Bearing an Hourglass
core novel 1984 Incarnations of Immortality
Record
| First published | 1984 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.96 (24,016 ratings, collected 2026-08-30) |
| Page count | 372 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780345313157 |
| Internal chronology | 2 |
Synopsis
Bearing an Hourglass follows Norton, a wandering man asked by a ghost named Gawain to father a child with Gawain's widow, Orlene. When the child dies of a genetic disease and Orlene takes her own life in grief, Gawain offers the devastated Norton the chance to become Chronos, the Incarnation of Time, and Norton accepts. As Time, Norton must live his personal existence backwards relative to the rest of the world, an unusual condition that isolates him even from the other Immortals and complicates any hope of reconnecting with those he has lost. Satan, ever scheming, attempts to tempt Norton with extraordinary powers of travel across the ages in exchange for interfering with a past event tied to Death's origin, forcing Norton to weigh his own grief and curiosity against the danger of altering history and the fate of Luna Kaftan's future.
Where it sits
- Universe: Incarnations of Immortality
- Series: Incarnations of Immortality core; position 2 of 7 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Piers Anthony
Notes
- From the series record (Incarnations of Immortality): The original seven-book run, one novel per Incarnation (Death, Time, Fate, War, Nature, Evil, Good), published together as a complete cycle 1983-1990.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series Incarnations of Immortality: position 2 of 7: previous On a Pale Horse (1983) · next With a Tangled Skein (1985)
- Internal chronology, within Incarnations of Immortality: position 2 of 8: previous On a Pale Horse (1983) · next With a Tangled Skein (1985)
Sources
- Wikipedia: Incarnations of Immortality
- bookseriesinorder.com: Incarnations of Immortality
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bearing_an_Hourglass
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