Paul Carnahan Talks 'How Soon Is Now?'
1 June 2025
In this Q&A with Paul Carnahan, he discusses How Soon Is Now?’ which is now out in audio.
How Soon Is Now is your debut novel, can you sum it up it in a few words for us?
How Soon Is Now? is a time travel novel, but a very human one built around a simple idea: What if you could go back to relive and even change parts of your past?
Can you tell us a bit about the history of The Nostalgia Club?
The idea for The Nostalgia Club came to me in the very early stages of planning the book. I knew I wanted to use time travel as the hook for an examination of the different reasons people might want to revisit their past – to be with a lost loved one, to roam once-familiar streets, to safely indulge in bad habits etc – and the idea of a support group for time travellers seemed the ideal way to do that. It gave me the perfect way to introduce a diverse group of characters who are all, in one way or another, unable to put their pasts behind them. In the fictional world of How Soon Is Now?, there are Nostalgia Clubs all over the world, and we focus on the Edinburgh branch, which meets in the back room of a pub. There may well be a branch near you, but Nostalgia Clubs tend to maintain a low profile, to avoid having their skills abused and/or their brains dissected, and their recruitment process can appear overly complex to non-time travellers.
What was it like, writing about the 1980s and 1990s?
Lots of fun – but getting the details right was a challenge. We live in a much more homogenised world now – the difference between the music and fashion of 2016 and 2025 is negligible, but the sights, sounds and smells of, for example, a student union bar in 1986 and a house party in 1995 would be very, very different from one another.
Sketching in the specifics of those differences without cliche or overkill was tricky, but rewarding. It’s not enough to simply have someone whip out a Rubik’s Cube or put Kajagoogoo on the telly and say ‘Hey, look! It’s the 1980s!’, as stories aiming for a bit of cheap nostalgia often do.
As the book’s lead character, Luke Seymour, revisits his own personal 1980s and 1990s, the reader has to experience them alongside him. The texture has to be authentic, and delivered sparingly.
What kind of characters can readers expect from How Soon Is Now?
Let’s see … we have a troubled ex-journalist trying to outrun his life’s biggest mistake and discovering a hitherto-untapped talent for time travel, a charming but cryptic Syrian refugee-turned-charity-worker, a car saleswoman with a very dark past, a perfumer with a most unfortunate disability, a widow desperate to unlock the truth about her husband’s murder, a bass player who gave up his rock star dreams for love … and more! I wanted to surround Luke with as diverse and rounded a cast as possible. The Nostalgia Club’s members all have something they need, individually and as a group, and their stories are very much embedded in the wider plot of ‘How Soon Is Now?’ as Luke learns more about the club’s members and the real reason behind his recruitment.
The book touches on a lot of themes, did you know in advance the themes you wanted to write about?
A book about someone discovering the ability to relive any point in their past could have grown in any number of directions – an idea like that could easily support a rollicking rom-com, for instance. But the more I thought about it, and pondered the many reasons people might be driven to revisit their past, the more depth I saw in the idea, and the clearer the themes became. If you’re looking with empathy and honesty at what ‘real’ time travel might be like, that brings you straight to big themes like memory, loss and the pull of the past, And if you’re being true to the characters within that story, it has to be, above everything, about love and, in the end, about hope and redemption.
You live in Scotland, was that a big inspiration for you?
Very much so. The book is set in Glasgow and Edinburgh in the 1980s, 1990s and present day. I’ve lived in both cities and love them both in very different ways. Edinburgh is where Luke meets the Nostalgia Club, and where he went to college in the 1980s. It’s also where I went to college in the 1980s, so that made the research for those sections much, much easier! Likewise, I gave Luke a flat in Pollokshields, in the south side of Glasgow, because that’s where I lived in the 1990s, and I knew I could pack in lots of the flavour and atmosphere of that vivid, vibrant neighbourhood. The two cities represent the two sides of the book: Glasgow has a grit and earthiness that matches the emotional heart of ‘How Soon Is Now?’, while Edinburgh has more of a moody, gothic atmosphere – a great match for the poignant, autumnal atmosphere of the book. And time travel’s happening anywhere in our world, it’s definitely happening in Edinburgh.
What would you say was the aspect that you had most fun with when writing How Soon is Now?
Writing for this group of characters – The Nostalgia Club and the people around Luke, like his girlfriend Alison and best friend Malcolm – was enormous fun. They’re all very vivid and alive. I missed spending time with them when work on the book once done. In fact, once I had the basic shape of the story worked out, the characters started letting me know which way they wanted to go. They took on a life of their own, to the extent that there’s a moment in the first third of the book where one character arrives and bends to whisper something into another character’s ear that I really didn’t expect and hadn’t planned, which sent the book spinning off into a much more surprising and interesting direction.
Are you writing anything at the moment that you can tell us about?
My second novel, the romantic comedy End of a Century, was released earlier this year, and I have a variety of writing projects – some of them very silly indeed – in mind for the future. Right now, though, I’m at work on my third novel, which will see the return of some characters and themes from ‘How Soon Is Now?’ and a slightly darker look at the temptations of time travel…
If you could bring back one thing from the 80s, what would it be?
My ability to eat and drink pretty much anything I wanted, in any quantity, with minimal repercussions.