A Time Travel Diaries Novel by Bruce Macfarlane
“Time travel isn’t about changing the past. It’s about ensuring the future unfolds as it already has.”
Time travel has never been simple for James Urquhart and Elizabeth Bicester. In fact, it’s often absurd, inconvenient, and occasionally Martian.
Now, in my latest novel, The Butterfly Effect, they face their strangest challenge yet: a mysterious brass box that can replay their lives across different timelines. It’s a device that reveals not only what has been, but what might have been—and it forces them to confront the truth that even the smallest choices can change everything.
A Story Reborn
This book has had a rather tangled journey—which, for a tale about time travel, feels entirely appropriate.
It began as a single scene in my first novel, Out of Time, where James—slightly bewildered and perpetually scruffy—stumbles into a Victorian cricket match and meets Elizabeth Bicester, a Cambridge graduate with sharp logic and even sharper opinions.
That one scene grew into a radio play, The Butterfly Effect, where I added a twist of Martian interference. The audio drama captured their voices, but it couldn’t tell the whole story.
So here it is again—reborn as a novel, expanded and retold the way I always wanted.
At its heart, The Butterfly Effect is about how the smallest, most trivial acts—a missed call, a wandering butterfly—can ripple through time and alter lives. But it’s also about love, identity, and the fragile thread that ties together who we were, who we are, and who we might have been.
Available in August 2025 on Amazon