Time Was was not what the blurb promised. It was the story of Thorn and Emmett, with small and rare peeks into the actual Tom-and-Ben time. It is not “a love story stitched across time and war” nor a gay historical romance, as it is advertised.
The worst part was that I did not care for Thorn and Emmett but loved Ben and Tom’s story, which makes me really divided regarding my feelings for this book. There were chapters that I loved and chapters that I didn’t, so it’s hard to give this book a rating.
I don’t know if I didn’t enjoy this book simply because it was not for me or because I was expecting something completely different and got disappointed when I didn’t get it. The story was not bad but it was not mind-blowing either.
However, I’m still interested in reading more books from the author, especially Luna: New Moon, which I’ve been meaning to read for some time.

A bookseller finds a love letter in the back of a book and tries to track down the lovers’ story, but the mystery is much different than he imagined as he finds pictures of two men scattered through time. This was a lovely and poignant novella about two travelers lost in time and the bookseller drawn to their story.

This was a beautiful, bitter-sweet, gem of a novella. I wish this was longer. I felt it had so much more to give. I loved Tom and Ben but also Emmet and his journey to discover their story. It seems very different to McDonald's backlist but I really hope we see more like this from him in the future as its truly a rare wonder.

I hopped onto the Ian McDonald train somewhat late, in that I only became acquainted with his larger body of work with his "Luna" series, with its broad and far-reaching conversations about social order, family, and all the ways in which one's identity intersects with the world (or worlds) in which we live. The "Luna" series includes a number of LGBTQIA+ characters, and even from the first to the second book I was tracking McDonald's evolution and the growth of complexity and richness in his depictions of these characters. But if those books represent progress and the ticking of all of the boxes I look to see ticked in science fiction, then "Time Was" somehow leapfrogs even beyond that development to offer something truly fresh, deeply complex, and intensely Queer. It not only ticked my boxes, it came back with a Sharpie and filled those suckers all the way in. It strikes the perfect balance between an authorial intent to push his skill at crafting narratives around representation and adept world-building, not to mention a downright glorious set of twists and turns. This is a novella which packs a punch, a human heart, and a social conscience all at the same time. It's everything I needed this summer, and I'm grateful to McDonald and to Tor.com for putting this out there into the world

Time Was, a novella by Ian McDonald is billed as a time-travel love story, but really, there’s not a lot of depiction of either in this slim work, and while it’s often linguistically/stylistically beautiful, in the end I was more disappointed than not.

Emmet Leigh is a used book dealer who specializes in WWII. He comes across a 1930’s book, Time Was, with a letter inside from Tom Chappel to his lover Ben Seligman dating from the war. Curiosity piqued (“This was what every dealer, every bibliophile, crave: a story outside the book”), Emmett tries to learn more about the two men. His first clues come from Thorn Hildreth, whose great-grandfather’s stash of papers and photographs puts last names to first names and faces to those. When a friend of his who works at the Imperial War Museum finds documentation of the same two men in WWI, and then later in 1990, Tom and Thorn realize they are time travelers and seek to further unravel the mystery.

McDonald tells a good part of the story via Emmett’s POV: first as he discovers the letter and finds the first clues, then as he moves in with Thorn and the two begin a relationship while his search becomes more of an “obsession,” one that takes a toll on him physically, mentally, and socially. As more clues are uncovered, his and Thorn’s theories shift and morph to better fit the facts as they know them. The other POV belongs to Tom. Here we learn how he and Ben met, began an illicit relationship, and eventually what happened to them that led to the time travel.

Easily my favorite part of the book was its lyrical prose. Here for instance, is Tom describing Shingle Street:
I know it in snow, those rare days of undifferentiated grey when the turnstones face into the white whip of thin flakes thrown down from the Baltic, when each pebble wears a rind of snow, locked together by ice . . . I know it in rain, when it becomes an undulating black river, shiny as a swimming dog . . . I know it in high summer sun, when the sky and sea seem anchored together and the whole world lies exhausted between them and nothing stirs, even breathes, when sky is heavy as tidewater and the sea seem to lift free from mere geography.

Tom being a poet allows McDonald to indulge his own inner bard, and so you get passages like the above filled with rhyme (know-snow), alliteration (sky sea seem), consonance (grey-face, whip-think) simile (as a swimming dog), personification (lies exhausted), and more. McDonald pulls back a bit when he’s in Emmet’s POV, but there’s no doubt that much of this work is told in simply beautiful prose, at times expressionistic, at times elliptical, which makes sense as well given time being “out of joint.”

