Time Together

Description

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.’Horton writes authentically of this intimate interplay of warring insecurities, nostalgias, and unrealised aspirations … Cutting through this is Horton’s restrained, crisp writing, so unadorned with superfluity that his simple descriptions of nature and light resonate … a compelling rendering of personal and interpersonal tensions and the subterranean currents that shape them. Without sentimentality, Horton tenderly evokes the at times quiet, opaque nature of grief.’-Jack Callil, The Guardian’Time Together is a slow burn of a novel. Beautifully written and impossible to put down. I loved it.’-Sophie Cunningham, author of This Devastating Fever’An artful, deliciously acerbic portrait of family, friendship, and the indignities of middle age. Horton is a master of domestic unease.’-Laura Elizabeth Woollett

Luke Horton is a writer and musician from Naarm/Melbourne. He is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Fogging (2020) and Time Together (2025), and his work has appeared in various publications, including The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, and Meanjin. The former editor of The Lifted Brow Review of Books, he currently teaches creative writing at RMIT and the Faber Writing Academy, and is a member of acclaimed indie-rock band Love of Diagrams.