Audrey Niffenegger’s sequel follows the time-travelling couple’s daughter
Audrey Niffenegger has written Life Out of Order, a long-awaited sequel to her bestselling 2003 novel The Time Traveler’s Wife, after spending 14 years developing it. The new book follows the couple’s daughter, Alba, and brings a more overtly political and dystopian focus to the story, as Niffenegger’s imagined future began to resemble developments in American politics.
The novel began taking shape in 2012, after Barack Obama’s re-election, when Niffenegger saw that period as a relatively hopeful moment in US politics. Alba shares her parents’ time-travelling condition but has more control over it and is more willing to use her abilities for personal and political aims. Niffenegger says readers often treated the first novel as romantic, while she saw its story as darker, shaped by the characters’ awareness of painful events they could not change.
- Audrey Niffenegger’s sequel arrives after 14 years of writing.
- Life Out of Order follows Clare and Henry’s daughter, Alba.
- The new novel explores dystopian futures and US politics.
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The Time Traveler's Wife was a bestselling 2003 novel about a couple whose relationship is marked by a man's involuntary ability to jump through time. The book became a phenomenon of contemporary literature and was adapted into a 2009 film. More than two decades later, author Audrey Niffenegger has now written a long-awaited sequel.
The new novel centres on Alba, the couple's daughter who inherited her parents' time-travelling condition but with crucial differences. Unlike her parents, Alba has greater control over her ability and deliberately chooses to use it to pursue her own goals. This marks a significant departure from the original novel, where the time-travel was something that largely happened to the protagonists rather than something they directed.
Most readers approached the first novel as a love story, but Niffenegger has said she always intended it to be darker, exploring themes of loss and the impossibility of changing tragic events. The sequel develops this darker vision by placing Alba's story in an explicitly political and dystopian context. This shift reflects how Niffenegger's vision of the future grew more troubled during the years she spent developing the new book.
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Originally published by The Guardian as “‘People forgot I existed’: Audrey Niffenegger on taking 14 years to write a sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife”.