Ian McEwan The Magic Clock

Gregory believed his greatest mistakes were behind him. When a strange clock hidden beneath the floorboards of his flat gives him the ability to relive a single day from his past, it seems like the answer to every regret he has ever carried. A missed opportunity can be reclaimed. An embarrassing failure can be erased. A painful memory can be rewritten. But every change comes at a cost. Each time Gregory alters the past, he wakes to a new present. Relationships shift. Careers rise and fall. Friends become strangers. Small decisions ripple outward into consequences he never anticipated. The more he tries to perfect his life, the more unstable it becomes. As the timelines grow increasingly tangled, Gregory begins to realise that some of the changes cannot be explained by his actions alone. Someone else may know the secret of the clock. Someone else may be changing the past as well. Caught between the life he wants and the lives he keeps creating, Gregory must confront a question that no amount of time travel can escape: What if the failures he is trying to erase are the very things that made him who he is? The Magic Clock is a thought-provoking story of regret, identity, second chances, and the dangerous temptation to rewrite the past.