The Map of Time

If you want a book that has adventure, romance, escapism and some turn of the century charm, this is a good selection.  It is a pretty hefty book with 600+ pages, but reads very easily (in my opinion).  The author does tend to go off on tangents frequently, but the story ties together very nicely.  The novel is divided into three sections.  The first section is about a young man named Andrew Harrington and how he lost the love of his life, but is offered a chance to go back in time to change the outcome.  The second section follows a man named Tom Blunt and his attempt to live and love in the present by pretending to be someone from the future.  The third section focuses on a fictionalized H.G. Wells (who appears in the previous sections as well) and his own experience with time travel.  The end went on a bit long, but by then you only have about 20 pages left and if you've already read the previous 580 then you may as well settle in and finish it. There are a multitude of characters and subplots woven into the tome, and one feels as though Palma is writing for a reader from that long gone era when books were a primary form of entertainment.  This is a book for people who don't want to watch television because they know the imagination provides a more fantastic escape.