TIME AND TIME AGAIN by Ben Elton

Note: I am not a paid reviewer, and I have purchased this title to read for my personal enjoyment.

I had recently read The Time Traveler’s Wife, and couldn’t resist picking up this book, part time travel and part alternative history. I can’t say it measures up to that terrific read, but it is an action-packed page-turner that kept me engaged to the end. Our protagonist, despondent British military tough guy Hugh Stanton is propelled back to 1914 by a clandestine group of Cambridge big-brain Isaac Newton disciples led by Hugh’s snarkily witty but ultimately evil former professor. Hugh’s mission is to prevent the assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand, assassinate the Kaiser, and thereby change the twentieth century for the good. The narrative shifts between 1914 and 2024 as we are immersed in the political landscape and the clunky Serbian-nationalist assassination plot that sparked the Great War. Hugh pursues his mission with the ruthlessness, and sexual magnetism of James Bond, and we unsurprisingly find that warping time leads to events spinning in unintended ways—in this case to a richly-imagined dystopian future that our time travelers must try to alter.