Here and Now and Then cover art

Here and Now and Then

A Novel

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Here and Now and Then

By: Mike Chen
Narrated by: Cary Hite
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

To save his daughter, he’ll go anywhere - and any-when....

Kin Stewart is an everyday family man: working in IT, trying to keep the spark in his marriage, struggling to connect with his teenage daughter, Miranda. But his current life is a far cry from his previous career...as a time-traveling secret agent from 2142.

Stranded in suburban San Francisco since the 1990s after a botched mission, Kin has kept his past hidden from everyone around him, despite the increasing blackouts and memory loss affecting his time-traveler’s brain. Until one afternoon, his “rescue” team arrives - 18 years too late.

Their mission: return Kin to 2142, where he’s only been gone weeks, not years, and where another family is waiting for him. A family he can’t remember.

Torn between two lives, Kin is desperate for a way to stay connected to both. But when his best efforts threaten to destroy the agency and even history itself, his daughter’s very existence is at risk. It’ll take one final trip across time to save Miranda - even if it means breaking all the rules of time travel in the process.

A uniquely emotional genre-bending debut, Here and Now and Then captures the perfect balance of heart, playfulness, and imagination, offering an intimate glimpse into the crevices of a father’s heart and its capacity to stretch across both space and time to protect the people that mean the most.

©2019 Mike Chen (P)2019 Harlequin Enterprises, Limited Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction Time Travel Heartfelt

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Kindred cover art
Weakest Lynx cover art
Paradox Bound cover art
School for Psychics, Book 1 cover art
Society of Wishes cover art
Freak of Nature cover art
The Extinction Trials cover art
Lost in Time cover art
Planetside cover art
Waiting in the Sky cover art
MILA 2.0 cover art
Stories Untold: A Novel cover art
The Lucidites Boxed Set cover art
The Genesis of Evangeline cover art
Seven Rules of Time Travel cover art
The Quantum Magician cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
Overall this is an enjoyable story.

My only difficulty with the audio book is that the ‘English’ accent of 2 characters in the story is distractingly poor. That these characters are English, seems to have no baring on the narrative anyway. Still worth a listen nevertheless.

Here and now and then

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
It’s too easy to complain about accents. I always hear people complaining when an accent they know well is a little off.

Not here though. The English accent is just terrible, laughably bad. Unlike others, I didn’t stop listening to it because of this but it really is awful.

Also, for English listeners the word era will annoy you. Americans pronounce this as “error” which would be okay a couple of times but the author uses it all the time, every minute or so. He never thinks to use an alternative such as period or time, just error, error, error.

I liked the story, it was a good idea. But I didn’t think the book was particularly well written. The writing was quite bland, not bad, just insipid. Some of the characters reactions are nonsensical.

I did listen to the end but I was never truest gripped or excited. Overall a mediocre, poorly narrated book.

Good story spoilt by terrible production

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
book is fantastic but the narrators 'british' accent made it very hard to get through the book.

accent hell

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Quaint story that's more about family than a time traveling secret agent. If hallmark made sci fi.

Wholesome wander through an exciting concept

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is the story of Kin Stewart, a father who is also a time-travelling assassin from the mid-22nd century, determined to save his daughter over a time gap of more than a century. The novel engages with the thought experiment of ‘what would a time traveller do if he were stranded in the past and built a new life for himself, was retrieved by his employer 18 years too late and ripped away from his 2014 family, then found out almost too late that his daughter needed him?'

The principles of time travel as they are imagined in this book are well explained and woven into the story. The 22nd-century world-building is good without being overwhelming; some things are different - we discover a technologically advanced society of people who live to 200 thanks to biotechnology, and there is a passing reference to the geography and cost of living in the Bay Area in the era of much warmer temperatures - while some stay the same, like a liberal techno-loving California full of geeks, the English Premier Football League (!) and Saturday amateur football matches. Behind this benign facade, the organisation that deals with temporal anomalies, Kin's employer, is ruthless and totalitarian in the application of its rules - there are extra-judicial killings galore with no due process, including for an innocent civilian. From such a premise, I was expecting much. But Kin never gets to realise that the job he did for so long, and the operating principles of his organisation, are appalling - not even when the organisation goes after his own daughter, though it was at fault for leaving him stranded in the past for 18 years and then imposing on him a wholly inhuman separation.

That lack of self-awareness is the biggest weakness in an otherwise entertaining book, especially as it doesn't fit the character of Kin as Chen develops him - not an amoral assassin, but a thoughtful man. His trained habit of compartmentalising matches Kin at the beginning of the story - but not by the end. The idea that such a person would not question that "bad guys" trying to use the past to make money in the future should be shot without the benefit of trial is jarring. Markus, another time traveller working for that organisation, comes across as one of those KGB agents in old Cold War spy novels, who, despite being friendly, justify the unjustifiable because "it's the rules" of their world. The only one who has any moral compass beyond the immediately personal is Penny, and one wonders how she will deal in the future with the reality of what Markus and Kin have done - will she just shove it under the carpet? That doesn't fit her character either.

Time travel raises many ethical questions, and I don't expect an author to examine them all in a single book; but I do expect an author to inquire into those he raises explicitly - call it a moral Chekhov's gun. Mike Chen explores those touching upon personal family issues and split loyalties, and he does that with beautiful emotion and originality, but he only superficially touches upon the central one of abuse of power and justifying the means by the end.

The narrator is competent as long as he speaks in American English. But two central characters are English and his attempt at an English accent is so painful, it hurt my teeth (please, authors and publishers, if a character is English, get a narrator who can do a decent English accent. Same with Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Australian, etc.). It completely spoiled my enjoyment of the audiobook, so that after a few chapters, I switched to Kindle.

Entertaining but superficial

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I enjoyed the whole story, despite being sci-fi, the storyline is very believable. Thoroughly enjoyed it

The ending

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Good story and the reader is very good ... except at English accents. I would get more of Mike Chen’s work.

Terrible English accent

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I listened to this on Audible and Holy Wow! What a beautiful and emotional story.

The narration by Cary Hite is silky smooth and adds so much depth to the already perfect words of the story.

It's one of those stories which causes you to reflect so much on the characters and the events which have played out.

I love it, so much.

Thank you, Mike :)

Beautiful and Perfect Story

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is a real shame. I was really enjoying this book, but had to stop halfway through as the actor has one of the worst English accents I’ve ever heard (and that is a high, high bar) It’s like some daemonic speak your weight machine. If you are going to have British characters in the book you really need to find someone you can do a British accent. I am English born and bred and, despite my best efforts, simply could not carry on listening to the actor mangle any more vowels.

Worst English accent ever

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I've read and enjoyed Light Years From Home from the same Author but found this weak, full of plot holes, tedious and with a horrible narration. Struggled until the sugar coated ending.

Amateurish story

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews