Excerpt from How to Stop Time by Matt Haig, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

'Sea buckthorn. It's crazy. It tastes like shit. Try it.'

The amazing thing about Hendrich was that he kept thoroughly of the times. He always had done, I think. He certainly had been since the 1890s. Centuries ago, selling tulips, he'd probably been the same. It was strange. He was older than any of us but he was always very much in the current of whatever zeitgeist was flowing around.

'The thing is,' he said, 'in California, the only way to look like you are getting older is to look like you are getting younger. If you can move your forehead over the age of forty then people become very suspicious.'

He told me that he had been in Santa Barbara for a couple of years but he got a bit bored. 'Santa Barbara is pleasant. It's heaven, with a bit more traffic. But nothing ever happens in heaven. I had a place up in the hills. Drank the local wine every night. But I was going mad. I kept getting these panic attacks. I have lived for over seven centuries and never had a single panic attack. I've witnessed wars and revolutions. Fine. But I get to Santa Barbara and there I was waking up in my comfortable villa with my heart going crazy and feeling like I was trapped inside myself. Los Angeles, though, is something else. Los Angeles calmed me right down, I can tell you ...'

'Feeling calm. That must be nice.'

He studied me for a while, as if I was an artwork with a hidden meaning. 'What's the matter, Tom? Have you been missing me?'

'Something like that.'

'What is it? Was Iceland that bad?'

I'd been living in Iceland for eight years before my brief assignment in Sri Lanka.

'It was lonely.'

'But I thought you wanted lonely, after your time in Toronto. You said the real loneliness was being surrounded by people. And, besides, that's what we are, Tom. We're loners.'

I inhaled, as if the next sentence was something to swim under.

'I don't want to be that any more. I want out.'

There was no grand reaction. He didn't bat an eye. I looked at his gnarled hands and swollen knuckles. 'There is no out, Tom. You know that. You are an albatross. You are not a mayfly. You are an albatross.'

The idea behind the names was simple: albatrosses, back in the day, were thought to be very long-living creatures. Reality is, they only live to about sixty or so; far less than, say, the Greenland sharks that live to four hundred, or the quahog clam scientists called 'Ming' because it was born at the time of the Ming dynasty, over five hundred years ago. But anyway, we were albatrosses. Or albas, for short. And every other human on earth was dismissed as a mayfly. So called, because of the short-lived aquatic insects who go through an entire life cycle in a day or – in the case of one sub-species – five minutes.

Hendrich never talked of other, ordinary human beings as anything other than mayflies. I was finding his terminology – terminology I had ingrained into me – increasingly ridiculous. Albatrosses. Mayflies. The silliness of it.

For all his age and intelligence, Hendrich was fundamentally immature. He was a child. An incredibly ancient child.

That was the depressing thing about knowing other albas. You realised that we weren't special. We weren't superheroes. We were just old. And that, in cases such as Hendrich, it didn't really matter how many years or decades or centuries had passed, because you were always living within the parameters of your personality. No expanse of time or place could change that. You could never escape yourself.

'I find it disrespectful, to be honest with you,' he told me. 'After all I've done for you.'

'I appreciate what you've done for me ...' I hesitated. What exactly had he done for me? The thing he had promised to do hadn't happened.

Excerpted from How to Stop Time by Matt Haig. Copyright © 2018 by Matt Haig. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.