That’s the good news. The bad news is, well, much of the rest. Because it’s a novella (i.e. short) and so much is filtered through Emmett, the love story at the center never really comes alive or feels all that real save for one early scene. I know this is one of those “Why didn’t the author write the book I wanted to read instead of the one they wanted to write?” complaints, but I couldn’t help being more interested in the two lovers than in Emmett. That early scene created such potential that mostly didn’t feel well mined.

And not just the story, but the vividness of the scenes with Tom and Ben were more compelling. Their story was often told in scene, while much of Emmett’s was summary, and often times summary that seemed oddly unselective in terms of when we got details and when we didn’t. That led to a sense of disjointedness (not connected to the time out of whack theme) and also at times to a sense of things not being earned.

The plotting had its own weaknesses. There’s I think a big reveal at the end, but I say “I think” because it seemed so predictable (and from such an early point in the book) that I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to be surprised by it or not. The same hold true for when Emmett solves part of the mystery with an epiphany that seemed relatively obvious to me and thus something he should have figured out much earlier. And one scene present Thorn in a way that I don’t think was intentionally harsh but comes across that way thanks to the brevity of the story, leaving a bad taste in my mouth with regard to her character (not so much her character but the authorial choice regarding her character and how that choice was presented).

I did like the elegiac atmosphere of the work, the sense that everything is ephemeral and loss is a given, and the way that melancholy played out in multiple ways—Thorn’s aged father, Thorn and Emmett’s relationship, Tom and Ben obviously, but also in other ways, such as the passing of the age of physical books and bookstores.

Despite that, Time Was felt like it left a lot of potential poignancy and emotionality on the floor. That potential, combined with those moments of evocative, poetic language, made the novella feel like a near miss, so I was left unsatisfied, closing it with but with a frustrated feeling of “what could have been.” Though in some ways, I suppose, that’s part of the point.

3.5 stars
I read this book because of the author, not the book description, which in fact I hardly read before finishing the book, so although the description is quite misleading, I had no problem whatsoever with that, and if I found the book a bit disappointed it was probably just because my expectacions were quite high.
In spite of that, this is well-written time-travelling novella, an entartining read for the couple of hours it takes to finish it. And although it lacks that "something" that could have made it a must-read instead of just a pleasant read, I think any science fiction fan (especially history buffs) will enjoy it.

Struggling second-hand book dealer, Emmet, is trying to survive in the increasingly difficult financial climate – and then comes across a small poetry collection called Time Was which includes a love letter from Tom to Ben, set in WWII. It sets him out on an astonishing search to discover who Tom and Ben are – a search that takes him to a tucked-away corner of England where odd stories abound about the seas catching fire…

And no… You won’t find that blurb anywhere else, as I wrote it myself. I feel the official version is highly misleading and yet somehow also manages to reveal some of the major plot points. I’m very glad I didn’t read it before I picked up the book, because I would have approached it expecting something completely different.

The main protagonist is gripped by the need to track down the fate of the two young men caught up in WWII and more or less abandons his everyday life to do it. In contrast to the lyrical, slightly highflown prose produced by Tom when in his viewpoint, Emmet is far more down-to-earth with a dry, sarky humour that I thoroughly enjoyed and stopped this turning into a treacly read. In fact, Emmett isn’t a particularly likeable character – and that was okay, too.

Tom and Ben were the people in the story that snagged my sympathy and attention – and I think that is exactly how I was meant to feel, in effect, shadowing the main protagonist in his attempts to find out more about these two people. But history and historical research is inherently messy – it never delivers exactly what you want, in the way that you want it. And there are two major surprises at the end of this bittersweet story that summed up that premise.

Overall, I think this is a haunting, really well written novella with a misleading blurb that isn’t doing it any favours whatsoever. Take my advice – don’t read it. Instead pick up this short story without an prior expectation and let the plot unfold around you.
9/10

Oh wow. Any book about someone trying to solve a historical mystery is going to have my attention. Ditto with digging through archives and using books as dead-drops. So I was hooked very early on. The main character of the bookseller is an engaging narrator and I loved the interchanging between his attempts to get to the bottom of who Tom and Ben were and Tom writing about falling in love with Ben. Plus it captured the sheer joy of pursuing an academic mystery perfectly, with some fun English eccentricities thrown in for good measure. I will definitely have to check out some more of this author's books now.

