There's a wrinkle in time on the 15:15 train from Paddington to Cheltenham Spa
It's the Summer of 1982, and Beth Sawyer is thrilled to have landed the title role in a play. It may only be in a fringe theatre in Shepherd's Bush, but it's the start she's always dreamed of.
It's the Summer of 2020, amid the global pandemic, and Tom Brookes is furloughed. Unable to face lockdown in a tiny city flat, he moves back to his mother's cottage in the sleepy Cotswold village of Stoatsfield-under-Ridge.
Neither of them expects an everyday train journey to throw their normal lives so spectacularly off-course.
This is the story of an extraordinary encounter between two people who should never have met.
***
The sky is darkening with unnatural speed; with it comes a silence she finds disquieting. CHAPTER ONE
***
(Pintail Press, 3 March 2021, 233 pages, ebook, #ARC from the publisher and voluntarily reviewed, #BlogTour 2 April via @RandomTTours)
***
***
I'm a huge fan of time shift / time slip / time travel novels. There's something I find strangely appealing about books that use this as premise and I've been a fan since I devoured The Time Traveller's Wife many years ago. Running Behind Time sounded right up my street, something I could really enjoy. Other time travel novels I've read tend to have character move between centuries so the differences between periods and eras are really obvious. This book only has them move thirty-eight-years. This doesn't sound a lot and I was surprised by how many differences there actually were such as PC's, mobile phones and even currency. I also really enjoyed the fact the author uses the Pandemic as a back-drop which makes the differences between 1982 and 2020 even more poignant. I also enjoyed the way the author deals with the complexities of time travel such as how this changes the characters and their relationships and the impact of seeing the same people in both era's. This is a fascinating, entertaining book.
