How to Stop Time, Matt Haig

What if you could live for centuries? That’s our main character, Tom Hazard’s life. The fault of his physical strange-ness, of his body’s inability to age. People see only what they have decided to see… he’d learned it over hundreds of years yet it still seemed new to him that this could occur. The truth was less true than just faking it. Deaths, love once so impassioned, now gone. Best not to love it all. That’s the first rule. Don’t fall in love. No falling in love. No staying in love. No daydreaming of love. If he stuck to that he’d be okay. Don’t attach yourself to people and try and feel as little as you possibly can for those you meet. Why? Because if you did, you’d slowly lose your mind. He’s convinced himself through the years the sadness of the memories weighed more and lasted longer than the moments of happiness themselves. So he decided it was truly better not to seek out love or companionship or even friendship. Be an archipelago, detached from humanity’s continent. His master of ceremonies, Hendrich was right. But then in his present life as a History teacher another woman, a teacher as well, recognizes him from a very old photo taken years and years ago, and he has to decide whether to tell her about his true nature and also that he in love with her and stop being ruled by the hands of time. It doesn’t matter that there is no way of resisting the laws of time. The time ahead of you is like the land beyond the ice. You can guess what it could be like but you can never know. All you know is the moment you are in.