Synopsis

Big, brooding and 28 years old, Dan Baird has just moved in with his glamorous fiancée. The trouble is Dan’s not sure that Nadia is the one. His soul-destroying job in life insurance is hardly helping matters. And then there are his explosive new tenants: a Scottish public schoolboy and a promiscuous conspiracy theorist.

Meanwhile at night, Dan dreams himself back into the past. In 1893, the master bedroom that he shares with Nadia is a sweatshop where thirty girls slave away at clattering sewing machines and sleep on the dusty floorboards. Here, Dan meets Egg, a feisty Russian-Jewish girl with some problems of her own.

With increasing rapidity, the story cuts between Dan’s waking life and his dreams. Matters come to a head when he realises that he is in love with someone far more than Nadia. But who? And so with their wedding day fast approaching, Dan sets out to find the dark-eyed girl of his dreams before it is too late.

In 1 sentence? Two Timing is a love triangle with a twist. The twist is that the protagonist’s lover lives in a different world.

What’s it like? The Time Traveller’s Wife meets Everything is Illuminated meets Brick Lane.

Why does it resonate? Two Timing explores the toughest dilemma most people will ever face: how much to compromise when choosing a partner. And it does this through a subject as universally intriguing as dreams. With page-turning playfulness, the novel exploits the dramatic irony of dreams’ most fascinating characteristic: that we have them every night, yet remember merely fragments.

Hilarious and heart-breaking, Two Timing is about the magic in all our lives.

Even if we wake up remembering nothing.