I was late.  I was always late. And I only noticed the time just then because I was wrangling with a cufflink that happened to be stuck under my watch.  Let’s face it; time is one of my big issues.  On the one hand, you could say it’s my life’s work.  I spend most of my days peering at it, poking it and wondering about its existence.  I even calculate it on wall-length blackboards.  But none of that ever matters because, in the end, I can’t control it.  If anything, time usually controls me.

So says John in the beginning of Tangled Roots.  Time is a big issue for him, and actually, for all of us, and the more I wrote this book the more I came to realize that time itself had become one of the main characters.  Over the course of some 350 pages, it gets investigated, torn apart, worried about, loved, longed for, hated and, in some ways, changed.  That’s kind of a strange idea, isn’t it — that time can change, that we can affect it as much as it affects us?  But that’s what I found myself writing about, and even believing, throughout the development of this novel.  So I decided to come clean.  I had said a few blogs ago that the book has two main characters.  But actually, it has three.  And perhaps, of the three, the most compelling one is time itself.