From the author who's inspired millions worldwide with books like Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven comes his most imaginative novel yet, The Time Keeper--a compelling fable about the first man on earth to count the hours.
The man who became Father Time.
In Mitch Albom's newest work of fiction, the inventor of the world's first clock is punished for trying to measure God's greatest gift. He is banished to a cave for centuries and forced to listen to the voices of all who come after him seeking more days, more years. Eventually, with his soul nearly broken, Father Time is granted his freedom, along with a magical hourglass and a mission: a chance to redeem himself by teaching two earthly people the true meaning of time.
He returns to our world--now dominated by the hour-counting he so innocently began--and commences a journey with two unlikely partners: one a teenage girl who is about to give up on life, the other a wealthy old businessman who wants to live forever. To save himself, he must save them both. And stop the world to do so.
Told in Albom's signature spare, evocative prose, this remarkably original tale will inspire readers everywhere to reconsider their own notions of time, how they spend it and how precious it truly is.
Release date:
October 1, 2013
Publisher:
Hachette Books
Print pages:
240
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His hair is long. His beard reaches his knees. He holds his chin in the cup of his hands.
He closes his eyes.
He is listening to something. Voices. Endless voices. They rise from a pool in the corner of the cave.
They are the voices of people on Earth.
They want one thing only.
Time.
Sarah Lemon is one of those voices.
A teenager in our day, she sprawls on a bed and studies a photo on her cell phone: a good-looking boy with coffee-colored hair.
Tonight she will see him. Tonight at eight-thirty. She recites it excitedly—Eight-thirty, eight-thirty!—and she wonders what to wear. The black jeans? The sleeveless top? No. She hates her arms. Not the sleeveless.
“I need more time,” she says.
Victor Delamonte is one of those voices.
A wealthy man in his mid-eighties, he sits in a doctor’s office. His wife sits beside him. White paper covers an exam table.
The doctor speaks softly. “There’s not much we can do,” he says. Months of treatment have not worked. The tumors. The kidneys.
Victor’s wife tries to speak, but the words catch. As if sharing the same larynx, Victor clears his throat.
“What Grace wants to ask is … how much time do I have left?”
His words—and Sarah’s words—drift up to the faraway cave, and the lonesome, bearded man sitting inside it. This man is Father Time.
You might think him a myth, a cartoon from a New Year’s card—ancient, haggard, clutching an hourglass, older than anyone on the planet.
But Father Time is real. And, in truth, he cannot age. Beneath the unruly beard and cascading hair—signs of life, not death—his body is lean, his skin unwrinkled, immune to the very thing he lords over.
Once, before he angered God, he was just another man, fated to die when his days were done.
Now he has a different fate: Banished to this cave, he must listen to the world’s every plea—for more minutes, more hours, more years, more time.
He has been here an eternity. He has given up hope. But a clock ticks for all of us, silently, somewhere. And one is ticking even for him.
Soon Father Time will be free.
To return to Earth.
And finish what he started.
This is a story about the meaning of time
and it begins long ago, at the dawn of man’s history, with a barefoot boy running up a hillside. Ahead of him is a barefoot girl. He is trying to catch her. This is often the way it is between girls and boys.
For these two, it is the way it will always be.
The boy’s name is Dor. The girl is Alli.
At this age, they are nearly the same size, with high-pitched voices and thick, dark hair, their faces splashed with mud.
As Alli runs, she looks back at Dor and grins. What she feels are the first stirrings of love. She scoops a small rock and tosses it high in his direction.
“Dor!” she yells.
Dor, as he runs, is counting his breaths.
He is the first person on Earth to attempt this—counting, making numbers. He began by matching one finger to another, giving each pairing a sound and a value. Soon he was counting anything he could.
Dor is gentle, an obedient child, but his mind goes deeper than those around him. He is different.
And on this early page of man’s story, one different child can change the world.
Which is why God is watching him.
“Dor!” Alli yells.
He looks up and smiles—he always smiles at Alli—and the stone falls at his feet. He cocks his head and forms a thought.
