When I was in college, I took a class in American Urban History. I was assigned a book called Time and Again by Jack Finney, which took me completely by surprise. It’s about Si Morley, an unassuming advertising artist in New York City 1970s who is recruited by the federal government to join a top secret program that is experimenting with time travel. He ends up traveling back to 1882, where he falls in love with a woman he meets there. He is capable of moving back and forth between past and present, and ultimately must decide whether he wants to stay in the past or return to his present life.
I absolutely loved Time and Again. Not only is it a suspenseful, gripping story, but it is full of fascinating, painstaking detail about life in New York in the 1880s. I will always remember the snowy night when Si Morley went to sleep in a dark apartment overlooking Central Park, and woke up almost a century earlier in that same apartment. I loved Time and Again so much that I listened to it on audio about 20 years later, narrated by the sublime Campbell Scott. I think it ignited my love for time travel fiction, such as The Time Traveler’s Wife and When You Reach Me.
This month, Touchstone re-released Time and Again in a paperback version with a new cover and a foreword by Audrey Niffeneger (author of The Time Traveler’s Wife). I was offered a review copy of the new version, but even though the cover of my old college copy has fallen off, I want to keep the one I fell in love with. The publisher generously agreed to let me do a giveaway of the new Time and Again here on the blog instead. So, if you’d like to read an AMAZING book about time travel and American history and New York City, please leave me a comment below and I will pick a winner next Wednesday, May 7.
Seriously, enter.
Good luck!