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  • Published: 6 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9781787336766
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 560
  • RRP: $59.99

Life Out of Order




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

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 DeTamble 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.

  • Published: 6 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9781787336766
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 560
  • RRP: $59.99

About the author

Audrey Niffenegger

Audrey Niffenegger is a visual artist and writer who lives mostly in Chicago and occasionally in London. She has published six books, including the novels The Time Traveler's Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry. She helped to found the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. Her art has been exhibited by Printworks Gallery in Chicago since 1986. She is a Professor in the Fiction Department of Columbia College. Her recent projects include a ballet, Raven Girl, in collaboration with Wayne McGregor for the Royal Opera House Ballet.

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Praise for Life Out of Order

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

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

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

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