Time travel has fascinated and tantalised many, even linking such unlikely artistic bedfellows as H.G. Wells and Cher. Wells wrote The Time Machine in 1895; nearly 100 years later Cher wailed: “If I could turn back time ...” In 2003, Audrey Niffenegger's bestselling debut The Time Traveller's Wife kept the theme bubbling, and now The Little Book posits its hero, Wheeler Burden, in late 1980s California and late 19th-century Vienna.

The Little Book has depth, though it is more adventure yarn than philosophical treatise. When Burden first appears in Vienna he gets into a scrape with a supercilious American, who - very much in the spirit of the story - turns out to be his grandfather. Later he unwittingly will fall in love with his grandmother.

The novel has an epic feel and a great, jostling bran tub of voices and perspectives. Edwards began working on it in 1974 and completed it last year, giving it that feel of something crafted, burnished and polished over time. The pleasure of it is in the tantalising question that lies at the heart of much time-travel fiction: if you could, would you change history, political and personal?

Wheeler finds himself lodging at Sigmund Freud's home. The two men have deep discussions about the Oedipal myth. He also becomes friends with Buddy Holly and is reunited with his father who, in his real-time life, he never met. Their finally realised relationship as father and son gives the book its emotional core. There is an encounter with Adolf Hitler too, then a boy: should Wheeler let history take its course or murder the young man?

The Little Book ranges so wildly that it seems at times without purpose. It doesn't resolve all the mysteries that it sets up and toys with. But the passion and warmth of 33 years hard work are ultimately winning. Like Niffenegger's novel, The Little Book could become a film. If it doesn't, it can take a respectable place alongside H.G. Wells - and Cher.

The Little Book by Selden Edward
Abacus, £11.99; 416pp Buy the book

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