every night. But I was going mad. I kept getting these panic attacks. I have lived for over seven centuries and never had a single panic attack. I’ve witnessed wars and revolutions. Fine. But I get to Santa Barbara and there I was waking up in my comfortable villa with my heart going crazy and feeling like I was trapped inside myself. Los Angeles, though, is something else. Los Angeles calmed me right down, I can tell you . . .’
‘Feeling calm. That must be nice.’
He studied me for a while, as if I was an artwork with a hidden meaning. ‘What’s the matter, Tom? Have you been missing me?’
‘Something like that.’
‘What is it? Was Iceland that bad?’
I’d been living in Iceland for eight years before my brief assign- ment in Sri Lanka.
‘It was lonely.’
‘But I thought you wanted lonely, after your time in Toronto. You said the real loneliness was being surrounded by people. And, besides, that’s what we are, Tom. We’re loners.’
I inhaled, as if the next sentence was something to swim under.
‘I don’t want to be that any more. I want out.’
There was no grand reaction. He didn’t bat an eye. I looked at his gnarled hands and swollen knuckles. ‘There is no out, Tom. You know that. You are an albatross. You are not a mayfly. You are an albatross.’
The idea behind the names was simple: albatrosses, back in the day, were thought to be very long-living creatures. Reality is, they only live to about sixty or so; far less than, say, the Greenland sharks that live to four hundred, or the quahog clam scientists called ‘Ming’ because it was born at the time of the Ming dynasty, over five hundred years ago. But anyway, we were albatrosses. Or albas, for short. And every other human on earth was dismissed as a mayfly. So called, because of the short-lived aquatic insects who go through an entire life cycle in a day or – in the case of one sub-species – five minutes.
Hendrich never talked of other, ordinary human beings as anything other than mayflies. I was finding his terminology – terminology I had ingrained into me – increasingly ridiculous.
Albatrosses. Mayflies. The silliness of it.
For all his age and intelligence, Hendrich was fundamentally immature. He was a child. An incredibly ancient child.
That was the depressing thing about knowing other albas. You realised that we weren’t special. We weren’t superheroes. We were just old. And that, in cases such as Hendrich, it didn’t really matter how many years or decades or centuries had passed, because you were always living within the parameters of your personality. No expanse of time or place could change that. You could never escape yourself.
‘I find it disrespectful, to be honest with you,’ he told me. ‘After all I’ve done for you.’
‘I appreciate what you’ve done for me . . .’ I hesitated. What exactly had he done for me? The thing he had promised to do hadn’t happened.
‘Do you realise what the modern world is like, Tom? It’s not like the old days. You can’t just move address and add your name to the parish register. Do you know how much I have had to pay to keep you and the other members safe?’
‘Well then, I could save you some money.’
‘I was always very clear: this is a one-way street—’
‘A one-way street I never asked to be sent down.’
He sucked on his straw, winced at the taste of his smoothie.
‘Which is life itself, isn’t it? Listen, kid—’
‘I’m hardly that.’
‘You made a choice. It was your choice to see Dr Hutchinson—’
‘And I would never have made that choice if I’d have known what would happen to him.’
He made circles with the straw, then placed the glass on the small table beside him in order to take a glucosamine supplement for his arthritis.
‘Then I would have to have you killed.’ He laughed that croak of his, to imply it was a joke. But it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. ‘I’ll make a deal, a compromise. I will give you the exact life you want – any life at all – but every eight years, as usual, you’ll get a call and, before you choose your next identity, I’ll ask you to do something.’
I had heard all this before, of course. Although ‘any life you want’ never really meant that. He would give me a handful of suggestions and I’d pick one of them. And my response, too, was more than familiar to his ears.
‘Is there any news of her?’ It was a question I had asked a hundred times before, but it had never sounded as pathetic, as hopeless, as it did now.
He looked at his drink. ‘No.’
I noticed he said it a little quicker than he normally would.
‘Hendrich?’
‘No. No, I haven’t. But, listen, we are finding new people at an incredible rate. Over seventy last year. Can you remember when we started? A good year was five. If you still want to find her you’d be mad to want out now.’
I heard a small splashing sound from the swimming pool. I stood up, went to the edge of the pool, and saw a small mouse, hopelessly swimming along past a water filter. I knelt down and scooped the creature out. It scuttled away towards the perfectly manicured grass.
He had me, and he knew it. There was no way out alive. And even if there was, it was easier to stay. There was a comfort to it – like insurance.
‘Any life I want?’
‘Any life you want.’
I am pretty sure, Hendrich being Hendrich, he was assuming that I was going to demand something extravagant and expensive. That I would want to live in a yacht off the Amalfi Coast, or in a penthouse in Dubai. But I had been thinking about this, and I knew what to say. ‘I want to go back to London.’
‘London? She probably isn’t there, you know.’
‘I know. I just want to be back there. To feel like I’m home again. And I want to be a teacher. A history teacher.’
He laughed. ‘A history teacher. What, like in a high school?’
‘They say “secondary school” in England. But, yes, a history teacher in a high school. I think that would be a good thing to do.’
And Hendrich smiled and looked at me with mild confusion, as if I had ordered the chicken instead of the lobster. ‘That’s perfect. Yes. Well, we’ll just need to get a few things in place and . . .’
And as Hendrich kept talking I watched the mouse disappear under the hedge, and into dark shadows, into freedom.
….
Note: Above are quotes and excerpts from the book “How to Stop Time by Matt Haig”. If you find it interesting and useful, don’t forget to buy paper books to support the Author and Publisher!
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