However, no matter how much I loved this book, the blurb set several false expectations which decreased my enjoyment. First, it revealed that Tom and Ben were time-travellers and what era they came from. Bit of a bummer considering how much of the book is about trying to figure out who they are and where they came from: I'd have enjoyed the mystery elements far more if I hadn't known their resolution and would have had fun trying to work out what was going on. Secondly, the blurb focuses on the love story between the two men. Yeah, that's present in the story and I became far too invested in the couple considering how short this book was, but the story isn't focused on that. When I recommend this to people, it might just be a case of shoving it at them and making them not read the blurb, because I think it'll spoil it for them.

Anything that is sold to me as a queer love story across the ages is, let’s be honest, always going to be a must-read for me. Far too often, stories featuring LGBTQ+ love have been erased from minds and the history books and it is often easy for people in this day and age to believe that these epic tales only happened once people were allowed to be out.
The synopsis of this short book just swept me away with visions of a couple being kept apart by circumstances out of their control. It is something that has always appealed to me - queer or not, science-fiction or not. But the realities of the novel did not live up to my grand visions.
The writing was exquisite, sure, wholly reflecting the idea that one of the characters is a poet, but the novel began to fail when it began to move away from the romance between Tom and Ben and their love across the ages. Instead, Ian McDonald decided to insert another part of the novel featuring a modern-day bookseller trying to decipher who the two men were. Of course I understand the merit of the choice, but I just wish with all of my heart that the framing device had been cut away in an edit and we got to spend more time with the real heroes of the tale.
It almost became a little like The Help in some ways. You know, a story that is supposed to be about black slaves that instead verges into the territory of focussing wholly on the exploits of this random white woman and how she becomes their saviour. Of course, there are unmistakable differences between the two tales which, even with the inclusion for who-knows-what-reason of a straight male protagonist, does not come close to being as offensive as the example I mention, but I cannot help but feel its echoes in this tale.
It is almost as someone read it and worried that Time Was was too gay; that, without the inclusion of this random straight dude it wouldn’t be marketable to the masses. I hope beyond all hope that was not the case, and I am just making silly inferences. Because, holy hell, the ferocity in the demand I have witnessed for queer literature over the years couldn’t be missed.
At least I am pretty certain it could not.

Contrary to popular opinion, I have enjoyed but not been a flag-waving fanatic of Ian McDonald’s recent novels. The Dervish House, the Luna books thus far, and the Everness trilogy all received accolades and praise unlike any work from McDonald’s first three decades as a writer. But there is the extremely strong impression it’s only because these books are the most mainstream of McDonald’s oeuvre—like he gave up trying to be original and just produced an abstraction of what the market wanted. Gone is the gonzo imagination of Out on Blue Six. Absent is the Walt Whitman approach to Hearts, Hands and Voices. Nowhere is the magic realism and charm of Desolation Road. Instead, the reader is given relatively familiar characters, setups, and straight-forward prose combined in very competent fashion—not a criticism, just an observation. Thus when learning McDonald had been commissioned to write a novella for Tor.com, my heart sank further: more standard, market stuff. Having now read Time Was, I couldn’t have been more wrong. It’s far too early to say McDonald is back, but damn did he surprise with what may be the most affecting, sweeping story of his career.

I suppose Time Was is technically a frame story, though it should be known that the boundaries between the frame and its content are often blurred, and the frame itself occupies the majority of space. The novella opens in the very-near-future with rare book seller Emmet Leigh searching the contents of a London dumpster for potential literary gold. Coming across a semi-anonymous book of poetry, he takes a chance and picks it up. Opening the leather-bound volume, a love letter falls out. Written by one Tom Chappell to a Ben Seligman, the pair opine separation even as the exigencies of WWII press close. Intrigued, Leigh begins digging deeper into the history of the two men, and discovers more than he could ever have imagined.

Though at heart the romance of Chappell and Seligman, McDonald never beats the reader over the head with its LGBTWERTYU elements in Time Was. Like Ian Macleod’s The Summer Isles or Adam Robert’s New Model Army, homosexuality is taken for granted, a natural aspect of life and the story, and matters array themselves from there. Given the extreme volume of social justice drum-beating happening in today’s world, McDonald’s approach makes for welcome relief. Addressing, describing, and respecting a real aspect of human existence without making a show of it does much more to raise awareness than any loud drum. And by doing so, the real emotions of life appear on the page to affect the reader. Brilliantly done.

