I am thrilled that the Blog Tour for An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim is stopping at my blog today.
"Polly flipped the photo over. And then she tore it up. She would regret this always. It would sit like a bubble in her lungs. She would wish she still owned the piece of paper that housed the outline of his face, with the ruts his writing made in the back, where he had written his message without signing his name."
Their story begins with a goodbye.
Polly and Frank are young and in love, a lifetime together before them. But one evening in 1981, as the Texas sun sets over their shoulders, the world is suddenly pulled apart by a deadly virus. Within months, Frank is dying. Polly can save him, but only if she agrees to a radical plan: to time travel to 1993 for a corporation who can fund his life-saving treatment. She can only go forward, she cannot go back. And she must leave everything she loves behind, including Frank.
All they have is the promise of a future together: they will find each other again in twelve years' time, in Galveston, Texas, where the sea begins.
But when something goes wrong and Polly arrives late, Frank is nowhere to be found. Completely alone, Polly must navigate a terrifying new world to find him, and to discover if their love has endured.
An Ocean of Minutes is an absorbing and timely novel about courage, yearning, the cost of holding onto the past - and the price of letting it go.
I very much enjoyed reading this book. It mainly focuses on Polly and her experiences upon her arrival in the future. The society into which she arrives is not what she had expected and there was a real sense of shadowing her through this minefield of the unknown.
It was this connection with the characters that held my attention firmly to the page. I felt as anxious for Polly all through the book as I would have done for a friend. I think Polly was a completely different person by the conclusion of the novel to which she had been at the beginning and the author dealt extremely well with depicting Polly's realisation of this whole new society she has stepped into and the impact that has upon the relationships that she forms with the people around her and also with those that she left behind.
This is a book about love, idealism and, above all, realism. However, this is a multi-layered book and I think that it will mean different things to different readers. For some, this will be about the lengths people go to for those they love, for others it will be about time travel but for me it was about the way we learn about ourselves. It was impossible to read this and not wonder how I would have reacted in those circumstances.
It is beautifully written and was a joy to read. The chapters alternate between Polly's past and present and we learn much about how far she has come through this.
Published tomorrow, I would encourage you to read this book for yourself. I am confident that you will enjoy it every bit as much as I did.
ISBN: 978 1786487919
Publisher: Quercus
Thea Lim's writing has been published by the Southampton Review, the Guardian, Salon and others, and she has received multiple awards and fellowships for her work, including artists' grants from the Canada Council for the Arts. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston and she previously served as nonfiction editor at Gulf Coast.
Thea grew up in Singapore and lives in Toronto with her family.
I was given a proof copy of this book by the publisher in order to provide an honest review.
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