Alan Bennett once defined a classic as a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have. For a modern bestseller, the formula needs rejigging only slightly – a book everyone feels they have read, even if they have gone out of their way to avoid it. Even if Bridget Jones’s Diary or The Da Vinci Code are not your bag, you absorb so much by osmosis that it becomes irrelevant whether or not you have scanned the pages.
As such, most people know the basics of The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger’s debut that – aided by a 2009 film adaptation – has sold in its millions since it was published in 2003. A librarian called Henry has a rare genetic disorder that causes him to travel through time at random, landing dazed and naked wherever the cosmos takes him. He learns to find his feet (and some clothes) a little faster each time. In the course of his many unchronological journeys, he meets his soulmate, Clare. They are wrenched repeatedly from each other’s arms to reunite weeks, months or years later in more or less romantic scenarios, depending on their ages at the time.
