What are ‘lost time accidents’, apart from something on building-site signs announcing hours lost to worker injuries? In this novel by the Austrian-American John Wray, the accidents represent time travel, or one family’s century-long, multi-generation, trans-Atlantic obsession and dark joke. ‘Time is our shared disorder,’ says the narrator’s aunt.

Waldy Tolliver is that narrator, anxious and infatuated and trapped in a time-pocket from which he lobs the family history in long passages to Mrs Haven, his recent lover.