The 35 Best Books About Time Travel
Here's what to read after you finish Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series.
Every item on this page was chosen by a Town & Country editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.
Gabaldon first published Outlander —the book that would eventually inspire the television series starring Caitriona Balfe as Claire and Sam Heughan as Jamie —in 1991, and the ninth novel in the series, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone , came out in November 2021.
Ahead of the seventh season of Outlander , now's the perfect time (ha) to dive into time travel books. From time traveling romance to alternate realities to murder mysteries, there's something for everyone here.
The Time Traveler's Wife
Any list about time travel books must begin with The Time Traveler's Wife , right? This bestselling novel tells the love story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who inadvertently travels through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Plot sound familiar? The book was adapted into a 2009 film starring Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana, and a 2022 TV show starring Theo James and Rose Leslie .
Read more: 20 of the best Time Travel Films Ever Made
A Murder in Time
Kendra Donovan is a rising star at the FBI, until one disastrous raid when half her team is murdered and a mole in the FBI is uncovered. After she recovers from her wounds, she's determined to find the man responsible for the death of her team—yet upon her arrival in England, she stumbles back in time to 1815. Mistaken for a lady's maid, Kendra is forced to quickly adapt to the period as she figures out how to get back to her own timeline. There are five books in the Kendra Donovan series , so if you love a time travel mystery, don't miss these.
Author Octavia Butler is a queen of science fiction, and Kindred is her bestselling novel about time travel. In it, she tells the story of Dana, a Black woman, who is celebrating her 26th birthday in 1976. Abruptly, she's transported back to Maryland, circa 1815, where she's on a plantation and has to save Rufus, the white son of the plantation owner. It's not just a time travel book, but one that expertly weaves in narratives of enslaved people and explores the Antebellum South.
Faye, Faraway
Diana Gabaldon herself called Faye, Faraway "a lovely, deeply moving story of loss and love and memory made real , " so you know it's going to be good. The plot focuses on Faye, a mother of two, who lost her own mother, Jeanie, when she was just 8 years old. When Faye suddenly finds herself transported back in time, she befriends her mother—but doesn't let on who she really is. Eventually, she has to choose between her past and her future.
The Eyre Affair
In this version of Great Britain circa 1985, time travel is routine. Our protagonist is Thursday Next, a literary detective, who is placed on a case when someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Brontë's novel.
Bonus: The Eyre Affair is the first in a seven book series following Thursday.
The River of No Return: A Novel
Lord Nicholas Davenant is about to die in the Napoleonic Wars in 1812, and wakes up 200 years later. But he longs to return back in time to his love, Julia. When he arrives in modern society, a mysterious organization called the Guild tells him "there is no return," until one day, they summon him to London and he learns it's possible to travel back through time. A spy thriller that's also historical romance that's also time travel... Say less.
One Last Stop
Casey McQuiston's second novel ( following Red, White, and Royal blue, which is going to be a major motion picture this summer ) is a queer time-loop romance set on the Q train in New York City, and it's riveting. August is 23, working at a 24-hour diner, and meets a gorgeous, charming girl on the train: Jane. But she can't seem to meet up with her off the Q train—until they figure out Jane is stuck in time from the 1970s. How did she travel through time? Can August get Jane unstuck? Will they live happily ever after!? The questions abound.
What the Wind Knows
Anne Gallagher grew up hearing her grandfather’s stories of Ireland. When she returns to the country to spread his ashes, she is transported back in time to 1921—and is drawn into the struggle for Irish independence. There, she meets Dr. Thomas Smith, and must decide whether or not she should return to her own timeline or stay in the past. As one reviewer wrote on Amazon, What the Wind Knows is a "spectacular time travel journey filled with love and loss."
The Midnight Library: A Novel
Imagine a library with an infinite number of books—each containing an alternate reality about your life. That's the plot of The Midnight Library , where our protagonist Nora Seed enters different versions of her life. She undoes old breakups, follows her dream of becoming a glaciologist, and so much more—but what happens to her original life?
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: A Novel
In this novel from Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland, magic existed—until 1851. A secret government organization, the Department of Diachronic Operations (or D.O.D.O. for short), is dedicated to bringing magic back, and its members will travel through time to change history to do so. As Kirkus Reviews wrote , the novel "blend[s] time travel with Bourne-worthy skulduggery." It's a delight for any fans of science fiction, with a slow burn romance between military intelligence operator Tristan Lyons and linguist Melisande Stokes.
This Is How You Lose the Time War
Cowritten by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers, this epistolary romantic novel tells the story of two time-traveling rivals who fall in love. Agents Red and Blue travel back and forth throughout time, trying to alter universes on behalf of their warring empires—and start to leave each other messages. The messages begin taunting but soon turn flirtatious—and when Red's commander discovers her affection for Blue, they soon embark down a timeline they can't change.
The House on the Strand
Set at an ancient Cornish house called Kilmarth, where Daphne du Maurier lived from 1967, The House on the Strand story follows Dick Young, who has been offered use of Kilmarth by an old college friend, Magnus Lane. Magnus, a biophysicist, is developing a drug that enables people to travel back to the 14th century, and Dick reluctantly agrees to be a test subject. The catch: If you touch anyone, you're transported back to the present. As the story goes on, Dick's visits back to the 1300s become more frequent, and his life back in the modern world becomes unstable.
The Kingdoms
It’s 1898 and there’s a man named Joe, who lives in London, which is, in this alternate historical, a part of the French Empire as in this version of the past, Britain lost the Napoleonic Wars. Joe has gotten off a train from Scotland and cannot remember anything about who he is or where he’s from. He soon returns to his work, and after a few years, he is sent to repair a lighthouse in Eilean Mor in the Outer Hebrides. Joe then finds himself a century earlier, on a British boat with a mysterious captain, fighting the French and hoping for a future that is different than the one he came from. If you're into time travel and queer romance and alternate history, this is for you.
The Future of Another Timeline
In 1992, 17-year-old Beth agrees to help hide the dead body of her friend's abusive boyfriend. The murder sets Beth and her friends on "a path of escalating violence and vengeance" to protect other young women. In 2022, Tess decides to use time travel to fight for change around key moments in history. When Tess believes she's found a way to make an edit to history that actually sticks, she encounters a group of time travelers bent on stopping her at any cost. Tess and Beth's lives intertwine, and war breaks out across the timeline.
Shadow of Night
The sequel to A Discovery of Witches , the plot of Shadow of Night picks up right where the story left off: With Matthew, a vampire, and Diana, a witch, traveling back in time to Elizabethan London to search for an enchanted manuscript. You really need to read the first book before reading Shadow of Night , but the series by Deborah Harkness is a swoony magical romance.
And: It's now a TV show! ( Season one is streaming on Amazon Prime Video .)
The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
In The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, the same day happens again and again. Each day, Evelyn Hardcastle is murdered at 11:00 p.m at Blackheath. And each day, our protagonist Aiden Bishop wakes up in the body of a different witness—and tries to solve her murder. He only has eight days, and it's a race against time to solve Evelyn's murder and to escape the time loop.
Recursion: A Novel
In 2018 New York City, detective Barry Sutton fails to talk Ann out of jumping off a building. But before Ann falls to her death, she tells him she is suffering from False Memory Syndrome—a new neurological disease where people are afflicted with memories of lives they never lived. The dissonance between their present and these memories drives them to death. This is best read unspoiled, but it's undoubtedly a time travel story you haven't read before.
On the eve of her wedding day, Shay Garrett looks into her grandmother's antique mirror and faints. When she wakes up, she's in the same house—but in the body of her grandmother, Brandy, as a young woman in 1900. And Brandy awakens in Shay's body in the present day in 1978. It's like Freaky Friday , but with time travel to the Victorian era.
Here and Now and Then
Kin Stewart is a time traveler from 2142, stuck in 1990s suburban San Francisco. A rescue team arrives to bring Kin back to his timeline—but 18 years too late. Does Kin stay with his "new" family, and the life he's built for himself in San Francisco, or does he return to his original timeline? He's stuck between two families—and ultimately, this is a time travel tale about fatherhood.
A Knight in Shining Armor
Originally published in 1989, this romance novel features a present-day heroine and a knight from the 16th century who fall in love. Per the book's description: "Abandoned by a cruel fate, lovely Dougless Montgomery lies weeping upon a cold tombstone in an English church. Suddenly, the most extraordinary man appears. It is Nicholas Stafford, Earl of Thornwyck…and according to his tombstone he died in 1564. Drawn to his side by a bond so sudden and compelling it overshadows reason, Dougless knows that Nicholas is nothing less than a miracle: a man who does not seek to change her, who finds her perfect, fascinating, just as she is. What Dougless never imagined was how strong the chains are that tie them to the past…or the grand adventure that lay before them."
Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma , a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram .
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Six Novels That Bring Together Mystery and Time Travel
Literature that tests the boundaries of time itself..
H.G. Wells was not the first author to explore time travel as a literary device, but he popularized the concept in ways that had never been done before. I’ve always been drawn to time travel in all genres—from sci-fi to suspense, from romance to action adventure—but my particular favorite is mixing the time-bending element with a good mystery.
Depending upon how it’s done, it can add to the tension—a race against time as our characters try to return to their own era—or it can allow readers to explore the past through modern eyes. In my own In Time mystery series, I’ve enjoyed the fish-out-of-water sensation that my main character—a modern-day woman and brilliant FBI agent—experiences after being tossed back to the Regency period in England. As women then were second-class citizens without the ability to even vote, not only does she have to deal with personal obstacles, but she also cannot tap into her usual arsenal of forensic tools to solve crimes.
Whether time travel is being used to wrap a mystery in an extra, innovative layer or is allowing readers to view humanity and history through a different lens, the theme is brilliantly done in the books that I’ve listed below.
Lightning , Dean Koontz
The moment I read Lightning , I fell in love with the characters and the story’s complexity, so I was shocked to later learn that Dean Koontz actually had to fight to get this book published. I was not shocked that after he finally succeeded, the novel was wildly successful. From the first page, I was plunged into a not-so-natural phenomenon of flashing lightning in the middle of a snowstorm, from which a mystery man emerges and becomes inexplicably linked to the life of the main character, Laura. In typical Koontz fashion, Lightning weaves together a plethora of elements—heroism, heartbreak, love, humor, and plenty of bad guys. The time-travel aspect is lightly done, but with a twist that literally leaves you gasping.
Recursion , Blake Crouch
I didn’t think I could go down a more twisted rabbit hole than when I read Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter , but he simply blew my mind with Recursion . Time travel is often portrayed as an external process, relying on Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which teased the notion that space and time could be bent to create a wormhole or vortex. Crouch, however, went inward , by proposing the possibility that we could use our own memories to be propelled back to any point in our lives. The concept is fascinating, and there were many points at which I had to put down the book to simply think about what I had just read. Of course, in Crouch’s tale there is as much danger and devastation in going back to tweak your own timeline as there is if you were to jump into a time machine and return to the days of the dinosaurs, stepping on an insect that would then change life as we know it (à la Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect).
Timeline , Michael Crichton
No one has ever blended science—both fact and theory—into action adventure quite like Michael Crichton. He delves into the mechanics of time travel in such a masterful way that the incomprehensible becomes a head-nodding moment. Even better, it doesn’t slow down the story, which begins as a puzzle and evolves into an escapade, when a modern-day professor is trapped in the Middle Ages, with his band of scientifically minded students following to rescue him. I loved learning about the history of this particular time, especially seen through the eyes of scientists. Of course, human nature remains consistent through the centuries, which means there is plenty of avarice, betrayal, and cruelty to keep readers white-knuckled with worry over whether our protagonists will escape with their lives.
The Shining Girls , by Lauren Beukes
Serial killers often escape detection by jumping jurisdictions, both in real life and in fiction. Lauren Beukes takes this to a mind-bending extreme by having a delusional psychopath jumping decades—from the Great Depression to the early ’90s—after discovering a house that is a time-traveling portal. When a woman survives her vicious attack, she becomes obsessed about finding her would-be murderer, and the puzzle pieces begin to slowly snap together. The writing is beautiful, the crimes brutal. This is not a book for the faint of heart, but if you have the courage, it’s well worth the read.
11/22/63 , by Stephen King
Traveling back in time with the purpose of changing history—and therefore the future—is an idea that has been explored in movies, TV (the old Twilight Zone had a few thought-provoking episodes on the subject), literature, philosophical discussions, and even in science classes. Yet Stephen King boldly—and brilliantly—explored the concept with perhaps the biggest do-over of all time with our main character, Jake (aka George), trying to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating John F. Kennedy.
The Time Machine , by H.G. Wells
It’s impossible to do a list of time-travel books without including the granddaddy of them all, The Time Machine . Written in 1895, Wells imagined the future—802701 A.D., to be precise—when his Time Traveler narrator recounted his journey there (and beyond). I had read The Time Machine years ago, but I thought I needed to reread the novella again before officially including it in this list. While I had fond memories of the story, I also have fond memories of The A-Team . Not everything stands the test of time (no pun intended). Thankfully, The Time Machine is worth the read and reread. Wells’ Time Traveler recounts his journey into the future, where human beings have undergone a Darwinian evolution—or, rather, a devolution, since humanity does not fare well. Even though it was written in the Victorian Age, it is a cautionary tale that will resonate for today’s reader, too.
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Time Travel Stories That Explore What It Means To Be Human
Holly smale recommends kate atkinson, octavia butler, and more.
The inspiration for Cassandra In Reverse came—as art sometimes does—from heartbreak, or something quite like it. A short but intense relationship that unravelled so quickly, and so unexpectedly, I was left reeling. What had gone wrong? Was it my fault? What could I have done differently?
Caught in a familiar, never-ending thought-loop, I spent months trapped inside my own head: obsessively re-running the entire relationship in enormous detail, looking for clues, searching for the point where it all went wrong. If I could just go back and tweak it—say the right thing, understand a facial expression I completely misinterpreted—would it have had a different ending? Would it, perhaps, not have ended at all?
As I worked through this familiar yet confusing process—carefully editing a memory and allowing my imagination to play out the consequences in detail—I slowly realized it was an idea for a book: a woman, gifted with the power of time travel, who initially uses it to try and fix her relationship. But, when I pitched it to my agent, she had a few understandable questions. Why would anyone become so hyper-fixated on a short-term relationship like that? Why obsess, and repeat, and re-run? Why not just… let go and move on?
The answer to that question came with my autism diagnosis, a few years later. As I grappled with understanding my own neurology properly for the first time, I realized that the way I thought and behaved was tied, inexorably, to the fact that I was autistic. The need to repeat, to loop, to hyper-fixate, to obsess, to examine, to study, to analyze: I did it because I was autistic. Thus, rather than being a time-travel book with an incidentally autistic protagonist, this was a protagonist who time travelled because she was autistic: because the very act of time travel was, on a macroscopic scale, a narrative version of what goes on in her brain anyway.
I think there’s a part of every human who wonders if editing a part of their life would make a difference to where they ended up. But, in using time travel to reflect my character’s internal workings, I was able to give Cassandra a way to show her distinct neurology, instead of just telling us.
So much of being autistic is in attempting—and often failing—to connect to the world around us, and time travel allows Cassie try, over and over again. It allows her to explore what it’s like to carry time with you—blessed, and cursed, with an intense long-term memory—and to see what life is like when you get a dress-rehearsal first. It allows her to search for love, just as I have searched, and to try to understand those around me, as I have also tried. And it allowed me, as the writer, to repeat, to loop, and to undo and redo, to my heart’s content.
