Probably my favorite fiction book by the wonderful Stephen Fry - when you have read his autobiography, my suggestion is to go for this one! The book does an excellent job of capturing the human emotional level of the whole insane thing, and it's much funnier than you'd expect this kind of book to be. So one of the things I wanted to explore was the obvious question: if that particular sperm had not hit that particular egg, would my family be alive?

Young and Leo Zuckerman - the young British historian and the elderly German physicist at the centre of the story - are engaging, believable, and well-rounded characters, and the situations into which they are thrown are, as I said, thrilling and involving and page-turning stuff. Suppose the opportunist Gloder had altogether avoided the Final Solution, and contented himself with some anti-Jewish rhetoric. Putting it this way, the protagonist would have needed at least some serious thinking and inner debate before proceeding as he does in the final chapters.

This is far more than just another what-if story of counterfactual fiction: it moves both through pathos and humour. Fry successfully establishes Michael’s character as a wunderkind bedevilled with increasing insecurities as his peers are rapidly catching up, if not overhauling his precocious giftedness. The story is told in first person by Michael "Puppy" Young, a young history student at Cambridge University on the verge of completing his doctoral thesis on the early life of Adolf Hitler and his mother. I particularly enjoyed how Fry shows the same scene, set during World War I, twice, once from the original timeline and once from the timeline after Michael erases Hitler. Michael learns that the water from the well in Hitler's home town was used to create "Braunau Water", which was the instrument to sterilise the European Jews, wiping them out in one generation.

The imagination is helped along at times by the clever use of almost a screenplay type script, very cleverly used to aid communication between author's minds and the readers.Leo has developed a machine that enables the past to be viewed—but it is of no practical use as the image is not resolvable into details. The year before I had been in a West End play which I had left, rather embarrassingly, and fled to Europe, causing rather a stink. It mocks him for believing that merely removing Hitler from the picture will somehow defuse the anti-semitism and fascist ideologies throughout Europe in the early twentieth century. I am aware that my extreme aversion to this literary device is subjective – probably connected to the fact that books are my first and major love, while films are okay, I suppose….

This amazing novel is a blend of science fiction, history, and time travel, and I thought it brilliant. And the conclusion that Fry comes to is certainly thought provoking – I’ve been thinking a lot about the book since I put it down. I learnt something about WW2 (and WW1) and have something to chew on with regards to human nature and the results of WW1. Apart from some techno-babble, we're never really told how the time-machine works, and that's not the point of the book either. Together, they hatch a plan to modify the machine such that it can be used to send something back into time.

One requires a certain level of hubris to think that one should be responsible for changing history, and Michael certainly has that. Granted, it drew a nice parallel, but those bits were so dry and boring compared to Young's POV, and that was a bit disappointing. In many respects this world seems more advanced—it’s 1996 and everyone has mobile phones and tablets—but culturally, civil liberties didn’t happen.