Book Description

"I’ll dive right in and tell you that the novel, Time Squared by Lesley Krueger, which I’ve loved more than I’ve loved than any book I’ve read in ages, could be billed as Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life meets Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, if we wanted to underline just how badly you really ought to read it. And oh, you really do." -- Kerry Clare.In this literary novel, Robin and Eleanor meet in 1811 at the British estate of Eleanor’s rich aunt Clara. Robin is about to leave to fight in the Napoleonic Wars, and Aunt Clara rules out a marriage between her niece and the handsome young soldier.Everyone Eleanor knows, including Robin, believe they’ve always lived in the early 19th century, in the Regency era that Jane Austen so vividly portrayed.Yet in this time-jumping, genre-bending, challenging novel, Eleanor keeps finding herself in different times, living lives that are both similar and different to the life she lived in Regency England. Whether she finds herself in 1811, 1941 or 2010, she always lives with her aunt, she's invariably accompanied by her best friend Catherine, and her evolving romance with Robin leaves her both tense and joyful as he fights in yet another war.Meanwhile, carriages change to trains, the telegraph arrives, bicycles come into vogue, then motorcars, and suddenly Robin is fighting in the First World War when he started out fighting Napoleon in 1811. Yet both Robin and Eleanor remain in their twenties a century after their love affair began.No one but Eleanor notices the time jumps, and she struggles on her own to figure out what’s going on. Is she feverish? Hallucinating? Losing her mind? Only when she reaches the 21st century does Eleanor understand that she and Robin are being manipulated through time.But who is doing this and why? Desperate, Eleanor sets off to confront the ones she finally discovers are behind this — chessmasters who are playing her like a pawn. Eleanor’s goal? To free herself from this quantum experiment to live out her life on her own terms, with Robin by her side.Neither sci fi nor romance, but a critically-acclaimed literary mash-up, Time Squared reveals the roles women are forced to play in different centuries, the power they’re allowed, the stresses they face — and what this does to their relationships. Shakespeare famously wrote, "Love alters not when it alteration finds."Or does it?