Robert Webb's dose of nostalgia...plus a book giveaway

We're pleased to welcome Robert Webb to CLC today! His debut novel, Come Again, recently published. Melissa finished it this past weekend and enjoyed the college memories it evoked. She's also big into the nineties, so setting it during that time scored bonus points for her. (A review is forthcoming.) Thanks to Little, Brown, we have THREE copies to give away!

Robert Webb is best known for his work as the Webb half of Mitchell & Webb in the Sony award-winning That Mitchell & Webb Sound and the Bafta award-winning That Mitchell & Webb Look, and as permanent man-boy Jeremy in the acclaimed Peep Show. In 2017, his call-to-arms memoir How Not To Be a Boy was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. Robert has been a columnist for the Daily Telegraph and the New Statesman, and now lives in London with his wife and daughters. Come Again is his first novel.

Visit Robert on Twitter.

Synopsis:
Can you fall in love for the first time twice ... ?

Kate's husband Luke -- the man she loved from the moment she met him twenty-eight years ago -- died suddenly. Since then she has pushed away her friend and lost her job, and everything is starting to fall apart.

One day, she wakes up in the wrong room and in the wrong body. She is eighteen again but remembers everything. This is her college room in 1992. This is the first day of orientation. And this is the day she meets Luke.

Kate knows how he died, and that he's already ill. But Luke is not the man that she lost: he's still a boy -- the annoying nineteen-year-old English student she first met. If they can fall in love again despite everything, she might just be able to save him. She's going to try to do everything exactly the same...


"Funny, brilliant, clever and unpredictable; I gobbled it up." 
—Jenny Colgan, USA Today bestselling author of The Bookshop on the Corner

What was a challenge for you when it came to writing a time travel novel?
I chose a time that I had fairly vivid memories of because the fall of 1992 was my own first week of college so I had a head-start with things like the clothes and the music. I didn’t worry too much about the sci-fi element of the book. I could have got wrapped up in all the paradoxes and the ‘if you change this in the past then how does it affect that in the future?’ stuff but it’s not that kind of story. For me the appeal of a character revisiting her younger self is entirely emotional. Here’s the husband she lost and he’s still just an annoying teenager. Here are her lifelong friends who don’t know who she is. Here’s her father, suddenly alive and well.

What was something you learned about yourself while writing Come Again?
Well, it’s my first novel so I guess I was starting to find out what kind of novelist I am. It turns out I’m someone who likes to plan a story instead of just launching into it with no idea about where it’s going.

When Come Again is made into a TV series, who would you cast in the lead roles?
Brilliant people who will be assured that they were the first choice for the part. Which is why I can’t answer the question. Sorry to be no fun.

What TV series are you currently binge watching?
We just re-watched all of Breaking Bad and now we’re on season one of New Girl which is great and really funny.

What is your go-to comfort food?
I can’t go far wrong with a baked potato with melted cheese.

Side note from Melissa: This takes me back to the nineties, when I would eat the same thing at 1-Potato-2 at the mall every week!

What are some of your favorite time travel movies and/or books?
Does Groundhog Day count? He’s kind of time traveling? If so, definitely that because it’s one of my favorite movies ever. I watched the Back to the Future movies with my girls (aged 9 & 11) and they were as much fun as I remembered. Something quite familiar about future Biff... More charmingly, the imagined 2015 involves hover boards but not cell phones. Oh well, you can’t get everything right.

Thanks to Robert for visiting with us and to Little, Brown for sharing his book with our readers.

How to win: Use Rafflecopter to enter the giveaway. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. If you have trouble using Rafflecopter on our blog, enter the giveaway here. 

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Giveaway ends July 28th at midnight EST.