Time-travel books have been amongst my favourites since I was very small and reading the adventures of Penelope in A Traveller In Time and Tom in Tom’s Midnight Garden. I loved the main character in Charlotte Sometimes and identified with both her longing to fit in and her longing to go home. The love of a good time-slip novel has stayed with me and the Outlander series has a particularly special place in my heart.
I found the first book in this series back in 2002, when I was travelling in New Zealand, and it was called Cross-Stitch. My then-boyfriend and I were in Queenstown and I had decided to get my first tattoo; sent back to the YHA to wait while the artist drew it up, I found myself in front of the book-swap shelf searching for an easy-read romance that wouldn’t take too much concentration as I waited, full of nerves, feeling a bit sick.
I didn’t find that book.
I mean, Outlander has romance, and it’s easy to read, but it has so much more depth than I was bargaining for on that slightly sweaty day in February, the book clutched on my knee as I held my wrist out to the needles. Reading it, I felt like my experiences were being effectively pinned to my skin – every memory of that time is as clear to me now as it was then. The crisp air, the incredible beauty of that country, the sense of the world as a place I belonged in, and the book resting on my knee.
Needless to say, I devoured the whole thing. I swapped it for another book in the next hostel we went to. I knew I was going to buy my own as soon as I got home. And my love for the series, its characters and its settings, is as enduring as those memories.
Many people love these books as much as I do but for anyone who hasn’t yet encountered them, the plot is roughly this: Claire Randall, a British World War Two nurse on holiday in Scotland, enters a stone circle and travels back in time to the eighteenth century. Whilst trying to get back to her husband Frank and escape the clutches of Jack Randall – her husband’s wicked ancestor – she falls in love with James Fraser. Cue the beginning of an epic love story that spans continents and centuries as they navigate the perils of Jacobite life, the joy of family and the heartbreak of separation, all the while experiencing the enduring love of a long marriage.
Peril, joy and heartbreak, all the turmoil of the world within the pages of a book…
The joy of time-travel books for me is not so much the time-travelling itself, although that is very cool. It is the same thing that draws me back to any great story – the love of the characters and the exploration of the human condition. This is what compels me to read and to write, and I hope that one day my own time-travel story will be half as loved by other readers as I love Outlander.