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Time Together
Once they were just them. Now they’re forty-something and there’s kids. Whose time is this?
Phil is trying to feel closer to his recently passed mother by spending time alone at his parent’s house on the coast. But he is lonely, and stupidly he’s invited a bunch of old friends to visit. It’s bound to be a mistake. All those children! But it’s too late now, and tomorrow Bella and Tim will arrive with their two kids, one on the brink of puberty, and the next day Jo and Lucas will come too, with their little one. Then there’s Annie, who will be by herself.
The story of a beach holiday told by four different people, Time Together is a novel about different kinds of love, different kinds of loneliness, and the way spending time together can bring out the best and worst in each other.
Phil is trying to feel closer to his recently passed mother by spending time alone at his parent’s house on the coast. But he is lonely, and stupidly he’s invited a bunch of old friends to visit. It’s bound to be a mistake. All those children! But it’s too late now, and tomorrow Bella and Tim will arrive with their two kids, one on the brink of puberty, and the next day Jo and Lucas will come too, with their little one. Then there’s Annie, who will be by herself.
The story of a beach holiday told by four different people, Time Together is a novel about different kinds of love, different kinds of loneliness, and the way spending time together can bring out the best and worst in each other.
242 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 4, 2025
18 people are currently reading
306 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
April 8, 2025
'We saw a sign on the freeway.
It said, "Once Perilous Now Safe," something like that, about a bridge or something, and I said' — she was looking at Tim - that's me!'
The classic beach getaway, sun, sand, and a whole lot of unresolved emotional tension. In Time Together, Luke Horton throws a group of old friends into a coastal retreat that is less about relaxation and more about confronting the messy realities of adulthood.
Phil, reeling from his mother’s death, invites his friends to his family’s beach house, hoping for some kind of solace (or at least a distraction). But, as with any good literary holiday, what follows is a mix of nostalgia, unspoken resentments, and the kind of existential pondering that pairs best with a glass of wine at sunset. Marriages are tested, friendships are scrutinized, and time itself becomes a quiet antagonist, reminding everyone that they are no longer the carefree young adults they once were.
Horton has a keen eye for the small moments that define relationships, the awkward pauses, the unsaid things that linger in the air, the way a single glance can carry years of meaning. His writing is observant, occasionally biting, but always deeply human. If you’ve ever been on a group trip and felt both comforted and stifled by the people around you, you’ll find a lot to relate to here.
Time Together is a novel about love, loneliness, and the passage of time. It’s tender, sharply written, and proof that sometimes, the best vacations are the ones that force you to face yourself. Just maybe don’t expect to come back feeling refreshed.
I Highly Recommend.
Many thanks to Scribe Publications for my Advanced readers copy.
It said, "Once Perilous Now Safe," something like that, about a bridge or something, and I said' — she was looking at Tim - that's me!'
The classic beach getaway, sun, sand, and a whole lot of unresolved emotional tension. In Time Together, Luke Horton throws a group of old friends into a coastal retreat that is less about relaxation and more about confronting the messy realities of adulthood.
Phil, reeling from his mother’s death, invites his friends to his family’s beach house, hoping for some kind of solace (or at least a distraction). But, as with any good literary holiday, what follows is a mix of nostalgia, unspoken resentments, and the kind of existential pondering that pairs best with a glass of wine at sunset. Marriages are tested, friendships are scrutinized, and time itself becomes a quiet antagonist, reminding everyone that they are no longer the carefree young adults they once were.
Horton has a keen eye for the small moments that define relationships, the awkward pauses, the unsaid things that linger in the air, the way a single glance can carry years of meaning. His writing is observant, occasionally biting, but always deeply human. If you’ve ever been on a group trip and felt both comforted and stifled by the people around you, you’ll find a lot to relate to here.
Time Together is a novel about love, loneliness, and the passage of time. It’s tender, sharply written, and proof that sometimes, the best vacations are the ones that force you to face yourself. Just maybe don’t expect to come back feeling refreshed.
I Highly Recommend.
Many thanks to Scribe Publications for my Advanced readers copy.
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February 2, 2025After the death of his mother, Phil invites old friends to her coastal home. They have not seen each other for a while but these are the people who were witnesses to each other’s youth and idealism. It’s a story of old friends and the messy dynamics of that. It can be so hard to let go of old rivalries, tensions and disappointments. Horton passes the perspective masterfully between four of them. There is some dialogue late in the book about what it feels like to lose the person who loves you completely that brought me to my knees with the raw truth of it. I loved it.
February 28, 2025
Time Together has such an interesting premise because it is about a group of forty-something friends gathering at a beach house after years of distance but half of the POVs are male. This ensured there was a different take than had there only been female voices.
