(In italiano sul Leggio) 
Have you ever read a book you loved so much that in the end you slowed down reading it because you didn't want to finish it?
The first time it happened to me, it was with War and Peace. It wasn't just that I liked it. Actually, it's so long that no one can possibly like all of it. But its characters had entered my life so deeply, that when I ended it I felt as if I had just lost a friend.

I have felt the same feeling recently reading Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife. I was literally sucked inside the story, to the point that I often dreamed of being part of it.

It's a story that may appeal to various kinds of readers:
- those who like science fiction
- those who hate science fiction
- those who like stories about time travels
- those who hate stories about time travels
- those who like love stories
- those who hate love stories.

All these elements (science fiction, time travel, love) are actually key elements in this novel, but all of them are treated in a totally unconventional way.

The cover says:

"This is the extraordinary love story of Clare and Henry who met when Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry suffers from a rare condition where his genetic clock periodically resets and he finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or future. In the face of this force they can neither prevent nor control, Henry and Clare's struggle to lead normal lives is both intensely moving and entirely unforgettable".

Ok, no politics. Someone might be disappointed knowing my interest for politics in science fiction. But when a book is good, damn, it's good. And this one has a feature which is, I think, the key to all good science fiction: it takes normal people - the characters, and the situations, are utterly believable - and plunges them into a completely abnormal situation. A scientific experiment, so to speak, to study how life and human behaviour is affected by the unexpected.
That's exactly my own, personal definition of science fiction. Or of that 10 percent left out by Sturgeon's Law.

Update
Someone expressed a feeling of frustration in reading this review, meaning he would have wanted me to write a bit more. It's what I intended to do, but I wrote this at work and didn't have too much time to linger over details. Now I do, so I'll add a few words.

There is something else that actually stroke me in this book: for a first novel (and even if it wasn't the author's first novel) you can see the story is studied to the smallest detail (even if there are a few incongruities, which can easily get lost in 500 pages), and yet you don't feel it. The author manages in making everything look natural, not artificial.

She masters feelings and atmospheres just as she takes care of the scientific part of the book, and she shows competence (or at least ability to deal with her collaborators) in a wide range of fields, from genetics through music to visual art.

And in all of this, you lack the tension of "the end": since the main character moves through time, and sometimes happens to find himself in the future, everything is revealed largely before it happens. And yet, the story is full of surprises, many of them happening not in the future, but coming from the past. I find that, too, quite... well, surprising.