Prose-wise, Time Was establishes McDonald as one of, if not the premiere stylist of his generation. Dynamic and unafraid, his oeuvre covers the widest range of any author I can think of. (Michael Swanwick is another contender.) From the skirting, clipped exposition of his debut Desolation Road to the disco-ball vigor of Out on Blue Six, the sing-the-body-electric approach in Hearts, Hands, and Voices to the tried and true, mainstream stylings of the Luna series, there is no other contemporary writer I have encountered who has shown such a spectrum of style. And Time Was is written in achingly beautiful prose unlike I’ve seen from McDonald before. As stated, it is a romance, and he imbues every page, every line with the weight and emotion of something unseen that fully complements the story being told without dipping into cheap sensationalism. Aged and mature, McDonald never delves into high school maudlinism, but instead uses panache to deliver a love story for adults—which is not something that can be said about the majority of the market these days.

And the compliments keep rolling. Time travel is in strong contention for the most overused science fictional device in existence. Extensory rather than central, McDonald deploys the device in a fashion that fits itself like a puzzle piece to the main premise yet never overshadows the narrative with fantasy “science” or deep, detailed, useless exposition. And it’s a natural extension. Where time and distance are used in many romance novels as a device to keep lovers apart, in Time Was McDonald uses time travel to enhance this. Also brilliantly done.

I rave and rave, and Time Was is indeed a fine novella. I would have liked to see another 30-40 pages of development, particularly the troubles in Leigh’s life as his obsession with getting to the bottom of Chappell and Seligman’s story unravels, not to mention a touch more personal content in the final chapters that ‘seals the deal’ on Seligman and Chappell. But what is remains works well, and given McDonald’s gorgeous delivery, is affecting. I have my reservations about Tor.com originals, not to mention the direction of McDonald’s oeuvre, but Time Was has me thinking twice about both.

Time Was by Ian McDonald

Emmett Leigh is a used book dealer and one day in London he finds something that catches his imagination – a love letter from one soldier to another, written during the Second World War, hidden away in a book of poetry. Emmett is determined to find out everything he can about Tom and Ben and it takes him on a trail of bookshops and collections in England and further afield. What he finds seems impossible – photos taken during other wars and times, including World War I, and Ben and Tom look no different. Emmett has to accept that these two men are time travellers, lost in time, searching for one another, using the letters in copies of this book of poetry as a map.

Time Was is a novella and, as a result, skims the surface of a story that has the most intriguing premise – lovers cast out into time by a wartime scientific experiment that went very wrong indeed. On one level, it’s a gay love story that is both touching and tragic, and on another it’s a science fiction tale of time travel and wartime experiments. Both are equally appealing but I’m not sure that the story completely makes up its mind over which way to go. It is, though, exquisitely written. Ian McDonald writes so beautifully, filling this little book with poetic prose.

I loved the setting for much of the story which is in Shingle Street, Suffolk. I love books set in places that I’m fond of and I adore this area. The author captures it perfectly and it presents such an evocative backdrop to Ben and Tom’s story. Mostly, though, this is the story of Emmett, a man who has problems in his own relationships.

I thoroughly enjoyed the way that the story ends. I can’t say that I understood it completely but I loved how the strands came together. I am a huge fan of Ian McDonald’s Luna science fiction series. I will always seek out his writing. Time Was wasn’t quite what I was expecting but it certainly resonates and it most definitely haunts.

Other reviews
Luna: New Moon
Luna: Wolf Moon

In the end, this seemed to be rather more about Emmett chasing the tragedy of Ben and Tom than about Ben and Tom themselves. A queer time travelling couple as the mover for another dude's life angst, yay? Also, Bury Your Gays. If I think about it in terms of rep, it isn't great: Ben and Tom's love might be strong and they might work at it to find each other across all the different times, but a lot goes unexplained (like how they get separated, and why they always end up in war zones), but it isn't really about them. It's about Emmett, and the twist at the end did not surprise me (or indeed feel like a twist) -- but nor did it quite feel like it followed on logically.

It's well-enough written (though the chapters in Tom's point of view could do with being slightly more different in order to distinguish the narrative voices), and there are some very poignant moments between Tom and Ben, but... they're mostly the backdrop to another dude's story, including featuring his pointless and unfulfilling relationship with a woman, who he meets because he's looking for evidence about Tom and Ben.

I was kind of excited about this one, but it sucks that Tom and Ben were the sideshow in a love story ostensibly about them.

Time Was is a haunting, lovely story of love and loss, war and suffering. It’s also a bookish mystery of sorts, all served up in a compact 176 pages.

