A Shift in Time — Vanessa Brooks

Duncan's life is about to be turned upside down and inside out. Inadvertently caught outside during a thunderstorm while cycling back from where he works in Sussex, England, Duncan decides to seek shelter from the raging elements within a Jacobean barn that belongs to his good friends James and Emily.

In the year 1640, Hugo Wylde is also standing alone during a ferocious storm, in the exact same entrance to the exact same Jacobean barn. He is grimly awaiting the arrival of his wife, Bridey, whom he intends to switch soundly for her continued disobedience.

When both men are simultaneously struck by lightning, their personas are switched. Duncan Miller awakes in the year 1640 to discover that he is now the owner of Wylde Manor, and that he is married to a beautiful young wife who expects her husband to discipline her for all her transgressions.

In this tale of time travel and adventure, we follow Duncan as he struggles to come to terms with his new life, bereft of all the modern trappings and conveniences.

In book two, Hugo finds that he has been transported forwards in time some four hundred years, into an unrecognisable world full of noise, strange technology, a world that is now full of people.

The answer to his future may be found in a note left for him four centuries earlier by the man who took over his peaceful existence. Hugo decides to travel thousands of miles away from the England, the land of his birth, to America, to join other like-minded folk who eschew the trappings of a modern world. When he comes to the rescue of a young widow, will these people open not only their community, but will one open her heart?