Bid Time Return

When Richard Collier, a thirty-six-year-old screenwriter, falls in love, the circumstances are, to say the least, daunting. Richard has been given six months to live by the doctors; Elise McKenna, the object of his increasingly obsessive affections, is a famous and protected stage actress, whom he knows only through a photograph—taken in 1896. Richard is in 1971, across a gulf of seventy-five years. To cross that gulf, and to comport himself as obscure suitor and stranded traveler in time are the challenges Richard must overcome to reach his beloved Elise.

"What was the phrase I read so many years ago?" Richard muses. "I remember. What you believe becomes your world. Lying here before, I believed that the voice I heard was telling me the truth and that I was lying on this bed, with my eyes closed, not in 1971, but in 1896. I'll do this again and again until that belief has so completely overwhelmed me that I'll literally be there and rise and leave this room and reach Elise."

If such a thing is possible, it can only be so in the place he has chosen to live out his last months: the evocative, real-life setting for this haunting, poignant, and unabashedly romantic novel is the Coronado Hotel near San Diego, whose gabled and turreted vastness has stood proud sentinel by the pounding Pacific surf for almost a century.

It is here that Richard, under death sentence and cutting all ties, wanders by chance or predestination. In painstaking—and to the reader eerily persuasive—fashion, he prepares for his inner voyage. It is a voyage which will leave the reader shaken, moved, and staring speculatively into the fire.