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Cover of Time and Again

Time and Again

Jack Finney

First published 1970 · 578 pages

A wistful, deeply immersive love letter to a bygone era that makes the past feel close enough to touch.

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What it feels like

Reading this novel feels like stepping through a hidden door into a sepia-toned photograph, where the air is suddenly thick with the scent of coal smoke and horse-drawn carriages. It is a deeply transportive, leisurely experience that prioritizes atmosphere and historical immersion over breakneck plotting. The narrative wraps you in a cozy, wistful mood, meticulously building the sensory details of 1880s New York until the past feels more vibrant and real than the present. Woven with authentic period illustrations, the story blurs the line between fiction and reality, creating a gentle, romantic ache for a time you never actually lived through. It will thoroughly delight history buffs, lovers of quiet time-slip romances, and anyone who has ever looked at an old building and wished its walls could talk.

Mood
  • transportive
  • atmospheric
  • cozy
  • wondrous
Tone
  • nostalgic
  • earnest
  • observant
  • wistful
Pace
leisurely
Themes
the allure of the past · romantic longing · escaping modernity · the butterfly effect · historical preservation
The writing
Highly visual and meticulously detailed, blending journalistic observation with a warm, nostalgic romanticism.
The arc
Moves from curious, detached experimentation into a profound, romantic immersion that forces a poignant choice between two worlds.
Who it's for
Readers who love getting lost in the architectural and cultural minutiae of history, and those who crave a gentle, romantic time-slip narrative.
Content notes
  • mild peril

About the book

Comment by Audrey Niffenegger, on The Guardian's website:

> Time and Again is an original; there is nothing quite like it. It is the story of Si Morley, a commercial artist who is drawing a piece of soap one ordinary day in 1970 when a mysterious man from the US Army shows up at his Manhattan office to recruit him for a secret government project. The project turns out to involve time travel; the idea is that artists and other imaginative people can be trained (by self-hypnosis) to imagine themselves so completely in the past that they actually go there. Si finds himself sitting in an apartment in the famous Dakota building pretending to be in the past... and ends up in the Manhattan of 1882.

> The story makes good use of paradox and the butterfly effect, but its greatest charms lie in Si's good-humoured observations of old New York and the love story that gradually develops between Si and the beautiful Julia, who doesn't believe Si when he tells her he's a time traveller. Time and Again is laden with authentic period photos and newspaper engravings which Jack Finney works into the narrative gracefully. When I first read WG Sebald's Austerlitz, a very different book in both subject and mood, I realised that it owed something to Finney's innovative use of pictures as evidence within a novel. Really, the pictures seem to say, this did happen, I saw it, don't you believe me? The pictures cause us, the readers, to sway slightly as we suspend our disbelief; they look like proof of something we know is unprovable. Isn't it?

> There is something wistful about time travel stories as they age: 1970 is now 41 years past. A lot happened in those years, and these characters are blissfully unaware of the future. I get a little shiver of nostalgia in the book's opening pages: gee, people used to go to offices and sit at drawing boards and get paid to draw soap. What a world. Perhaps if I could imagine it completely enough, I could visit... but no. I'll just read about it, again and again.

Description from Open Library.

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