The framing of the device revolves around a man named Emmett, a book dealer who surrounds himself with stacks of archaic volumes and keeps himself housed and fed through his EBay sales. When he’s sorting through the book-filled dumpster outside yet another failed rare book store, he comes across what he thinks may be a valuable find — an odd little book of poetry, with an “inclusion” — a letter tucked inside. Both are clearly old, and could be worth quite a lot to a collector.

But as Emmett reads the letter, he realizes there’s more to the story. The letter is between two WWII soldiers, Tom and Ben, and it’s clearly a love letter. But there’s something strange about it too, and Emmett decides to try to find out more. He tracks down another person with artifacts related to Tom and Ben, but these are from World War I. And photos show young men who don’t appear to have aged. Are they some sort of immortals? Is it all a joke? How can this be?

Emmett becomes obsessed with finding out more about Tom and Ben, and meanwhile, we see bits and pieces narrated by them as well, as we learn of their meeting during World War II and the top-secret experiment that Ben is involved in. As Emmett discovers, it would appear that something — something inexplicable — happened, and the two have become unmoored in time, using notes tucked into copies of this unusual poetry book, to find one another again and again and again.

At first, it’s hard to see how it all fits together, and yet it works. The writing builds a sense of wonder, informed by a deep, passionate love that keeps Tom and Ben forever seeking and sometimes finding one another, no matter where in time they end up. It’s lovely and mysterious, and unlike anything I’ve read lately. I do love a good time travel story, when done well, and Time Was is done very well indeed.

The best types of time travel books make me feel like starting over again once I’ve reached the last page, so I can go back and see the chronological displacements and events out of order for what they truly are, catching the hints and clues I missed the first time around. Time Was is one of those books.

Highly recommended. It’s a fast, absorbing, and deeply touching story. I only wish we could have spent more time with Tom and Ben. There’s a tragic undertone to every moment they’re together, and I’d like to think they had plenty of happiness along the way as well. If you measure the success of a story by how much the reader comes to care about the characters, then I’d say this one is absolutely a success.

short but packs a mighty punch. This novella follows a historian’s attempts to track down time-crossed lovers Tom and Ben from their appearances in photos and videos across wars through history. Very The Last Beginning, so I loved it.

The provenance of a book is not new premise in literature, but Ian McDonald’s novella Time Was takes it in a wholly new and fascinating direction. Emmett is niche bookseller specializing in books of the Second World War. At the closing of a famous book store in London, he finds a slim book of poetry with a lover letter hidden away inside. He quickly sells the book, but keeps the letter.

Tom the Rhymer meets Ben the boffin and fall in love at the advent of WW2. Ben is brought to a small coastal town to work on a highly classified experiment for the war effort, and Tom is a local whose head is lost in verse. The results of their relationship and the experiments are intertwined in a story that reaches Emmett in contemporary London and beyond.

McDonald’s writes sentences woven out of affection and care, of his subject and the words themselves. His paragraphs held time on the page, and even though I desperately wanted to find out what happened, I had to tell myself to slow down and enjoy.

Please read Time Was. A tale that values representation and “quantum-magical theory.” A great tribute to love and the word.

“Time was, time will be again…”

Thank you to NetGalley, Mcmillan/ Tor, and Ian McDonald for the advanced copy for review.

This book...was not what I was expecting. I had never read anything from Ian McDonald before and wasn't sure what to expect. The blurb is somewhat misleading, as it makes it seem like it's focused on the love story and the characters searching for each other through time...and the focus really isn't on that. It's a good story and I was interested enough to keep reading, but it did throw me off once I realized that's how the entire novella was going to go. Regardless, I would enjoy a full book with this tory.

Published by Tor.com on April 24, 2018

Time Was begins with a bookseller’s discovery of a letter in an old book of poetry. The bookseller, Emmett Leigh, is intrigued by the letter from Tom Chappell to his lover Ben Seligman, who has gone off to fight the war. Leigh feels compelled to research the story of Tom and Ben. To that end, he tracks down people in the present who can give him clues about the past. His investigation leads him to the diaries that Reverend Anson kept of his chaplaincy in 1940s Egypt. Anson, whose diary describes Tom as “gay” in the old-fashioned sense of the word, is apparently oblivious to the nature of Tom's relationship with Ben.

