3.5 

Time to Burn

By Ellery Lloyd
Time to Burn by Ellery Lloyd digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Club comes a gripping mystery about time travel tourism and the dangerous consequences which ensue when the privileged make the past their playground.

Mercurial tech entrepreneur Inigo Frank has perfected commercial time travel, though it is tightly regulated and so expensive that it’s open only to the very wealthiest.

His company, Tempus Tours, has so far been approved for just one route: a journey back to London in 1941, to the days of the Blitz, allowing the super-rich to experience the awesome sights and sounds of the aerial bombardment of the capital during World War II. It’s a slick operation—routes across the wartime city are meticulously plotted, guides are extensively trained, and rules for the time tourists are strictly enforced.

To immortalize his achievement, Frank enlists award-winning filmmaker Phoebe Hunt to create a fly-on-the-wall documentary. On her first day shadowing Inigo, she is set to witness the return of a billionaire property developer and his family from their trip to the past. But instead of their awe-filled return, she captures the group arriving bloodied and traumatized, with one of their number missing.

Not only that, but Phoebe recognizes the missing woman, and knows not only that she’s not who she claims to be but that she has every reason to harbor a grudge against her. And as events begin to unravel in the present day, it seems increasingly clear that she had sinister motives for returning to the past—and that people close to Phoebe are in danger.

Phoebe must race to untangle the truth—before past and the future are rewritten.

With this inventive, propulsive and genre-bending page turner, the bestselling author of The Club and The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby once again delivers an enthralling tale of legacy and wealth, history and technology with a gripping mystery at its core.

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Time to Burn Reviews

3.5
“This is a real page turner. I couldn't put it down and feel satisfied yet completely bereft after finishing the book an hour ago. I love time travel thrillers and this is definitely one of the best I've read with a very believable premise of Tempus Tours. The mix with a mystery surrounding the protagonist's family history in a commune was also very topical. I was on edge with all the twists and felt it was very well written.”
“It was the premise of Time to Burn that initially caught my eye, offering a fresh, unique take on time travel, which it absolutely delivers on. This is smart, twisty speculative fiction dressed up as a thriller, and for the most part, it really works. If you could travel back in time, which moment in history would you want to witness? In Time to Burn, commercial time travel is real, tightly regulated and available only to the ultra wealthy through Tempus Tours, founded by tech entrepreneur, Inigo Frank. Documentary filmmaker, Phoebe Hunt, is brought in to capture his crowning achievement on film, but on her very first day shadowing him, she witnesses a tour group return from a trip to 1941 London traumatised and missing one of their members. Worse still, Phoebe recognises the missing woman, and knows exactly why she’d have every reason to want to change the past. I found the way glitching was woven into the story via the Mandela Effect really interesting, it gave the time travel mechanics a grounded, almost plausible logic that had me questioning what timeline I’m living in! Lloyd clearly put a lot of thought into how these journeys into the past ripple forward and distort the present, with small changes resulting in significant consequences. This is a book that started off a little slow for me, taking its time to establish the mechanics before the plot properly kicks into gear. But it gradually snowballed, getting bigger and faster with every chapter until it built into this incredible crescendo of shifting timelines, tangled consequences, shared histories and buried secrets. By the final third, I genuinely couldn’t put it down. The ending was insane and gave me real Inception and Tenet vibes. Everything clicks into place in a way that recontextualises so much of what came before, and I think this is genuinely one of those books that would reward a re-read with the hindsight of knowing exactly how it all plays out and to appreciate just how intricate the setup is. If I have one criticism, it’s that this would have been a full 5⭐️ for me if we’d had a bit more time to develop emotional bonds with the characters. I felt like character development took a backseat to plot here, which is understandable given how much narrative ground this book covers, particularly with the flashbacks to Phoebe’s prior documentary, and how intricately the timelines are woven together, but it did mean I wasn’t quite as emotionally invested in Phoebe and the rest of the cast as I wanted to be. Overall, Time to Burn is a clever and genuinely original speculative thriller. If you love time travel stories that make you work a little to keep up and reward that effort with a truly satisfying payoff, this is well worth picking up. Thank you to Ellery Lloyd, Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for sharing this ARC with me in exchange for my honest review, I am grateful for the opportunity to share my thoughts.”

About Ellery Lloyd

Ellery Lloyd is the pseudonym for the London-based husband-and-wife writing team of Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos. Collette is a journalist and editor, the former content director of Elle (UK), and editorial director at Soho House. She has written for The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Sunday Times. Paul is the author of two previous novels, Welcome to the Working Week and Every Day Is Like Sunday. He is a professor of creative writing at the University of Greenwich. Together, they are the authors of People Like Her, The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby, and The Club.

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