My favorite books are those where character and plot become one and the same. And, while time travel has been done so many times, Cassandra in Reverse is, in many ways, simply autistic neurology writ large, which felt like a slightly new perspective worth bringing to the table.
The best time travel stories, for me, allow the writer to essentially explore what it means to be human, and the incredible books I have picked below do exactly that.
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
In this beautiful novel, Kate Atkinson uses a form of time-travel to investigate the fragility of being alive in a warm, luminous and witty way. Ursula is consistently dying and being re-born—with each life repeating until she uses her memories (and often instinct) to send it in slightly different directions and make alternative choices. One of the biggest issues of writing a time travel book is making sure that the repetition isn’t boring for the reader, and this book does that sublimely. Every sentence is so beautifully and clearly observed, and its companion book ( A God In Ruins ) plays with an off-shoot of the same basic idea: where would we all end up if we got another chance?
Kindred by Octavia Butler
An incredibly powerful novel, Kindred centers on the lives and experiences of slaves through the eyes of Dana—a Black woman living in 1976—who finds herself repeatedly pulled through time to the slave plantation of one of her ancestors in 1815. Time travel is used with enormous poignancy to explore race, gender and power dynamics through the eyes of a woman with modern sensibilities: a woman who cannot escape the time she has been thrown into, or the inevitable pain and struggle that comes with it. Every character feels alive, every story is explored and compassion is woven into every line: even for the brutal white plantation owners, who also seem caught in a time they cannot escape from. An astonishing book, as well as a vibrant and fascinating narrative that pulls the reader backwards in time along with its heroine.
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
No list about time travel would be complete without a nod to what is generally considered the first book to popularize the concept, as well as the first to coin the term ‘time-machine’. In his novella, H.G. Wells uses the eponymous Time Traveller—never given a name—to question the “fourth dimension,” and a human’s ability to travel through time as well as space. He uses time travel to move only forward, thus the book becomes a searing social dystopian examination of what human society—and the earth itself—will eventually become if it continues on the same path, and peers at the living standards of the working class through the lens of the underground Morlocks. Weird, dark, morbid but brilliant, this book opened up a brand new genre and still has enormous power.
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffeneger
The focus of The Time Traveler’s Wife is love, predominantly from the perspective of the person who doesn’t time-travel: who is, essentially, left behind with the consequences. The connection between Henry, a man with a genetic condition that causes him to time-travel, and Clare—the woman he falls in love with—feels so real, as does the heartbreak, but it is the impact of waiting that really stands out: a sense of longing for a person, or a time, that has been or yet to come.
Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore
An incredibly entertaining and poignant novel, Oona is a unique character: one gifted—or cursed—with experiencing each year of her life in the wrong order: hopping forwards and backwards in time, and attempting to piece it together into one cohesive whole. It’s a novel that explores the impact our life choices have on us, externally and internally, and allows the characters to develop organically on the inside, even as her outside jumps around. It also has immense fun with technology, the use of ‘seeing the future’ to financially profit, and how foresight doesn’t necessarily prevent it all happening again, but this is a book that predominantly focuses on the importance of making mistakes, as well as embracing every age of being human.
__________________________________
Cassandra in Reverse by Holly Smale is available from MIRA Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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10 Time Travel Story Ideas with a Mystery
- Posted on 29 Dec, 2023
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The Missing Artifact: In the year 3023, a renowned historian discovers an ancient relic rumored to possess time-traveling capabilities. Desperate to uncover its secrets, they embark on a journey through different eras, tracing the artifact’s origins. However, each leap through time reveals cryptic clues and unsolved mysteries, leading them on a perplexing trail where the artifact’s true purpose and the enigmatic figures behind its creation remain elusive.
The Time Loop Enigma: A physicist accidentally triggers a temporal loop, reliving the same day in various historical periods. As he navigates through different epochs, strange anomalies and clues emerge, suggesting a hidden pattern in the loop’s occurrences. The mystery deepens as they encounter echoes of their actions across time, uncovering a web of interconnected events that may hold the key to breaking free from the loop.
The Vanishing Colony: A group of time-traveling explorers visits an early American colony only to find it inexplicably deserted. Unraveling the mystery leads them through a series of temporal jumps, encountering clues left behind by the vanished settlers that hint at a secret society practicing temporal manipulation. Pursuing the truth puts them in a race against time as they navigate through history to prevent a catastrophic alteration of the timeline.
The Ghost Ship Expedition: A team of historians discovers an ancient maritime vessel that vanished without a trace centuries ago. As they investigate the ship’s disappearance, they find themselves inadvertently transported back to the ship’s final voyage. The eerie atmosphere and spectral occurrences hint at a temporal anomaly, forcing them to solve the mystery of the ship’s fate before they become trapped in the past.
The Time Traveler’s Journal: A researcher stumbles upon a journal filled with detailed accounts of time travel experiences. The journal’s author remains a mystery, but their accounts depict visits to pivotal moments in history. As the researcher follows the journal’s clues, they uncover a clandestine organization guarding the secrets of time travel, facing moral dilemmas and paradoxes along the way.
The Anachronistic Artifacts: An archaeologist unearths ancient artifacts that seemingly belong to different time periods. Each artifact possesses advanced technology far beyond its era, hinting at a time-traveling civilization. Investigating further, the archaeologist discovers a clandestine society manipulating history for their gain, prompting a high-stakes confrontation across multiple timelines.
The Time Crime Investigation: In a future where time travel is regulated, a detective specialized in temporal crimes investigates anomalies disrupting the timeline. They follow a trail of paradoxes and anomalies, uncovering a rogue time traveler manipulating historical events for personal gain. Pursuing the culprit leads the detective through a maze of altered realities, challenging their understanding of cause and effect.
The Temporal Conundrum: A group of friends accidentally discovers a device that allows brief jumps through time. However, their experiments spiral out of control, causing rifts in the temporal fabric. As they struggle to mend the fractures, they encounter versions of themselves from alternate timelines, forcing them to confront the consequences of their actions and the existential mysteries of multiple realities.
The Time Heist: In a daring attempt to rectify historical injustices, a team plans a heist across different eras to retrieve stolen artifacts and return them to their rightful place in history. As they navigate through various time periods, they uncover a hidden agenda behind the thefts, leading to a confrontation with a shadowy figure manipulating the timeline for personal gain.
The Time-Traveling Detective Agency: Operating under the radar, a clandestine detective agency specializes in solving cases that transcend time. They receive cryptic requests for assistance from across different historical periods, investigating crimes with connections across centuries. Each case unravels a deeper conspiracy linked to a mysterious figure manipulating events from the shadows, challenging the agency’s resolve and ethical boundaries.
Let us know what you think about our ideas! Comment below to give us your opinion, add onto an existing idea, or submit one of your own!
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20 Must-Read Time Travel Books
Dana lives in East Haven, CT. She works for that Ivy League institution down the street and tries to read as many books as possible in her free time. Audiobooks and print books get equal love. Also, she unapologetically judges books by their covers and makes way too many playlists (c'mon, books need a soundtrack too!). Follow her on Twitter @lucyhenley115 .
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Hear me out, there’s a sub-genre of sci-fi that that has a touch of anything you could ever want: time travel books. The best time travel books come in all packages: adventure, historical fiction, romance, social commentary, mystery, humor, poetry. It really has it all. So, if you can still recite the opening credits of Quantum Leap from memory, this list is for you. Enjoy these must-read time travel books.
Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen
Kin is a time-traveling agent from the year 2142 who gets stuck in 1990s San Francisco after a botched mission, and his rescue team shows up 18 years too late after he’s already built a life for himself. Here and Now and Then has all those warm and fuzzy sci-fi feels with just the right amount of Doctor Who level angst . Kin dealing with the circumstances of time travel and the consequences it brings about is super compelling and emotional and so, so worthy of a Murray Gold score.
The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz
In the world of Another Timeline , time travel has been around since forever in the form of a geologic phenomena known as the “Machines.” Tess belongs to a group called the Daughters of Harriett, determined to make the future better for women by editing the timeline at key moments in history. They run up against the misogynistic group called the Comstockers working towards the opposite goal. There’s time travel, murder, punk rock concerts, nerd references, and an edit war. As Newitz recently said in an extra of their podcast, Our Opinions Are Correct , history is a “synthesis of good fuckery” and I can’t think of a better phrase to describe this book than that.
An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim
There is a deadly flu pandemic in America. Polly’s boyfriend Frank gets sick and she signs up for a one-way ticket to the future to work off the cost of Frank’s cure. They agree to meet up in the future, but Polly is rerouted to a later time where America is divided and she has no connections and no money. This is a really gorgeously written and heart-wrenching story about time travel, dystopian society, the brutality of survival in an unfamiliar world, and a character study of a normal person dealing with it all.
Kindred by Octavia Butler
Dana is an African American woman celebrating her birthday in 1976 California when she is pulled through time to Antebellum Maryland. She saves a young white boy named Rufus from drowning and finds herself staring down the barrel of his father’s rifle. She is pulled back to her present just in time to save her life, appearing back in her living room soaked and muddy. She is repeatedly pulled back to the past encountering the same young man. Over the course of these harrowing episodes, Dana realizes her connection to Rufus and the challenge she is faced with. This is a brilliant, thought-provoking, and intense book that is required reading for so many reasons least of which is time travel.
Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield
Alice Payne Arrives is a quick romp through time with some truly amazing female characters. Alice Payne is a half-black queer woman in 1788 England living in her father’s deteriorating mansion. She’s also a notorious masked highway robber and her partner is an inventor. Prudence is a professional time traveler from the 22nd century working fruitlessly to try and change one small event in 1884. The two women cross paths and work together to put Prudence’s plan to end time travel in motion. This novella packs a lot of action and time travel goodness and there’s a sequel called Alice Payne Rides . It also contains one of the realest lines of any of the time travel books I’ve read: “2016’s completely fucked.”
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
Charles Yu is a time machine repairman searching for his missing father, “accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and Ed, a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog.” He receives a book from his future self that could help him locate his father. The book is called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and he wrote it. Hi, this book is super cool, fun, clever, and weird in the best ways. It has the highest distinction I can give a sci-fi book and that is warm and fuzzy.
The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas
Four female scientists invent time travel in 1967. One of the scientists, Bee, suffers a mental breakdown just before they’re about to go public with their findings. The other three exile Bee from the project to save face. Fifty years later time travel is a normal part of life and a huge business. It’s regulated by the Conclave, founded by three of the original scientists, which seeks to self govern all aspects of time travel. The Psychology of Time Travel serves up time travel with a locked-door mystery and the payoff of alternating perspectives and timelines slowly coming together.
The River of No Return by Bee Ridgeway
At the moment of his death on a Napoleonic battlefield, Lord Nicholas Falcott wakes up in the 21st century. He’s recruited by a time travel agency known as The Guild for training. Julia Percy lives in 1815 England and after the death of her grandfather seeks to find her place in a world where meddling with time is commonplace. There’s a whole lot going on here: romance, betrayal, double-agents, and drawing on emotion to facilitate time jumps, leading to my favorite line: “Though really they were probably both insane. Two grown men dressed up like Mr. Darcy, holding hands behind a tree, trying to pull themselves by the heart strings back to the long ago.”
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Blue and Red are fighting on opposite sides of an endless time war. They begin to exchange letters on the battlefield, first as a boast, then as an exploration of friendship across enemy lines, and finally as a romance. I have previously described this as “poetic sci-fi realness.” I could be more professional and say that this is an epistolary work of rival agents forming a bond despite their opposition, but like I can’t okay. This book is so intricate and beautiful and the letters are not on paper, they could be in the dregs of a teacup or the rings of a tree, and I’m not crying you’re crying.
All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai
Tom is a misfit in a utopian world, and he goes back in time and accidentally screws up the future. This mishap leaves him stranded in our 2016, but what we think of as the real world is a dystopian wasteland to Tom. He eventually finds different versions of everything he knows and maybe even his soulmate. Tom has to decide whether to fix the timeline and bring back utopia or live in this new version of the world he’s created. Probably me as a time traveler, tbh.
The Fire Opal Mechanism by Fran Wilde
The Fire Opal Mechanism is technically a sequel to The Jewel and Her Lapidary , but it can definitely be read as a stand-alone. Ania is a librarian at the last university desperately trying to save as many books as she can. All the other universities have fallen to the Pressman, an extremist group bent on destroying all the world’s books and replacing them with a generic, self-updating compendium available to everyone regardless of economic class. Jorit, branded a thief, is on the run just trying to survive long enough to afford passage on a ship away from all these problems. They team up and inadvertently discover time travel, but will it help them fix the present? This is really beautifully written, especially the passages about books: “Touching a book, for Ania, was like touching a person’s fingertips across the years. She could feel a pulse, a passion for the knowledge the book contained.”
The Silver Wind by Nina Allan
The Silver Wind is a series of stories linked by the character Martin Newland. Each story is like an alternate universe brought about by time machines and time travel. As Allan describes on her website : “While the overarching theme of this book might properly be found in Martin’s struggle with infinity, its individual chapters deal with those small acts of creative defiance that determine our transcendence of ordinary mortality.” A thoroughly thought-provoking déjà vu experience.
What the Wind Knows by Amy Harmon
Anne Gallagher travels to Ireland to scatter the ashes of her beloved grandfather. She is pulled back in time to the Ireland of 1921 and is mistaken as the long-lost mother of a young boy. She assumes this identity and is drawn into the lives of those around her and the political unrest of the time. It’s a historical romance perfect for fans of Outlander.
The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
What if time travel fell into the hands of a criminal? The Shining Girls is the story of serial killer named Harper Curtis who stumbles upon an abandoned house in Depression-era Chicago that allows him to travel in time. He chooses his victims and visits them at different times of their lives before returning for the kill. Kirby survives Harper’s attack and, along with a former homicide reporter, tries to unravel the mystery before anyone else dies. This book is wild, W-I-L-D. There’s a lot of violence, so it might not be for everyone, but it’s such an interesting take on the time travel story.
Version Control by Dexter Palmer
Set in the near-future, Rebecca works in the customer support department of the dating site where she met her husband Phillip. He is a scientist building a causality violation device (definitely not a time machine!). But Rebecca can’t help but feel that there’s something wrong with the present. So, this is kind of about living with technology and kind of about relationships and overcoming tragedy and also time travel. Intelligent and poignant but make it sci-fi.
How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North
Starting out with an FAQ guide to your rented time machine, How to Invent Everything humorously goes through the history of well, everything. From how to determine what time period you have landed and are now stuck in to inventing language and electricity it’s a very Hitchhiker’s Guide -ish look at history presented as a guide for creating the things you’ll miss when you’re stranded in an earlier timeline than your own.
Time After Time by Lisa Grunwald
It’s 1937 and Joe Reynolds is a hard-working railroad man at Grand Central Station. Nora Lansing is an aspiring artist and the last thing she remembers is her train crashing in 1925. They meet at the big clock and Joe walks Nora home, but she disappears in the street. She reappears one year later and meets Joe again. Realizing she’s jumping in time and trapped in Grand Central for mysterious reasons that might have something to do with Manhattanhenge, Nora and Joe try to unravel the mystery before she disappears again. For me this was a time travel books mashup of The Clock meets Kate & Leopold meets Gentleman in Moscow and I was very about it.
TimeKeeper by Tara Sim
TimeKeeper takes place in an alternate Victorian world where time is controlled by clock towers. Danny is a young clock mechanic enamored with his new apprentice, who turns out to be the Enfield clock spirit, Colton. Bombings at other towers start to occur and broken clocks mean the towns they oversee will be frozen in time. The romance between Danny and Colton is very adorable and the race against literal time is an exciting backdrop. It’s the first in a trilogy.
Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick
If you’re a time travel fan then this sentence from the publisher’s summary is sure to get you excited, “World-renowned paleontologist Richard Leyster’s universe changed forever the day a stranger named Griffin walked into his office with a remarkable job offer…and an ice cooler containing the head of a freshly killed Stegosaurus.” Time travel allows a group of scientists to go back and study dinosaurs up close in their natural environment. If you are now humming the Jurassic Park theme, please know, So. Am. I.
Just One Damned Thing After Another (Chronicles of St. Mary’s) by Jodi Taylor
There is so much going on in this whirlwind adventure that if you blink you’ll miss a major plot point. Just One Damned Thing After Another is just the first book in a series of the adventures of St. Mary’s Institute of Historical Research as they rattle around through time trying to answer history’s unanswered questions. There are currently 11 books published and forthcoming and a ton of short stories that fill in the blanks between adventures. Taylor also has a spinoff time travel series, The Time Police, with the first book just out called Doing Time . It follows three hapless new time police recruits as they try to keep the timeline straight.
Looking for more of the best time travel books? Check out these timey-wimey posts:
Time Travel Romances
7 of the Best Alternate Timeline Books
The Lack of Black Characters in Time Travel Romance
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The 10 best time travel novels
Posted by Mal Warwick | Reading Recommendations , Science Fiction | 0
Time travel is one of the most familiar tropes in science fiction. Many scholars trace the idea to Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol (1843) and Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). ( Others differ , finding antecedents as early as 1733 in Samuel Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century .) But time travel’s first occurrence in modern science fiction came in 1895 with the publication of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine .
Estimated reading time: 13 minutes
Early in the Golden Age of Science Fiction , time travel anchored popular works such as L. Sprague de Camp’s novel, Lest Darkness Fall (1939), Robert Heinlein’s By His Bootstraps (1941), and A.E. van Vogt’s The Seesaw (1941). Prominent later examples include Isaac Asimov’s A Pebble in Time (1950), Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder (1952), Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956), Harry Harrison’s The Technicolor Time Machine (1967), and Robert Silverberg’s Hawksbill Station (1968). During the first half-century of modern science fiction, it was rare for any well-established author not to write at least one time travel novel. Many wrote several.
Having read many of the time travel stories published during the genre’s early years, I’ve concentrated largely on more recent works. Below I’m listing the best of those I’ve encountered so far. They’re listed in alphabetical order by the authors’ last names.
This post was updated on November 13, 2023.
The best time travel novels
Timescape by Gregory Benford (1980) 514 pages ★★★★☆ – An ingenious twist on time travel
Physics can drive you crazy. Solid matter isn’t solid . Black holes don’t just make matter and light disappear; they suck up information, too. And Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead at the same time. Go figure. And if paradoxes like these rattle your nerves, you may want to avoid reading Gregory Benford’s masterful hard-science-fiction novel about time travel, Timescape . It’s a brilliant story, and gracefully written. But it will challenge your reading comprehension unless you’re well versed in contemporary physics.
Timescape is a story of unintended consequences, of husbands and wives, of environmental collapse, and of academic politics. But above all it’s an account of how scientific research is conducted in the age of Big Science. And Benford indulges his characters’ tendency to think aloud about the most profound questions in theoretical physics. It’s far above the level of most people’s understanding, or at least above mine. But the story at the core of this novel is suspenseful to a fault and beautifully executed. Read more .
Fata Morgana by Steven R. Boyett and Ken Mitchroney (2017) 384 pages ★★★★☆ – Clever plot twists in a time travel tale
Science fiction authors love time travel stories, because it affords them abundant opportunities to build plots full of clever plot twists and turns. Sometimes the surprises are really anything but shocking. But that’s not the case with the ingenious tale Steven R. Boyett and Ken Mitchroney have written under the title Fata Morgana . Perhaps someone more discerning than I am could suss out the plot twists in advance, but I was taken aback when the reality descended on me of what really happens in this well-paced story.
In several opening chapters, Boyett and Mitchroney paint a detailed and engrossing picture of the experience of an American bomber crew based in England during World War II. Those chapters read like a well-researched and capably written war story. I read a great deal about World War II, but what I found here was revealing. In fact, both the beginning and the end of this book, which deal with the bomber crew’s experiences during the war, are exceptionally good. And the clever plot twists add a layer of fun. Read more .
Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen (2019) 336 pages ★★★★☆ – A novel treatment of time travel in this promising science fiction debut
Time travel is one of the themes most commonly found in classic science fiction. But it’s taken a back seat in recent years to dystopian novels and space opera, not to mention epic fantasy (which I don’t consider science fiction at all). Of course, time travel back to the past has no basis in known science (although relativity makes time travel forward quite easy). But the paradoxes that open up in any logical treatment of the subject offer a wealth of possible plots. That’s the opening for suspense that Mike Chen found in his promising science fiction debut, Here and Now and Then . Read more .
New Pompeii by Daniel Godfrey (2016) 352 pages ★★★★☆ – It’s not time travel. But it looks like it.
In a brief prologue, we meet Manius Calpurnius Barbatus, duumvir (co-ruler) of Pompeii, and his young adult daughter, Calpurnia. They are cowering in the mounting ashfall from Mt. Vesuvius as it gradually buries their town. Much will happen before we meet them again. But then they will play major roles in this intriguing story.
On one track in the story, a young woman named Kirsten Chapman faces years of terror. She repeatedly finds herself submerged in a bathtub in a locked room, only to be jerked back there soon after she emerges. On the other, major track, a young history graduate student named Nick Houghton faces the ruin of his career. Cutbacks decimate the faculty and fellowship funds at his “third-rate university” in England, and he is certain to lose his stipend. But Nick is not trapped in his depressing reality. For suddenly he finds himself employed by a company called Novus Particles UK LLP, or NovusPart, which has somehow muddled into a way to meddle with the timeline. Read more .
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel (2022) 218 pages ★★★★★ – Emily St. John Mandel writes about a pandemic again
Emily St. John Mandel came to the attention of millions of readers worldwide with the publication of her third novel, Station Eleven . The book has sold at least 1.5 million copies and elevated Mandel to the ranks of superstar status in the literary firmament. Perhaps it was foreordained that a beautifully written novel about a pandemic would sell so well while COVID-19 ran rampant across the globe. And, with COVID still upending lives everywhere, we might expect that her sixth novel, Sea of Tranquility , which is also about a pandemic, would hit the bestseller lists, too.
Mandel writes science fiction with the science largely in the background. In Sea of Tranquility , she uses the time-honored sci-fi device of time travel to illuminate the lives of a handful of characters who are linked together across five centuries. Time travel is a given in the story, simply an artifact of the reality Mandel imagines. It’s the characters we care about as we shuttle back and forth from 1912 to 2020 to 2203 to 2401. The story hangs on a pandemic, but it, too, is merely a pivot in the plot.
The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz (2019) 344 pages ★★★★☆ – Alternate feminist history by a gifted science fiction author
What is history, and how does it work? We know, of course, that history isn’t fixed and immutable. It’s subject to the revision and reinterpretation of successive waves of scholars. Sometimes the fresh approach is based on new information that comes to light. But more often what we call history is merely a story historians tell us using carefully selected facts filtered through the cloudy lens of their own values and beliefs. We know, too, that history doesn’t travel in straight lines. But what makes it swerve? Indeed, how does change happen? Is it the product of the individual genius of so-called Great Men or the inevitable outcome of the ideas and social movements that engage a nation or an era? These are among the questions explored in Annalee Newitz’s thought-provoking feminist alternate history, The Future of Another Timeline . Read more .
The Continuum (Place in Time #1) by Wendy Nikel (2018) 174 pages ★★★★☆ – An ingenious take on time travel
Novels about time travel frequently twist themselves into knots about the paradox that comes into play when travelers attempt to change something in the past that might mean they would never have been born. In The Continuum , the first of a series by science fiction newcomer Wendy Nikel, the grandfather paradox never surfaces . . . but somehow it seems that it ought to. The novel is a truly original take on time travel.
Here’s what you need to know about Wendy Nikel’s universe:
- The discoverer of time travel, a certain Dr. Wells, has opened the Place in Time Travel Agency, or PITTA.
- You can only travel back in time to dates that are one or more centuries in the past on precisely the same day, time, and place from which you leave.
- To return to the present, you press your thumb on a small spherical device called a Wormhole. So, be sure not to lose it! (As I said, this is an original take on time travel.)
- But you’re not supposed to travel back to key turning points in history. Those are Black Dates. They’re a no-no.
- The heroine of this novel is young Elise Morley, who is a Retrieval Specialist for PITTA. Her job it is to rescue clients who have disregarded the rules by going to when they shouldn’t or attempting to overstay their time in the past. Read more .
Mammoth by John Varley— A novel about time travel featuring wooly mammoths and an eccentric billionaire
The concept of time travel as it’s typically treated in science fiction is a straightforward affair. You’ll find that in almost any novel about time travel. Somebody figures out how to build a “time machine,” steps into the chamber, and—presto, change-o—ends up somewhere back or forward in time. Maybe a hundred years in the past or future, maybe 100,000. In any case, it’s all a matter of finding a way to locate a particular spot on the continuum of time and violating the laws of physics to get there. Well, if you’re skeptical, as I certainly am, you’ll find an entirely different view of time and time travel in John Varley’s supremely entertaining novel, Mammoth . And along the way you’ll learn a good deal about the spectacular fauna of North America in the Pleistocene Era more than 12,000 years ago. Oh, and by the way, there’s also hidden in the text a novel explanation for UFOs, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Read more .
Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel #2 of 5) by Connie Willis— A time travel novel about the Black Death
What do we know about the past, and how do we know it? Historians rely largely on the contemporaneous written records they call primary sources . But other disciplines make important contributions to history as well, including archaeology, physics, and genetics. Still, what they learn comes exclusively from what remains of the past. What if historians could learn first-hand by sending scholars into previous centuries to compare the historical record to the reality? Award-winning author Connie Willis explores that idea in her monumental 1992 science fiction tale, The Doomsday Book , a novel about the Black Death.
Kivrin Engle is a bright and adventurous first-year student in medieval history at Oxford’s Brasenose College . In the mid-21st century, time travel is well established as a method for historians to study conditions over the past four or five hundred years, and Kivrin is eager to explore 14th-century England. Together with the acting head of medieval studies, Mr. Gilchrist, and her history tutor at Balliol College , Mr. Dunworthy, she develops a plan for a two-week visit in 1320, farther back than others have previously gone. Her target is the village of Skendgate, near the city of Bath in the country’s far southwest. Unfortunately for all concerned, everything goes wrong when Kivrin sets out for the past. Read more .
Blackout (Oxford Time Travel #4 of 5) by Connie Willis (2010) 650 pages ★★★★☆— Historians study World War II in person
History is often an unreliable guide to the past. Documents go missing or remain classified. Records may be erroneous—or even have been written to be misleading. And historians inevitably build their own prejudices and expectations into their interpretation of past events. How extraordinary it might be, then, for an historian to travel back in time and observe those events in person as they unfold. That’s the conceit at the heart of Connie Willis ‘ award-winning novels about mid-21st century Oxford historians who do exactly that. Blackout is the first of a pair of those novels that trace the adventures of three young historians as they travel in time to study World War II as it happened. Read more .
Time travel novels that didn’t make the grade
Of course, I’ve read a lot more time travel stories than these few. I’m listing above only the best ones I’ve come across in recent years. Below, however, are several additional time travel novels I’ve read and reviewed that don’t merit inclusion above.
Permafrost by Alastair Reynolds (2019) 178 pages ★★★☆☆ – Time travel and the apocalypse
The Corridors of Time by Poul Anderson (1965) 186 pages ★★★☆☆ – A legendary sci-fi author makes a mess of time travel
Feedback (First Contact # 3) by Peter Cawdron (2014) 462 pages ★★★☆☆ – Time travel dominates this tale of First Contact
Quantum Time (Quantum #3) by Douglas Phillips (2019) 371 pages ★★★★☆— An entertaining tale of time travel
Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg (1967) 166 pages ★★★★☆ – A science fiction Grand Master gets it wrong about the future
Just One Damned Thing After Another (Chronicles of St. Mary’s #1) by Jodi Taylor (2013) 324 pages ★★★★☆ – Historians blunder about in the past in this time travel story
In addition to these five novels I gave lower ratings, there are two highly touted books I couldn’t even finish. Connie Willis’ All Clear , the sequel to Blackout , won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. But I couldn’t get past chapter 3. And Time and Again by Jack Finney, which Stephen King calls “the time travel novel,” was so filled with trivial detail that I gave up about halfway through.
For related reading
For more good reading, check out:
- These novels won both Hugo and Nebula Awards
- The ultimate guide to the all-time best science fiction novels
- 10 top science fiction novels
- The five best First Contact novels
- Seven new science fiction authors worth reading
- The top 10 dystopian novels
And you can always find my most popular reviews, and the most recent ones, on the Home Page .
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40 Best Time Travel Books To Read Right Now (2024)
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Travel back in time with the best time travel books, including engrossing thrillers, romance, contemporary lit, and mind-bending sci-fi.
Table of Contents
Best Time Travel Books
Books about time travel promise to not only transport you across time periods and space – Doctor Who-style – but also tesser you into new dimensions and around the world. Most readers already know about classics like The Time Traveler’s Wife , A Christmas Carol , and The Time Machine .
For romance time travel, grab In A Holidaze or One Last Stop . For contemporary and new time travel books, Haig’s The Midnight Library and Serle’s In Five Years captivated our hearts and minds.
Recursion re-kindled our love for science fiction, and Ruby Red transported us to 18th-century London. Books like Displacement promise intuitive and raw commentary about generational trauma and racism in graphic novel form.
Below, find the best time travel novels across genres for adults and teens, including history, romance, classics, sci-fi, YA, and thrilling fiction. Get ready to travel in the blink of an eye, and be sure to let us know your favorites in the comments. Let’s get started!
Contemporary & Literary Fiction
If you enjoy contemporary and literary fiction filled with strong main characters, these are some of the best books in the time travel genre. Uncover new releases as well as books on the bestseller lists. Of course, we’ll share a few lesser-known gems too.
In Five Years by Rebecca Serle
Would your life change if you had one seemingly real dream or premonition? What if some key facts were missing but you had no idea? Can we change the future?
One of the best books about time travel and friendship, don’t skip In Five Years . In fact, we read this New York City-based novel in half a day. Have the tissue box ready.
Dannie nails an important job interview and is hoping to get engaged. Of course, this is all a part of her perfect 5-year plan. Dannie has arranged every minute of her life ever since her brother died in a drunk driving accident.
On the night of Dannie’s “scheduled” engagement, she falls asleep only to have a vision of herself 5 years into the future in the arms of another man. Did she just time travel or could this be a dream? When Dannie arrives back in 2020, her life goes back to normal. …That is until she meets the man from her dream.
We were expecting In Five Years to be a time travel romance story; however, this is a different type of love and one of the best books about strong friendships .
Read In Five Years : Amazon | Goodreads
Before the coffee gets cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Translated by Geoffrey Trousselot | We just love Japanese literature . One of the most debated time travel books among our readers – you’ll either love it or hate it – Before the coffee gets cold takes place at a cafe in Tokyo, Japan.
Along with coffee, this 140-year-old, back-alley cafe lets visitors travel back in time. Four visitors at the cafe are hoping to time travel to see someone for the last (or first) time. The way each patron views the cafe says a lot about them. The details and repetition are everything.
