Audrey Niffenegger’s global bestselling novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife, is set to get a sequel, publishing this coming autumn. Over a decade after The Time Traveler’s Wife first hit bookshops in 2003, a follow-up, Life Out of Order, is set to be published later this year.
Set in the same world as The Time Traveler’s Wife, the upcoming novel focuses on the life of Alba; the daughter of Henry and Clara the central characters from the original novel. Alba has inherited her father’s ‘Chrono-Displacement Disorder’, the condition that made him travel through time involuntarily. As an adult now, she is negotiating two marriages with two different men in two different time periods but with an overlap, as well as contending with the complexities of modern life.
Niffenegger explained that she began writing the sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife when Obama had just been re-elected for his second term in office, and it was “a different world.”
“The world around me was changing quite a lot, and the book started getting more and more political”.
Niffenegger added that, as Alba was born six days before 9/11, she would need to make some guesses about the future her adult protagonist might end up facing.
“I thought, OK, that’s probably got a lot to do with climate change. So, I started writing in that direction, and of course it rapidly turned into a dystopia, and then I thought, well, let’s bring some politics to bear on this situation. But I would put something in the book, and then it would happen in real life, and that got to be distressing. And then 2016 came and just blew everything up. Alba’s dystopia and my dystopia started looking similar.”
In Life Out of Order, Alba “is haunted by secrets she must keep from those she loves most, including Zach, her supportive anchor in the chaos, and Oliver, a fellow time traveller and musician,” reads the publisher’s description of the book.
“Her journey takes her from the riots of Chicago’s streets to the eerie refuge of the Yellow House, to the digital corridors of the Museum of Lost Souls, a virtual sanctuary of forgotten memories and lost artefacts.”
The original novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife has sold more than 9 million copies worldwide, and has been adapted into a blockbuster film (2009) starring Rachel McAdams, as well as an HBO series and a musical. So, Life Out of Order has big shoes to step into. The new book is due to be published on 27th October by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Penguin, in the UK. In the US, the novel will be published by HarperCollins on the same date.
