Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today we are lucky to have with us Matt Haig author of, his latest novel, How To Stop Time, published in February by Viking.

Matt is the author of the bestselling memoir Reasons to Stay Alive, along with novels including The Humans and The Radleys as well as several award winning children’s books.

Matt is lucky enough that Benedict Cumberbatch has signed on to star and produce the film version of this book.

How to Stay Alive is a book about immortality, or as close to immortality as one can get.

Tom Hazard has been alive for centuries but he only looks like he is in his early forties, thanks to a genetic reconfiguration, mutation, what you will that for better or worse causes him to age very very slowly. The novel travels as does Tom (since he has all the time in the world) from Elizabethan England, where we fall in with Shakespeare for a few pages, to Jazz-Age lost generation Paris, where we converse with the Fitzgeralds, to New York, the South Seas, Australia.

Tom is forced, to avoid suspicions of all kinds, to move every eight years or so to avoid detection as the folks around him get older and wrinkly and he stays the same as he was (outwardly).

However you don’t leave the past behind, no matter how long you live and one of the hardest things Tom has to learn, imperfectly, is to never fall in love. Love transcends time.

Tom wants an ordinary life. But can he have one. Let’s find out.