How to Stop Time Synopsis
THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION OF MATT HAIG'S SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
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. From Elizabethan England to Jazz-Age Paris, from New York to the South Seas, Tom has seen a lot, and now craves an ordinary life.
Always changing his identity to stay alive, Tom has the perfect cover - working as a history teacher at a London comprehensive. Here he can teach the kids about wars and witch hunts as if he'd never witnessed them first-hand. He can try to tame the past that is fast catching up with him. The only thing Tom must not do is fall in love.
How to Stop Time is a wild and bittersweet story about losing and finding yourself, about the certainty of change and about the lifetimes it can take to really learn how to live.
This special Illustrated Edition features over fifty enchanting line drawings by the award-winning artist Chris Riddell
About This Edition
Matt Haig Press Reviews
'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
'Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin' -- Jeanette Winterson
'How to Stop Time is 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
'Matt Haig is astounding' -- Stephen Fry
'It's not easy to write a book that's simultaneously fun and serious and gripping and simple and profound, but Matt Haig manages it again and again. How to Stop Time is just brilliant' -- Gavin Extence, author of The Universe Versus Alex Woods
'Strange and brilliant and heartfelt' -- Jenny Colgan
'Goodness. What a stunning book. Brilliant, beautiful and mindbendingly magnificent' -- Jill Mansell
'My favourite book of this year, and most others. A dazzling read. Time stopped still' -- Danny Wallace
About 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.
He has sold over three million books worldwide.
Matt Haig on his teen novel, The Radleys:
"This is a story about growing up, first and foremost. About how we learn to come to terms with who we are, independent of the ideas our parents had for us. About how we decide our own identities. As well as what shapes those identities - who we choose to love, and hate, admire and fear. It is about how denying ourselves can sometimes be more dangerous than succumbing to tempation. This is the story I wanted to tell. I never set out to write a vampire story, but vampires were the obvious choice. After all, as family secrets go, you can't get much bigger than finding out you are actually a full-blown creature of the night. And hopefully it fits as a metaphor for teenage life. A life full of physical changes, forbidden cravings, and feelings of being an outsider. In that sense, we've probably all been vampires at some stage."
Author photo © Clive Doyle
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