Time and Again

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Time and Again

Jack Finney

Literature

Aug 26, 2018

Jack Finney’s immersive time-travel novel, in which assiduously researched details of life in late-nineteenth-century Manhattan are choreographed with imaginative élan into a fleet but intricate narrative, is treasured by legions of readers. The author spices his suspenseful plot with a beguiling, factual nostalgia that incorporates historical curiosities and actual events. A twentieth-century advertising illustrator named Simon Morley has found a way to travel back in time to do his sketching of 1880s New York on-site, so to speak. Under the aegis of a secret government project unfolding in late 1970, Si is immured in the famous Dakota apartment building overlooking Central Park; the furnishings are a replica of a Victorian domestic setting from a century earlier, providing a congenial environment for the self-hypnosis that will transport him into the past. What ensues is a tale of international espionage in the present, blackmail and murder in the past, and romance across temporal dimensions, one that carries the reader along for a heady, time-defying ride.

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Debra Hanff

May 23, 2020

A favourite read from my youth. Loved the way the photographs were worked into the fiction, and the premise is just the sort of thing to appeal to a young mind! (Or to any mind, for that matter). If you could go back in time to change history, would you do it? The idea that small, insignificant events can have a huge historical outcome.

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