Time travel with all its pitfalls and potential paradoxes has been known to do my head in, but that is not what made this novel so emotionally exhausting – yet extremely worthwhile - to read. What got to me instead were the carefully drawn characters and the emotions involved as Dieter, a British out-and-proud linguist from 2041, and Janos, an almost-killed Hungarian soldier from WW2, meet and get to know each other. There are so many reasons why they should never have met, and even more obstacles of all kinds when they do, that I wasn’t sure they’d make it. Then, in the last third of the novel, the author threw me a curveball of epic proportions and the situation looked very dire indeed. This book is an emotional wringer of the first order, an action/adventure that made me bite my nails, and a thoughtful and thought-provoking story about the difficulties of overcoming fear, prejudice, and cross-cultural boundaries.

Janos is a Hungarian soldier who joined a war he does not believe in so he could hide the truth about his sexual orientation. He has seen more than one of his friends and lovers tortured and killed for loving men, and he figures the best place to hide is in plain sight. Except then his comrades turn on him, and Janos runs – right into a time portal and a world he has no idea how to navigate.

Dieter is a historian and linguist for the Temporal Research Institution, a neutral entity set up to research and verify a range of historical events under a strict code of noninterference. Dieter is not an active agent, not trained to go on missions, but he is the one who briefs the agents who do travel back. He helps them be inconspicuous, and he also knows what documents or events to look for. Imagine his surprise when a soldier stumbles through the gateway – one who looks utterly shocked, does not speak English, and is armed to his teeth. Dieter is the only one in the building who speaks Hungarian, and he decides to try to save the man’s life even though he is scared out of his wits.

From this first meeting, where Dieter and Janos manage to agree on a truce so Janos can receive medical attention, these two men have a rapport that slowly develops into friendship. Both of them soon want more, but Dieter is conscious of the noninterference rules, even though Janos can stay in the future because he was minutes away from death where/when he came from, and Janos is way too scared to admit he is attracted to a man. Despite all the evidence to the contrary Janos discovers as he learns about a future he could never have imagined, he cannot trust the evidence he finds, not for a very long time.

I loved the slow and careful way Dieter and Janos get to know each other. Janos needs to find a new role for himself, and as he gradually begins to understand his new situation and how his talents and historical perspective can help the TRI, he gains self-confidence and a new zest for life. Dieter spends half his time holding back and trying to figure out how he can help Janos without falling even deeper in love. Between the two of them there is enough angst to fill three novels, but I think that every single moment is worth it in the end.

If you like time travel – intelligently done, if you prefer to read about the human consequences of interfering with the past rather than the exact technical details of how everything works, and if you’re looking for a read that is both an intensely emotional love story and a thoughtful analysis of the consequences of messing with time, then you will probably like this novel as much as I do. It’s one of the best stories about the human side of time travel that I have ever read.


NOTE: This book was provided by Dreamspiner Press for the purpose of a review on Rainbow Book Reviews. ( )