Although Tom introduced Ben to Anson as being in photoreconnaissance, Leigh can find no record of a Ben Seligman occupying that position in Egypt during the war. Hence a mystery arises that the bookseller feels the need to solve. Anson’s granddaughter provides photographs and an archivist identifies two men of the same name and appearance in her voluminous records of war. The two men, however, served in an earlier war: World War I. A witness described them as part of a battalion that vanished in Turkey while assaulting entrenched Ottoman soldiers — a battalion known as the Lost Sandringhams. As the witness described it, the two men vanished into a cloud of smoke. Were they deserters? Were they taken prisoner and executed? Were they abducted by aliens?

But the bigger mystery is why, twenty-four years later, Tom and Ben were photographed standing in front of the Sphinx, having not aged a day. The deeper Leigh digs, the more questions arise. He finds more copies of the book of poetry and more letters. Time Was contains some surprising twists, culminating in a final surprise that requires the reader to rethink the events that took place up to that point. I love stories like that.

I also love Ian McDonald’s prose. McDonald composes masterful phrases (Tom pushes a bike “under a sky the color of judgment”) and sentences (“All written art is an attempt to communicate what it is to feel, to ask the terrifying question: Is what I experience in my heart the same as what you experience?”). Time Was is a novella, exactly the right length for the poignant story it tells, and it tells that story in exquisite prose. Readers who enjoy serious literature while generally shying away from science fiction will be well rewarded by spending some time with Time Was.

RECOMMENDED

During World War II, Tom and Ben were brought together by a secret project designed to hide British targets from German radar. The two had to kept their growing love for one another secret. When the project they were assigned to went wrong, Tom and Ben vanished and were never seen again, presumed to be dead. Now they are lost in time, searching for one another by leaving clues in books - hoping to make their timelines overlap in order to be together again.

I'm a sucker for a good time travel story and Time Was by Ian McDonald sounded exactly like the novella for me. Unfortunately, after I completed the story I felt like I'd been duped because the story is described as a WWII time travel love story, but really it's about pretentious book-loving historian who happens to find some of Ben and Tom's correspondences and begins to put their story together. We do get a handful of short POV chapters from our time travelers perspectives but not nearly enough to really care about their story at all, no matter how much I wanted to become hooked. Plus, I hate to say it, but Tom and Ben were actually on the dull side.

Overall, I love the idea of Time Was, but I was underwhelmed by the execution. The storytelling begins to get more disjointed and disconnected the further you go along and we don't get nearly enough time with the cast to become invested in their stories. I think I would have preferred to have followed Ben and Tom's storylines directly without the historian framing their tale. Unfortunately, Ian McDonald's newest release just wasn't for me although there's plenty of potential.

Time Was by Ian McDonald
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Time to manage our expectations here.

I'm a fan of Ian's work and I'm generally amazed by the amount of research he puts into his novels, twisting strange stories into very creative manifestos, and there's a bit of that coming through the pages here, too, but it begs the question:

What is this?

It is a love story only if you see it through the lens of a mystery fan first, a time-paradox sleuth second, and if you like a REALLY slow burn through a deep focus on poetry and old personal notebooks from the PoV of a bibliophile in hunt of the central mystery.

It's not bad and the questions raised do drag us to the inevitable end, but this is a very niche piece.

History buffs, bibliophiles, and SF mystery fans who don't mind a slow burn that leads to a somewhat odd end in this thankfully short work will probably get a lot out of this.

But for me? It was fine. Okay. But not my favorite of his by a long shot.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC!

A good find at a used book sale might be a copy of a book that was missing from a series, a first edition, or a signed first edition. Emmett, the protagonist of Time Was by Ian McDonald, is hoping for good hardbacks about World War II to sell online when he visits the closing sale of the Golden Page in London. Instead, he accidentally acquires a mysterious collection of poetry that leads him down a deep research rabbit hole and into an even stranger story of love and weird science.

Emmett discovery of an anonymous book of poetry—Time Was, by E.L.—is just a prelude to another find. The book contains a surprising love letter from one soldier to another soldier. Love letters from World War II are not so rare; soldiers wrote to their (female) sweethearts and vice versa all the time. But love letters between soldiers of the same sex are vanishingly rare (possibly none existent). This stunning find leads Emmett on a quest to find out who Tom and Ben were and what might have happened to them. Then, an archivist friend tips Emmett off to the possibility that Tom and Ben might have been alive and together…in World War I.

Time Was contains an astonishing number of discoveries for such a brief book. One thing leads to another in short order. The more Emmett learns, the weirder and more gripping the novel gets. It is packed with things I love: unusual love stories, time travel, and deep dives into archival material. I had a great time reading this fast-paced novella.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. It will be released 24 April 2018.