Locked in Time is a 1985 suspense novel by Lois Duncan. The story centers around Nore, a seventeen-year-old girl who moves into a new home with her father and her new stepfamily. Soon after she meets her stepmother, stepbrother, and stepsister for the first time, Nore begins to suspect something is not quite right about her stepfamily. The author states that the novel explores some of the issues surrounding having eternal life. Duncan says she developed the idea for the novel when one of her daughters was thirteen years old and was having issues with her body image. Duncan mentions that her daughter was "taking everything out" on her, and she began to wonder what it would be like if her daughter never outgrew her adolescence.
The novel won several awards and honors including the 1988 South Carolina Young Adult Book Award, the 1989 Nevada Young Readers' Award, and the 1989–1990 Tennessee Volunteer State Book Award. In 2011, Locked in Time was reissued with updates to modernize the content. An audiobook based on the modernized text was released the same year.
Lois Duncan Steinmetz (April 28, 1934 – June 15, 2016), known as Lois Duncan, was an American writer, novelist, poet, and journalist. She is best known for her young-adult novels, and has been credited by historians as a pioneering figure in the development of young-adult fiction, particularly in the genres of horror, thriller, and suspense.
The daughter of professional photographers Lois and Joseph Janney Steinmetz, Duncan began writing at a young age, publishing two early novels under the pen name Lois Kerry. Several of her novels, including Hotel for Dogs (1971), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1973), Summer of Fear (1976), and the controversial Killing Mr. Griffin (1978), have been adapted into films.
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