How To Stop Time

 How To Stop Time by Matt Haig

Tom Hazard has a rare condition called anageria, causing him to age at an extremely slow rate. He looks 40 but has actually lived over 400 years, which may not be as great as it sounds. If he stays very long in one place people become suspicious and question why he's not aging, and that's usually followed by all sorts of rumors and wild accusations. As a boy, his mother is accused of witchcraft; as a young man, he is forced to leave his wife and daughter behind for their protection. It's a dangerous life.

In time he finds others like himself and is recruited to The Albatross Society, an organization formed for the protection of people like Tom. The man who runs it arranges for the members to be relocated every 8 years with complete new identities in exchange for which they do jobs for the Society. Tom accepts a mission that leads him to change his thinking about what life is for and how it should be lived. 

In his current situation as a teacher, he meets, and is attracted to, a woman who says she recognizes him from a very old painting. Tom knows the first rule of The Albatross Society is "don't get involved in relationships", but he's lonely and he likes her. Eventually he has to tell her the truth about his age...I'll let you imagine how that conversation goes.        

It's an interesting story - if a bit heavy on angst - that asks some serious questions. What is life for? Does it matter how you live? If you had unlimited time, what would you do differently? Is more time necessarily better?   

I liked this one, and these lines in particular:

"...the only reason such music exists is because it is a language that couldn't be communicated in any other way..."

"The main lesson of history is: humans don't learn from history."

"...you only need to switch on the news to see the dreadful repetitions, the terrible unlearned lessons, the twenty-first century slowly becoming a crude cover version of the twentieth."

" I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future."

   

"To teach feels like you are a guardian of time itself, protecting the future happiness of the world via the minds that are yet to shape it."