True to the title, visits may only last as long as it takes for the coffee to grow cold. If they don’t finish their coffee in time, there are ghostly consequences.
Before the coffee gets cold asks, who would you want to see one last time, and what issues you would confront?
Along with the many rules of time travel, these visitors are warned that the present will not change. Would you still travel back knowing this? Can something, anything, still change – even within you?
The story has a drop of humor with a beautiful message. We shed a tear or two. Discover even more terrific and thought-provoking Japanese fantasy novels here .
Read Before the coffee gets cold : Amazon | Goodreads
If you are looking for the most inspiring take on time travel in books, Haig’s The Midnight Library is it. This is one of those profound stories that make you think more deeply . TWs for pet death (early on) and suicide ideation.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Imagine if you could see your other possible lives and fix your regrets. Would that path be better? Would these changes make you happier?
Set in Bedford, England, and at a library , Nora answers these questions as she intentionally overdoses on pills. Caught in the Midnight Library – a purgatory of sorts – Nora explores books filled with the ways her life could have turned out. She tries on these alternative lives, pursuing different dreams, marrying different people, and realizing that some parts of her root life were not as they seemed on the surface.
Find hope and simplicity in one of the most authentic and heaviest time travel novels on this list. Haig addresses mental health through a new lens that is both beautiful and moving.
With a team full of avid readers and librarians, discover our top selections featuring more books about books .
Read The Midnight Library : Amazon | Goodreads
The Two Lives of Lydia Bird by Josie Silver
Some of the best time travel books are those with alternate realities, including The Two Lives of Lydia Bird . There are content warnings for prescription pill addiction and more.
Set in England, Lydia and Freddie are planning their marriage when the unthinkable happens. Freddie dies in a car accident on the way to Lydia’s birthday dinner. In a matter of seconds, Lydia’s world falls apart. She isn’t sure how she will survive. When Lydia starts taking magical pink sleeping pills, she enters an alternate universe where Freddie is alive and well.
Caught between her dream world and real life, Lydia must decide if she will give in to her addiction – living in a temporary fantasy world – or give it up completely.
While the repetitive and predictable plot drags a bit – slightly hurting the pacing – the overall story shows emotional growth and the nature of healing after loss. And, as Lydia soon learns via her dreams, no love is perfect. Maybe her future was destined to be different anyway, which is reminiscent of Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library .
Read The Two Lives of Lydia Bird Jose Silver : Amazon | Goodreads
The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August by Claire North
If you are looking for more suspenseful books about time travel and like Groundhog Day , check out The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. However, this is not just one day on repeat; instead, this is a lifetime.
Harry August is repeatedly reborn into the same life, retaining his memories each time. No matter what Harry does or says, when he lands on his deathbed, he always returns back to his childhood, again and again. On the verge of his eleventh death, though, a girl changes the course of his life. He must use his accumulated wisdom to prevent catastrophe.
Read The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August : Amazon | Goodreads
An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim
When it comes to time travel books, An Ocean of Minutes is one of the most original takes about time travel’s effects on alternate history.
Polly and Frank are deeply in love in 1981 when a pandemic devastates the planet. By the end of 1981, time travel (invented in this alternate reality in 1993) has been made available.
Because of this invention, individuals can sign on to work for the TimeRaiser corporation in order to escape or save their loved ones in the present. Due to a flaw in the technology, though, they can only transport people for 12 years. This prevents them from stopping the pandemic by just 6 months.
When Frank gets ill, Polly signs up, both agreeing they will meet back up in 1993. Now alone in the future, Polly has to learn to navigate a world she has less than zero preparation for. In this world, she is a time refugee, bonded to TimeRaiser without a physical cent to her name.
Lim uses the time travel mechanic to cleverly explore the subject of immigration, forcing the reader to follow Polly blindly into a world they should know, but don’t. This is what makes An Ocean of Minutes one of the most unique time travel novels on this reading list.
Read An Ocean of Minutes : Amazon | Goodreads
Time Travel In Science Fiction
For fantasy and sci-fi lovers, take a quantum leap into fictional worlds, quantum physics, possible futures, black holes, and endless possibilities. See if you can tell the difference between the real world and new dimensions.
Recursion by Blake Crouch
Recursion is one of our all-time favorite time travel books to gift to dads who love sci-fi. Can you tell what we gave our dad for Christmas one year?
In Recursion, no one actually physically time travels – well, sort of. Instead, memories become the time-traveling reality.
Detective Barry Sutton is investigating False Memory Syndrome. Neuroscientist Helena Smith might have the answers he needs. The disease drives people crazy – and to their deaths – by causing them to remember entire lives that aren’t theirs. Or are they!?
All goes to heck when the government gets its hands on this mind-blowing technology. Can Barry and Helena stop this endless loop?
Recursion is also a (2019) Goodreads Best Book for Science Fiction.
Read Recursion : Amazon | Goodreads
This Is How You Lose The War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar
A Goodreads runner-up for one of the best science fiction novels (of 2019) – and one of the shortest time travel novels on this list – This Is How You Lose The Time War follows two warring time-traveling agents falling in love through a letter exchange.
Red and Blue have nothing in common except that they travel across time and space and are alone. Their growing and forbidden love is punishable by death and their agencies might be onto them.
In a somewhat beautiful yet bizarre story, we watch as Red and Blue slowly fall for each other and confess their love. They engage in playful banter and nicknames. Every shade of red and blue reminds them of each other.
The first half of the novel is a bit abstract. You might wonder what the heck you’ve gotten yourself into. However, once you get your feet planted firmly on the ground of the plot, the story picks up and starts making more sense.
We can’t promise you’ll love or even understand This Is How You Lose The Time War – we aren’t sure we do. However, this is truly one of the most unique sci-fi and LGBTQ+ time travel romance books on this reading list – written by two authors. Also, maybe crack out the dictionary…
Explore even more of the best LGBTQ+ fantasy books to read next.
Read This Is How You Lose The War : Amazon | Goodreads
All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai
A debut novel, All Our Wrong Todays is both a humorous and entertaining time travel book that speaks to how we become who we are.
In 2016, technology perfected the world for Tom Barren. However, we all know that perfection doesn’t equate to happiness. Barren has lost his girlfriend, and he just happens to own a time machine… Now, Barren has to decide if he wants to keep his new, manipulated future or if he just wants to go back home to his depressing but normal life.
Read All Our Wrong Todays : Amazon | Goodreads
Here And Now And Then by Mike Chen
Imagine getting trapped in time and starting over. That’s exactly what happens to IT worker, Kin Stewart, in one of the bestselling science fiction time travel books, Here And Now And Then .
Stewart has two lives since he is a displaced time-traveling agent stuck in San Francisco in the 1990s. He has a family that knows nothing about his past; or, should we say future. When a rescue team arrives to take him back, Stewart has to decide what he is willing to risk for his new family.
Here And Now And Then is a time travel book filled with emotional depth surrounding themes of bonds, identity, and sacrifice. Find even more books set in San Francisco, California (and more!).
Read Here And Now And Then : Amazon | Goodreads
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is one of the most unusual books about time travel out there.
Our protagonist Charles Yu lives in a world where time travel exists and is readily available to the average person. And yes, he is named after the author, and yes, it is as meta as it sounds; and yes, this is just the beginning of this speculative fiction time travel book.
Charles Yu’s day job is spent repairing time machines for Time Warner Time. But in his free time, he tries to help the people who use time travel to do so safely and to counsel them if things have gone wrong.
It’s no surprise that Charles’ entire life revolves around time travel since his father invented the technology many years ago. And then he disappeared. In fact, Charles is also trying to find out just what happened to his dad, and where – or when – he’s gone.
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe won’t be for everyone, but it’s one of the best time travel books if you want delightfully meta, fantastically non-linear, and very very weird.
Read How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe : Amazon | Goodreads
The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez
For beautiful, lyrical time travel novels about found family and love, The Vanished Birds is a must-read.
Nia Imani exists outside of time and space. She travels in and out of the world through a pocket of time with her space crew. They emerge to trade or sell goods every eight months. But eight months for them is 15 years for everyone else.
She has lived this way for hundreds of years. Though she has her crew, and there are people she shares connections with sporadically throughout their lives, she is lonely. And although she barely ages, she watches friends and lovers grow old and die.
One such person is Kaeda, who meets Nia for the first time when he is 7. The next time he sees her, he has aged 15 years, while she is only months older. She continues to come every 15 years of his life, always looking the same.
Then one day a mysterious, mute boy falls from the sky into Nia’s life. His name is Ahro, and there’s something extra special about him. Something that could revolutionize space travel forever. And now there might be people after Ahro who won’t love him the way Nia does.
If you love a character-driven book with exquisite prose – and a few time warps – this is one of the best time travel books for you.
Read The Vanished Birds : Amazon | Goodreads
Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
Night Watch is one of the most fun and thrilling books about time travel. It’s also a bit ridiculous and very very British.
Why can’t policing just be simple? All Sam Vimes wanted to do was capture and arrest a dangerous murderer. But thanks to those damned wizards and their experiments, he and the killer have both been accidentally thrown back in time thirty years.
And to top it off, the man who would have become a mentor to young Sam Vimes in the past has been killed in the process! How’s Vimes going to get this all sorted out?
The City Watch he’s spent years improving is just a bunch of semi-competent volunteers at this point. He’s got no money, no clothes, and no friends. But at least he’s making enemies fast. Can he catch the killer, stop history from not repeating itself, and get home to his family? Oh, and the city’s about to dissolve into civil war. Typical.
Night Watch is perfect if you prefer your time travel books to be fantasy-based.
P.S. There may be mild spoilers for previous books in the Discworld series, but this can be read as a standalone. And if you only ever read one Discworld novel, this is one of the best there is – and so far the only one of the Discworld books with time travel!
Read Night Watch : Amazon | Goodreads
The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz
The Future of Another Timeline is one of the few time travel books to explore history through a feminist lens.
In 1992, Beth – a high school senior – and her friends Heather, Lizzy, and Soojin attend a riot grrl concert with Heather’s boyfriend Scott. But afterward, one of Scott’s not-so-funny sexist jokes gets out of hand and Lizzy accidentally kills him. Now they’re on the run, and the bodies just keep piling up.
Meanwhile, in 2022, Tess is part of a group of women and non-binary people working together to change history. They have the use of five time devices which only allow them to travel backward and back to the present day – but never forwards.
Beth and Tess come from two wildly different times (1992, and 2022, respectively). But, while Beth is busy making history, Tess is quite literally trying to change it. However, both of them want the same thing: a better world. When their worlds collide, will they be able to save each other – and the world?
The Future of Another Timeline is a time travel fiction celebration of feminism and queerness with lots of sci-fi and punk rock thrown in. This is one of the best time travel novels for those who enjoy stellar women making history .
Read The Future of Another Timeline : Amazon | Goodreads
The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley
The Kingdoms is wildly imaginative and sure to enchant fans of time travel books, alternative history stories, and tales about parallel universes.
In 1898 Joe Tournier steps off a train and suddenly can’t remember anything that comes before that moment. The world he now finds himself in is as foreign to him as it is to us: an alternate history/reality where the UK lost the Battle of Trafalgar and is now a French colony.
In this world, the British are kept as slaves. Napoleon is a popular name for pets, and tartan is outlawed. Since Joe arrives on a train from Glasgow speaking English and wearing tartan, there is some speculation he might be from The Saints, a terrorist group based in Edinburgh fighting for freedom.
But all Joe remembers is the fading image of a woman and the name Madeline. Although he is identified by his owner and brought “home,” Joe is determined to find this Madeline. And his resolve is only strengthened when he receives a postcard signed ‘– M’ and dated 90 years in the past.
Discover even more books about Scottish culture, history, and everyday life.
Read The Kingdoms : Amazon | Goodreads
The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
The Light Brigade is one of the best time travel stories for anyone who loves character-driven tales or books about war and conflict.
As war wages on Mars, the military has devised the perfect soldier to fight on the frontlines: being made of light. The Light Brigade, as they’re called back home, is made up of soldiers who have undergone a procedure that breaks them down into atoms capable of traveling at the speed of light. They are the perfect soldiers, but broken people.
The book follows one such soldier, Dietz, an eager new recruit who is experiencing battle out of sync with everyone else. Because of this, she – and we – see a different reality of the war than the one presented by the Corporate Corps. As Dietz becomes more and more unstuck in time, she becomes more and more unsure of her own sanity and the role she is playing in this war.
Read The Light Brigade : Amazon | Goodreads
The Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way
You Look Like Death Volume 1 | Now a popular (and excellent) Netflix TV show, The Umbrella Academy is one of the best time travel books of all time.
One day, forty-seven children are suddenly and inexplicably born to women who were not previously pregnant. Eccentric millionaire Reginald Hargreeves goes around the world buying as many of the surviving children as he possibly can. He is able to get seven.
These children, it turns out, all have superpowers (except, it seems, for the unremarkable Number Seven aka Vanya). They become the crime-fighting group: The Umbrella Academy.
Fast forward several years, and Number Five, whose special power is that he can travel in time a few seconds or minutes per go, has mysteriously appeared after Hargreeves dies. And now he brings warning of an apocalypse – one which he insists none of his siblings will survive.
The Umbrella Academy series currently has three volumes, all packed with tales of time travel, parallel worlds, family drama, and lots of epic battles. We’ve absolutely loved this time travel book series so far; we can’t wait to see what Gerard Way does with future installments.
Discover even more great books with music, musicians, and bands.
Read The Umbrella Academy : Amazon | Goodreads
Historical Fiction
Travel back in time to witness wars and history. See what happens if you try to rewrite the future. Many of these historical fiction books with time travel promise to teach you more.
The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
We have a plethora of Agatha Christie fans amongst our Uncorked Readers , and Turton’s The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evenlyn Hardcastle is inspired by Christie.
Similar to Levithan’s Every Day , each day, Aiden wakes up in a different body from the guests of the Blackheath Manor. Trapped in a time loop, Aiden must solve Evelyn Hardcastle’s murder to escape. In the process, he navigates the tangled web of secrets, lies, and interconnected lives of the guests. Can he identify the killer and break the cycle?
The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is an award-winning historical thriller and one of the best time travel novels if you enjoy Downton Abbey and Groundhog’s Day . Discover even more great books set at hotels, mansions, and more.
Read The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle : Amazon | Goodreads
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
Travel back in time to Scotland in one of the most well-known time travel book series (and now TV series) of all time. Outlander is a part of pop culture. A New York Times bestseller and one of the top 10 most loved books according to The Great America Read, get ready to enter Scotland in 1743.
Claire Randall, a former British combat nurse, walks through an ancient circle of stones and is transported into a world of love, death, and war. This is a place of political intrigue, clan conflicts, and romantic entanglements. Claire must navigate the unfamiliar landscape while grappling with her feelings for the dashing Jamie Fraser.
Encounter even more cult-classic books from the ’90s like A Game Of Thrones , which is perfect for fantasy map lovers .
Read Outlander : Amazon | Goodreads
11/22/63: A Novel by Stephen King
Written by bestselling author, Stephen King, 11/22/63 is one of the best award-winning time travel books for historical fiction lovers. Set in 1963 when President Kennedy is shot, 11/22/63 begs the question: what if you could go back in time and change history?
Enter Jake Epping in Lisbon Falls, Maine. Epping asks his students to write about a time that altered the course of their lives. Inspired by one of those haunting essays, Epping enlists to prevent Kennedy’s assassination. How is this time travel possible? With the discovery of a time portal in a local diner’s storeroom…
11/22/63 is one of the most thrilling and realistic books about time travel, according to both critics and readers.
