Matt Haig

  How To Stop Time is up for a Books Are My Bag Readers Awards in the popular fiction category. Please do vote here.

Anthony McCarten, the screenwriter of The Theory of Everything, is writing the screenplay for How To Stop Time. More info here.

How to Stop Time is out in the UK now. Here are some of the reviews:

“Matt Haig has an empathy for the human condition, the light and the dark of it, and he uses the full palette to build his excellent stories” (NEIL GAIMAN)

“Haig writes exquisitely from the perspective of the heart-sore outsider, but at their most moving his novels reveal the unbearable beauty of ordinary life” (Guardian)

“How to Stop Time is a beautiful, and necessary book. I feel very lucky to have read it. It is magical, intriguing and at times, very sad. A triumph” (MARIAN KEYES)

“Full of Haig’s trademark humour and humanity. It is a wonderfully entertaining ride through centuries of adventure with a gloriously heart-warming message. A must read” (Sunday Mirror)

“My favourite book of this year, and most others. A dazzling read. Time stopped still” (DANNY WALLACE)

“Matt Haig is a writer for children and adults who is adept at digging into the human heart” (Sunday Times)

“Compelling and full of life’s big questions, How to Stop Time is a book you will not be able to put down” (GRAEME SIMSION, author of THE ROSIE PROJECT)

“An ambitious plot is deftly handled in this exquisitely written novel. A joy! *****” (Heat Magazine)

“Matt Haig is astounding” (STEPHEN FRY)

“The narrator is 400 years old, but the sardonic asides give this pacy novel a modern twist. Matt Haig has designs on our heartstrings . . . The energy and zip of this book are hard to resist” (Hermione Eyre Guardian)

“Halt everything to read Matt Haig’s How to Stop Time . . . A tale that makes you fall in love with reading all over again *****” (The Sun)

“Outlandish . . . heartwarming, perceptive prose” (Anita Sethi Daily Telegraph)

“Engrossing . . . A book to relish” (Metro)

“Strange and brilliant and heartfelt” (JENNY COLGAN)

“An imaginative, ambitious novel by an author with an infectious passion for history and the human condition” (Sunday Express)

“Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin” (JEANETTE WINTERSON)

“A moving tale of regret and redemption” (Psychologies)

“It’s not easy to write a book that’s simultaneously fun and serious and gripping and simple and profound, but Matt Haig manages it again and again. How to Stop Time is just brilliant” (GAVIN EXTENCE, author of THE UNIVERSE VERUS ALEX WOODS)

“A refreshing exploration of how to make peace with one’s past selves” (The Herald)

“Goodness. What a stunning book. Brilliant, beautiful and mindbendingly magnificent” (JILL MANSELL)

“A tender, affecting novel about Tom Hazard, who’s lived for 400 years. He’s got it all under control as long as he doesn’t fall in love. Guess what happens next?” (Red, 2017’s best summer reads)

“Inventive, exciting, moving and bursting with insight about history, time and what it is to be human” (KATE WILLIAMS, author of THE PLEASURES OF MEN)

SunnyMarch and Studiocanal have acquired the film rights to How to Stop Time. Cumberbatch is attached to star and executive produce through SunnyMarch, along with Jamie Byng, CEO of Canongate.

How to Stop Time will be published on 6th July 2017. You can order it here. Here’s the blurb from the back cover:

‘I am old. That is the first thing to tell you. The thing you are least likely to believe. If you saw me you would probably think I was about forty, but you would be very wrong.’

Tom Hazard has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but owing to a rare condition, he’s been alive for centuries. From Elizabethan England to Jazz Age Paris, from New York to the South Seas, Tom has seen a lot, and now craves an ordinary life.

Always changing his identity to stay alive, Tom has the perfect cover – working as a history teacher at a London comprehensive. Here he can teach the kids about wars and witch hunts as if he’d never witnessed them first-hand. He can try and tame the past that is fast catching up with him. The only thing Tom mustn’t do is fall in love.

How to Stop Time is a wild and bittersweet story about losing and finding yourself, about the certainty of change and about the lifetimes it can take to really learn how to live.

More info on the movie stuff is here.

Reasons to Stay Alive is up for a Books Are My Bag Award. They are the only book awards with shortlists curated by bookshops. If you fancy winning  £100 National Book Tokens please vote for Reasons!