Described as the nation's most glamorous, flamboyant and fashion-conscious scientist, Baroness Susan Greenfiels is a distinguished neuroscientist, broadcaster, writer and best-selling author. She is Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford and Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

Henry DeTamble suffers from Chrono-Displacement Disorder, a genetic disability, which means he has no control over the awkward possibility that he will suddenly vanish from his linear life. At moments of stress or high emotion, he is liable to find himself suddenly transported helplessly in time to another scene that matters in his life, whether future or past.

‘I can be reading the Sunday Times,’ he explains, ‘coffee in hand and Clare dozing beside me on our bed and suddenly I’m in 1976 watching my 13-year-old self mow my grandparents’ lawn. Some of these episodes last only moments; it’s like listening to a car radio that’s having trouble holding to a station. I find myself in crowds, audiences, mobs. Just as often I’m alone, in a field, house, car, on a beach, in a grammar school in the middle of the night. I fear finding myself in a prison cell, an elevator full of people, the middle of a highway.’

The time shift usually lasts a few hours and he arrives quite naked, a circumstance which causes him embarrassment, difficulty and, ultimately, severe injury. But otherwise, while in the future or past, he is there exactly as he was in the present he has just left. So he can talk to his younger and older selves, as well as to his wife, Clare, at various stages of her life – and he can sometimes say what is going to happen in the future, although he tries to do this as little as possible. In any case, he does not much interfere with events (although his foreknowledge allows him to become rich through lottery wins and stock investments). To facilitate the reader’s grasp on all these time shifts, each section is headed with a precise date and age for those involved.

Henry’s time-travelling starts when he is a small boy of five. After a memorable visit to the Natural History Museum, he finds himself suddenly back there that night – and he is met by his 24-year-old self who has come back from the future to look after his younger incarnation and begin to explain to him the curious circumstances of his life. At the age of six, Henry is with his mother, an opera-singer, when she is killed in a car crash, a scene he revisits obsessively throughout his life. His father, a musician, declines into alcoholic grief and Henry grows up quite disturbed, violent, drunken, punky, and frequently arrested.

Only at the age of 28 does he meet the love of his life, Clare Abshire, then 20. He knows nothing about her at this point – but she knows all about him, because now that they have met, he begins to go back to her childhood, moulding her upbringing though a series of regular meetings. From the ages of six to 18, Clare is visited by Henry aged anything between 28 and 43. He’s now in love with her and he knows they are going to be married. Clare’s role throughout their strange life together is to wait and to trust. Even when they are eventually living together in the present, he keeps disappearing and reappearing, sometimes traumatised by his experiences elsewhen.

Towards the end of the novel, Henry and Clare, after many failed attempts, have a child. Their daughter, Alba, is a time traveller, too. For such travellers, death, although real, is not quite the end. They can appear fleetingly to one another, although the rules of time and space otherwise remain unyielding. You take what you can get and it’s never enough. In its way, The Time Traveler’s Wife is a universal story. For we all live a strange existence in time, rarely content in the present, always haunted by our pasts, ceaselessly hoping for a better future, connecting with one another only fleetingly, often feeling ourselves to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time. We are all helplessly shifted through time – and we become most conscious of that captivity when we are in love.

Before the worldwide success of her first novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife, she was known as a book artist, producing beautiful handmade books, written and illustrated by herself, in editions as small as ten copies. These books are mainly made up of pictures. The Time Traveler’s Wife was originally going to be one of Audrey’s hand-painted books, before it grew into a 500-page epic. Audrey says she had always wanted to write a novel and realised that this idea was not going to be easily represented in pictures.

The book was not written in the order that it is read. In fact, the whole idea, the whole book, sprang from the title. Audrey often starts her visual books with a title and this time she says that this title just kind of flew into her head, ‘and one of the things about the title is that you already know that there are going to be two characters and they’re married to each other and the husband time travels.’ She wrote the books’ ending, and then just started the middle and the beginning, which was very difficult, and it got revised a lot. When Audrey is creating a visual book, she says she will storyboard it like an animated film so it’s very easy for her to re-arrange pages by just picking them up and moving them. So with the scenes she wrote for The Time Traveler’s Wife, she thought of them in a similar way – they were sort of like units that could be moved around. Audrey says, ‘At one point the whole thing was assembled in a completely different order and someone said to me you’re going to completely confuse every reader and you should follow Clare’s experience.’

Audrey says that for her the real insight, the real original part of the idea was to have Henry have a genetic disease: chrono displacement disorder. During the period that she was writing the book genetics were very much in the news as the race to unscramble the human genome was on. ‘So the idea popped into my head that the thing that would impel him [Henry] to time travel would be this genetic flaw, a very complicated rare genetic flaw.’ She says that when you look at yourself, you can see that time is doing something to you, even though it’s invisible. Audrey decided that time travel would be a very extreme version of that, ‘I was thinking about epilepsy and also about schizophrenia, this kind of idea of an electrical storm inside the brain that also, in schizophrenia it’s like tuning into some other reality that’s falling freely. I was interested in having one fantastical or strange thing and then regular reality. There’s this idea that you change one thing about the world and everything else moves around it.’

On publication in the United States the novel caused a sensation, spending over 20 weeks in the New York Times bestseller lists. Now its rights have been sold in more than 15 countries. The film rights have been bought by Plan B – the production company owned by Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston – the screenplay is currently being written. Brad and Jen themselves are set to produce the film and, as far as Audrey knows, are also planning to star.

Audrey, 41, now lives in Chicago, in a white stucco bungalow with her cats Muybridge and Claudine.

Here's what they thought...

“I think it’s an excellent book for a first time author…it’s an easy book to read on the train, it’s not complicated or brain cracking.” Diana Pearl Teye

“It’s a great romance…” Tim O’Dell

“A very readable and fulfilling love story. The take home message is ‘spend time for love’.” Alan W Bevan

“I would recommend it to loads of people…lovely romance, lovely characters, big thumbs up.” Amanda Shaw

“I felt the time travel was a contrivance that didn’t work.” Anita Abell

“I read it as a romantic novel, it was dark and dangerous in parts which I thought gave it a real extra punch.” Judith McKeon

“I have been one step away from stopping people in the streets and recommending they read it immediately.” Stephen Males

“I have read many books, I have never read anything like this before…you must read the book.” Ann Sutcliffe

The members involved were:
Diana Pearl Tye, Tim O’Dell, Alan W Bevan, Amanda Shaw, Agnieszka Bonham, Judith McKeon, Joanne Whaltey De Lopez, Stephen Males, Stephen Fleming, Jon Creighton, Joanne Woolfenden, Josephine Patimore, Ann Sutcliffe, Diana Smith, Anita Abell, Pamela Davison, Debbie Jordin, David Harris, Margaret Brown, Jo Hammond, Phil Bugliont, Tony Emerson, Joan Salmon, Pat Dunne, and Pedro Galváo.

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