Calling a book life-affirming is an overused cliché. In How To Stop Time, Matt Haig once again creates a novel that holds up a mirror up to life and mental health issues to show a character dealing with their problems and coping with being different. He doesn’t so much affirm life as offer up a story about the freedom to live and to really feel like you are living.

Tom Hazard looks like he is a forty-one year old History teacher in a London comprehensive. Actually, he is older - a lot older - due to a rare condition that slows down aging. He was born in the sixteenth century and played lute for Shakespeare and piano amongst the Roaring Twenties, but now he is hiding from the past, trying to stop memories from catching up with him and not daring to think about having a future. For preservation, he is not allowed to fall in love. However, the past, the present, and the future have all decided that they have a date with him and Tom finds himself facing up to who he is and what he wants from his very long life.

Haig writes with a kind of honest straightforwardness that is similar to his other books, a style which brings the character’s insecurities and thoughts right to the surface and creates an emotional book. It is from Tom’s point of view and jumps between the present and his long past in a memory style. This means that much of the book is more focused on thoughts, introspection, and inaction than events occurring (perhaps Tom should’ve had a few words with Shakespeare about Hamlet). The narrative is simple and not particularly original - person alive for centuries runs into famous people, meditates on lost love, looks for others with similar longevity - but the real selling point is the way that Haig makes it more about learning to actually live life and not being fixated on the past or panicked about the future.

There are a number of particularly endearing details and characters, such as the Tahitian Omai becoming a modern surfing star who believes in living your life to the full. Haig’s descriptions of the Roaring Twenties stand out as getting across both the all-consuming feel of the period and poking slight fun at it appearing as an epitome in a similar vein to the opening of A Tale of Two Cities. The extended appearance of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, with witchhunting and Shakespeare and the plague, are less exciting, but give a good base for Tom and his views of the world.

By the ending, Haig answers his promising title and shows a character learning to reclaim the chance to live his own life how he wants to, with less fear of the future or the past. The book’s messages will resonate with overthinkers and anxious individuals wanting to escape their own headspace and live, but also anybody who enjoys a character-focused tale of love, life, and history.

Tom Hazard is old, really old. A rare condition means he ages incredibly slowly; he has been alive for centuries. He lives by a set of rules including not staying in one place for too long and never getting to close to us 'mayflies'. But can you really live your life in isolation? I love Matt Haig's books and this didn't disappoint. How to Stop Time will stay with me for a while. I raced through it and was sad to reach the end. Haig draws such human, sympathetic characters that, despite the fantastical element to the story, you can't help but identify with them. I often found myself highlighting passages when his words resonated with me; T0m's struggles are my struggles, his hopes are mine. It's as if Haig can see into my soul. I'm sure other readers will feel the same way. With a touch of mystery and drama, the narrative flows well as we move back and forth from the present to the past, garnering clues as to how Tom has come to be the man he is over 400 years of existence. Ultimately, it is a book about finding and accepting yourself, and allowing others to accept you too. I hope I can follow in Tom Hazard's footsteps.

This is an engrossing and easy read, tackling an ambitious premise with an ease and simplicity that is beguiling. A novel which spans centuries and locations across the world from Arizona to Tahiti, Tom Hazard's search for the things he's lost over his long life is complicated by his membership of a secret society whose aims and intentions become ever more sinister as the story progresses.

I'm sorry I couldn't get into this book at present will try again in the future