Who Is The Protagonist In 'Here One Moment'?

The protagonist in 'Here One Moment' is a fascinating character named Liora, a time-walker with the rare ability to pause moments around her while she moves freely. She's not your typical hero—her power comes with a heavy price. Every time she uses it, she loses fragments of her own memories. Liora works as a museum curator by day, subtly using her abilities to protect priceless artifacts from thieves. The story kicks off when she accidentally witnesses a murder during one of her paused moments, dragging her into a conspiracy that spans decades. What makes her compelling is her moral ambiguity—she’s not afraid to bend time to her will, but she agonizes over the personal costs.

Liora from 'Here One Moment' is one of those protagonists who sticks with you long after you finish the book. She’s a time manipulator, but the twist here is that her power isn’t about traveling through time—it’s about freezing it. Imagine being the only person moving in a world stuck on pause. The author does a brilliant job showing how isolating this gift is. Liora’s relationships suffer because she can’t share her secret, and her memory loss adds this tragic layer—she forgets faces, names, even why she started using her power in the first place.

Her backstory is drip-fed throughout the novel. We learn she grew up in a family of ‘moment-walkers,’ but they’ve all vanished, leaving her to piece together their legacy. The murder she witnesses isn’t random; it’s tied to a shadowy organization hunting people like her. The way Liora fights back isn’t through brute force but by outsmarting time itself—setting traps in paused moments, leaving clues only she can follow later. It’s cerebral and fresh compared to typical time-travel plots.

What elevates Liora beyond a power showcase is her humanity. She collects vintage cameras because they capture moments she can’t hold onto. Her apartment walls are covered in sticky notes reminding her of important things. Small details like these make her feel achingly real. By the climax, when she confronts the truth about her family, you’re rooting for her not just to survive, but to remember.

Liora’s the heart of 'Here One Moment,' and she’s anything but predictable. Picture someone who can stop time but can’t control what she forgets afterward—that’s her curse. The novel plays with this brilliantly. One scene she’s using her power to savor a perfect sunset, the next she’s waking up with no idea why there’s blood on her hands. Her profession as a curator is a clever touch; she preserves history while losing her own.

Her power mechanics are razor-sharp. Frozen moments aren’t just visual—sounds hang midair, raindrops hover like glass beads. The author makes you feel the eerie beauty of it. But the real tension comes from Liora’s enemies: a cult that believes moment-walkers are ‘time thieves’ who need to be eradicated. Their leader can manipulate frozen moments too, creating this cat-and-mouse game where both sides are rewriting reality around each other.

The romance subplot with a journalist investigating the cult adds depth. He doesn’t know her secret at first, and their scenes crackle with dramatic irony. When he finally discovers the truth, it’s not some grand reveal—he pieces it together from the gaps in her memory, the way she sometimes stares at things nobody else can see. That subtlety makes their relationship one of the book’s highlights.