Time Stamp

A novel that ranges over the subjects of loss, marriage, politics, and art, Time Stamp is a searing depiction of the way parents' lives affect their children through their untold or barely told stories—things that exist in the ether of family life and persist, yet play out differently on the stage of a new generation. Told in alternating narratives that open in 1911 when eleven-year-old Will Wheelock is on the periphery of a South Carolina lynching, and in 1997 when Will's daughter, Maddie, is attending a London retrospective of her photographs of refugee camps, Time Stamp encompasses most of the twentieth century. With the trajectory of two arrows aimed at the same target, Will's story moves forward and Maddie's backward until they collide in 1972 during Richard Nixon's Christmas bombing of Hanoi. It is a pivotal moment when Will's lifetime as a fence-sitting public servant shatters, and Maddie's true personal and artistic quest begins.