Out of Time by M. Jacqueline Murray
Life has a time limit. Love doesn’t.
Maddie Cole has spent seven decades living on her own terms. A trailblazing engineer who chose career over convention, she built a life she’s proud of, even if it meant leaving romance behind. At 78, she figures that chapter is closed.
Then a family weekend in Bar Harbor, Maine takes an unexpected turn. Her daughter gets called away on business, and Maddie finds herself alone at the Hope Point Lighthouse B&B with its owner, Nate Jacobs, an 83-year-old widower and former corporate lawyer who has lived his entire life by the book. Everything about him should put them at odds. Instead, long breakfasts, coastal walks, and unhurried conversation start to awaken something she had convinced herself she no longer needed.
And then comes the discovery that stops them both cold: they have been crossing paths for decades, in the same cities, the same circles, the same rooms, without ever truly meeting. Until now. With limited time ahead and something neither of them quite has words for between them, the question becomes whether this is the best possible timing or the worst.
Out of Time is the kind of love story that tends to catch readers off guard. It is quiet and funny and deeply human, with two protagonists who feel unmistakably real. Kirkus Reviews called it “an uplifting reminder that one may find love at any age,” and the book went on to win four International Firebird Book Awards, including Best Unconventional Love Story and Most Heartwarming. It was also a Finalist for the American Writing Awards in Women’s Fiction.
If you have ever wondered whether love has an expiration date, this book is a pretty convincing argument that it does not.
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Author Bio:
I came to novel writing the way I’ve come to most things in my life: by saying yes before I fully thought it through.
My career has taken some genuinely unlikely turns. I started out as a geochemist and hydrogeologist, earned a science degree from the University of Waterloo and an MBA from Queen’s University, spent years as an environmental consultant, then pivoted into medical device and biotech marketing. Somewhere in the middle of all that, my husband Mike dared me to write a novel during a road trip, and I made the mistake of having a really good idea about five minutes into the conversation. That idea became Out of Time, the first book in my Maddie and Nate series.
The inspiration was personal. Mike and I discovered, years after meeting, that we had unknowingly crossed paths for nearly two decades before finally becoming colleagues in Arizona. That near-miss history became the heartbeat of the series: three books, the same two people, three entirely different timelines. What if they’d met at 78? At 38? At 28? Does timing define love, or does love find a way regardless?
When I’m not writing, I’m usually doing at least three other things. Photography is a genuine passion, the kind where you end up lying on the ground to get the right angle and don’t care who’s watching. Music is another constant. I speak several languages, which comes in handy because I divide my time between homes in the US, Canada, and Italy, and I travel as often as I can talk myself into it. Cooking is woven into my books literally: every recipe that appears in the Maddie and Nate series is a real one.
I’m originally from Oakville, Ontario, and have lived in Arizona and Ohio. I write what I call Thoughtful Speculative Romance, which is my way of saying the books don’t fit neatly into one box, and I’ve stopped apologizing for that. Out of Time has won four International Firebird Book Awards, including Best Unconventional Love Story, and was a Finalist for the American Writing Awards in Women’s Fiction. Kirkus Reviews called it “an uplifting reminder that one may find love at any age,” which is still the sentence I’m most proud of not having written myself.