The Time Traveler's Wife

Henry DeTamble has a genetic condition that periodically and involuntarily rips him out of the present and drops him, naked, into some other point in his own life, a disorder Niffenegger calls Chrono Displacement. Clare Abshire first meets an adult Henry when she is a child of six, visited repeatedly across her Michigan childhood by a man from her own future who already knows how their story will go, and by the time she meets him again as a stranger at the Newberry Library in Chicago at twenty, he is meeting her for the first time even though she has loved him for years. Their marriage is shadowed constantly by Henry's disappearances and by five miscarriages caused by the same condition passed to their unborn children, until a version of Henry from before his vasectomy visits Clare and gives them a daughter, Alba, who inherits her father's ability but with much greater control over it. Henry already knows, from a trip forward in his own timeline, that he will die when Alba is five, and the novel closes on that death exactly as foretold: an older Henry travels to a snowy Michigan woods on a winter night and is shot by mistake by Clare's own brother, then returns just long enough to die in Clare's arms. The final pages jump forward to Clare at eighty two, still waiting by the window as Henry once asked her to stop doing, receiving a final letter from him describing one last, promised reunion still to come.

Niffenegger alternates Henry and Clare's voices chapter by chapter, and the novel's chronology loops back on itself constantly, since Henry experiences his own life out of order. It reads as a genuine page turner despite, or because of, its structural puzzle, though several critics found its prose overwrought in exactly the places the plot turns most melodramatic.