The Time Keeper (2012) by American author Mitch Albom is a fable that explores the themes of Humans’ Relationship with Time, The Need to Live in the Present, and the Acceptance of One’s Mortality. The inventor of the world’s first clock, Dor, is punished for measuring time and banished to a cave for thousands of years where he becomes an ageless Father Time. Eventually, he is granted his freedom with the condition that he must teach two contemporary human beings—a teenage girl contemplating ending her life and an elderly businessman who wants to live forever—the true meaning of time using a magical hourglass and his own experiences as a mortal man and immortal being. The novel is narrated in third person, which occasionally directly addresses the reader and employs Albom’s signature spare prose punctuated with bolded statements.

Albom is a celebrated sportswriter, fiction writer, playwright, and screen writer. His 1997 memoir, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man and Life’s Greatest Lesson, was adapted into a television movie in 1999 and a stage play. His nonfiction work Have a Little Faith (2009) was adapted into a Hallmark Hall of Fame made-for-television movie in 2011. His fictional works The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003) and For One More Day (2006) were also adapted into made-for-television films in 2004 and 2007, respectively. Albom’s writings, both fiction (Little Liar, The Next Person You Meet in Heaven) and nonfiction (Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family), explore topics related to human mortality and how to find meaning in one’s life.

This guide references the first print edition produced by Hyperion in 2012.

Content Warning: The novel includes depictions of suicide, suicidal ideation, and sexual assault.

Plot Summary

Dor is the first person to measure time. As a child, he begins counting and is the first human to conceive of numbers. As an adult, he spends his time perfecting measurements of the hours and minutes of each day, which brings him to the attention of God. When he first begins measuring shadows with a rudimentary sundial, he is visited by a supernatural old man who makes the sundial disappear. Despite this frightening encounter, Dor continues to measure and create simple clocks. He marries his childhood sweetheart, Alli, and they have three children. Unlike his childhood friend Nim, who becomes a powerful, wealthy king, Dor is never successful because he focuses his attention on measuring and creating the first clocks, something that is not valued within his society. His obsession with measuring has consequences for his personal life since he often gets caught up in his measuring and neglects his relationship with his wife and children.

When Nim demands that Dor labor on his tower and share his knowledge of measuring time to make Nim more powerful, Dor refuses, and he and Alli are banished. Alli is heartbroken to leave their children but decides that they will be safer with Dor’s family. After showing hospitality to another couple who were banished from their community, Alli contracts the plague. As she lies dying, Dor attempts to stop time by climbing Nim’s tower to reach the gods so that he can get Alli to a healer. The tower collapses, and Dor finds himself in a cave where, for over thousands of years, he takes on the role of an ageless Father Time. The old man whom he met as a child uses Dor’s tears to create a pool in which Dor can hear the voices of human beings pleading and making demands of time, a constant reminder of the misery that Dor has brought to humanity by introducing them to the concept of time.

In order to be freed from the cave, Dor, as Father Time, must intervene in the lives of two modern-day people—Victor Delamonte and Sarah Lemon, two people whose voices he has heard in the pool in his cave. Victor is an elderly successful businessman who is dying from kidney failure and cancer and wants to extend his life through cryonics. Sarah is a socially unpopular high school student who decides that she wants to end her life after she feels humiliated by a boy she was in love with.

After he has been released from the cave with a magical hourglass, Father Time is able to slow time and then ultimately stop time in order to show both Victor and Sarah what the future would be like if they both got what they want. The sands of time show that Victor survives into the future as an exhibit rather than an able-bodied man, and Sarah sees the heartache that her death causes her mother and her uncle. The two choose to change the course of their lives, and then they must help Dor, who has begun to age. Dor is allowed to return to his last moments with his wife, and they pass away peacefully. Victor pays for Sarah’s education, and she goes on to cure the disease from which Victor dies.