Blast from the Past

Blast from the Past is a 1998 novel by Ben Elton, published by Bantam Press and later adapted into a stage performance by the West Yorkshire Playhouse. The plot centres on Polly Slade, an ordinary woman with a highly unusual past, whose world is thrown into turmoil when the two men in her life show up at her front door in the middle of the night: Jack, a general in the United States Army with whom she had a short-lived affair as a teenager and Peter, an obsessive stalker who has been terrifying her for the past two years. Themes of the novel include obsession, rape, the morality of war, gender politics, and whether one can ever hope to return to the past and find that everything is just as one remembers it.