I loved the idea of this book. To love someone enough to change your life completely by time travelling takes a special kind of love and trust. Polly risks everything for Frank in this beautifully told story. This is an enjoyable read. It tells of love and loss and human nature.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

This was a really interesting book set in a dystopian America during the 1980's and 90's. There are recognisable elements in the 1980's, but when a flu pandemic breaks out everything changes.

Polly is the central character, and it is through her eyes that the main themes of the book are revealed. The power of love (no, not the 80's power ballad) and the sacrifice that she makes to save Frank's life is central to the book. This is why she finds herself 17 years in the future trying to track down her lover and reunite with him. The future is a cruel country, ruled by the laws of the company TimeRaiser, and the life of the journeymen (the time travellers) and the migrants, is very different to the wealthy. I would have liked to have seen this explored in a bit more depth, and it felt quite abrupt and overly easy when Polly was suddenly able to leave this life and continue her search for Frank.

As the reader, we learn about Frank through Polly's memories of him. I would have felt a little more invested in their relationship if there had been a little more from his point of view. I also felt that Polly was a fairly unsubstantial character and that she only existed in relation to her feelings for Frank and without him there wasn't very much to her.

I did enjoy the book, but it lacked any real depth or challenging ideas for me to have really fallen in love with it.

My thanks go to the publishers and Net Galley for the advanced copy in return for an honest review.

I loved this book, from the premise, to the characters and the narrative it all just worked. Told in flashbacks between the 1990s where a flu epidemic has killed thousands and where Polly and her partner Frank have been trapped; holidaying in Texas just before the quarantine cordon was created; and the late 1970s when Polly and Frank meet.
The novel begins with Polly agreeing to time travel as part of a companies bid to show how successful their time traveling method is. In return, Polly will be spared the flu that now, even her beloved Frank has, but her agreeing to travel means the company will pay for Frank to get top notch treatment for the flu rather than the governments standard and often unsuccessful treatment. Polly is applying for a 12 year visa so the plan is made that she and Frank will just meet up in 1993 at an agreed spot in Galveston and that if they don’t meet on the first Saturday, for them to keep trying on every Saturday of September. While waiting to travel Polly is given the company’s policy documents to read, which contains the innocuous paragraph
“TimeRaiser can convey the whole cost of your travel expenses and you will be bonded to TimeRaiser for an agreedupon period.“

To Polly’s horror she awakes in a hospital suffering the physical affects of time travel and the date is in 1998. She is 5 years late for her meeting with Frank. This horror is compounded when Polly realised that being bonded to the company is not just a line in a booklet but a tragic reality. She is effectively a slave of the company. In the 17 years since she left the country has been torn in two with the lower section now called America and the upper portion now called The United States. Travel between the two is expensive and requires a Visa and America is in very poor shape post the flu pandemic.
The bulk of the novel is then Pollys quest to meet Frank, if he is still looking for her, risking her own safety to do so as she is forbidden to leave the area she is working in, interspersed with chapters detailing how their romance began and their lives together in the late 1970s. Polly dreams of becoming a mother and Frank simply wants her to be happy.
It takes a lot of struggle and much time passed before we find out if Frank is still alive and if he and Polly can carry on as they left off and I was holding my breath at times, desperate for Polly to find the happiness she deserved.
No spoilers from me, but the conclusion was beautiful although bittersweet.

An Ocean of Minutes is a believable tale of love being stretched to its limits. In order to provide Frank with treatment from an infectious illness, Polly time travels into the future and is separated from him. They promise to reunite with each other, but Polly finds herself further into the future than promised and there is no sign of Frank. She begins her new life in a dystopian world with a class system, poverty, and severe control and punishment. Whilst searching for Frank, she begins to doubt whether his love for her would still exist if they were to find each other again.

I found this novel to be beautifully written and carefully crafted. Polly's loss made me feel extremely anxious and I felt her pain in the uncertain landscape she finds herself in and her fear that she has lost Frank. I am not usually keen on books that stretch the imagination away from reality, but Lim has created a thoughtful and believable account of Polly and Frank's reality. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel.

Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the opportunity to read a pre-publication copy.

A wild but brilliant tale of time travel, love, trust and hope all set in a world that is both unsettling and familiar. At various times it reminded me of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Vandermeer's Area X and Rainbow Rowell's Landline. A weird and wonderful book.

Beautifully imagined and written. Masterly descriptions of a dystopian world and the greed of corporations. A believable time traveling tale that concerns itself with the nitty gritty of travel. Despite all this, from a personal view I felt very uninvolved with the characters and the book. Maybe that's the effect it should have on the reader, but, for me it's a good book and not a great book.

