A thoughtful mix of sci-fi and personal story about Dory, who gets stuck in the future while trying to save her sick partner. It’s a deep look at love, loss, and how time shapes us, with a bit of tech and mystery thrown in. I liked it because the emotional depth and themes really hit home, making the story feel personal and meaningful. What I didn’t love was the slower pace at times, it made parts drag a bit and broke the flow. In short: a moving tale about time, heartache, and hope, though not always easy to get through.

- Lyrical, heartfelt, and quietly powerful -

Time/Life is a personal and moving blend of speculative fiction and memoir (kinda), filled with emotion, social commentary, and reflection.

While I occasionally found it hard to follow the timeline shifts, and I’m not sure I could summarise every detail, the listening experience was still rich and rewarding. The author’s note and the interview at the end added so much context and heart (and disbelief that it started out life pre 2020!)

This isn’t your expected sci-fi; it’s also reflective story about grief and memory. I'm still thinking about it - another reviewer mentions "magical realism but sci-fi" and I think that's a great way of putting it.

I also loved the audiobook narration by Annie Aldington—her delivery matched the tone perfectly and made even the more abstract or emotional passages feel grounded.

I really couldn't get into it. Normally, I really love time travel, but this wasn't it. I liked the commentary on wealth and excess, but I couldn't bring myself to care about the characters.

This audiobook just wasn't for me. I wasn't engaged with the story and I didn't like the narration.

Thank you to the publishers and Netgalley for the review copy.

Time/Life is a bold, moving, and thought-provoking novel that blends speculative fiction with memoir, offering a deeply personal and emotionally resonant reading experience. It caught me off guard in the best way. What I expected to be a standard time-travel narrative evolved into something far richer and more reflective.

Catherine Mayer's background as a journalist is evident in the novel's incisive commentary and crisp prose. The story, presented as the memoir of journalist Dory Silver, begins with a televised interview with tech mogul Elo O’Halloran that unexpectedly leads to a journey into the far future. This frame sets the stage for a layered narrative that weaves together timelines, memories, and meditations on love, grief, and the long tail of trauma left by the COVID pandemic.

Mayer's incorporation of her own lived experiences, including the loss of her husband, Andy Gill, and her involvement in political activism, adds authenticity and emotional weight to the story. Her portrayal of grief and resilience, primarily through the character of Morgan and the echoes of long Covid, is both raw and empathetic. These elements ground the futuristic elements in a profoundly human story.

The book has a dreamlike structure that may challenge some readers, particularly in the audio format, where time shifts can be more challenging to follow. Still, many listeners found Annie Aldington’s narration compelling and well-suited to the novel’s tone. The audiobook also includes a powerful interview with Sandi Toksvig and a poignant original song co-written by Mayer, which adds valuable layers to the experience.

Literary references abound, including those of Virginia Woolf, Ursula K. Le Guin, H.G. Wells, and Naomi Alderman. These create a rich intertextual dialogue that enhances the book’s themes. Readers who appreciate speculative fiction with heart and purpose will find much to admire. The narrative challenges conventions, blending genres and perspectives in a way that feels both urgent and timeless.

Time/Life is not a typical sci-fi story. It uses time travel not for spectacle but as a means to explore the emotional and societal impacts of our present moment. It reflects on the tech obsession of the 21st century, the aftermath of a global crisis, and the often invisible weight of personal loss. For all its ambition, the book remains intimate and warm, a rare combination in speculative literature.

While it may not be for everyone, those who connect with it will find themselves changed by the end. It is a novel with purpose, clarity, and emotional depth, a compelling debut worth seeking out.

Well this book took me by surprise! I received a copy via NetGalley and I didn’t read straight away because the cover art work didn’t sell it to me, but truly, it’s great. Fans of Margaret Atwood, Ursula K Le Guin, Naomi Alderman, JG Ballard, HG Wells, David Mitchell, and Gang of Four line up and get a copy (if you’re a fan of the last on that list, definitely listen to the audio book).

Plus it’s one of those books that is growing on me more and more now I’ve finished it, which was helped along a lot by the author and Sandi Toksvig interview at the end of the audiobook. So this is very much a review for the audiobook (although I’m sure a print copy would be great too).

To get my critique out the way first - it’s written by a journalist and you can tell. It’s very journalistic in style and either she will continue to embrace this in further fiction, or it will mellow. I’d prefer the latter as I like my fiction to be rounder and more evasive, eluding and creating through plot, dialogue and scene setting rather than factual. However the bones of this book rang so true to my main literary and life interests I feel I need to leave that criticism to the side, and maybe embrace this style because it really packs a lot in.

