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The Time Traveller's Wife
This is a great book--kind of a chick thing but then again not. It's a story told alternately by one of two people: a man who has a genetic disorder which makes him 'chronolgically impaired' and his wife. Chrono-impaired means that under stress, he travels through time, usually to his past. Sometimes for minutes, sometimes several hours. He has no control over this phenomenom. Nothing that isn't part of his body can go with him--when he disappears, he leaves a pile of clothes and when he arrives, he is naked. (He gets so frustrated with losing his crowns and fillings every time he travels that he eventually has those teeth pulled out.) If he's lucky, he arrives in a secluded spot, but he is not always lucky and has to deal with not only getting arrested for being public indecency but also the possibility of arriving in the middle of a highway.
I haven't said much about the wife, but she is an excellent character. They each talk about the disappearences from their own points of view--she, his leaving and his returning, and he, his travels. His struggle with the complex mobius loop of time and occurences, meeting his wife long before they are to meet in chronolgical time, trying to decide what he can tell her about their future, and what has to be discovered. For example, in real life they meet in their 20s. But when he is in his 30s and 40s, long after they are married, he time travels back to when she is only 6--and they meet. In fact, they become friends and eventually lovers as he visits her several times throughout her adolescence and teen years. She accepts that he is from the future and more specifically from her future and looks forward to their first chronological meeting...at which time, she will remember meeting him, understanding him, loving him and so on, but he will have no idea who she is, because he's only 26 and won't actually time travel to meet her till he is 36.
It's a blend of sci fi and romance, with a mysterious twist on every page. And it's a hell of a first novel for the author.
The other book I read with a similar theme was called Replay, also definitely worth a look if this stuff intrigues you. In this one, the unhappy main character dies at 43, only to be reborn as his 18 year old self but with the knowledge and experience he had at the end of his life. So he relives his entire life, getting everything just right this time, and then...he dies at 43. And does it all over again, and again, and again. He lives a completely different life each time--sometimes successful, sometimes tragic, sometimes heroic--until he meets a fellow replayer and has a passionate love affair with her. The thing is, though they both die and are reborn, they are on different cycles, so with each life they meet closer to the end. Much of their time together is spent trying to 'game' the system so they can be together longer, sooner.
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