Phil is staying at his parents' house at the coast not long after his mother's death. With his father away he is lonely and on a whim decides to invite his old group of friends and their children to come visit. First Bella and Tim arrive with their two kids, one a pre-teen, then Jo and Lucas come with their small child. Annie, newly single, tags along too.
So we then get the story of a beach holiday told by four different people. It is a midlife crisis novel of sorts. A group of friends trying to remember what their friendships were like when they were young. Those with kids and coupled-up with certain views and those that aren't seeing life a little differently. All struggle with loneliness in some form but they all love each other in the way that only long term friends can.
Time Together also shows us how spending close time together can bring out the best and worst in people. Friendships are messy! I thought the switch between POVs worked really well and felt seamless. I really enjoying reading this for most of the book. It takes a particular turn towards the end (when the friends go on a bit of a bender) that I didn't vibe with but that was definitely a personal preference.
Overall though I thought this was a great read. It felt like this could be any group of friends in their late forties (like I am ahem). The passions, the annoyances, the disappointments, the resentments that we all have with people that we have spent lots of time with - definitely relatable.
Thank you @text_publishing for my #gifted copy.
Phil is staying at his parents' house at the coast not long after his mother's death. With his father away he is lonely and on a whim decides to invite his old group of friends and their children to come visit. First Bella and Tim arrive with their two kids, one a pre-teen, then Jo and Lucas come with their small child. Annie, newly single, tags along too.
So we then get the story of a beach holiday told by four different people. It is a midlife crisis novel of sorts. A group of friends trying to remember what their friendships were like when they were young. Those with kids and coupled-up with certain views and those that aren't seeing life a little differently. All struggle with loneliness in some form but they all love each other in the way that only long term friends can.
Time Together also shows us how spending close time together can bring out the best and worst in people. Friendships are messy! I thought the switch between POVs worked really well and felt seamless. I really enjoying reading this for most of the book. It takes a particular turn towards the end (when the friends go on a bit of a bender) that I didn't vibe with but that was definitely a personal preference.
Overall though I thought this was a great read. It felt like this could be any group of friends in their late forties (like I am ahem). The passions, the annoyances, the disappointments, the resentments that we all have with people that we have spent lots of time with - definitely relatable.
Thank you @text_publishing for my #gifted copy.
July 23, 2025
Stupid people doing stupid things
March 4, 2025
A beautifully written, character driven story that glimpses into the lives of a group of friends. I loved the way Luke captured the summer holiday feel and how old friends slip back into friendship after time apart. They were all friends I’ve known over the years. I enjoyed his insightful observations on grief, friendship, growing older adults adolescent/ parent relationships. As I was reading I found myself wanting a little more- an event or revelation to tie things together. But overall I enjoyed my stay down the coast and catching up and Luke’s clever writing.
Want to read
November 20, 2025Boring, neurotic people on holidays at a house on the coast.
I don't rate books I don't finish.
Update:
I've bought a copy and I'm going to try it again. Because I really do like this author's work.
I don't rate books I don't finish.
Update:
I've bought a copy and I'm going to try it again. Because I really do like this author's work.
November 22, 2025
Time Together is an emotionally haunting gem of a novel about people of my generation, whose worlds are shaped by combinations of older parents, young children, cherished but sometimes neglected friendships, and pressing life commitments.
Following his mother’s death Phil invites his once-close friend group to stay for a week in his parents’ house on the Victorian coast. The charming house is surrounded by bursting vegetable gardens and flowerbeds overflowing with hollyhocks, geraniums, daisies and roses. This home and garden has been well tended and is full of books, worn-in furniture, and memory collections. In contrast, their friendship has not travelled well on the long, precarious road of evolving work and family priorities.
But they’re all here.
Over the course of a week, they reconnect; revitalising, testing, evaluating their connection. Via four points of view - Phil, Bella, Tim and Annie – the story unfolds delicately but tensely, revealing the vulnerability and reality check that come with middle age; nostalgia for youth and for what might have been but won’t ever be; and the ways parenthood creates ripples of friction that effects both parents and their friends.
A blurb on the back cover perfectly describes this novel as one of ‘domestic unease’. The holiday week is fraught when they’re sober and walking in the beautiful forest and swimming on the beach, cooking food and sitting around on the veranda talking, but when a few benders are thrown in, things get precarious.
Underpinning the beautiful, clean prose and tender insights, is a moving mediation on grief and grieving. I empathised deeply with Phil’s complex grief about his mother. Like him, I have lost my mum recently, and can’t quite work out how to think about it. I don’t think you ever come to terms with losing a parent. I loved this gentle novel for its thoughtful and thought-provoking commentary on the sweeping varieties of intimacy and grief in our lives. Tense and tender, I couldn’t put it down.
