Paperback writer: Donovan Day mixes time travel with The Beatles in 'Get Back'

July 28, 2016

So it looks like I'm not the only one preoccupied with The Beatles and time travel. US author Donovan Day has written about both these things in his first novel Get Back.

In the book, 17-year-old Lenny manages to travel back in time and gets to hang out with The Beatles and some of his other musical heroes and has some fascinating conversations (he even has to explain how music works in the 21st century!) A key moment comes when Lenny – knowing how John Lennon's life ends on that fateful day in 1980 – has to make a tremendously difficult decision.

The idea for the book apparently came to Day in a dream. “I was doing research on The Beatles for an article and began dreaming about them all the time. In one dream, I was in the studio with them and they let me sit in and jam. Later, we got to talking and they discovered I was from the future. They had all sorts of questions about music and records and what whether people would remember them in 2015 and still play their music. It was a happy conversation until — in the dream — John asked, ‘And what becomes of me?’”

Funnily enough, when I was 17 or thereabouts and also infatuated with The Beatles, I used to dream about meeting them too. Just not to quite this extent!

The book is available – and has some excellent reviews – over on Amazon. And you can find Donovan Day online on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and his own blog, Beatles4Ever.

So if you can't resist the idea of travelling back in time to meet The Beatles, this will be just the book for you. Get Back is ostensibly geared towards young adults, but the story has elements that appeal to readers from millennials to baby boomers.

And finally, just for a moment, allow yourself to think about the book's subtitle: “Imagine…Saving John Lennon.”