Finalist, 2022 Foreword INDIE Awards — Science Fiction

"It is a dreadful thing to be possessed, to be invaded by a spirit woman who commands your body and soul and looks out at the world through your eyes. It happened to me. Pray it will never happen to you."

Adele's diary tells the story of her domination by the incubus Lynne, a serving girl in a London alehouse who died a violent death and commandeered Adele's body for eight years. Can Adele be held responsible for Lynne's crimes” Will the evil spirit return and renew her tyranny over Adele's mind?

Lynne has moved on into the twenty-first century, but transmigration has left her emotions flat. Lynne is eager to go back to her first life and experience once more the passion she felt for her lover, Jack. To do so, she needs a channel to the past: the manuscript of Adele's diary—if only she can find it.

A time-slip novel set in contemporary Los Angeles and eighteenth-century London, The Loneliness of the Time Traveller is a story of love, crime, and adventure combined with fantasy, a little bit of Jane Austen'style irony, and a healthy serving of social criticism.

Erika Rummel has taught at the University of Toronto and WLU, Waterloo. She has lived in big cities (Los Angeles, Vienna) and small villaes in Argentina, Romania, and Bulgaria. She has written extensively on social history, translated the correspondence of inventor Alfred Nobel, the humanist Erasmus, and the Reformer Wolfgang Capito. She is the author of a number of historical novels, most recently The Road to Gesualdo and The Inquisitor's Niece, which was judged best historical novel of the year by the Colorado Independent Publishers' Association. In 2018 the Renaissance Society of America honoured her with a lifetime achievement award. She divides her time between living in Toronto and Santa Monica, California. The Loneliness of the Time Traveller is her eighth novel.

Erika Rummel's profile page

"Smart writing and a crafty plot spin us through time and into the world of Lynne, a transmigrating soul in present-day California who hopes to use an ancient text to connect her to an eighteenth-century British lover. In a vividly realized England, she functioned by occupying the body of genteel and unsuspecting Adele. Read on as the well-heeled and the impoverished tangle with mayhem, passiion, and moral dilemmas. When a long-ago murder is committed, who is responsible: Adele or the more impulsive Lynne who invades her body” Expertly researched, this is the ultimate travel tale."
—Carole Giangrande, author of The Tender Birds