Time After Time

Remember the eighties? The batwing jumpers, the puffball skirts, the dragged-through-a hedge-backwards hair? Cass Thomson does. From the heavy eyeliner to the hits of Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran, it all feels like yesterday. Cass is intrigued and a little frightened by the invitation asking her to a school reunion. If she goes, there's the possibility that she'll meet Gideon Harker, the boy she adored from the age of thirteen with the desperate intensity of first love. From his bleach-blond hair to his punk boots, Gideon was her ideal man, and she's never met anyone to match him, not even now that she's running a minor stately home and perfectly content with her sports journalist boyfriend, Greg. It's dangerous to go back and see what might have been: what if Gideon is no longer the romantic, soul-searching, green-eyed charmer she remembers, but a balding, beer-bellied, nine-to-fiver? But Cass just can't help herself.