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.