The Thief of Time

Name: The Thief of Time
Rating: 3.78 (6291 reviews)

by John Boyne

First published 2000

Amazon

3.8(6,291)

Paris, 1758. Matthieu Zela flees after witnessing his mother’s murder and begins a new life in England with his younger half-brother Tomas. Before the eighteenth century ends, Matthieu discovers that he has ceased to age. His long life is marked by his love for Dominique Sauvet and by successive generations of descendants named Tomas, whose repeated crises bind him to ordinary mortality.

Over two and a half centuries Matthieu becomes an engineer, soldier, financier, film producer and television executive. His recollections move through the French Revolution, the Great Exhibition of 1851, early Hollywood and the Wall Street Crash, placing personal reinvention beside changing technologies and economies. Immortality functions less as escape than as an accumulation of grief, missed chances and responsibility.