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Gotta get back in time: The current explosion of time travel novels goes beyond sci-fi and fantasy

If something about how we've been experiencing time feels messed up to you, you're not alone, by nancy mccabe.

Maybe I just had time travel on the brain in 2020-21 when I was working on my own time travel novel, " Vaulting through Time ," but suddenly it seemed that everywhere I turned I found new books about temporal displacement, time loops , time skips, time slips or parallel timelines , and the onslaught continues today. What's going on? Have we traveled to an alternate universe with a whole new set of literary expectations around time?

Already in the pipeline before the pandemic, many of these novels may have struck at the right moment, given a boost by a widespread distorted perception of time.

After all, during shutdowns it felt like many of us were stuck in time loops, repeating the same day over and over. In addition, "It felt like during the pandemic the timeline split, like we're in an alternate timeline we're not supposed to be in," says writer and avid time travel fan Rebecca Johns-Trissler. "It's like something is off. Something feels deeply messed up. If we could have seen what was coming at the end of 2019, what would we change?"

Most of the novels I encountered aren't easily classified as science fiction or fantasy. Discussion of the butterfly effect, the grandfather paradox, or big balls of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff are scarce. This new tsunami of mainstream novels, many of which have hit bestseller lists, are often described as "genre-bending," categorized as women's, literary, and teen fiction; as mysteries and thrillers, horror and romantic comedy.

"People are fed up. Time travel provides a mental escape."

And most often, the novels in this new wave straddle more than one genre as they use time tropes to explore relationships and probe mysteries. Notably absent are characters who set out to kill Hitler or use time travel as a contrivance, à la Mary Pope Osborne's long-popular kids' "Magic Treehouse" series to deliver lessons in history—although history provides a rich backdrop in, say, Kiku Hughes's 2020 YA graphic novel "Displacement ," about Japanese internment camps, and Leah Henderson's 2020 middle grade "The Magic In Changing Your Stars ," which evokes a rich history of dance in 1930s Harlem.

The proliferation of time travel novels is staggering. Take the following examples:

• Parallel universes lighten dark themes in Matt Haig's 2020 "The Midnight Library ." In it, protagonist Nora takes a drug overdose and hovers between life and death, trying out all the different lives she might have led. 
• Toshikazu Kawaguchi's "Before the Coffee Gets Cold" series, primarily published in translation in the U.S. after 2020, revolves around a magical café in Tokyo where patrons can time travel — but they can only stay in other realities for the amount of time it takes for a cup of coffee to cool off.
• Jodi Picoult's 2021 "Wish You Were Here " features the Covid pandemic and a parallel-universe twist that it would be a spoiler to elaborate on any further.
• Sarah Lariviere's 2021 young adult novel "Time Travel for Love and Profit " stars a teen stuck in a time loop for ten years, repeating her freshman year of high school—pretty much everyone's nightmare.
• In another clever time loop twist, Holly Smale's "Cassandra in Reverse " stars a protagonist who discovers she can rewind time, a process that sheds light on neurodivergence and her struggle to fit in.
• In Rebecca Serle's 2020 novel "In Five Years ," Dannie glimpses her life five years in the future—an experience that impacts her present.
• Casey McQuiston's protagonist August develops a crush on a woman who proves to be displaced in time on the subway in her 2021 LGBTQ+ romance/romantic comedy "One Last Stop ."
• A man and his daughter time travel in search of their lost wife and mother in Dean Koontz's horror novel "Elsewhere " (2020).
• Protagonists travel through time to re-examine relationships with parents in Helen Fisher's novel "Faye, Faraway " (2021), Emma Straub's novel "This Time Tomorrow " (2022), and Maurene Goo's YA novel "Throwback " (2023), which follows a contemporary second-generation Korean-American teen who meets her teenage mother in the '90s.
• Recent mysteries and thrillers with time twists include Lauren Thoman's "I'll Stop the World "  (2023), Gillian McAllister's "Wrong Place Wrong Time " (2022), and Joshua David Bellin's "Myriad " (2023).
• Emily St. John Mandel's bestselling literary novel "Sea of Tranquility " (2022) uses time travel to raise philosophical questions about the nature of reality.

In The New York Times Book Review , Elisabeth Egan attributes the popularity of "The Midnight Library" partially to "the life-altering, priority-jumbling pandemic" — an explanation that perhaps applies to the popularity of time travel in general.

Paul Booth, organizer of a pop culture conference at DePaul University with time travel as its May 2023 theme, also links the popularity of time travel to our current moment: "There's a common distaste for the current climate — political, cultural. People are fed up. Time travel provides a mental escape. There's an apocalyptic sense in the world today."