“Throw another!”
Alli throws it high. Dor counts his fingers, a sound for one, a sound for two—
“Ahrrgunph!”
He is tackled from behind by a third child, Nim, a boy much larger and stronger. Nim crows as he puts a knee in Dor’s back.
“I am king!”
All three children laugh.
They resume their running.
Try to imagine a life without timekeeping.
You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie.
Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays.
Man alone measures time.
Man alone chimes the hour.
And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures.
A fear of time running out.
As children grow, they gravitate to their fates.
So did Dor, Nim, and Alli, the three children on that hillside.
Nim became tall and broad-shouldered.
He carried mud bricks for his father, a builder. He liked that he was stronger than other boys. Power became Nim’s fascination.
Alli grew more beautiful
and her mother warned her to keep her dark hair braided and her eyes lowered, lest her fairness encourage the bad desires of men. Humility became Alli’s cocoon.
Dor?
Well. Dor became a measurer of things. He marked stones, he notched sticks, he laid out twigs, pebbles, anything he could count. He often fell into a dreamy state, thinking about numbers, and his older brothers left him behind when they went hunting.
Instead, Dor ran up the hills with Alli, and his mind raced ahead of him, beckoning him to follow.
And then, one hot morning, a strange thing happened.
Dor, now a teen by our years, sat in the dirt and wedged a stick in the ground. The sun was strong and he noticed the stick’s shadow.
He placed a stone at the shadow’s tip. He sang to himself. He thought about Alli. They had been friends since they were children, but now he was taller and she was softer and he felt a weakness when her lowered eyes lifted up to meet his. He felt as if he were being tipped over.
A fly buzzed past, interrupting his daydream. “Ahhhh,” he said, swatting it away. When he glanced back at the stick, its shadow no longer reached the stone.
Dor waited, but the shadow grew even smaller, because the sun was moving up in the sky. He decided to leave everything in place and return tomorrow. And tomorrow, when the sun cast a shadow exactly to the stone, that moment would be … the same moment as today.
In fact, he reasoned, wouldn’t every day contain one such moment? When the shadow, stick, and stone aligned?
He would call it Alli’s moment, and he would think of her each day at that juncture.
He tapped his forehead, proud of himself.
And thus did man begin to mark time.
The fly returned.
Dor swatted it again. Only this time it stretched into a long, black strip, which opened into a pocket of darkness.
Out stepped an old man in a draped white robe.
Dor’s eyes widened in fear. He tried to run, to scream, but nothing in his body responded.
The old man held a staff of golden wood. He poked Dor’s sun stick and it rose from the dirt and turned into a string of wasps. The wasps created a new line of darkness, which opened like a pulled curtain.
The old man stepped through it.
And he was gone.
Dor ran away.
He never told anyone about that visit.
Not even Alli.
Not until the end.
Sarah finds time in a drawer.
She opens it looking for her black jeans and instead discovers, buried near the back, her first watch—a purple Swatch model with a plastic band. Her parents gave it to her for her twelfth birthday.
Two months later, they divorced.
“Sarah!” her mother yells from downstairs.
“What?” she yells back.
After the split, Sarah stayed with Lorraine, who would blame Tom, her absent ex, for every wrong thing in their lives. Sarah would nod sympathetically. But each of them, in a way, was still waiting on the man; Lorraine to admit he was wrong, Sarah to have him rescue her. Neither thing happened.
“What, Mom?” Sarah yells again.
“Do you need the car?”
“I don’t need the car.”
“What?”
“I don’t need the car!”
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere!”
Sarah checks the purple watch, which still runs: it is 6:59 P.M.
Eight-thirty, eight-thirty!
She closes the drawer and yells, “Focus!”
Where are her black jeans?
Victor finds time in a drawer.
He takes out his calendar book. He sees the next day’s itinerary, which includes a 10 A.M. board meeting, a 2 P.M. conference call with analysts, and an 8 P.M. dinner with a Brazilian CEO whose company Victor is buying. The way he feels, he’ll be lucky. . .
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