Read 11/22/63 : Amazon | Goodreads
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
If you are looking for historical fiction novels about time travel that address slavery and racism, be sure to check out Butler’s Kindred. This is also one of the best books published in the 1970s .
One minute Dana is celebrating her birthday in modern-day California. The next, she finds herself in the Antebellum South on a Pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. Dana is expected to save the plantation owner’s son from drowning. Each time Dana finds herself back in this time period as well as the slave quarters, her stays grow longer and longer as well as more dangerous.
Examine the haunting legacy and trauma of slavery across time. For younger readers, there is also a graphic novel adaptation . Discover more books that will transport you to the South .
Read Kindred : Amazon | Goodreads
What The Wind Knows by Amy Harmon
A bestseller and Goodreads top choice book, if you devour historical Irish fiction, What The Wind Knows will transport you to Ireland in the 1920s.
Anne Gallagher heads to Ireland to spread her grandfather’s ashes. Devastated, her grief pulls her into another time. Ireland is on the verge of entering a war, and Anne embraces a case of mistaken identity. She finds herself pulled into Ireland’s fight for Independence at the risk of losing her future life. She also falls for another main character and doctor, Thomas Smith.
What The Wind Knows is one of the best time travel novels that both romance and fantasy readers can appreciate. Witness connections that transcend time.
Read What The Wind Knows : Amazon | Goodreads
The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
Known for being one of the best time travel books for thriller lovers, The Shining Girls also has the reputation as the spookiest novel on this reading list.
Kirby Mazrachi is the last shining girl – a girl with a future and so much potential. Harper Curtis is a murderer from the past meant to kill Mazrachi. However, Kirby is not about to easily go out without a fight, leading her on one violent quantum leap through multiple decades.
As Kirby races against time to track down a serial killer and unravel the mysteries of the House, encounter themes of resilience, fate, and the shining spirit that can transcend even the darkest forces.
Read The Shining Girls : Amazon | Goodreads
Time Travel Romance Books
We love a good time-travel romance novel, but we also understand how hard it can be to hold onto love when time is so unstable. From queer love stories set on trains to holiday celebrations, fall in love across time with these books.
One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
From bestselling author, Casey McQuiston of Red, White, & Royal Blue – one of our favorite LGBTQ+ books for new adults – don’t miss the most-talked-about book (from 2021), One Last Stop.
Twenty-three-year-old August is quite the cynic and living in New York City. Up until now, August has jumped schools and towns as often as you change a pair of socks. August has also never been in a serious relationship and wants to find “her person.” August’s life suddenly changes, though, when she meets a beautiful and mysterious woman on the train.
Jane looks a little…out of date… and for good reason; she’s from the 1970s and trapped in the train’s energy. August wants nothing more than to help Jane leave the train, but does that mean leaving her too?
A feel-good, older coming-of-age story, laugh out loud and be utterly dazzled as you follow love across time and space. You’ll cozy (and drink) up in the parties and community surrounding August. One Last Stop is one of the all-time best LGBTQ+ time travel books – and perfect if you enjoy books that take place on trains .
Read One Last Stop : Amazon | Goodreads
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Time Traveler’s Wife is one the top time travel romance novels – and not just because the story features a librarian . We are so biased.
Henry and Clare have loved each other pretty much forever. Unfortunately, Henry has Chrono-Displacement Disorder, sporadically misplacing him in time. Of course, this time-traveling dilemma makes Clare’s and Henry’s marriage and future together pretty darn interesting.
Grab some Kleenex as they attempt to live normal lives and survive impending devastation. The Time Traveler’s Wife has also been made into a romantic movie classic . Watch even more fantasy movies with romance .
Read The Time Traveler’s Wife : Amazon | Goodreads
In A Holidaze by Christina Lauren
If you are looking for a sweet and sexy holiday rom-com set in Utah, grab In A Holidaze by Christina Lauren.
Mae leaves her family and friend’s Christmas vacation home after drunkenly making out with an old childhood friend. Blame the spiked eggnog. Unfortunately, Mae’s secretly in love with her best friend’s brother, Andrew. On the ride to the airport, Mae wishes for happiness just as a truck hits her parent’s car.
Mae lands in a time-travel loop where her dreams start coming true. Is it too good to last? What happens when she isn’t happy once again? Is she trapped?
For holiday books about time travel, this one is sure to put you in the Christmas spirit if you enjoy movies like Holidates or Groundhog’s Day . It’s light with a happy ending – typical of this author duo. We also recommend In A Holidaze if you are looking for Christmas family gathering books – a big request we see here at TUL.
P.S. Did you know that Christina Lauren is a pen name for a writing duo, Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings? Christina Lauren also wrote The Unhoneymooners , which was also hilariously enjoyable and set on an island .
Read In A Holidaze : Amazon | Goodreads
A Knight In Shining Armor by Jude Deveraux
For cozy time travel romance books and a feminist tale set abroad, try A Knight In Shining Armor .
Dougless Montgomery is weeping on top of a tombstone when Nicholas Stafford, Earl of Thornwyck, appears. Although this armor-clad hunk allegedly died in 1564, he stands before her about to embark on a journey to clear his name. Convicted of treason, Montgomery vows to help her soon-to-be lover find his accuser and set the record straight.
Read A Knight In Shining Armor : Amazon | Goodreads
The Night Mark by Tiffany Reisz
Set in South Carolina, if you love lighthouses and beach vibes, you’ll find something enjoyable in the time travel romance, The Night Mark .
After Faye’s husband dies, she cannot move on and recover. Accepting a photographer job in SC, Faye becomes obsessed with the local lighthouse’s myth, The Lady of the Light.
Back in 1921, the lighthouse keeper’s daughter mysteriously drowned. Faye is drawn into a love story that isn’t hers and becomes entangled in a passionate and forbidden love affair.
Read The Night Mark : Amazon | Goodreads
The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston
Anyone who likes their time travel books to have a magical love story should pick up The Seven Year Slip for their next read. It’s one of our favorite magical realism novels .
When Clementine’s aunt dies, she inherits her fancy New York apartment on the Upper East Side. Although Clementine would really rather have her aunt back and can’t imagine living in her home, she eventually forces herself to move in and inhabit her aunt’s space.
And not long after, she wakes up to discover a strange man in her living room… except it’s not her living room, it’s her aunt’s… from seven years ago. Clementine’s aunt always said her apartment held a touch of magic; sometimes it created time slips that brought two people together when they were at a crossroads.
But what happens when you start to fall for someone stuck seven years in the past? Clementine knows there’s no future together, but she also can’t let go of this link to her aunt.
Like her previous speculative fiction romance, The Dead Romantics , Ashely Poston’s unique time travel tale is full of heartache and grief. However, it will also make you swoon. Basically, this one is a must if you are a fan of time travel romance books.
Read The Seven Year Slip : Amazon | Goodreads
Classic Books
No time travel reading list would be complete without the classics. Below, uncover just a few great time travel novels that started it all.
The End of Eternity by Issac Asimov
The End of Eternity is said to be one of Asimov’s science fiction masterpieces. This is also one of the most spellbinding books about time travel – although some criticize the story for its loopholes.
Harlan is a member of the elite future known as an Eternal. He lives and works in Eternity, which like any good time travel novel, is located separately from time and space.
Harlan makes small changes in the timeline in order to better history. Of course, altering the course of the world is dangerous and comes with repercussions, especially when Harlan falls in love.
Read The End of Eternity : Amazon | Goodreads
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
It goes without saying that Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is one of the most famous and best time travel books for classic lovers – and a literary canon-worthy Christmas novel.
Ebenezer Scrooge is a greedy, lonely, and cruel man who truly has no Christmas spirit. Haunted by the ghosts of the past, present, and future, Scrooge must find the ultimate redemption before it’s too late. Does he have a heart?
Find even more classic and contemporary ghost books , including a few unique takes on ghosts.
Read A Christmas Carol : Amazon | Goodreads
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five is a somewhat bizarre time travel book about finding meaning in our sometimes fractured and broken lives. It’s also one of the most popular books published in the ’60s .
Similar to The Time Traveler’s Wife, Billy Pilgrim is “unstuck” in time in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Drafted into World War II, Pilgrim serves as a Chaplain’s assistant until he is captured by the Germans. He survives the bombing at Dresden and ultimately becomes a married optometrist. Things get a little wild…
Suffering from PTSD, Billy claims that he is kidnapped by aliens in a different dimension. Like most time travel novels, the story is out of order and Billy travels to different parts of his life.
Aliens come in all shapes and sizes; have more alien encounters with this reading list .
Read Slaughterhouse-Five : Amazon | Goodreads
A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
First published in 1889, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is one of the most popular classic and satirical time travel novels that’s set close to our childhood home. Having grown up in CT close to the old Colt factory, this story makes us smile.
Hank Morgan supervises the gun factory and is knocked unconscious. Upon waking, he finds himself in Britain about to be executed by the Knights of King Arthur’s Round Table in Camelot.
Morgan uses his future knowledge to his advantage, making him a powerful and revered wizard, which unfortunately doesn’t quite save him as he hopes. Not to mention that Morgan tries to introduce modern-day conveniences and luxuries to a time period that isn’t quite ready for them.
Read A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court : Amazon | Goodreads
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
The Time Machine is one of the best frontrunner time travel books of all time. Published in 1895, the Time Traveler recalls his exhausting time travel adventures to incredulous believers. He even disappears in front of them.
Blended with fantasy and science fiction over the course of 800,000 years, the Time Traveler battles “bad guys.” He also loses his time machine, debatably falls in love, and meets the underground dwelling Morlocks.
Read The Time Machine : Amazon | Goodreads
Young Adults Books
For young adults and teens – plus adults who appreciate YA – read the best middle-grade and high school time travel books. We’ve included more time travel graphic novels and manga here too.
Displacement by Kiku Hughes
For historical YA graphic novels , Displacement is one of the must-read books about time travel that will teach young readers about generational trauma, racism, politics, and war.
Follow Kiku, who is displaced in time, back to the period of U.S. Japanese incarceration [internment] camps – essentially glorified prisons – during WW2. Kiku begins learning more about her deceased grandmother’s history, which mirrors the horrid actions under former President Donald Trump. How can Kiku help stop the past from repeating itself, and more so, how can we?
In a simplistic but powerful style of storytelling, Hughes’s emotional YA WW2 book is accessible to young readers. Displacement is also one of the shorter and quicker books with time travel on this list. Find even more LGBT+ graphic novels to read – one of our favorite genres.
Read Displacement : Amazon | Goodreads
The Girl From Everywhere by Heidi Heilig
Changing the past can be pretty tempting. We’ve even seen that The Flash cannot resist. However, altering the course of history can be dangerous…
The first of two YA time travel books, Nix is the daughter of a time traveler. Her dad can sail anywhere on his ship, The Temptation. Her dad has his own temptation, though: to travel back to Honolulu in 1868, the year before her mom dies in childbirth. Nix’s father threatens to possibly erase her life and destroy a relationship with her only friend.
Discover even more great books about maps. Or, travel via armchair with these ship books.
Read The Girl From Everywhere : Amazon | Goodreads
Ruby Red by Kerstin Gier
Translated by Anthea Bell | If you are looking for time travel in books and enjoy YA historical fiction, try Ruby Red , which is the first in the Ruby Red Trilogy.
Gwyneth Shepherd quickly learns that she can easily time travel, unlike her cousin who has been preparing her entire life for the feat. Gwyneth wants to know why such a secret was kept from her. There are so many lies. Gwyneth time travels with the handsome Gideon back and forth between modern-day and 18th-century London to uncover secrets from the past.
Back in our MLIS and library days, Ruby Red was one of our favorite YA time travel books to recommend since so few knew about the series. Just a small warning that this enemies-to-lovers trope is a tad sexist, though. Find books like Ruby Red on our books with red (and more colors) in the title reading list .
Read Ruby Red : Amazon | Goodreads
Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
A little creepier for young adult time travel novels, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is all about time loops. We’ve only read the first in this eerie series that mixes manipulated vintage photography with a suspenseful and chilling story.
Jacob discovers a decaying orphanage on a mysterious island off the coast of Wales. Known as Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, the building isn’t exactly abandoned… Jacob runs into peculiar children who might be more than just ghosts.
If you are looking for Kurt Vonnegut-esque time travel books for teenagers, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is for you. Find even more great adult and YA haunted house books to add to your reading list .
Read Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children : Amazon | Goodreads
A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle
One of the most well-known books about time travel for families – made even more popular by Oprah and Mindy Kaling, A Wrinkle In Time , is the first book in The Time Quintet .
Although a time travel book series for elementary and middle-grade students – and also a 1963 Newbery Medal winner – adults will love the lessons and whimsical sci-fi quality of A Wrinkle In Time.
Meg Murray and her brother, Charles Wallace, go on an adventure in time to find and rescue their father. Their dad disappeared while working for the government on a mysterious tesseract project.
Watch this thrilling time travel adventure mixed with a coming-of-age story and a little girl power, too.
Read A Wrinkle in Time : Amazon | Goodreads
Orange by Ichigo Takano
Translated by Lasse Christian Christiansen and Amber Tamosaitis | This YA sci-fi romance manga is one of the most endearing time travel books you’ll ever read.
On the first day of 11th grade, Naho oversleeps for the first time ever. She also receives a letter that claims to be sent from herself 10 years in the future. The letter tells her both of the two big things that will happen to her that day as proof of sender: she will be late, and there will be a new kid in class named Naruse Kakeru from Tokyo who will sit next to her.
Naho is unsure if she trusts the letter, or whether or not she should heed its warnings – especially since it talks about past regrets and trying to undo them.
Orange is an adorable, but heartbreaking time travel manga that teaches us the meaning of friendship, love, regret, and so much more. If you’re looking for the best books about time travel for teens, Orange is the perfect option (and adults will love it too).
Read Orange : Amazon | Goodreads
If you devour the time travel genre, don’t miss these great movies…
If you enjoy books that take you back in time, you might also appreciate these top movies with time loops . Would you be able to fix past mistakes, fall in love, and you know, maybe not die this time? Find out if these protagonists succeed.
Travel Back In Time With These Reading Lists:
- Best ’90s Books
- Iconic ’80s Books
- Best WWII Historical Fiction
Christine Frascarelli
Dagney McKinney
45 Comments
Hi, nice list but just FYI you have one of the novels named incorrectly: it should be All Our Wrong Todays, not All Our Wrongs Today.
Thanks for letting us know! Every year, this list grows, and sometimes we miss a few mistakes.
The Things Are Bad Series by Paul L Giles is the funniest, most insightful time travel books I’ve ever read. It has everything!
Thanks so much for the review and rec!
Dream Daughter by Diane Chamberlain is an engrossing time travel book that I enjoyed immensely.
Our readers and contributors are big Diane Chamberlain fans. Thanks!
A huge time travel fan. A great list. Another time travel book recommendation: Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montemore. Wonderful story.
Thank you so much for the kind words and recommendation! We’ll have to check it out.
Great list, thanks. I also love seeing all the recommendations in the comments. I would add the Chronos Files series to your list. And, of course, the film ABOUT TIME, which is fantastic!
Thanks so much for the recommendations. We appreciate it!
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- Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
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Time of death: a time travel detective mystery (paradox p.i., book 1) audible audiobook – unabridged.
Revisiting the past can be murder.
Private Detective Greyson Travers has a secret, but he isn’t the only one. When a stunning widow asks him to investigate the suicide of her husband, Greyson plans for an easy resolution. But a quick look into the past gets dangerous for his future. He isn’t the only one interested in the case, and the longer he’s involved, the more victims turn up dead.