What better way to come to terms with the inevitable erasure of time than through an ability to break the boundaries time imposes on us?

While on the rise in our literature for decades, the idea of time travel didn't even exist until the late 1800s. The human ability to travel through space vertically via hot air balloon and the greater freedom to travel horizontally via the railroads incited the imaginations of writers like H.G. Wells to wonder what would happen if we could also travel through time.

Over the course of the next century, concepts like time slips, time loops and alternative timelines gradually entered the mainstream, becoming more firmly entrenched by the early 21st century with such influential works as Audrey Niffenegger's 2003 "The Time Traveler's Wife ," a richly layered portrait of a marriage. In it, time travel becomes a potent metaphor for the transience of even the most permanent relationship, of love, loss, absence and longing, of the fragility and complications of our connections. In her hands, time travel was impossible to dismiss as a hokey gimmick.

Subsequent decades saw exponential increases in books, TV shows, and films centered on time travel-related themes, from " Outlander " (based on the series of books published beginning in the early 1990s) to Canada's "Being Erica" to France's "The Seven Lives of Lea" to U.S. shows like "Manifest" to our ongoing vast cultural obsession with the possibilities of the multiverse . In an article on board games, Booth notes that more than 100 games with a time travel theme are cited on BoardGameGeek. 

While works like " The Time Traveler's Wife " highlight tensions between our desire for control and our ultimate lack of it, in general, time travel may feel so appealing because of its ability to suggest that our existence is purposeful, that our choices have power. Otherwise, why, as a popular meme suggests, are time travelers to the past so often warned that even a random small act can impact the future?

Choice was also a prevalent theme during the pandemic, Booth points out. "There was a lot of discourse about our individual power to protect the herd, and conversely, about our individual rights, to wear a mask or not, to be vaccinated or not."

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He cites a variety of other influences on the popularity of time travel, including the internet and the increasing fragmentation of our lives. "The mashup of online technology with traditional technology reflects a growing change in the way our culture understands and deals with time, memory, and history," Booth says. "For example, on Facebook the persona continues to live long after the person has died." Social media, he says, makes experiences feel at once timeless and fleeting.

The pandemic brought on a widespread heightened awareness of death as well, and what better way to avoid — or process — the reality of that? What better way to come to terms with the inevitable erasure of time than through an ability to break the boundaries time imposes on us?

Certainly, in the relative isolation of our pandemic bubbles, many of us were grappling with regrets or applying hindsight to personal as well as larger political and social issues. Maybe it's a natural progression to imagine turning back time, playing the hero, changing outcomes — or to imagine visiting the future, making better choices as a result. Maybe greater confinement fueled our wanderlust or led us to seek comfort in nostalgia, to indulge in the wish fulfillment and possibility offered by the seemingly infinitely flexible fictional device that is time travel.

about time travel in entertainment

• Opiate for the Masses: "Making History" and "Time After Time" add to this season's TV travel addiction
• Here's to a coming era of "Doctor Who" where showrunner Russell T. Davies helps more kids feel seen
• The naked truth about "The Time Traveler's Wife" is that it would be a mess in any era

Salon has affiliate partnerships, and purchasing a book through our links may earn us a commission. 

Nancy McCabe is the author of nine books, including the newly-released young adult novel " Vaulting through Time " and two forthcoming novels. Her creative nonfiction includes the memoirs " Can This Marriage Be Saved ?" and " From Little Houses to Little Women: Revisiting a Literary Childhood ." She teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford and for the School of Creative and Professional Writing at Spalding University. Follow her on  Twitter at @nancygmccabe  or learn more about her work at  nancymccabe.net .

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11 Time Travel Novels That Will Transport You

Anne Mai Yee Jansen

Anne Mai Yee Jansen is a literature and ethnic studies professor and a lifelong story lover. She exists on a steady diet of books, hot chocolate, and dragon boating. After spending over a decade in the Midwest and the Appalachians, she returned to the sun and sandstone of California’s central coast where she currently resides with her partner, offspring, and feline companions. Find her on Instagram @dreaminginstories

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This unique ability of time travel novels means that these books either harken back to the past or project into the future (or, sometimes, both). If you’re interested in spending a little more time thinking about this, give the essay “Time Traveling Books: Historical Fiction or Speculative Fiction?” a read.

And while many time travel novels often feature complex mechanisms for time travel (such as Charles Yu’s fascinating How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe ), not all time travel requires a time machine. Take Octavia Butler’s Kindred — a true classic! Butler’s protagonist finds herself unwittingly thrust into the past at unpredictable moments in her life…an extremely perilous situation for a Black American woman who keeps finding herself in the antebellum South.

