Aeon

by Peter Donovan

Imagine the coolest New Year’s Eve party ever. Set on the luxury yacht Aeon, just east of Tonga on the International Date Line. Celebrate the New Year, cruise across the dateline with a hangover, then do the whole damn thing again. Mac’s idea was perfect and winning the lottery made it all the better, until Aeon is dragged a year into the past, instantly changing the future.

Now Mac and everyone aboard must live the entire year again, trying desperately to get their lives back on track. Friendships will be strained to breaking point and lives will be lost as Mac tries to return Aeon to the dateline, single minded in his attempt to recreate the circumstance of the previous year and get his old life back.

Mac’s future is just a memory.

300 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2013

About the author

Peter Donovan was born in the beautiful and historic City of Bath, England in 1974. After 30 years living in the United Kingdom, he emigrated to Melbourne, Australia in 2005 where he now lives with his wife Joanne and his two British Blue cats, Cobalt and Sapphire. Peter has worked as an Aircraft Engineer and a Power Station Operator. He has always been interested in science, both fact and fiction. From an early age he remembers pulling things to pieces and trying to improve them, driving his mother and father to distraction; only later in life learning how things went back together again! Peter’s wife of 13 years, has listened to many weird and wonderful ideas that Peter thought would make a good story.

Eventually her comment, “For Christ’s sake stop talking about it and write it!” gave him the nudge he needed to begin.

“In a few short years, I’ve been into space with the help of the Chinese, seen the end of the world, averted disaster in the US, rebuilt a space shuttle and now I’ve won the lottery and travelled in time. The life of an author never gets boring!”



2012 Nibiru Rising, was his first published book in paperback. Peter has since gone on to publish 2013 Nibiru’s Shadow, also in paperback and has released 2012, 2013, Legacy and now Aeon as ebooks.

Reviews

[Peter Donovan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Below is the official book review from www.onlinebookclub.com, they rated it 4 out of 4 so I've given it four stars above. Thanks to d0dridge for a great review and I'm glad you enjoyed it.(Peter Donovan)

Peter Donovan’s novel Aeon is a near future novel focusing on an average guy called Marcus or ‘Mac’ for short. Mac has organised a New Years party for his brother Karl and Karl’s wife Sarah. Amber, Sarah’s friend has tagged along to keep Sarah company amongst all the men. The other two guests are a couple called David and George who have been together for five years. The party goes well and when the New Year is over Mac moves the yacht over the timeline so that him and his guests can celebrate New Year’s again. There are tensions between the guests however and after a while things begin to take a turn for the worse. Unfortunately Mac’s plan to mess about with the timeline works a bit too well for him and Mac and the guests on board the yacht end up travelling in time.

The consequences of this shift in time are that Mac and everyone on board Mac’s yacht, Aeon, have to repeat the same year over again. This causes many problems in itself and is the focal point for a large part of the novel.

I really did enjoy reading Aeon and it was a very refreshing, original and refined take on time travel and the consequences. The novel focuses on a few main characters with brief interjections from some interesting ones. The plot and the way it develops is gripping and the few moments in the book when I started to get slightly concerned about the direction it was taking amounted to nothing as it took off again. Aeon is full of matter of fact twists and on occasions heart clenching moments. On reflection I am surprised at the amount of empathy I had for characters who did not feature prominently in the novel. The intensity and tension build up really subtly in the novel and it ends up being very gripping but not in an immediately obvious sense. I really like some of the deadpan humourous language used in the novel, a small example being; “He also desperately needed to empty the stinking rubbish bins in the kitchen. The main bin now had a colony of smaller satellite bins set around it and a pile of cardboard takeaway containers.

I think Aeon is an accessible novel and would appeal to many readers of different genres of fiction. There were points in the book where the science of time travel featured prominently but at the same time these were written by Donovan in quite an accessible way to the reader and I don’t think they would be an issue for many readers.

I downloaded the book initially for my laptop as a PDF with full intentions of transferring it to my kindle to read. I have never successfully really managed to properly engage with a book read on my laptop until this one. The book is futuristic but in subtle ways. In one instance the author refers to current pioneering technologies in a historic sense without going into too much detail.

A negative side to the book which I feel I must mention is the layout. It may be simply because I read the novel as a PDF file on my laptop, but there never seemed to be a really clear distinction between scenes. On a couple of occasions I was unsure whether I was meant to feel disorientated or the narrative had suddenly shifted. Again, it may have simply been because of the format I was reading the book in, but it was annoying to begin with.

I rate this book 4 out of 4 stars. I would certainly recommend this book as I found it very entertaining and thought provoking. It has certainly inspired me to read more of Peter Donovan’s novels and I hope anyone who reads it enjoys it as much as I did.