How to Stop Time

The Premise and What Haig Does with It

Tom Hazard was born in 1581 and has a rare condition — anageria — that slows his aging to roughly one year of visible change for every fifteen years lived. He is now in his mid-forties in appearance, over four hundred years old in fact, and working as a history teacher in a London comprehensive school, a job he chose because knowing the past first-hand gives him a professional edge he can use without explaining.

This is a genuinely interesting premise, and Haig uses it primarily to ask what longevity costs rather than what it offers. Tom has watched his wife die, his daughter disappear, and centuries of friends and lovers age past him. The novel’s emotional core is not the wonder of having lived through so much history but the accumulated weight of loss that comes with it — a depression that spans not years but centuries. Where Haig’s later The Midnight Library explores depression through a single night of infinite possibilities, How to Stop Time approaches the same territory through endurance: what it means to keep going when going on has become its own burden.

The Historical Sequences

The novel moves between Tom’s present-day life in London and extended flashbacks to previous centuries: Elizabethan London, where he knew Shakespeare; the South Pacific voyages of Captain Cook; and the jazz clubs of 1920s Paris, where he played guitar alongside F. Scott Fitzgerald. These sequences are the novel’s most openly enjoyable material, and Haig researches them well enough that the period detail feels inhabited rather than decorative.

The Elizabethan chapters are the strongest. Haig resists the temptation to make Shakespeare a cameo of knowing greatness and renders him instead as a working playwright with practical anxieties, which makes the encounter feel less like a waxwork and more like a meeting. The Paris sequence is the weakest — Fitzgerald appears briefly and the jazz club atmosphere reads more as fantasy of the period than observed texture. The Cook voyage chapters land between these extremes: historically grounded but serving mainly as connective tissue in Tom’s biography rather than scenes that carry their own emotional weight.

The Albatross Society and the Central Tension

Tom belongs to the Albatross Society, an organization of people with anageria that exists to help them maintain cover identities across the centuries and avoid exposure. The Society’s central rule is absolute: never fall in love. The reasoning is protective — love means attachment, attachment means people noticing that you do not age, and exposure has historically meant persecution.

This is where the novel’s central tension lives, and Haig is interested in the way an ostensibly protective institution can become a mechanism for preventing exactly the human connection that makes endurance worthwhile. The Society’s leader, Hendrich, is drawn as a figure whose centuries of self-protective isolation have made him genuinely menacing rather than simply cautious. The argument the novel stages — between survival through detachment and the possibility that survival without connection is not actually living — is its most serious intellectual content.

The execution is less satisfying than the idea. The romance that violates the rule is with a fellow teacher, and the relationship develops quickly enough that the stakes feel asserted rather than earned. Haig is better at conveying why Tom is afraid to love than at showing why this particular love is worth the risk.

How It Sits in Haig’s Body of Work

How to Stop Time was published two years before The Midnight Library and reads as a slightly earlier, slightly lighter version of concerns Haig would develop more fully in that later novel. Both books are interested in depression, in the question of what makes a life worth living, and in protagonists who have reason to believe that the answer might be nothing. Both use speculative premises to externalize internal states.

The difference is one of register and demand. The Midnight Library is more emotionally intense, more structurally ambitious, and more willing to sit with difficulty. How to Stop Time is warmer, more inclined toward resolution, and more interested in being enjoyable. The historical sequences give readers something to appreciate that does not require emotional vulnerability in the way the later novel’s Nora Seed does. This is not a criticism of the book Haig wrote, but it does mean the novel is less likely to stay with readers who come to it looking for the experience The Midnight Library provides. It is a good novel for what it attempts. It attempts something smaller.

Our rating: 3.5/5 — An entertaining and warmly optimistic novel about the costs of living too long, with strong historical sequences and a melancholy premise Haig handles with care, though it lacks the emotional ambition of his later work.