A Bridge of Years

I was attracted to this book when I heard a reviewer say. "A man buys a house and finds that it cleans itself and if he leaves the washing up on the kitchen bench overnight it's been done in the morning." And that was my entry point into this very human time travel story.

Tom is the house buyer. He's recently divorced and moved out of town. He buys a house that has been left abandoned by the previous owner who has disappeared without a trace and is ten years missing. The mysterious washing up feature is only one of the strange things he finds. At the heart of the story is time travel.

When he finds himself no longer in the Pacific North West in 1989 but walking out of an apartment building into New York city in 1963 it turns his world upside down. We meet the other characters that populate the story. The estate agent who sold him the house, the helpful young woman who finds him sitting dazed in New York, her friends who live for folk songs and poetry in smoke filled cafes and sing of justice and peace, and somewhere in the shadows is a dark force who seeks his death.

This is not a time travel story of a man on a quest, he's not trying to 'fix' some event of history. It's not a hard science fiction exploration as if Wilson is saying, "I've got this idea about time travel, what do you think of it?" It's a thriller built loosely around a murder, but Tom doesn't yet know about the murder that happened before he even bought the house. The characters lift off the pages as real people with all their strengths and failures and the reader is drawn into their humanity. As the story moves to its chaotic climax we are engaged in their fears and desperation and their hope that a half baked plan will succeed.

There are two twists at the end that round out the story of two of the main characters. They give comfort to the reader while at the same time leaving questions about the nature of time travel itself and what can really be achieved for the future by going back into the past.