The Time Traveler's Wife recap

Henry DeTamble is a Chicago librarian with a genetic disorder that flings him uncontrollably through time, dropping him naked and defenseless into moments of his own past and future. Clare Abshire has loved him since childhood, because his older self repeatedly visited her as a girl; when they finally meet in ordinary time, she already knows him well while he is meeting her for the first time. They marry and build a life around his unpredictable disappearances, enduring the strain, the danger, and a series of heartbreaking miscarriages before a daughter, Alba, is born, who inherits Henry's condition but with more control over it. Henry's time traveling grows more dangerous as he ages; a winter episode leaves him with frostbitten feet that must be amputated, a sign he reads as the approach of his death. On a holiday visit to Clare's family, Henry travels into the woods where her father and brother are hunting and is accidentally shot; he returns to the present mortally wounded and dies in Clare's arms at forty-three. Clare spends the rest of her long life waiting, and as a very old woman she is visited one final time by a young, time-traveling Henry, exactly as he had once promised.

Henry DeTamble lives with a rare genetic disorder that causes him to travel through time without warning or control, vanishing from the present and reappearing, naked and vulnerable, at another point in his own life. He has learned to cope by stealing clothes, hiding, and using his knowledge of what is to come. Clare Abshire has known and loved Henry since she was a small girl, because his older self kept appearing in a meadow near her childhood home; for her the love came first and the ordinary meeting second. The story follows their relationship out of chronological order, jumping across the decades of both their lives, as an older Henry visits a young Clare, a young Henry meets a Clare who already knows him, and the two build a marriage around his uncontrollable comings and goings. It is a love story told through the strange logic of time travel, tender and precarious, in which the couple must hold on to each other across a life that refuses to unfold in order.

Henry has always known, from glimpses of his own future, roughly how and when he will die, and the novel moves steadily toward it. As he grows older his condition becomes more perilous, and one winter he time-travels into freezing conditions and cannot get warm in time; his feet are severely frostbitten and have to be amputated, leaving him unable to run from the dangers his travels throw him into. He understands this as the beginning of the end. During a New Year's holiday at the Abshire family home in Michigan, Henry is pulled through time into the surrounding woods, where Clare's father and brother are out hunting, and he is accidentally shot. He travels back to the present grievously wounded and bleeds to death in Clare's arms on the first day of the year, at the age of forty-three. Clare is left a widow with their young daughter, Alba, who shares Henry's gift. Before he died, Henry had traveled forward and seen Clare as an old woman, and had written her a letter telling her he would come to her once more. The book ends decades later: Clare, now in her eighties, has waited her whole life, and one day the young Henry appears to her a final time, giving them one last meeting across the impossible distance of his condition.