Following his mother’s death Phil invites his once-close friend group to stay for a week in his parents’ house on the Victorian coast. The charming house is surrounded by bursting vegetable gardens and flowerbeds overflowing with hollyhocks, geraniums, daisies and roses. This home and garden has been well tended and is full of books, worn-in furniture, and memory collections. In contrast, their friendship has not travelled well on the long, precarious road of evolving work and family priorities.
But they’re all here.
Over the course of a week, they reconnect; revitalising, testing, evaluating their connection. Via four points of view - Phil, Bella, Tim and Annie – the story unfolds delicately but tensely, revealing the vulnerability and reality check that come with middle age; nostalgia for youth and for what might have been but won’t ever be; and the ways parenthood creates ripples of friction that effects both parents and their friends.
A blurb on the back cover perfectly describes this novel as one of ‘domestic unease’. The holiday week is fraught when they’re sober and walking in the beautiful forest and swimming on the beach, cooking food and sitting around on the veranda talking, but when a few benders are thrown in, things get precarious.
Underpinning the beautiful, clean prose and tender insights, is a moving mediation on grief and grieving. I empathised deeply with Phil’s complex grief about his mother. Like him, I have lost my mum recently, and can’t quite work out how to think about it. I don’t think you ever come to terms with losing a parent. I loved this gentle novel for its thoughtful and thought-provoking commentary on the sweeping varieties of intimacy and grief in our lives. Tense and tender, I couldn’t put it down.
May 12, 2025
Couples going away together on holiday – there is so much room for drama and humour. And relatability – we have all experienced the dynamics of being away with friends – and the pleasures, tensions and awkwardnesses that it can bring.
I’ve just finished watching The Four Seasons – a series remake of an old Alan Alda movie where three couples go away together four times a year (which seems a lot!). And at the same time I was reading this novel. Phil is hosting his old friends at his parent’s beach house. They are mostly in their 40s and have mostly known each other since uni days. Bella and Tim have two kids, sulky Millie on the verge of adolescence and Paul. Bella is out-of-sorts and Tim is navigating the hostile relationship that has erupted between Millie and Bella, who is about of a loose cannon on all fronts. The other carload of friends includes a couple, Jo and Lucas and their little girl, and Annie who has recently broken up with a guy that the rest of the group disliked. Phil has recently lost his mother. The book is narrated from the alternating points of view of Phil, Bella, Tim and Annie. This construct is fine though it means that characters such as Lucas and Jo are quite one-dimensional. (In fact the rendition of Lucas as a Marxist ideologue was unconvincing.)
There is lots to work with, and while I enjoyed the novel. I felt like Horton didn’t quite know what to do with the tensions in the room or how to resolve them. What he does do really well is evoke a sense of place – I could really visualise the house, the beach, the lagoon and the rest of the coastline. I really wanted to know the exact location of the novel – it felt a bit like Mallacoota but I can’t be sure. He also created the rhythms of living together as a group and deciding what to do each day quite well. It’s just that the dramatic arc of the book is not as developed as it might have been.
I’ve just finished watching The Four Seasons – a series remake of an old Alan Alda movie where three couples go away together four times a year (which seems a lot!). And at the same time I was reading this novel. Phil is hosting his old friends at his parent’s beach house. They are mostly in their 40s and have mostly known each other since uni days. Bella and Tim have two kids, sulky Millie on the verge of adolescence and Paul. Bella is out-of-sorts and Tim is navigating the hostile relationship that has erupted between Millie and Bella, who is about of a loose cannon on all fronts. The other carload of friends includes a couple, Jo and Lucas and their little girl, and Annie who has recently broken up with a guy that the rest of the group disliked. Phil has recently lost his mother. The book is narrated from the alternating points of view of Phil, Bella, Tim and Annie. This construct is fine though it means that characters such as Lucas and Jo are quite one-dimensional. (In fact the rendition of Lucas as a Marxist ideologue was unconvincing.)
There is lots to work with, and while I enjoyed the novel. I felt like Horton didn’t quite know what to do with the tensions in the room or how to resolve them. What he does do really well is evoke a sense of place – I could really visualise the house, the beach, the lagoon and the rest of the coastline. I really wanted to know the exact location of the novel – it felt a bit like Mallacoota but I can’t be sure. He also created the rhythms of living together as a group and deciding what to do each day quite well. It’s just that the dramatic arc of the book is not as developed as it might have been.
