Welcome to the Middle Shelf, where I recommend books that deserve a spot on your reading list. This week: How to Stop Time by Matt Haig, a historical fantasy that completely surprised me — and I mean that in the best possible way.
I’ll be upfront: I am a romance reader. I mostly tend to reach for a good love story. So picking up a book about a 400-year-old history teacher was not exactly my usual move. But something pulled me toward this one, and I am so glad it did.
Tom Hazard looks like an ordinary man in his forties. He is not. Born in 1581, Tom has a rare condition that causes him to age almost impossibly slowly, which means he has lived through Elizabethan England, Jazz-Age Paris, and everything in between — rubbing shoulders with Shakespeare, sailing with Captain Cook, sharing cocktails with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Now he’s quietly living as a history teacher in London, trying to blend in, trying not to feel too much. And above all else, following the one rule that keeps him safe: never fall in love.
And here’s where it gets really fun. Tom isn’t just teaching history — he lived it. He stands in front of a classroom full of teenagers trying to make these moments feel real, dropping the kind of insights that only someone who was actually there could give. It is equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking. There were lines that made me laugh out loud and lines that stopped me completely and made me sit with them for a moment. Haig has a gift for sneaking something profound into a sentence that looks like it’s just going to be funny — and before you know it, you’re feeling things you weren’t expecting to feel.
What makes this book so extraordinary is the way it moves through time. The jumps between centuries could have felt jarring or confusing, but Haig handles them so seamlessly that you just float along with Tom, feeling the weight of every era he carries with him. And Tom himself — his deep emotions, his loneliness, his longing for an ordinary life — made me feel like I wasn’t reading a story so much as sitting with someone while they told me their life. All five hundred years of it.
This is why it earns its spot on the Middle Shelf. It isn’t graphic, it isn’t childish — it is just deeply, quietly human. It is philosophical without being pretentious, romantic without being a romance novel, and historical without ever feeling like a textbook. It is the kind of book that makes you think about your own life long after you’ve closed the last page.
If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to live forever — and whether it would be a gift or a curse — this book will answer that question beautifully.
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