Time Travel for Beginners, a novel by Sydney author Jaclyn Moriarty

Showing all posts about Jaclyn Moriarty

Time Travel for Beginners, a novel by Sydney author Jaclyn Moriarty

8 August 2026

I’ve been talking about time-travel stories recently, so here’s another one, this time a book. Time Travel for Beginners, is the latest novel by Sydney based Australian author Jaclyn Moriarty.

If you can find a shop called the Time Travel Agency, located somewhere in Sydney, then you too may be able to travel through what some people call the fourth dimension:

The guidelines are simple: you can go whenever you wish into the past, and there’s no fear of altering the present. Have tea with Jane Austen, scream at a Beatles concert, witness the Olympics in ancient Greece. Perhaps a more personal trip? Visit your long-lost grandmother, recapture the heady days of your youth, return to the idyllic time when your teen was a babbling baby — or watch yourself make the one decision that changed everything.

Is it a hoax? And if it’s real, what’s the catch?

When single mother Anna is offered a job at the agency, she glimpses the possibility of happiness. Meanwhile, Teddy’s a customer hoping to untangle his recently imploded marriage. And Jade, who has a deeply buried secret, despises the agency for offering false hope.

The line about there being no fear of altering the present (ah, the Grandfather Paradox), reminds me a little of Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s 2015 time travel novel Before the Coffee Gets Cold.

Visitors to a particular cafe in Tokyo, Japan, can, subject to a number of stipulations, travel to the past. They cannot however change anything in the past, and must return to the cafe in the present day before their coffee gets cold. Not too much time to unravel the spacetime continuum there.

Back to Moriarty though. Writing is clearly a talent running through her family. Sisters Liane Moriarty, and Nicola Moriarty, are also accompanied authors.