How to Stop Time
'I am old. That is the first thing to tell you. The thing you are least likely to believe. If you saw me you would probably think I was about forty, but you would be very wrong.'
Tom Hazard has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but owing to a rare condition, he's been alive for centuries. From Elizabethan England to Jazz-Age Paris, from New York to the South Seas, Tom has seen a lot, and now craves an ordinary life.
Always changing his identity to stay alive, Tom has the perfect cover - working as a history teacher at a London comprehensive. Here he can teach the kids about wars and witch hunts as if he'd never witnessed them first-hand. He can try to tame the past that is fast catching up with him. The only thing Tom must not do is fall in love.
How to Stop Time is a wild and bittersweet story about losing and finding yourself, about the certainty of change and about the lifetimes it can take to really learn how to live.
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Matt Haig
Matt Haig doesn’t just write stories—he opens doors. Sometimes to alternate realities, sometimes to the quiet corners of the mind, but always to something profoundly human. Whether through the time-slipping wonder of The Midnight Library, the melancholic wisdom of How to Stop Time, or the raw vulnerability in Reasons to Stay Alive, his work pulses with the question: what does it mean to be alive—and how do we bear it?
His writing walks the delicate line between the real and the surreal, where fantasy isn’t escapism but a lens to look inward. In Haig’s world, time travel becomes a metaphor for regret, parallel lives explore mental health with empathy, and even the darkest moments are treated with a tender kind of defiance. His prose is deceptively simple—accessible yet poetic, the kind that leaves quiet echoes long after the final page.
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