Three strangers’ lives are forever changed when they’re all drawn to a mysterious agency claiming to have unlocked the secret to time travel.
Anna, Teddy, and Jade are on a collision course. The Agency is the cause. It is also the solution.
On a quiet road nestled within the bustle of Sydney lies a nondescript storefront known simply as the Time Travel Agency. At once a confounding mystery and a beacon of hope, the Agency seems to attract those who need it most. Single mother Anna is in desperate need of change, and the Agency gives her the chance to begin her career—and life—anew. Teddy is a genius at salvaging businesses but needs saving himself, and he’s drawn to the Agency hoping to travel back in time to untangle his troubled childhood and his recently imploded marriage. Jade has no interest in the Agency at all, because there’s no way people are literally time traveling, right? Jade’s present is challenging enough, with her spirited, increasingly bad-tempered daughter and a deeply buried secret too painful for words.
As Anna, Teddy, and Jade’s paths converge, the question of just how legitimate the Agency’s ventures into the past are becomes a mysterious, provocative, tantalising, and even heart-wrenching one to parse—but there is no denying that the ripple effects through all three of their lives are very, very real …
Q&A
Congratulations on the publication of Time Travel for Beginners! In your acknowledgements, you mention that the book took twenty years to complete. How did the characters and plot evolve over the decades?
Thank you! I’m still not sure whether the slow progress of this book was its ‘magical evolution’ as it ‘became itself’ or just my own indecisiveness/procrastination. (I definitely wished I’d get a move on sometimes.) I knew I wanted to write about a time travel agency and originally imagined a collection of customers’ reports on their journeys, a kind of mosaic story. Then I thought I’d make it a criminal investigation into the agency after it had been closed down. Next, I wanted a character to get a job there… And so on.
The novel centres around a commercialised time travel agency, where customers may visit almost any time, and any place – at least for a short visit. Why did you opt to explore the more mundane aspects of such a time travel business? And were you ever tempted to incorporate more extensive time travel shenanigans, science fiction-style?
The idea for this book came to me when I thought I saw a Time Travel Agency on a suburban street—it was just a sign for Time magazine leaning crookedly against a travel agency.
I wanted my agency to feel like the one I (thought I’d) glimpsed—a real place where regular, everyday things happened, and regular, everyday people got jobs. I also wanted it to be fun, because time travel is inherently fun, but too many shenanigans could’ve undercut the human element.
I can see from other author interviews that many people ask you about when and where you would personally love to time travel. In the novel, despite the light-hearted premise, for some characters, time travel borderlines on an addiction. What led you to explore the darker elements of time travel?
This is related to the previous answer—I wanted the agency to feel as real as possible, and that meant exploring the human aspects of time travel. For example, people often say they’d give a million dollars to go back and see a lost relative or friend again. In the context of the agency, that made me think: would it be enough to visit just once? Wouldn’t you want to keep going back? And if you did, how could you ever go forward?
Time Travel for Beginners is beautifully character-driven, and features two protagonists, Anna and Jade, who are both single mothers to teenage daughters. What elements of their mother-daughter relationships did you aim to examine on the page?
Thank you again! I was really interested in examining how parents (including me) question their parenting decisions, and parenting approaches, and fret about the impact they might be having on their children. It’s such a huge responsibility! You’re shaping a human being!
Time travel customers, like Teddy, opt to travel back in time to more closely examine their previous experiences, which can lead to revelations about their own histories as well as the fallibility of memory. How did you approach Teddy’s personality, and his tricky family relationships?
Teddy was a fun character to write because I saw him as a good guy, who has learned to live a good life, despite a difficult childhood. I guess we tell ourselves stories about who we are, and how we became that person, and we gather evidence that confirms those beliefs. I’m a former lawyer, and I’ve always been interested in how evidence and memory can be flawed and misleading, even when you have the best intentions.
Time Travel for Beginners is out now through Ultimo Press.
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