4 ideas
Clare Abshire first meets Henry DeTamble when she is six and he is a naked, middle-aged time traveler appearing in the meadow behind her family's Michigan house. He visits her dozens of times through her childhood and adolescence, carrying a list of dates he got from her as an adult. When she meets the 28-year-old Henry at the Newberry Library in Chicago, she has known him for fourteen years and he has never seen her before.
The novel is built on the partner who stays behind rather than the one who has adventures. Henry's disappearances are dramatic but brief from his side, while Clare lives through the long stretches of absence, uncertainty, and ordinary time. Seeing any relationship this way shows a hidden cost: the one who waits does unseen labor that the absent one never fully experiences.
In the book the past and future are fixed, so Henry cannot change events he has already witnessed, including his mother's death and his own. Characters still choose how to meet those events: what they say, whom they comfort, how they prepare. Fate settles the outcome, but the meaning of the outcome is still up to the people living it.
Clare's love for Henry is formed in childhood by an adult who already knows she will become his wife, so her choice of partner is shaped before she is old enough to choose. The novel raises the question of whether a love can be freely chosen when one partner's future knowledge helped create it. Clare herself wonders whether she ever had a real alternative.