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Life Out of Order

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What to expect

Two great loves. A world in chaos. And a life that never lands in order. Discover the long-awaited sequel to the bestselling phenomenon, The Time Traveler’s Wife.

Alba De Tamble is a time traveler, slipping unpredictably through decades like her father before her. But the hardest thing she carries isn’t the burden of futures she can’t understand, or pasts she cannot change – it’s a secret: she is in love with two different people.

Each of them offers a different life. Zach lives in the present and can’t follow her when she disappears. Oliver can travel through time, just like she can.

As Alba careens from time to time, moving from the riot-torn Chicago streets of her present to the eerie, timeless Yellow House, and into the digital corridors of the Museum of Lost Souls and a flooded future London, she must face a question she can no longer avoid: how is it possible to love, and live a meaningful life, in an increasingly troubled, fractured world?

Intimate and expansive, Life Out of Order is a kaleidoscopic story of love, resilience and hope when time is running out.

© Audrey Niffenegger 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Critics Review

A graceful, complicated, satisfying metafiction, it takes on the biggest issues of our times without a flinch
Bonnie Garmus
A wonderfully enigmatic reading experience
Tracy Chevalier
This is a marvel of a book - ambitious, melancholy and beautifully written. An intricate and unexpected tale about time travel, but that also captures the future as well as the now, in all its chaos and wonder, beauty and fear; it left me reeling with questions and answers, but also filled me with heartache and hope. Sometimes a novel is more than a book, and just like the original, this is one of those times. It’s a journey. An adventure. Something I won’t stop thinking about. Henry and Clare never left me, and I know Alba, Zach and Oliver won’t, either. (Or Beck, or Isadora!) What an extraordinary feat of storytelling
Claire Daverley
Can a novel be both intimate and epic? Utopian and dystopian? Old fashioned in the best way and utterly contemporary? In the case of Audrey Niffenegger’s Life Out of Order, the answer is yes, yes, yes. She engages with the large questions of our anthropocene era yet her characters, tumbling through time, are so real, I’m hoping they’ll appear in my kitchen. I can’t stop thinking about this marvellous novel
Margot Livesey
Life Out of Order is fiction with a pulse - urgent, atmospheric, unforgettable. Exploring how we persist when the present is never guaranteed, Niffenegger offers fans a deeper, soaring continuation of her iconic world. It's a fiercely imaginative feat of world-building, a rare sequel that doesn't just revisit the past, it redefines our understanding of what it means to belong to time itself
Sarah Addison Allen
The Time Traveler's Wife was a lovely orchid, but Life Out of Order is a whole riotous garden of wildflowers. The ending of Life Out of Order made me cry, for page after page. A love story that understands that time is made out of love and loss, this novel stuck in my mind for days after I finished reading. This is a book for anyone who feels as though time is not on their side and wishes they could make it otherwise
Charlie Jane Anders
The much-anticipated and very long-awaited follow-up to The Time Traveler’s Wife… [is] a page-turner
i, *Autumn Picks of 2026*
Author Audrey Niffenegger
Narrator Santino Fontana, January LaVoy, Bahni Turpin, Fred Berman, Phoebe Strole, Zheng Xi Yong, Melissa Barrera
Duration 10 hours
Release Date
ISBN 9781529995749
Format Audiobook
Publisher Random House
Genre Magical realism, Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Love and relationships, Romance: time travel, Science fiction: time travel
Availability AU, GB, IE

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