Greyson can travel through time. It makes him the best sleuth in the city. But every advantage comes at a cost. Under pressure from a powerful mob kingpin and an agency governing time, his investigation will take him deep into the underworld.
The clock is ticking, and Greyson might be too late to discover the truth. Sometimes, the past is better left for dead.
If you love treacherous twists and mind-bending murder mysteries, jump into this pause-resisting thriller where time is never on your side.
Can you solve the mystery of the future?
- Listening Length 4 hours
- Author Nathan Van Coops
- Narrator Stacy Carolan
- Audible release date May 28, 2021
- Language English
- Publisher Skylighter Press
- ASIN B096476MFC
- Version Unabridged
- Program Type Audiobook
- See all details
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The 32 Best TV Shows About Time Travel
Time traveling is a popular topic when it comes to all types of entertainment from books to films. But in recent years time travel has also become a popular theme in TV.
So let’s take a look at this list of the best time traveling TV shows and find out how each of them handles time travel and all the history that comes with it.
Doctor Who, BBC One (1963 – 1989, 2005 – present)
When it comes to time traveling and TV, probably the most notable name in this niche is Doctor Who because this time travel series has been around for 39 seasons and is still going strong.
Hailing from British television channel BBC One, Doctor Who tells the tale of the Time Lord aka The Doctor, and his companions as they travel to different times and try to prevent evil forces from changing history and hurting innocent lives.
Once the Time Lord gets hurt beyond healing, he can transform into a new body and continue saving the world. Hence why at this point 13 (soon to be 14) different actors have played The Doctor.
Doctor Who is not only a huge part of the fabric of British popular culture but by now this time travel show has found its way into the hearts of many people all over the world.
It has inspired many spin-offs in the form of TV shows, comic books, movies, novels, you name it. But more than that, by now it has become an industry standard both when it comes to science-fiction television series and shows about time travel.
No wonder that Doctor Who continues to be successful after countless actor changes and plot twists.
Where to watch Doctor Who:
Timeless, nbc (2016 – 2018).
Another time travel TV series that has already become a cult classic and is adored by fans all over the world is NBC’s Timeless . And despite the turmoil that this show has gone through, it still is time traveling at its best.
Starring Malcolm Barrett, Matt Lanter, and Abigail Spencer as Rufus, Wyatt, and Lucy, Timeless details the trio traveling to different times in an effort to stop their adversaries from rewriting history.
But as it later turns out, the conspiracy goes deeper than them just changing history. Since the people who our trio is chasing are traveling through time to take down a dangerous and all-powerful organization. The same one that helped build the time machine that Rufus, Wyatt, and Lucy are using.
And although Timeless went on for just two seasons (and a two-hour wrap-up movie), you should still check out the show because it’s not only entertaining but will make you think and want to know more about the events that each episode is exploring.
Where to watch Timeless:
Dc’s legends of tomorrow, the cw (2016 – present).
If you are a fan of superhero TV shows, then you will probably have heard about DC’s Legends of Tomorrow . It is a show that is a huge part of The CW’s Arrowverse. And has crossed over with shows like Arrow , The Flash , and Supergirl multiple times now.
And even if you don’t like the rest of the superhero series but do enjoy a good old time travel TV show, then I suggest you still give Legends of Tomorrow a watch.
The plot of this show is based around a team of superheroes that are traveling through time in their time machine christened the Waverider to prevent different catastrophes from happening. Both ones made by others and those created by the team’s previous adventures.
At the forefront, there are well-known DC heroes like Rip Hunter, Firestorm, The Atom, Kid Flash, Steel, and Vixen. Joined by some original characters like Caity Lotz’s White Canary among others.
One of the defining characteristics of Legends of Tomorrow is how fun it is. Because adjectives like unapologetic, witty, and entertaining are frequently used to describe this time travel series.
However, more than that, it adds an interesting layer to the whole Arrowverse universe. And above all, it is just a hoot to watch.
Where to watch Legends of Tomorrow:
12 monkeys, syfy (2015 – 2018).
Then there also is SyFy’s 12 Monkeys , which is a little darker take on time traveling. One that comes with mystery, drama, and apocalyptic stakes. But that doesn’t lessen how good this time travel TV series is.
Split between two timelines, 12 Monkeys centers on Aaron Stanford’s James Cole, who is tasked to travel back in time and stop the distribution of a virus that has the ability to end the human race as we know it.
In Cole’s real timeline, the year is 2043 and people are struggling to survive because of the terrible mutations caused by the virus. So Cole travels back to 2015 to find virologist Cassie Railly, played by Amanda Schull, that can help him stop the release of the virus and the organization that is behind it called The Army of the 12 Monkeys.
If you think about it, the post-apocalyptic setting and time travel really do go hand in hand. Because if you can go back in time to stop history from being changed, why not go back to change it if it prevents something terrible from happening?
And that is what this show explores. Beautifully combining elements of mystery, drama, and science fiction, to form a great TV show.
Where to watch 12 Monkeys:
Outlander, starz (2014 – present).
Want another show that mixes time travel with historical events and does it flawlessly? Then you should put Outlander on your must-watch TV show list!
The show starts in the 1940s when a combat nurse Claire Randall visits Inverness, Scotland as part of her second honeymoon with her husband Frank. Claire accidentally happens upon the standing stones at Craigh na Dun which transport her back in time to 1743.
To return to her own time she first has to survive 18th-century Scotland. And she does so by joining a group of rebel Highlanders from Clan MacKenzie and marrying one of the Highlanders, Jamie Fraser. But eventually, she falls in love with her new husband and aids the clan in evading British redcoats that are pursuing them.
Over the five seasons of Outlander that are currently out (with the sixth coming soon), we see Claire jump back and forth between the 20th and 18th centuries and her two families as she faces two pregnancies, wars, and much more. But eventually, Claire finds her way back to Jamie.
Where to watch Outlander:
Travelers, showcase (2016 – 2018).
Then we have Travelers , a joint venture between Netflix and Canada’s Showcase that will tick all of your time travel TV show boxes.
Set in a post-apocalyptic world , this show depicts the adventures of travelers – operatives who go back in time to prevent the collapse of society.
These travelers are transferred into the bodies of our current-day humans, who otherwise would die, to blend in with twenty-first-century people. And with the help of their artificial intelligence boss from the future, travelers carry out missions in order to stop many catastrophic events from happening.
Travelers is a great mix of sci-fi and drama, featuring a great cast and spine-tingling storylines. So if you love all that and love a good time-travel series, then look no further than Travelers .
Where to watch Travelers:
Dark, netflix (2017 – 2020).
Netflix’s first German original series was the science fiction series Dark , which mixes in some mystery drama with sci-fi: time travel, the apocalypse, wormholes, and parallel worlds.
Dark takes place in Winden, a fictional German town, and begins in 2019 after children begin to disappear from the town. As the show progresses, however, timelines jump drastically between as early as 1921 to as late as 2053.
As four families in Winden investigate the disappearances to reunite with their lost loved ones, they discover a wormhole beneath the local powerplant that allows them to travel between timelines, thus uncovering a generations-long conspiracy involving the town and their families.
Where to watch Dark:
The umbrella academy, netflix (2019 – present).
Netflix brings another to the list with The Umbrella Academy .
On October 1, 1989, 43 infants were suddenly born from unsuspecting women despite them not even being pregnant the day before.
7 of them were raised together as the Hargreeve siblings and trained in their respective abilities until their relationship became strained as teenagers and they drifted apart.
Now, as adults, they’re brought back together by the death of their adoptive father – and the threat of the end of the world, of course.
They’re forced to travel back in time but end up in different times and places, and must find each other again to stop the nuclear apocalypse.
Where to watch The Umbrella Academy:
Seven days, upn (1998 – 2001).
We know that the National Security Agency has its share of secrets, but what if one of those secrets was a time-traveling machine?
In UPN’s Seven Days , the plot centers on one such device made from alien technology found at Roswell.
The Chronosphere, as it’s called, can only be used in times when national security is at risk – the limited capacity of the device allows for just one human to go back in time by seven days in order to avert disasters.
Thus, when the White House is attacked, the NSA employs former Navy SEAL and CIA operative Frank Parker to go back and prevent it from happening.
Where to watch Seven Days:
Loki, disney+ (2021 – present).
Yes, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of the greatest gifts to the cinema of our time. Now, the MCU has expanded even further into the television medium and we’ve got a few series to accompany it!
One of those is Loki , which of course, centers on the God of Thunder’s mischievous adopted brother.
After the events in Avengers: Endgame , particularly his stealing of the Tesseract, Loki inadvertently creates another timeline that began in 2012, making him a “time variant” version of himself.
When confronted by the authorities, Loki is given two choices: face punishment and cease to exist, or travel through time to fix his own mess and the threat that has emerged.
Where to watch Loki:
Making history, fox (2017).
The thing about traveling back in time is, you have to be very careful that your actions in the past won’t affect the future (which is essentially your actual present).
Most of the time, that’s something you wouldn’t know until you go back to your time. In Making History , however, Dan Chambers travels back in time to right before the American Revolution and sets off a series of events that seriously mess up the future.
Being able to constantly travel between time periods, Dan recruits the help of history professor Chis Parrish to travel with him and ensure that the American Revolution still takes place.
Where to watch Making History:
Quantum leap, nbc (1989 – 1993).
The title of NBC’s sci-fi comedy-drama Quantum Leap is also the name of the time travel machine that accidentally sends its creator, physicist Dr. Sam Beckett, back into the past.
Now, he’s stuck – and not as himself, either!
Sam discovers that he jumped into the body of a stranger and because he’s still himself, doesn’t know all the details of his current identity.
With the help of his friend Al, who appears as a hologram only he can see, he must fix something that went wrong so he can jump in time again and eventually get back to his own body.
Where to watch Quantum Leap:
Quantum leap, nbc (2022 – present).
Speaking of Quantum Leap , in 2022 NBC revived the 1989 series into a more modern take on the cult classic.
In this new Quantum Leap , thirty years have passed since Dr. Sam Beckett vanished into the Quantum Leap accelerator, and the Quantum Leap project was put to rest.
Now the project is restarted with a new team, who tries to puzzle together the mysteries behind Beckett and his time-traveling machine.
So, we follow Ben Song, the lead physicist of the Quantum Leap time travel project, who gets lost in the past after leaping back in time.
As he tries to return to the present he is helped by his fiancée Addison Augustine, who appears to him as a hologram during each leap, and the team back in the present time.
Where to watch Quantum Leap reboot:
The way home, hallmark channel (2023 – present).
Among the newest time travel shows on this list is Hallmark’s The Way Home which has already been renewed for a second season.
The Way Home follows three generations of Landry women who learn that they can time travel after discovering a magic pond on their family’s farm in Port Haven.
When Kat and her daughter Alice return to Port Haven and are forced to move in with Alice’s estranged mother Del, the three women use time travel to uncover their family history, including what really happened to Kat’s little brother Jacob and whether they can prevent his disappearance.
Where to watch The Way Home:
Russian doll, netflix (2019 – 2022).
Netflix’s Russian Doll deviates from the traditional time travel theme of a willing traveler in one specific timeline because Russian Doll’s protagonist Nadia Vulvokov not only has absolutely no choice or control over her so-called time traveling, but hers is also a time loop.
She wakes up every day having to relive the day of her 36th birthday party in New York City; every time, she dies and comes back to the exact same moment.
Every time, Nadia scrambles to figure out what happens to her and tries to prevent her death, leading her to find Alan, a man who is experiencing the same time loop.
Where to watch Russian Doll:
Undone, prime video (2019 – present).
Undone may be an animated series, but it certainly isn’t geared toward younger audiences; though there is a touch of comedy, the series leans more towards the psychological drama genre and “explores the elastic nature of reality”.
The series follows Alma Winograd-Diaz right after she gets into a near-fatal car accident.
Right before the crash, she has a strange vision of her dead father, and right after it, she finds that she now has the ability to manipulate and move through time.
Using this newfound power, she travels between time periods to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding her father’s death.
Where to watch Undone:
Voyagers, nbc (1982 – 1983).
Premiering back in the early 1980s, NBC’s Voyagers! Is set in a world where time travel already exists.
In fact, there’s already a secret society in place that trains its members, called Voyagers, to go back in time and make sure that historical events happen exactly the way they’re supposed to – otherwise it could affect the present in unexpected ways.
One such Voyager is Phineas Bogg, although he isn’t exactly the best at the job.
During an accidental trip to 1982, he meets the young Jeffrey Jones and ends up bringing him along on one of his missions.
Having lost his Guidebook, Phineas now needs to rely on the extremely smart Jeffrey to get history right.
Where to watch Voyagers!:
Fringe, fox (2008 – 2013).
Fox’s Fringe is a series that was well into the science fiction genre, with parallel universes, supernatural abilities, biotechnology, doomsday predictions, and of course, time travel.
The title is taken from fringe science, which is a branch that deals with scientific theories riddled with skepticism or even having been disproven already.
In Fringe , Special Agent Olivia Dunham is assigned to oversee the FBI ’s Fringe Division, which is run by Peter Bishop and his father Walter.
Together, the team uses both fringe science and Olivia’s knowledge in investigative techniques to explore the unexplained.
In the process, they discover a larger mystery involving parallel universes and alternate timelines .
Where to watch Fringe:
Time after time, abc (2017).
ABC’s Time After Time is based on the novel of the same name written by Kevin Williamson in 1979.
In addition to that, each episode takes its title from a line in Cyndi Lauper’s song, which was inspired by the film (and subsequently, the same book!).
In Time After Time , we are taken to H.G. Wells’ home in 1893.
During a dinner party, he reveals his time machine – right before his guest John Stevenson is arrested for actually being Jack the Ripper .
John escapes through the time machine and Wells follows him straight into the present: 2017. Thus begins a cat-and-mouse game as John attempts to gain control of the machine.
Where to watch Time After Time:
11.22.63, hulu (2016).
When you have anything with Stephen King involved, you know it’s going to be great.
Hulu’s eight-episode miniseries 11.22.63 is based on King’s novel 11/22/63 and is a science fiction thriller like no other.
Starring James Franco in the lead role, 11.22.63 follows Jake Epping, an English teacher from Maine .
His best friend Al reveals a time travel machine and asks him to take over the mission he’s been working on: to travel to the 60s and prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Will Jake be successful in changing a past that simply refuses to be changed?
Where to watch 11.22.63:
The 4400, usa network/sky one (2004 – 2007).
The 4400 is yet another slightly different take on the idea of time travel, in that there has been just one (fairly significant) shift forward in time, to the present.
Beginning in 1946, individuals who were easily overlooked or marginalized by society slowly began disappearing through beams of green light.
Now, all 4400 of them (hence the title) have been returned to the present day – without having aged a day and in some cases, even manifesting supernatural abilities like telekinesis, healing, and telepathy.
Tom Baldwin and Diana Skouris are assigned to investigate the phenomenon and find out why the 4400 have returned.
NOTE: For a fresher take on the show, you can also check out the reboot of the original series which is currently airing on The CW.
Where to watch The 4400:
Somewhere between, abc (2017).
When tragedy strikes our lives, we always wish there was something we could’ve done to prevent it.
In ABC’s Somewhere Between we meet Laura Price, a successful news producer with a great career, a loving husband who’s a district attorney, and a beautiful daughter named Serena.
However, her life changes when the serial killer she is helping the cops to catch kills Serena.
Distraught with grief , Laura attempts to complete suicide but is unsuccessful, instead waking up having time-traveled to a week before Serena’s death.
She teams up with Nico, a former SFPD detective who experienced the same reset and wants to find the real killer to change his brother’s fate as well.
