Life Out of Order, a novel by Audrey Niffenegger, sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife

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Life Out of Order, a novel by Audrey Niffenegger, sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife

26 October 2026

Twenty-three years after writing The Time Traveler’s Wife, American author Audrey Niffenegger, has published a sequel, Life Out of Order.

The focus of the follow up moves to Alba, the daughter of Henry DeTamble, who had a rare genetic disorder that caused him to travel through time, often with little warning. In Life Out of Order, Alba has inherited her father’s disorder, and also finds herself moving back and forth through time.

You’d almost have needed to be able to travel through time when Niffenegger penned the original novel in 2003, to have been able to envisage the world of 2026:

Alba DeTamble is a time traveler, slipping unpredictably through decades like her father before her. But the hardest thing she carries isn’t the burden of futures she can’t understand, or pasts she cannot change — it’s a secret: she is in love with two different people.

Each of them offers a different life. Zach lives in the present and can’t follow her when she disappears. Oliver can travel through time, just like she can.

As Alba careens from time to time, moving from the riot-torn Chicago streets of her present to the eerie, timeless Yellow House, and into the digital corridors of the Museum of Lost Souls and a flooded future London, she must face a question she can no longer avoid: how is it possible to love, and live a meaningful life, in an increasingly troubled, fractured world?

Alba was seen as a child in the 2009 film adaptation of The Time Traveler’s Wife, directed by Robert Schwentke, which featured Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana.

The Time Traveler’s Wife, a film by Robert Schwentke, with Eric Bana, Rachel McAdams

19 November 2009

The Time Traveler’s Wife, trailer, based on the 2003 novel of the same name, by Audrey Niffenegger.

Said by some to depict “realistic” time travel. Henry DeTamble (Eric Bana) has — thanks to a rare genetic disorder — an unfortunate disposition of jaunting off to another time and place, often leaving his wife Clare (Rachel McAdams), and others, all too literally in the lurch.

Time travel is time travel, and while DeTamble’s mode may be realistic, it is probably the least convenient form I’ve seen so far.

Originally published Thursday 19 November 2009, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.

You can travel no further back in time than 1955

18 August 2009

The Time Traveler’s Wife, directed by Robert Schwentke, and based on the novel of the same name by Audrey Niffenegger, is the latest in a long line of time travel themed movies.

According to physicist Dave Goldberg, Niffenegger’s story makes for a more realistic representation of time travel than most of the (fiction) served to date.

But this is interesting, time travel is (theoretically) only possible to points in time where a time machine already exists. In other words for Marty McFly to travel from 1985 to 1955, as he did in Back to the Future, a DeLorean like time machine would already need to have been in existence in 1955…

According to Einstein’s picture of the universe, space and time are curved and very closely related to each other. This means that traveling through time would be much like traveling through a tunnel in space — in which case you’d need both an entrance and an exit. As a time traveler, you can’t visit an era unless there’s already a time machine when you get there — an off-ramp. This helps explain why we’re not visited by time-traveling tourists from our own future. Futuristic humans don’t drop in for dinner because we haven’t yet invented time travel.

Of course the concept of time travel — in the form of the Flux Capacitor — did exist in 1955, it simply hadn’t taken physical form… does that count?

Originally published Tuesday 18 August 2009, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.