Set now, in a world that thinks the pandemic is over (it’s not, neither here or in the book), it proposes to be an autobiography of a journalist called Dory Silver. She encounters a Time Machine through a live TV interview she is leading with a tech mogul - Elo O’Halloran (likenesses entirely fictional but I imagine also entirely purposeful). They get whisked into the future in a time pod and we get a story woven through multiple timelines.

Through Dory we learn about her relationship with her love, Morgan. Morgan who is not with her, is now seriously ill, with what sounds to me like severe long Covid/ME. This was the biggest surprise for me - a sci-fi tale that centres Covid and which upholds the experience of those most deeply affected by it both in the earliest days and now.

We also travel with Dory around the world in her memories, as she recounts stories she’s written and events she’s experienced. Through this we get a piercing and astute look at the world at the start of the 21st century.

The novel shifts between 1st and 3rd person, which I found confusing in audio, and wasn’t sure about. But Sandi Toksvig’s reflection that this switching untethers the novel from conventions made me rethink, and I agree that it does indeed do that.

There are many literary references (to Virginia Woolfe, to The Handmaid’s Tale, to The Time Machine) some direct some more vague. But I also think it works beautifully alongside Naomi Alderman’s recent novel The Future. The two books speaking to each other in my mind and making each richer in the process.

Catherine Mayer was the co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party and the widow of Andy Gill from the Gang of Four , who died of Covid in Feb 2020. She references herself in the book - a few times which made me wonder and I looked it up. But in the interview with Toksvig it transpires she wrote a large chunk of the book before Covid, in 2019, giving me shivers of prescience. The WEP also stood by Trans Rights, ultimately leading to its dispersal, which makes sense because this book approaches gender in ways I’ve only seen in Le Guin and Jasper Fforde’s work (in sci-fi anyway).

I’m shying away from saying too much about the plot. It’s simple but also dense due to Dory’s life experiences. But there’s a twist I figured out early on, and enjoyed very much. It underlined the book for me as a place I was both safe and welcome to be in. I thank Mayer very much for that.

Whilst the book is partially set in the future, and this gives it a really good story arc and holds the plot well, that was a side-story for me, with the real interest being how Dory explores grief.

I’m excited to see what comes next from Mayer; I’ll be keeping my ears peeled!

Thank you to HarperCollins UK Audio, HQ, the author and NetGalley for an LRC in return for an honest opinion

Unfortunately this was a really disappointing experience. I was looking forward to this book after reading the glowing reports professing it to be a 'reimagining of H G Wells Time Machine' (which I loved reading!). I have only listened to an hour of it so far (11%) but I don't plan on picking it up again until I have acquired a written version. I'm not particularly enamoured with the story so far but I think it's down to the narration. Annie Aldington may well be a seasoned British voice actor but I'm afraid her voice is definitely not suited to this book. I found her delivery to be flat, lacking in variation with no suitable pacing. Therefore this is not a review of the book but of the narration itself. I consume audiobooks at a high rate (approx 4 or 5 p/week) so I really become disheartened when I start listening to one and the delivery just falls flat. As they say, a narrator has the power to make or break a story and I feel this is certainly the case here! Occasionally a narrator can put me off the book completely but in this instance I think the reviews stating the merits of this story are such that I will definitely start reading it again at some point. I have knowledge of the author's background, especially the heartbreak surrounding her and her daughter before and during the Covid Pandemic. For this reason I will instead, for the moment, be reading 'Good grief - Embracing life at a time of death', the book Catherine Mayer wrote with her daughter Anne Mayer-Bird.

#TimeLife #NetGalley

DNF at 40%

I tried to push through this, but ultimately it just wasn't for me. The time travel plotline felt dreamlike in a way that meant I wasn't fully engaged and I never felt intrigued to find out what would happen next. Uncanny valley Elo(n) was just unsettling to me - close enough that I couldn't stop thinking about which details were drawn from life and which had been fictionalised.

The narrator was perfectly good, but the narration still added to my feeling of detachment. I listened to a lot of audiobooks as a kid, so there's something about a particular type of narrator that feels old-fashioned to me, fairly or unfairly.

This could maybe be more of a hit if you're into lit fic.

