Picked up for the SEPTEMBER SAPPHIRE CHALLENGE. Where will it go....

I hadn't intended to read this - but I'm glad I did!

Tom Hazard may look like an ordinary 41-year-old but actually he's been alive for centuries, aging just a year for every fifteen that pass. He’s mixed with key names in history, Shakespeare, Captain Cook & Fitzgerald but he’s tired of this life & wants to find the daughter he had to abandon centuries ago.

While the chapters alternate between Tom’s past & current life, his life follows a chronological path, there’s no back & forth in time for Tom, his life, albeit at a slower pace than our own, moves strictly forward. Starting as the very end of the sixteenth century, the story follows Tom as he first discovers his condition & the effect it has on those he loves & consequently loses because of it.

In the late 1800’s he embarks on a life structured by a secret organisation, “The Albatross Society”. The society monitors those with Tom’s condition, enabling them to move around the world & begin fresh lives every eight years, in order that people will not notice that they are not aging as they should …a society whose number one rule is ”DO NOT FALL IN LOVE”.

But Tom has known love & it’s the love for his daughter that keeps him going over the centuries, knowing that she has the same condition & in all likelihood is alive somewhere…he just needs help in finding where….

Overall it’s a good, inventive read, romantic, sad at times - yet not melancholic - & above all, thought provoking .

"Life isn’t meant to be lived perfectly…but merely to be LIVED."

Going off as part of a Belated Birthday package.

Thank you for this belated birthday book. I look forward to reading it. It sounds really interesting!
Merry Christmas x

I've just realised that I have 2 copies of this book so I'm sending this one out into the world x