Catriona Silvey’s Love and Other Paradoxes is a sweet fantasy romance with a dreamy, nostalgic sensibility that recalls temporal-crossing romantic comedies like Richard Curtis’s About Time. It’s a short, swiftly paced book that invites reading in one sitting. 

Silvey’s novel also feels like it could be a great companion to Kaliane Bradley’s recent genre-blending masterpiece The Ministry of Time. The inverse of Bradley’s novel, it situates its romance in the male historical figure and love interest’s timeline and centers his perspective. Humor, the action of the primary timeline, and the undeniable pull between the male and female main characters take precedence over the detailed workings and mechanics of time travel. This light sci-fi/fantasy approach to worldbuilding, á la Richard Curtis, is a little different but mostly bolsters Silvey’s romantic comedy narrative. 

We’re introduced to Joe Greene, a half-Scottish and half-English philosophy major as an undergrad at Cambridge University in 2005. Joe’s an affable, yet sartorially challenged wallflower who longs to be a poet, but his dreams of producing the type of poetry that will have a similar impact to that of his literary idol Lord Byron feel juvenile and unattainable. He feels doubly pressured to be successful by Cambridge’s competitive environment and the knowledge that failure could mean returning empty-handed to his working-class hometown. By chance, Joe sees an amazing window display in a coffee shop near campus one day and decides to walk in. When he goes to order a cup of coffee at the counter, the barista is shocked to see him. Inexplicably, the strange and fetching young woman recognizes him despite the fact they’ve never met—in her time, Joe is better known as the celebrated poet Joseph Greene and his work is studied in secondary schools.

Esi Campbell, a half-Ghanaian and half-Jamaican aspiring artist, is simultaneously vexed and unnerved to be in an improbable meet-cute with the younger version of an author she’s always thought was overrated. She’s decades behind her own timeline of 2044 and out of her depth. She snuck away from her time-traveling historical tour to seek out her mother, an undergrad in Joe’s year, to deter her from making a fateful decision. Esi’s mother was a college friend of the woman who would become Joseph Greene’s muse and longtime partner, Diana Dartnell.

Her personal mission notwithstanding, Esi wants to remain inconspicuous so as to avoid detection by her tour guide and not trigger a butterfly effect. Getting entangled with Joe is a very conspicuous complication to her plans. However, after Joe’s first meeting with Diana is a disaster, Esi agrees to play matchmaker for him in exchange for his help finding her mother. Along the way, their transactional arrangement develops into some inconvenient and strong feelings that just might have unintended consequences for the past and future. 

I am surprised and a little disappointed that it’s written solely from Joe’s perspective, instead of the dual POV structure that I’d expected from the book’s descriptive copy. I wonder if the choice to only follow Joe was made later on in the revision stage or if Silvey decided upon it early on during the writing process. After all, Silvey used a dual POV structure to great effect in her prior novel Meet Me in Another Life. Were there any particular worldbuilding concerns tied to exploring Esi’s point-of-view and delving into a separate 2044 timeline? Did alternating the lens present other storytelling pitfalls? It seems switching between both Esi and Joe’s perspectives could have enriched the narrative by giving Esi a clearer character arc and a more direct sense of interiority. Though overall, I enjoyed the book for its humor and the adorable time-bending romance at its heart.

LOGLINE: In 2005, Cambridge University undergrad Joe Greene yearns to make a name for himself as a poet, but most days he can barely write his assigned papers, let alone a transcendent poem. When aspiring artist Esi Campbell deviates from a time-traveling historical tour of Joe’s era, their unlikely meet-cute transforms into a connection that could alter the past—and future—in monumental ways.   

MOOD: Love and Other Paradoxes is a short, smile-inducing reverie that fuses humor, time travel, and romance. It pairs well with the romantic comedy About Time and Kaliane Bradley’s genre-blending The Ministry of Time.

TITLE: Love and Other Paradoxes

AUTHOR: Catriona Silvey

GENRE: Romance/ Time Travel, Fantasy Romance, Romantic Comedy, Fiction, Science Fiction 

PUB DATE: 11 March 2025

PUBLISHER: William Morrow Paperbacks, an imprint of HarperCollins

LENGTH: 320 pages