Where to watch Somewhere Between:
Terra nova, fox (2011).
Terra Nova takes its viewers to both extremes of the time-traveling timeline.
The present-day is 2149, where overpopulation has threatened to deplete the Earth’s resources.
In an attempt to save Earth and mankind, scientists have found a way to travel back in time, sending groups of humans back to the Cretaceous Period to set up colonies.
Terra Nova focuses primarily on Elisabeth and Jim Shannon, and their three children, who have joined the 10th pilgrimage to Terra Nova.
They offer their expertise as a trauma surgeon and former narcotics detective and help those in charge with stopping those whose intentions go against the greater good.
Where to watch Terra Nova:
Frequency, the cw (2016 – 2017).
One concept in time travel is known as “the butterfly effect”, wherein one small change in time may have great effects elsewhere.
Frequency demonstrates this concept perfectly.
Raimy Sullivan is an NYPD detective who, after a strange weather phenomenon, discovers that she can communicate with her dead father through his old ham radio.
Believing he was a corrupt cop, she learns the truth and warns him of his murder, thus saving his life.
However, this has profound effects on the future – Raimy’s present.
Now, they must work together across time to save her father and preserve the present.
Where to watch Frequency:
Life on mars, bbc one (2006).
In many of the shows on the list so far, the protagonists experience a time loop that’s triggered at the point of their death.
It’s no different for Sam Tyler, the main character in the British series Life on Mars .
Sam is a Detective Chief Inspector with the Greater Manchester Police, but one day he accidentally gets hit by a car.
When he awakens, he’s in 1973 and working at one rank lower than he was: Detective Inspector.
The selling point of Life on Mars , however, is that we’re left unsure if Sam’s predicament is due to his actual death, a comatose, or time travel.
Where to watch Life on Mars:
Always a witch, netflix (2019 – 2020).
Always A Witch (or Siempre Bruja in its original Spanish title) is a Colombian series that is set in both present-day Colombia and the 17th century .
The series follows Carmen Eguiliuz, a young 19-year-old witch who, after committing the crime of falling in love with a white man in 1646 colonial Colombia, is scheduled to be burned at the stake.
She gets a chance to escape to a new life when the mysterious wizard Aldemar makes a deal with her: he will save the man she loves if she travels into the future to find the woman who can break his curse.
Where to watch Always a Witch:
Beforeigners, hbo (2019 – present).
HBO’s Beforeigners is a Norwegian sci-fi crime drama series and the first Norwegian original from HBO Europe.
The title is a clever play on words centered on the general plot: a group of “foreigners” has suddenly shown up at a neighborhood in Oslo, and they are all from “before” times, or several different time periods in history.
Whether from the Viking period , the Stone Age, or the more recent 19th century , each of these ‘Beforeigners’ tries to integrate in modern-day Norwegian society.
One of them even partners with a detective to investigate first a murdered Stone Age woman, then a series of murderers tied to Jack the Ripper.
Where to watch Beforeigners:
Alice, sbs tv (2020).
Alice was a South Korean sci-fi series that aired in late 2020.
In the lead-up to the main plot, the show’s background is explained to its viewers.
Set in 2050, time travel is monitored by an agency called Alice, which sends its clients to the past to help find closure with deceased loved ones.
Alice one day sends two agents to 1992 in order to find the Book of Prophecy, but one of them disappears with the book and her unborn child.
In 2020, the child becomes a detective and in his investigation into his mother’s death in 2010, discovers the existence of Alice and time travel.
Where to watch Alice:
Live up to your name, tvn (2017).
Yet another South Korean time travel series , Live Up to Your Name initially takes its viewers some 400 years into the past, right in the middle of the Joseon dynasty.
There we meet Heo Im, a doctor of traditional Korean medicine who also specializes in acupuncture.
On one of his treatments of the king’s migraines, he made a mistake and was charged with treason.
Chased by the king’s soldiers, he’s shot with an arrow and presumed dead when he falls into the river – except he ends up waking up in present-day Seoul instead, where he meets cardiothoracic surgeon Choi Yeon-kyung.
Where to watch Live Up to Your Name:
My only love song, netflix (2017).
Our third South Korean series is Netflix’s My Only Love Song , which aired in 2017.
We start off in modern-day Korea where we meet Soo-jung, a talented and top-level actress.
However, it seems that the fame may have gotten to her head as she’s arrogant, and believes fame and money make the world go round.
When things don’t go her way on her new show, she winds up in a time-traveling van that takes her to the 6th century.
There, she meets a man much like herself in terms of arrogance, but his hidden soft spot and generosity towards the poor changes her perspective on her own life and self.
Where to watch My Only Love Song:
Signal, tvn (2016).
Signal is based on the 2000 American film Frequency , but another thing that sets this South Korean series apart from others is that the cases investigated in the series are also based on real-life crimes in the country.
Signal follows a cold case profiler from 2015 and a detective from 1989 simultaneously; they discover they’re able to communicate with each other through an old walkie-talkie.
Using this unique ability to provide much-needed foresight in investigations, they team up to both solve and in some cases, even prevent these horrific crimes.
Where to watch Signal:
Rooftop prince, sbs (2012).
Last but not least, South Korea brings its last time-traveling series to the table with Rooftop Prince , a comedy-drama filled with intrigue, mixed identities, and possible reincarnations.
Crown Prince Lee Gak from the Joseon dynasty accidentally time travels to 2012 with three others from his entourage, and their lives are thrown into a whirlwind.
He crosses paths with Se-na, who looks exactly like his recently deceased wife.
In the hopes of getting answers about his wife’s mysterious drowning, he assumes the identity of another man who he also looks exactly like and attempts to marry Se-na in this timeline as well.
Where to watch Rooftop Prince:
11 comments.
Tomorrow people cw
You forgot The Time Tunnel, an Irwin Allen sci-fi show (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost In Space, Land of The Giants), all classic 60s sci-fi
Journeyman should also be on this list. It was only half a season on NBC but it wraps up to a satisfying conclusion.
Fantastic acting and interesting characters.
Glad someone else watched Journeyman. I thought I’d was a great spiritual successor to Quantum Leap.
Journeyman is one of the good shows u can watch but qunatum leap i watched and didnt like
Where is The Time Tunnel?????
Another show for your list is “Being Erica” (CBC, 2009-2011). Excellent writing, and very unique.
i was looking for this comment. such an underrated show
I concur. This was definitely a great one. It certainly provides a lot of food for thought.
Some of the information in the Doctor Who one is wrong. It started in 1963, it was only revived in 2005 (you put 2006), and it’s been going for 39 seasons, as of June 2022
Thanks for letting me know! I updated the article accordingly.
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Screen Rant
Star trek: the 18 best time travel stories of all time.
Time traveling on Star Trek usually brings with it adventure, self-examination, and a refreshing change of wardrobe.
There's always been time travel in Star Trek ; sometimes it's done well, sometimes less so. Occasionally it's been used in the movies too: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home has Kirk and crew traveling back to get some whales, and the first two Trek reboots have regular visits from future Spock. But it's in the various series where they've used time travel not just to tell a fun story, but to reveal something about humanity, ask moral questions, and yes, give us a good time with some fun anachronisms and a change of wardrobe.
We've left out a few episodes that could be interpreted as time travel, when a character experienced another planet's history, like the brilliant " The Inner Light " from The Next Generation or "Memorial" from Voyager. These all take place in the same reality our characters live in. Some are more about personal stakes, and some affect the entire universe, which is probably why it always gives Janeway a headache; once you start bouncing around from one timeline to another, it can be hard to keep track of what's going on. So here, in all its glory and confusion, with examples from the original series (TOS), The Next Generation (TNG), Deep Space Nine (DS9), and Voyager (VOY), are the 18 Best Time Travel Episodes Of Star Trek .
18. "Tapestry" - TNG
Captain Picard is in cardiac arrest, Doctor Crusher frantically trying to save him, when he finds himself face-to-face with Q, who questions him about the artificial heart that's now jeopardizing his life. He tells Q that he made some foolish, regrettable choices in his past, so Q zaps him back to his days as a cadet, when he was, it turns out, a lot wilder than the Jean-Luc we know today. But when he chooses to avoid those mistakes this time, the impact on his life is that he's... boring. He's an assistant astrophysics officer, who begs Riker and Troi for a promotion and is told that he doesn't "take risks" or "stand out."
Q gives him a replay, and he once again gets into the bar fight that results in him being stabbed through the heart by a Nausicaan, thus restoring his life to the one he had. Crusher saves him. Afterwards, he confesses to Riker that by changing one thing, he unraveled the tapestry that was his life. A good bit of philosophy, that, and helpful to all of us who sometimes look back with too much regret.
17. "Shattered" - VOY
When you tally it all up, Voyager probably does more time traveling than any other ship in the fleet. This time, the ship gets fractured into different eras of its own history, so one minute Janeway hasn't met the Maquis, the next one Seska and the Kaizon have taken over, another one has the crew newly assembled after being trapped by the Caretaker. Only Chakotay, protected by a serum, is able to travel from one to the next. Wisely, he kidnaps Janeway and injects her with the same serum, because she's got a history of getting headaches from time travel and will want to put an end to it as soon as possible.
This one is extra fun for its look back at Voyager 's history, showing us an angry B'Elanna, a vengeful Seska (who never disappoints), and a still Borgified Seven of Nine. It also disproves the recent theories going around that Voyager 's characters didn't evolve over the course of the series; watching Chakotay try to convince the crew in each era that working together is their only solution shows us how far each character has come from that very first episode.
16. "All Our Yesterdays" - TOS
Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to Sarpeidon to warn its people that their sun is going supernova. They meet librarian Mr. Atoz, who rushes them around insisting that they "choose" before it's too late. It turns out that the library provides gateways into different times and locations, and after hearing a shout, Kirk runs through one of them and Spock and McCoy follow. But they've gone to different places: Kirk's is full of terrified witch-burners, and Spock and McCoy are in an ice age. The people of Sarpeidon have been escaping the supernova into their own past.
The real story here is Spock's. He and McCoy meet the exiled and beautiful Zarabeth, and Spock falls in love with her. Challenged by McCoy, he realizes that he's reverting back to what ancient Vulcans were like: savage, emotional, even meat-eating. Since they haven't been "prepared" for their new timelines, they all must head back through the gateways. Spock doesn't want to go, but in order to save McCoy, he must. Once they're back, Spock is profoundly affected by the experience, and McCoy has gotten a rare glimpse into the battles Vulcans fight against their primitive, emotional natures every day.
15. "Children of Time" - DS9
The Defiant discovers an inhabited planet behind an energy barrier, and Dax insists on investigating. They push through the barrier, ship shaking all the way, and find the planet behind it inhabited by humans, Trills, and Klingons. They're told that when they try to get back through the barrier in two days, they'll fail, get thrown back 200 years in the past, and get stranded. The people on the planet now—all 3000 of them—are their descendants.
Kira, however, has no descendants; history reveals that she died from injuries sustained when they crossed the barrier. While one Odo remains aboard the Defiant, unable to keep his shape, the Odo from 200 years ago is still alive, and confesses his love to Kira.
The moral question: if they can find a way to break through the barrier successfully, they'll wipe out a 200 year-old civilization and 3000 people. If they don't, Kira will die and they'll never see their families again, giving them a time travel conundrum that makes the title of this episode particularly apt.
14. "Cause and Effect" - TNG
Jonathan Frakes directed this one, and it gave him a huge challenge: how do you shoot the same scene over and over again, with minuscule differences, and keep the audience interested, especially when it's all pretty mundane stuff up until the last minute? Of course, that last minute is a doozy, because that's when the Enterprise blows up, and the cycle begins again.
The Enterprise gets stuck in a time loop, and plays out its own destruction over and over again. The senior officers are playing poker. Then they're on the bridge. Then they encounter a phenomenon. Then they blow up. Around and around they go. So where's the time travel?
Well for one, they're reliving the same day over and over again. Eventually it starts to feel too familiar, and they get their first clue that something is happening on another level. When they finally figure it out, thanks to some clue-planting by Data, they break free, and meet Frasier. It's really Kelsey Grammer , Captain of the U.S.S. Bozeman, who's been trapped in that same loop for 80 years. "There's something we need to discuss," Picard tells him. Gently.
13. "Relativity" - VOY
Seven of Nine gets recruited by Braxton, Captain of a 29th-century ship, to save Voyager from a saboteur who uses a temporal disruptor to destroy the ship. As she bounces through time, appearing on Voyager when Janeway first takes command (long before Seven was freed from the Collective) as well as in the present, she slowly tracks down the device that's causing the temporal anomalies. But every time she travels through time and is retrieved, she becomes weaker; every trip damages her, and she won't be able to survive too many more.
It's a bit of a time travel detective story as she appears in timelines she shouldn't be in as well as the present, and then discovers that the saboteur is actually Braxton himself, who has a grudge against Janeway for something that comes up later on our list. Along the way, we get the fun of seeing Seven without her Borg implants, a ping pong game in which the ball freezes in mid air, and a quick throwaway mention of the Borg's attempts to prevent the Federation from existing in the movie Star Trek: First Contact.
12. "Blink of an Eye" - VOY
There's an original series episode, "Wink of an Eye," in which aliens who move at an accelerated pace take over the Enterprise. Because they move so quickly, the crew can't see them, and to them, the crew looks frozen in place because they're moving so slowly.
This concept moves from a wink to a blink on Voyager , where the ship gets stuck in orbit over a planet where a primitive, caveman-like society exists. While minutes pass on Voyager, years go by on the planet, which incorporates Voyager into its mythology as it is not only visible in the night sky, it's been causing earthquakes. The Doctor beams down to investigate, and in just a few minutes, he spends three years on the planet. He reports on how Voyager has affected everything there, from technology to philosophy and art, and that the tremors it creates are still a problem.
When the planet reaches the space age, they send an astronaut ( Daniel Dae Kim ) to Voyager. He heads home with Voyager's tech specs, and he returns, years later to him, with help; Voyager has inspired the technological advances that frees them, centuries after their arrival.
11. "Tomorrow is Yesterday" - TOS
This one plays the time travel story for laughs, mostly, and that's what makes it so fun. The ship gets trapped in the 1960s, is flagged as a UFO, and takes aboard American astronaut Captain John Christopher. As they try to determine the damage they may be causing to the past, they decide that since he's not really noted in the history books, it's safe to keep him on the ship, but further digging leads to the discovery that his unborn—in fact, not yet conceived—son is Colonel Shaun Geoffrey Christopher, who will head the first Earth-Saturn mission. Christopher must be returned.
Kirk and Sulu head down to earth to erase the evidence of the Enterprise, and Kirk gets caught, which gives us some fun scenes during his rather innocuous interrogation. In the meantime, another 1960s refugee accidentally ends up on the Enterprise, and his reaction when he runs into Spock makes us wish they had Worf on board as well.
It's a bit of a silly one, but their efforts to return inspire the "slingshot" effect that gets used again in "Assignment: Earth" and the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
10. "Timeless" - VOY
An icy landscape. Two figures in climate suits. The shot widens, and we see that buried deep within the ice is the starship Voyager.
Harry Kim and Chakotay have located their ship, which crash-landed 15 years earlier, and they're determined to change history and save it. We switch back and forth between the two timelines, watching the crew make plans for their new quantum slipstream drive, and watching a much older, much more bitter Harry Kim as he tries to violate the temporal prime directive and save his ship from the mistake he made in his calculations that has haunted him for the last 15 years. He and Chakotay have stolen technology to do it, and are tracked down by Captain Geordi La Forge, who warns them that they are about to commit treason.
