As the collection’s title suggests, time’s passage is the fil rouge of these stories. All of Tabucchi’s characters struggle to find routes of escape from a present that is hard to bear, and from places in which political events have had deeply personal ramifications for their own lives.

Each of the nine stories in Time Ages In A Hurry is an imaginative inquiry into something hidden or disguised, which can be uncovered not by reason but only by feeling and intuition, by what isn’t said.