This book manages to combine a heartfelt memoir with time travel into the future. Full disclosure, it took me a while to get into the book as I am an SF fan and time-travel nerd, and I wasn't expecting an emotional and heartbreaking love story. However, looking again at the cover, it is subtitled 'A memoir by Dory Silver' (although admittedly in hard-to-read letters). Dory Silver is the protagonist, and her fantastical narrative of travelling in the future is made believable as it weaves in present-day events and, as I found out later, real people, including the author herself as a character.

I'm glad I persevered, as the two elements of the story came together beautifully in the end. I loved the clever writing, the parallels to H.G. Wells’ Time Machine, nods to Ursula K. Le Guin's work, and the details of the pandemic that were sad and familiar to me. The audiobook contains an original recording of a related song and an interview with the author at the end, which was fascinating. I was shocked to learn that the story was conceived before the pandemic. (Did the author herself time-travel to the future?) I also felt great empathy and admiration for the author when I learned the pain she went through during the pandemic. The books must have been cathartic to write with the luxury of time travel and fiction at your disposal.

I wish I had read it as an ebook rather than an audiobook, which I generally prefer, as the narrator's voice and the various accents were not to my taste, but I got used to them.

I received a free audiobook download of this book from NetGalley. My opinions are my own.

Sometimes, you encounter a book that leaves you a different person after the final words. Time/Life is just such a book. It's about tech - and feels remarkably precient for the "AI" bubble that we're currently living through, but the time travel tech allegory will probably ring true for every tech bubble until time travel tech exists.

I've raved about this book to friends; the phrase "magical realism but sci-fi" came up. The 2020s world of Dory Silver, a journalist tapped to interview a big name in tech onstage at a big event in Vegas, is very real - and Mayer's use of words does give Dory's memories a magical quality (the author's vocabulary is poetic; she has fun with words!) - the magical parts are really the segments set in the distant future. They feel quite believable but have that hyper-real glow of magical SF. Trust me on this; I'm not on psychedelics, I promise.

The "big name in tech" I referred to is an Irish guy who *definitely* isn't Elon Musk, or Peter Thiel or... or... or... From the book, I gather that Elo uses the Irish spelling of O'Hallaron but my knowledge of Irish is a sliver above zero, so I'm not going to attempt it in my review.

This book is about time travel in the SF sense; our current societal obsession with technological advancements for their own sake, and the long term consequences of our actions, far beyond those any of us could even dream of predicting - but it's also intensely personal.

I knew I knew the name Catherine Mayer from somewhere; she co-founded the Women's Equality Party in the UK, and has been a prolific journalist. She was also married to Andy Gill of Gang of Four fame, until his death in 2020. This leads into the other part of the book; Dory's inner life. This felt oddly memoirish until I took a few minutes to look up the author online; then everything clicked into place - and I loved the book even more. Dory is the author, but also not. She's an avatar for her grief. 2020 was a strange, terrible and surreal year for *everyone*; the author maybe more than most of us, as both her mother and spouse died. Having experienced profound losses both drawn out and expected, and a whirlwind of shock and horror, this book has been a salve for both those wounds.

In the past year or so, I've read a number of contemporary books that acknowledge the COVID pandemic, but this is the first that really examines the emotional impact and lasting trauma of it all. Yes, lockdowns were stifling and boring for people (I'm disabled, so staying home all week wasn't that different to my Before) but the rush to move on and forget about everything that happened means forgetting about the victims who died and the victims who lived - the people who lost loved ones, and the people with Long COVID. So many people sacrificed their futures to try to help our world keep turning, and to aid and comfort the people who were dying. In our rush to get back to "normal" these people are trampled.

I'm meandering; so many words to say: read this book. It might not be for everyone, but if it's for you you will be transported, you will feel a lot of emotions (you might cry) and you will feel changed and renewed.

I struggled through this title, thinking it would come together or click for me along the way. The structure of the story was hard for me to follow, which affected my ability to connect. I did enjoy the narration!

Time/Life is a deeply personal sci-fi centred around a journalist's journey into the future and her subsequent reflections on the past. I found the story to be a good mix of sci-fi with more human feeling literary fiction elements. I particularly liked how Catherine Mayer's own personal experiences were skillfully interwoven throughout the book, making the protagonist's journey feel believable.

This may be due to listening to the audiobook version, but I found the changes in time to be slightly confusing for the first 50%. There were no clear indicators of when this was happening within chapters. However, the narration by Annie Aldington was fantastic, and I felt that the tone was captured well. I also loved the inclusion of a song that was co-written by the author that linked to both her own life and the story within the book. This was a lovely and personal touch. 

Overall, I enjoyed Time/Life and its use of time travel as a starting point for a moving story of love and loss.