Plot summary

When a young man and woman meet for what on the surface seems like the first time in the Chicago library where he works, she, artist Clare Abshire, knows that they have met several times over the course of her life, last when she was eighteen, while he, Henry DeTamble, who doesn't have that recollection, knows that her assertion of them having met can be true as he, since he was six years old, has been able to travel through time, albeit involuntarily and the reason yet unknown, and only in his physical bring without even the clothes on his back. That travel includes to times and places where he can visit himself in other time periods, but each version of himself only knowing what that version has seen or experienced, which is why this version of Henry has no recollection of Clare. His travels, their occurrences which are exacerbated by alcohol consumption, generally tend to be to times and places that are touchstones to whatever is happening in his life at any given time, which is why he often visited Clare and previously always in the meadow behind her wealthy parents' house. He also knows that he has no ability to change the past, just as preventing the death of his opera singer mother Annette that fateful day of the first time when he was six, or affect the future in his travels. While she already knows that he is the love of her life, he too quickly comes to that realization. Although they do not enter into the decision lightly, they decide to marry. As their relationship progresses, the realities of his affliction have a profound affect on how they relate to each other, while his travels take him further and further into the future to want to be able to affect what happens in the present. As such, the philosophical issue of if they have any choices in their lives or if they are already predetermined are touched upon.—Huggo