It's a high-action, emotionally intense episode, beautifully directed by LeVar Burton, and with but seconds to spare, (older) Harry realizes that the only way to save the ship is to sabotage the slipstream. His younger self is devastated by the failure, until Janeway shows him a message recorded by the older one, explaining what happened, and adding, "You owe me one."
9. "Little Green Men" - DS9
So many TV series have a Roswell episode; why shouldn't Deep Space Nine ? A malfunction on their ship causes Quark, Rom and Nog to crash land in New Mexico in 1947, where they are held at a military base. The comedy gets started when the Ferengi's universal translators aren't working and they smack their heads, trying to fix them, so the army officers assume it's a greeting ritual and mimic them. This, plus the frequent use of tobacco-- "If they'll buy poison, they'll buy anything!" --convinces Quark that he can make a fortune among these greedy, ignorant humans.
There are some great moments here, especially when they try to convince the army that they're part of an invasion force. "We've been studying you puny Earthlings for centuries and you're ripe for conquest," Nog tells them, hoping to generate some fear. But it's actually Quark with the agenda; he intends to use his knowledge of future technology to manipulate humanity, establish an economic empire, and get warp drive to the Ferengi homeworld long before humans, Klingons, or Vulcans get it. Fortunately Odo, who's sneaked along for the ride, has other plans, and eventually they find their way home.
8. "Endgame" - VOY
The series finale of Voyager sent the show out with a bang, and took us back and forth as Admiral Janeway, years after the ship's return home, travels through time to shave years off Voyager's journey and save the crew who didn't make it back. Like Harry Kim in "Timeless," she's got a bit of a guilt problem: Tuvok didn't make it back in time to cure the neurodegenerative disease that destroyed his mind, and Seven didn't make it back at all. She wants to shave over 20 years off of their journey, and recruits Tom and B'Elanna's daughter, the EMH and Captain Harry Kim to help.
This episode is rich with details. In the past, Chakotay and Seven have started dating, and B'Elanna and Tom are about to have a baby. In the future, Chakotay has died, and Naomi Wildman has a daughter, born on Voyager while it was still in the Delta Quadrant. We get to see Admiral Janeway arguing with Captain Janeway as they determine which course of action to take, and even the Borg Queen gets involved, and then defeated.
It's an intense, fast-moving finale, with a payoff worth waiting seven seasons for.
7. "Future's End" - VOY
Not only does this two-part Voyager episode boast guest stars Ed Begley Jr. and Sarah Silverman (in her first acting role), it also has a great story and a fun, Venice Beach setting. "We could have worn our Starfleet uniforms. I doubt if anyone would have noticed." Tuvok comments.
It all starts when a ship from the future tries to destroy Voyager for causing an explosion in the past. It's Captain Braxton from the 29th century, who fails in his mission and gets stranded on Earth in the 1990s. He becomes a homeless lunatic, and Henry Starling (Begley) steals his technology and builds an Apple-like empire. It's Starling, not Voyager, who will cause the universe to explode, and the crew tries to stop him with the help of a young astronomer, Rain Robinson (Silverman).
Like many of the examples here, it's a strong story with deep consequences and a series of fun-to-watch scenes along the way. Chakotay and B'Elanna get captured by redneck conspiracists, The Doctor gets a mobile emitter but experiences pain for the first time, and Tuvok and Paris ride around in a van and get take-out burritos.
6. "Past Tense" - DS9
Another beautiful two-parter, with a particularly magnificent performance from Avery Brooks. Sisko, Dax, and Bashir, through--what else?--a transporter accident get thrown back to San Francisco in 2024. They get separated; while Dax is found by a generous benefactor, Sisko and Bashir end up in a zone called the Sanctuary District, which is an overcrowded section of the city designated for unemployed and homeless people. Sisko remembers that a man called Gabriel Bell will sacrifice his life to change things.
There's a whole political story here, and they do end up disrupting the timeline. Of course this destroys the future they're from, stranding Kira and O'Brien in a Starfleet-free world. They're left alone to track down the others, which provides one of the few lighter moments, when they try a few different timelines before landing in the right one, especially when they run into some flower children in the 1960s.
But the heart of the story about social injustice, poverty, class, and rebellion, both in Bashir's horror that Earth could have treated its poor this way, and Sisko's determination to take the place of Gabriel Bell when he is killed before he can fulfill his destiny.
5. "Year of Hell" - VOY
There are a handful of stellar two-partners across the Trek franchise, and this one's in the top five. Guest star Kurtwood Smith plays Annorax, who flies around in a time ship changing history. His goals are both global and personal; he wants to restore his planet's role as a dominating force in the quadrant, and bring back his wife, who died in one of his temporal incursions. Voyager messes with his delicate calculations by popping up unpredictably, he takes revenge, and thus begins the year of hell.
We see Seven guiding a blind Tuvok and offering to help him shave, Janeway telling Chakotay to reprocess her birthday present for much-needed supplies as the ship endures one attack after another, and Janeway's moment of ultimate sacrifice, fired by a combination of determination and fury. Every time the time ship engages, as it wipes out civilizations, "restoring" the timeline, disrupting it, it builds up Annorax's obsession. "You can't imagine the burden of memory that I carry." he tells Chakotay. "Thousands of worlds, billions of lives, gone, brought back, gone again. I try to rationalise the loss. They're not really being destroyed, because they never existed. Sometimes I can almost convince myself."
4. "All Good Things ... " TNG
Another series finale, another tip-toe through the time tulips. A disoriented Picard interrupts a date between Troi and Worf to tell them he's been traveling back and forth through time.
Q has told Picard that he will cause the annihilation of humanity, and Picard bounces through three different timelines, desperately trying to figure out how he causes the destruction and what will fix it. Thanks to the time jumps, we learn that Troi and Worf had a relationship, Riker never forgave Worf, and Troi died with the two mens' differences unresolved. Picard retired to a vineyard, Data became a professor and owned a lot of cats, La Forge stopped needing his VISOR, Dr. Crusher married and divorced Picard and got her own ship, and the Klingons have taken over the Romulan Empire. We also get to see Tasha Yar again, in the past, and Miles O'Brien, who has long since left the Enterprise for Deep Space Nine. And yes, Picard saves humanity, as he always does, and always will.
There's a quiet, lovely moment at the end when Picard joins his senior officers at poker for the first time. "I should have done this a long time ago," he tells them, then ends the series' seven-year run with the words "Five card stud, nothing wild, and the sky's the limit."
3. "Yesterday's Enterprise" - TNG
This one's another fan favorite, because it brings back Tasha Yar and gives her a much more noble death ... for the moment. (There's more to her story, but we don't learn it here.)
The Enterprise goes through a temporal rift and everything changes. They're a ship in wartime, Starfleet is struggling, and Tasha Yar is still alive. They come face to face with a starship from the past, scarred from battle, and the two crews work together to repair it and send it back into its timeline to finish the fight. They know two things: one, it's a doomed mission, and two, it might save the Federation. The key to all this is Guinan, who convinces Picard that this timeline is all wrong and needs to be fixed. She keeps giving Tasha weird looks, which is how Tasha finally figures out that she's supposed to be dead, and asks for permission to fight with the older ship.
No need to spoil the rest, for the few who haven't seen it, but it's an action-packed episode full of emotional moments and gives much thought to the ebbs and flows of time and fate.
2. "City on the Edge of Forever" - TOS
Many fans consider this the best Star Trek episode of all time. Writer Harlan Ellison wrote the original story , which put a drug dealer aboard the Enterpise, but it was altered to make it more Trek-friendly, to his anger and dismay.
McCoy is accidentally injected with cordrazine, goes haywire, and beams down to a barren planet. They follow him and find the Guardian of Forever, a talking time portal. McCoy jumps in, and Earth's history is eradicated in an instant. Kirk and Spock follow, hoping to find him and restore all of their civilization.
What McCoy did was save the life of Edith Keeler, played to perfection by a young Joan Collins. She's a visionary, someone who, amidst the poverty and hopelessness of the Great Depression, shares Gene Roddenberry's optimistic view of the future. Kirk falls in love with her, but Spock's clever use of "stone knives and bearskins" reveals that she must die, because otherwise she'll change the world and America will never create the atom bomb.
There are some comedic moments in this one (not to mention that cringe-y "rice-picker" bit), but it's really about the Kirk/Edith love story, and the way one small thing--a traffic accident--can change the world, and break the heart of our Captain.
1. "Trials and Tribble-ations" - DS9
A surge of chroniton radiation takes Sisko, Dax, Bashir, O'Brien, Odo, and Worf back to the glory days of the U.S.S. Enterprise, when James T. Kirk sat in the command chair. They're orbiting Space Station K-7, which tells any self-respecting Star Trek fan that they've landed right in the middle of the classic episode "The Trouble with Tribbles." It turns out they're after the same villain too: Arne Darvin, a Klingon surgically altered to appear human, has traveled back in time to warn his younger self and get his revenge on Captain Kirk by killing him.
We get all the glories of "The Trouble with Tribbles," with all its due reverence. There's the bar fight, in which Odo, Worf, Bashir and O'Brien now participate, and Kirk's taking down of his men for causing it, with O'Brien and Bashir now part of the line-up. And now that we know Dax and Sisko were inside the tribble compartment, examining them for bombs and discarding them, we have our explanation for why they kept falling on Kirk so relentlessly. A centuries-old mystery solved! And p.s., Dax thinks Spock is hot.
The technical work on blending the new footage in with the old is flawless, making it the best time travel episode ever, and a perfect homage to the series that started it all.
Okay, we know we missed somebody's favorite: go to the comments section and tell us which ones.
The newest series, Star Trek: Discovery , premieres on CBS later this year.
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When my mother passed away, I inherited her research, added it to my own, and followed the trails she had laid down ahead of me. In 2016, I utilized my first direct-to-consumer ancestry DNA test to test my family and find answers to a few family mysteries that had eluded past researchers. I had no idea of the journey it would take me on.
The Eyre Affair. $16 at Bookshop. In this version of Great Britain circa 1985, time travel is routine. Our protagonist is Thursday Next, a literary detective, who is placed on a case when someone ...
The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells. It's impossible to do a list of time-travel books without including the granddaddy of them all, The Time Machine. Written in 1895, Wells imagined the future—802701 A.D., to be precise—when his Time Traveler narrator recounted his journey there (and beyond).
If you're a history buff, you'll love the science of time travel mixing with the method of travel, as your sent back to the start of the American Revolution in Massachusetts. One spark to this intriguing story was the main characters are thrown off their initial course of testing their time-ship, hoping to travel just a couple years into ...
The stories are about Greyson Travers, or at least a version of Greyson Travers, the grandson of Dr. Harold Quickly who invented time travel. This version of Greyson who is a time travel detective was created when the time line was split. In the first three books Greyson investigates and solves mysteries for others.
If you like detective stories, enjoy time travel, and don't mind when the two mix, then this is definitely the book for you. I rarely recommend books from authors with whom I'm not familiar, but Time of Death is extremely well-written & phenomenally well-paced. My only real complaint is that it seemed too short, although it doesn't really hurt ...
Another story from our favorite time travel detective. Positives: An entertaining and at times frenetic rhythm, very typical of Van Coops. New and interesting characters, others already known and well exploited. I really liked the veteran detective who appears in the middle of the story, a tribute to the great detectives of literature. But best ...
Maybe not quite a traditional detective story, but I see it as sort of an SF riff on Lord Peter Wimsey and (obviously) Three Men in a Boat. Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge, if you'll accept bobbling as one-way time travel. You might like some of Tim Powers' time travel novels, like "Three Days to Never" or "The Anubis Gates".
The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton. An Agatha Christie style murder mystery with a body-hopping, time-looping sleuth, this novel is a work of genre-crossing genius. Set in a stately home in the 1920s, the story sees the titular character shot at midnight during her own birthday party.
The best time travel stories, for me, allow the writer to essentially explore what it means to be human, and the incredible books I have picked below do exactly that. *. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. In this beautiful novel, Kate Atkinson uses a form of time-travel to investigate the fragility of being alive in a warm, luminous and witty way.
The Time Crime Investigation: In a future where time travel is regulated, a detective specialized in temporal crimes investigates anomalies disrupting the timeline. They follow a trail of paradoxes and anomalies, uncovering a rogue time traveler manipulating historical events for personal gain. ... A Time Travel Story - Part Four (252) The end ...
The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz. In the world of Another Timeline, time travel has been around since forever in the form of a geologic phenomena known as the "Machines.". Tess belongs to a group called the Daughters of Harriett, determined to make the future better for women by editing the timeline at key moments in history.
Amazon.com: Time of Death: A Time Travel Detective Mystery (Paradox P.I.): 9781950669073: Van Coops, Nathan: Books ... I love a good sci-fi time travel story, some more than others and Nathan's best of all. When it's well done the writer defines the rules of how things work, there needs to be some internal logic and Nathan Van Coops has a great ...
From time to time, I record my stories for those more partial to listening over reading. You will find them here as well as on our Time Travel Detective's YouTube page. Buy Me A Coffee. Time traveling is my passion and I am often awake and researching hours before the Sun rises each morning. If you like my stories, you can help fuel my coffee ...
The Clockwork Game : A Time Travel Detective Mystery (Paradox P.I. Book 3) - Kindle edition by Van Coops, Nathan. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading The Clockwork Game : A Time Travel Detective Mystery (Paradox P.I. Book 3).
Fata Morgana by Steven R. Boyett and Ken Mitchroney (2017) 384 pages ★★★★☆ - Clever plot twists in a time travel tale. Science fiction authors love time travel stories, because it affords them abundant opportunities to build plots full of clever plot twists and turns. Sometimes the surprises are really anything but shocking.
Best Time Travel Fiction. Fiction (of any genre) where the plot involves time travel. flag. All Votes Add Books To This List. 1. The Time Traveler's Wife. by. Audrey Niffenegger (Goodreads Author) 3.99 avg rating — 1,784,600 ratings.
We were expecting In Five Years to be a time travel romance story; however, this is a different type of love and one of the best books about strong ... Instead, memories become the time-traveling reality. Detective Barry Sutton is investigating False Memory Syndrome. Neuroscientist Helena Smith might have the answers he needs. The disease ...
Amazon.com: Time of Death: A Time Travel Detective Mystery (Paradox P.I., Book 1) (Audible Audio Edition): Nathan Van Coops, Stacy Carolan, Skylighter Press: Audible Books & Originals ... I love a good sci-fi time travel story, some more than others and Nathan's best of all. When it's well done the writer defines the rules of how things work ...
Dark, Netflix (2017 - 2020) Netflix's first German original series was the science fiction series Dark, which mixes in some mystery drama with sci-fi: time travel, the apocalypse, wormholes, and parallel worlds.. Dark takes place in Winden, a fictional German town, and begins in 2019 after children begin to disappear from the town. As the show progresses, however, timelines jump ...
This book has everything, cursed rings, time travel, swoon-worthy romance, forbidden love, and a drop-dead gorgeous Tudor King. There's also a murder mystery as well, which adds so much depth to the plot. And I love, love, love how Murray treated the time travel aspect. There are dire consequences for changing the past and those consequences ...
11. "Tomorrow is Yesterday" - TOS. This one plays the time travel story for laughs, mostly, and that's what makes it so fun. The ship gets trapped in the 1960s, is flagged as a UFO, and takes aboard American astronaut Captain John Christopher.
via merchant. 1. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Arguably the classic time travel book, published all the way back in 1895, The Time Machine is one of the oldest time travel stories and is largely ...