I found An Ocean of Minutes incredibly moving. It is a dystopian novel which is very plausible, despite the time travel element. The time is 1980. An accident in a lab has led to a global flu pandemic. It is our ages version of a disaster movie. The best way to explore this disaster is at micro level, through the eyes of young couple in love Polly and Frank.
Frank quickly becomes ill, and Polly must make a dreadful choice. The only way to pay for Frank's treatment is to work for a new company that sends people to the future, where the disease has gone. It is a one way trip, with a promise to meet on the other side. Of course, the path of true love never did run smooth.
Neither the reader or Polly has any way to predict the strange new world she finds herself in. So much has changed, except her love for Frank. You completely believe in this new reality, whilst being grateful it isn't ours. An Ocean of Minutes shows how ordinary people behave when put under terrible pressure, and the different choices they make.
Thea Lim shows how class and money determines access to the essentials of life, and the expectations you have of your future. It also explores survivors guilt. Is it really better to live on, if your loved ones have gone? Can you live with the choices you have made in order to survive?
A few days after finishing this book, it is still resonating in my head. That is what a good novel is supposed to do.

Can true love withstand the test of time if one person travels to the future while the other is left behind ? What happens when there’s also a deadly virus to contend with? That’s the exciting premise behind this read which I really enjoyed. A bit silly but in a good way. I haven’t read many time travel/sci fi books in a while but this was a lot of fun.

It’s fascinating when you think about it - if you’ve seen the movie The Lake House, when one person travels into the future and vows to wait for their loved one....Ah that’s true love right? Well, not sure about Polly in the story. She wasn’t as emotional as I expected her to be. But maybe time travel messes with your mind.

Whilst some parts were more light hearted, the ‘scenes’ about the flu pandemic and the post apocalyptic descriptions were eerie and very evocative. Some of the places are real too, which heightened the tension. Take care if you head to Houston airport anytime soon!

Was an interesting concept, but seemed to jump around a bit - perhaps a bit like time travel? The ending is believable and the characters are interesting - a powerful look into time travel and the effects on modern life.

Different to books I would normally pick but I quite enjoyed it. I loved the idea you could time travel to help save someone with a cure. It was well written and easy to follow.

Great concept, slightly dystopian but with romance thrown in too. It was fairly unexpected, cleverly written although occasionally unclear. I connected with the main character and stayed hooked until the end.

Great storyline.... sending yourself into the future,so your beloved can get healthcare from a fu that's wiping people out.
Agree where to meet... what can go wrong?
For starters you could be a few years late.
The best bits of this book for me,were the confusion of the new timeline and the struggle to understand how things worked,and the not knowing who to trust.
The hunt for Frank,or the wait for Frank was good too.
I felt a bit flat when he was found,and didn't live up to the promise of his younger self.

I quite enjoyed this even though it was a bit weird! Distopian fiction is not really my thing and I did not understand exactly what was going on, although I got the basic story, that Polly went into the future to raise money to treat her boyfriend Frank who gets flu in a pandemic in Texas. The people who time travel are indentured to the company which provides the facility, and are not treated very well. Polly makes many foolish mistakes as she blunders about in the future (1998), and tries to meet up with Frank and her aunt Donna. No one explains to her what is going on until she gets it wrong and faces the consequences. There are flashbacks to track the relationship between her and Frank, and give an idea of her former life. I cannot say whether it all goes well for them at the end, for fear of spoilers. I did not really understand how this time travel worked, or what constituted America in this alternate reality. It was well written and structured and I had some sympathy with Polly as a character but the scenario just didn't work for me.

Interesting thoughts on how time travel would affect relationships, and change the known world around you to something strange, even if the same place - fascinating premise.

A beautiful novel that breathes new life into the well-trodden time-travel genre. An incredibly rich, well-imagined universe, and a protagonist with a strong, unique voice. Heart aching to read.

So, Polly and Frank love each other and Frank falls ill with a pandemic flu that is very rare. In order to get treatmnt they need a lot of money, so Polly ends up offering to work for a time travelling company. They make a pact to find each other again when she is "deployed" to 1993, the time to which she is gonna travel. But when she arrives it is 5 later and the pandemic flu has wiped almost all population. So she gets scared and then lots of bizarre and silly situations happen: she gets on the wrong bus and goes to another place instead of where she has to go, she doesn't know how to deal with the driver in order to get driven where she must be, she doesn't ask anyone (she sees some weird things around her, like recorded children's laughter and people with helmet like things on their head), she has to pee and ends up surrounded by bushes where she gets found by her boss that has come for her, aaaaaand... wtf I am reading?

I am sorry because I wanted to enjoy this, the pandemic idea sounded interesting as did the thought about they meeting again in the future, him all cured because of her time travelling paying the fees, but there were lots of surreal situations (like the described above) which I didn't buy into which affected my enjoyment of the story. The potential is there, but the book wasn't on my wave lenght.