A Bridge of Years

A Bridge of Years is a science fiction novel by Robert Charles Wilson, published in 1991. Tom Winter has gone looking for somewhere quiet after the end of a relationship, and the cottage he rents in the Pacific Northwest looks like exactly the refuge he wanted until he works out what is hidden inside it.

The tunnel runs between Tom's present and New York in 1963, and the earlier end of it offers him something he wants badly: a chance to begin again in a city and a decade that have not yet become the world he came from. He is not the first person to have found the passage, and he is not the first to have decided that it should stay a secret.

Someone else is already using it. A killer has come through from a bleak and brutal future and will do anything to protect a route he has treated as his own, which turns Tom's refuge into the one place where two versions of history can collide. The book asks what a man owes to the time he escapes to, and neither end of the tunnel turns out to be the safe place he was looking for.