March 23, 2025
Once they were just them. Now they’re forty-something and there’s kids. Whose time is this? Phil is trying to feel closer to his recently passed mother by spending time alone at his parent’s house on the coast. But he is lonely, and stupidly he’s invited a bunch of old friends to visit. Tomorrow Bella and Tim will arrive with their two kids, one on the brink of puberty, and the next day Jo and Lucas will come too, with their little one. Then there’s Annie, who will be by herself.
This was a slow-burn, fleeting-moment-in-time snapshot of a group of friends holidaying together, reminiscing about the past and their lost youth, and realising they had little control over the passage of time. To be honest, I was waiting for something ‘big’ to happen during the holiday, but it wasn’t that kind of story.
Unfortunately, I didn’t really connect with any of the characters. Perhaps they were just too different to me that I didn’t really understand their decisions and motivations. Their definition of the golden time in the past when life was ‘perfect’ wasn’t something I was interested in.
Having said that, I understood the intention of the story. I got that Phil was grieving and this weird visit from everyone managed to make him survive the lowest point so he could be ready to take the next step. I got that the other characters missed their youth and independence after kids.
It’ not the upbeat-kind of a beach read, but if you can connect with the characters’ thought processes, you might enjoy this!
(Thanks to Scribe Publishing for a gifted review copy)
See my bookstagram review.
This was a slow-burn, fleeting-moment-in-time snapshot of a group of friends holidaying together, reminiscing about the past and their lost youth, and realising they had little control over the passage of time. To be honest, I was waiting for something ‘big’ to happen during the holiday, but it wasn’t that kind of story.
Unfortunately, I didn’t really connect with any of the characters. Perhaps they were just too different to me that I didn’t really understand their decisions and motivations. Their definition of the golden time in the past when life was ‘perfect’ wasn’t something I was interested in.
Having said that, I understood the intention of the story. I got that Phil was grieving and this weird visit from everyone managed to make him survive the lowest point so he could be ready to take the next step. I got that the other characters missed their youth and independence after kids.
It’ not the upbeat-kind of a beach read, but if you can connect with the characters’ thought processes, you might enjoy this!
(Thanks to Scribe Publishing for a gifted review copy)
See my bookstagram review.
March 28, 2025
A gentle rumination of a book. Beautifully written. Four friends get together for a week at a holiday house - two have spouses and those each have two children. The book describes the various interactions between these characters. Not a huge amount happens. This is an internal book about thoughts. Interesting in the way it considers relationship issues - love, family, desire, parents, children, etc. Worth reading, but not as good as Luke Horton's first amazingly good book, The Fogging.
February 5, 2025
I loved how the novel delves into the inner worlds of its characters—how their relationships, insecurities, and assumptions shape the way they see themselves and each other. It’s a character-driven novel, portraying grief, depression, and jealousy in a way that feels layered, human, and deeply relatable.
September 9, 2025
Hmm. I am conflicted. The writing in this book is excellent, the way the author shifts from each character perspective so seamlessly. There were so many relate facets for me - 40 something, friends from your youth reuniting over a death of a parent. This book isn’t for everyone, it is a slow burn and all in all, not much happens. Which I suppose is the beauty of it.
December 19, 2025
Phil arranges one last get away at his families holiday house with his oldest friends. I thought this was going to be one of those books with very little plot, but an abundance of heart and interesting dialogue. Instead what’s presented is the most mundane conversations, that if I was there in person, I would call everyone boring to their face.
Read
November 3, 2025I wanted to like this book but I found it boring, depressing and all the characters quite unlikeable. The every day lives of ordinary Australians at their most ordinary. I didn’t care what happened to any of these people, not even the kids.
Read
April 29, 2025DNF
May 24, 2025
Dark, light, and deliciously descriptive narration of a beachside holiday between friends.
June 22, 2025
An understated and contemplative book that captures that languid feeling of a beach holiday and old friends reuniting with tensions under the surface. Real dialogue and sharp observations.
July 6, 2025
Probably more a 3.5. Some interesting relationship dynamics but I got fed up with the self obsession
August 19, 2025
A definite slow burn but raw, real characters that touch on adulthood and parenthood in an unglamourised way.
October 23, 2025
Gave up on the audiobook 1/2 way through. “Said” used too many times . Although very descriptive it was also very boring.
December 1, 2025
was very hard to connect to
December 23, 2025
A group of fourty-somethings stay at a beach house together after years of not seeing each other. Told from multiple viewpoints. It's relatable but too much of a slow burn.
May 10, 2025
A slow start but overall a wholesome and relatable book about life changes and friendships. Would recommend if you’re looking for an easy read.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews