When a substantial inheritance leaves him financially secure, Jacob Moss, a thirty-something drifter decides, on a whim, to restore the derelict television studio where his favourite childhood programme, Dexter and the Time Machine, was once filmed. The show followed the adventures of an eccentric space dog as he travelled through history.
His project gains momentum when he meets Kenny Abbott, the programme's former presenter, now an ageing alcoholic in recovery. Together they set out to reunite the original cast and recreate a lost episode. As public interest grows and the restoration nears completion, Jacob believes he is on the cusp of recapturing a fragment of his lost youth.
But the past refuses to stay buried.
Unsettling discoveries about his late father gradually expose gaps in Jacob's memory and an encounter with a former classmate leaves him with further doubts. As long-forgotten events begin to surface, he learns that the nostalgia he has built his life around is concealing something far darker.
Eventually, Jacob is forced to confront a truth he has suppressed. The childhood he idealises was not be what he remembers, and the television programme that shaped his imagination may have played an unexpected role in a tragedy that changed multiple lives forever.
A poignant and thought-provoking literary novel, Jacob and the Time Machine explores memory, guilt, lost youth and the seductive dangers of nostalgia, asking whether it is ever possible to return to the past-or whether some doors are better left closed.