Time Being

Synopsis

When Laura Cameron, a philosophy professor at a London university, is found dead in a bizarre echo of the Reeva Steenkamp case, the questions are myriad. Her friend and colleague, Esther Luck, is as shocked as everyone else.

But Esther knows more than she’s letting on. After two years battling illness, her notions of what makes life worth living, of what her future holds, have changed utterly. Held in a tense web of intrigue between Laura’s widower Jack, her ex Michel, and her conventional family, Esther is given the chance of new life on borrowed time as the mystery of Laura’s death deepens.

What follows is an exploration of guilt, mortality, freedom, time and the brilliant and beautiful puzzle of being alive.

Praise for This Book

‘Time Being is a deftly plotted and hugely satisfying contemporary thriller, one which captures the reader from page one. Jude Cook writes like a dream, his central premise, that of a ‘mercy killing gone wrong’, is held taut till the final pages. Time Being isn’t a whodunnit, more a why dunnit, revealed in exquisite and lyrical prose. It’s a pleasure to read a spicy thriller which also boasts literary measure, language and full-blooded characters. This is a hybrid novel which yolks fine writing and fine plotting together – utterly rare. Read Time Being for both style and substance. A page turner.’ —Monique Roffey

‘What happens when suicide turns into murder? Jude Cook offers a richly compelling and incisive account of a moral philosopher who dares not speak the truth.’ —Michael Arditti, author of The Tribe

‘With Time Being, Jude Cook has pulled off that rare thing – a literary novel that has the push and pull of genre fiction. The novel opens grippingly with the shocking news that a lecturer has been shot at close range in a university toilet cubicle. The dead lecturer is a colleague of Dr Esther Luck, our main protagonist. Immediately after this news, we learn that the shooting was actually an act of euthanasia gone horribly wrong. Esther has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and has asked an ex-boyfriend to put her out of her misery. But he got the wrong woman. After this twisty opening, Cook has Esther look back over her life and reassess her standing in it. She is a philosopher, specialising in Kantian ethics and moral responsibility, and her thoughts question all sorts things – sexuality, family ties, friendship, white lies, professional envy. The aforementioned ex-boyfriend is a Frenchman named Michel (the spit of Vincent Cassel, apparently) who brings with him a touch of Camus’s The Outsider. Time Being is indeed an existentialist novel but it wears its learning very lightly. It is a beautifully written exploration of what it means to live and take a life, a book about choices and second chances, and the inevitable, relentless march of time.’ —Richard Skinner, author of The Velvet Gentleman

‘This elegantly written thriller reaches beyond its nightmare premise to wrestle with serious ideas.’ —Toby Lloyd, author of Fervour

‘In this gripping work of literary crime fiction, Jude Cook presents the unravelling of a woman’s life with sensitive precision. His eye for detail brilliantly captures a particular side of London life, making it vividly immediate to today’s readers, and, no doubt, equally potent to audiences of tomorrow.’ —Emily Midorikawa, author of A Tiny Speck of Black and Then Nothing

‘Time Being is a brilliant and engaging disquisition about moral choice ratcheted through a novel of suspense. Jude Cook’s taut, confident style tackles not only crime and punishment but the underbelly of some female friendships and professional rivalries with an admirable agility and perspicacity. A thoroughly entertaining read.’ —Amanda Craig, author of ‘High and Low’

Praise for Previous Work

‘(On Jacob’s Advice) Intriguing … The narrative moves slowly and magnificently towards a series of crises.’ —TLS

‘(On Jacob’s Advice) Set against a backdrop of rising antisemitism and full of intellectual discourse, Cook’s second novel is a thoughtful paean to Paris.’ —Daily Mail

‘(On Jacob’s Advice) portrait of the middle-class, liberal man in 2015 as a kind of prelapsarian naif.’ —Literary Review

‘There’s an addictive charm … that gives a potency to this ambitious tale.’ —John Sunyer, Financial Times

‘Daring, moving, imaginative and, above all, funny, this is a great debut from a promising novelist.’ —Sunday Mirror

‘An exuberant, stealthily shocking debut … razor sharp.’ —Daily Mail

‘From the start of his journey to the amazing ending of his saga we follow with awe and trepidation his moral life as all around him (almost) everyone else shows the human condition at its worst. If there is any literary justice this should sell by the bucket load. Hope it does and we hear again from this terrific first time novelist!’ —Guardian Online