I came across this time travel novel, and this author, by a review of Stephen King’s 11/22/63. Supposedly, Stephen King was inspired by this book and author and it helped with the idea for 11/22/63. I am not sure how true that anecdote is, but it was enough to inspire me to buy the book and read it. I was not disappointed. The book starts in 1979 in Belltower, Washington, a small, sleepy town not far from Seattle with this sentence:

Soon, the time traveler would face the necessity of his own death.

The pace never lets up. A Bridge of Years is the story of a few characters, each of them down on his luck, who come together in a house on Post Road in Belltower in 1989, to face a dangerous nemesis from the future, with no place to hide and a lot to lose. Most of the action occurs in 1989, likely because Robert Charles Wilson published the book in 1991. That was his present. But the story spans from 1962, to 1979, and then 1989, into the middle of the 21st century and it speculates on through the eons of human evolution. This is not just a book about time travel, but rather, time travel is the essence of the entire story and the plot. Time travel is the fabric of the structure of the novel itself. It’s one of the better ones of the genre, and I think I need to check out this author some more.