The future of literary time travel is just as exciting as its past and present. You can expect Stephen Graham Jones’s “historical slasher” comic series Earthdivers to premier this October. (Incidentally, some of Jones’ other books — like Ledfeather and The Bird is Gone — also dabble in time travel.) No matter when you look for it, there’s always a good time travel novel to be found.

Long Division by Kiese Laymon

Originally published in 2013, Kiese Laymon’s time warping novel about racism across the decades was republished in 2021. It’s the story of “City” Coldson, a teenager who spectacularly fails at a nationally televised spelling contest. His timeline begins in 2013, but shortly after being sent to stay with his grandmother in a small southern town things get…weird. Things take a metafictional turn for the character when he discovers a book called Long Division written in the 1980s by an author with his same name. And then 1964 makes an appearance, and before you know it, Laymon has taken you on a wild ride spanning half a century and confronting racism across the years.

The Mexican Flyboy by Alfredo Véa, Jr.

Simon Vegas acquired a time machine in Vietnam…and he’s been trying to get it in working order ever since. Once he gets it working, things get really wild really fast. Simon’s time machine has a focus: seeking out injustice and delivering its victims to a utopian afterlife. There are plenty of famous names sprinkled in there, but the real focus of this novel is on questions of power (or, perhaps more aptly, powerlessness), compassion and humanity, and trauma and justice. Since it’s Alfredo Véa, Jr. doing the writing, there’s a masterful blurring of genre lines and the larger question at the core of the time travel: is it real, or is it all in Simon’s head?

An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim

This is a time travel novel that feels uncannily timely. It’s a book that already gave readers a lot to think about, but given its release one year before the COVID-19 pandemic, the global context adds another layer of meaning. It’s 1981 and the U.S. is in the middle of a deadly pandemic. (Sound familiar?) Frank is sick, but people in the future mastered time travel in order to try to subvert the pandemic. So Polly has contracted out her future in order to save him. Of course, when love and time travel happen, nothing ever goes smoothly — their plan to be reunited at a set time in a set location is ruined when Polly gets sent too far into the future. As Polly tries to find Frank, Lim’s novel asks deep questions about love, connection, and these troubled times we live in.

The Girl from Everywhere by Heidi Heilig

Nix is a time traveler’s daughter, and she’s been seemingly everywhere and everywhen. It’s been a grand adventure…but then her dad is navigating toward an uncertain past: the year before Nix was born in the place where she was born. The problem is, Nix’s mother died in childbirth. The big question, then, is what her father intends to do when they get to when they’re going. And Kash, Nix’s mischievous love interest, throws another wrench into the works. Heilig’s novel is so hard to put down, and if you like The Girl From Everywhere , the second book of the duology, The Ship Beyond Time , is also available!

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

It’s nearly impossible to not be at least mildly interested in a semi-epistolary novel co-authored by the likes of Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Their improbable protagonists are on opposite sides of a war: technology vs. biology (obvs, I’m being a bit reductive). And yet… love . Despite the improbability of it all, despite the war they’re caught up in, despite the very real danger their correspondence represents to each of them. Love .

The Perishing by Natashia Deón

This is an unconventional time travel novel, for sure. For starters, protagonist Lou is immortal. She’s also, apparently, an amnesiac, having woken up in an alley with no memory of her past. Set in Los Angeles during the Great Depression, The Perishing follows Lou as she makes a name for herself and breaks all kinds of barriers as a professional journalist. But then she makes a new friend and is shocked to find that his face is one she’s been drawing for years. Deón crafts a fascinating mystery that will have you pondering all manner of ideas, big and small, long after you’ve finished the last page.

Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen

How can you go wrong with a time travel novel featuring a secret agent protagonist? I would argue that you can’t. Kin Stewart is living the suburban lifestyle in San Francisco, but it’s not suburbia he needs to be rescued from. It’s his life, which is a facade while he waits for someone to come get him and return him to his real life over a century and a half in the future. But help takes almost two decades to show up, and in the meantime Kin has been living his life — complete with a wife and daughter. Chen’s novel is appealingly deep, exploring the many dynamics that define the self even as it entertains with its fresh take on time travel.

Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story by LeAnne Howe

Miko Kings is the oldest book on this list, but it’s a fascinating read. Howe’s novel follows an intriguing cast of characters as the Native American baseball team in Oklahoma, the Miko Kings, strive to win the championship. The year: 1907. Yup, that’s the same year Oklahoma (the majority of which was officially known as Indian Territory ) was granted statehood by the United States. With that political history looming in the background, Hope Little Leader is caught up in some events that are far larger than his role as pitcher for the team. And then there’s the odd and brilliant Ezol Day, whose theories on time are intertwined with linguistics and Indigenous epistemologies. This book has it all: conspiracy, romance, and political scheming. To top it off, you’ll find some wonderfully non-standard textual elements here, like newspaper clippings and handwritten journal entries.

A Bubble of Time by Pepper Pace

What would you do if, in your 50s, you suddenly found yourself reliving your high school years as your actual 16-year-old self? That’s exactly what happens to Kenya Daniels in Pepper Pace’s hilarious and smart time travel novel A Bubble of Time . She’s 16 again, but with all of her half-century of lived experience alive and well in her memory. There’s a truly comedic element here for anyone who lived through the ’80s, because it’s pretty entertaining to follow Kenya as she is forced to revisit the wild decade as her younger self. But Pace’s time travel novel is also at turns thoughtful, heartwarming, and unexpected, too.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

What would you do if you could travel through time? What if you could travel through time, but only for a very short duration and without the ability to change the present? In Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s time travel novel, there’s a cafe in a basement in Tokyo where this is possible. But only from the cafe. With these interesting constraints on their time, patrons (and staffers) in the cafe time travel for small but profound reasons. It’s a strikingly beautiful meditation on the little regrets we carry with us throughout our lives. If you’re a fan of this book, you’ll be happy to know that it’s the first part of a trilogy; Tales from the Cafe came out two years ago and the third book, Before Your Memory Fades , is scheduled for release this November!

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

The Kingdoms is a wild ride! It’s historical fiction as much as it is a time travel novel. It opens with Joe Tournier’s confused arrival in 19th century England, but this is a very different England than the one you might have learned about in the history books: this England is a French colony. Shortly after his arrival, a mysterious postcard arrives. Not only is it written in English (a forbidden language in this alternate reality), but it’s addressed to him. As Joe seeks answers, he travels into Scotland (which is also an alternate Scotland) and beyond. It’s a captivating read — if you’ve ever read Pulley’s other works, this will come as no surprise.

Wanna buy yourself more time?

Get yourself stuck in a literary time loop by checking out the books on this list of time loop books . Or, if you’re feeling lovey, try a selection from this list of romantic time travel novels . And of course, you can’t go wrong with any of the options on this list of must-read time travel books !

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Here's what to read after you finish Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series.

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Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series is an incredible introduction to the time travel genre. In the books, Claire Randall's entire life shifts when she travels back in time through the stones at Craigh na Dun , arriving in Scotland in 1743. There, she meets her 18th-century husband, Highland warrior Jamie Fraser, and their epic love story spans centuries.

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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Time travel book ‘This Time Tomorrow' makes the millennial midlife crisis fun

The millennial midlife crisis has arrived.

Yes, while you’ve been cracking jokes about avocado toast , the eldest millennials have quietly, and with great dread, entered their 40s. Given that they can’t afford homes , never mind sports cars, what’s a millennial’s midlife crisis look like? In Emma Straub ’s winning new novel “This Time Tomorrow” (Riverhead, 320 pp., ★★★½ out of four, out now), it looks a little like the movies they grew up on, with a dash of time travel to spice up the existential dread. 

Alice Stern’s father is dying. That’s tough on any daughter, but it’s hitting Alice particularly hard as she approaches a midlife crossroads: She’s about to turn 40, suspects she’s going to be proposed to by a man she doesn’t want to marry, and still can’t decide whether she wants children despite a biological clock that’s rapidly ticking down. She can’t seem to definitively make up her mind about anything, and the one constant in her life, the single father who raised her with unwavering if imperfect love, is lying unresponsive in a hospital bed. 

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“There was supposed to be an upside to adulthood, wasn’t there?” Alice muses. “The period of your life that was your own, and not chosen for you by other people?”

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It doesn’t help that she’s still at the exclusive private Belvedere School where she spent her adolescence, working in admissions, where she decides which of her old classmates’ kids make the cut. Alice’s sense of arrested development gets thrown into overdrive when her unrequited teenage crush walks through her office door with a beautiful wife and young son in tow.

All those intense adolescent feelings come flooding back, complicated by remorse over paths not taken. Could this have been her life if she’d told the cute boy with the lush Jordan Catalano hair how she felt?

May's top rom-com reads: Emily Henry's 'Book Lovers' and Casey McQuiston's 'I Kissed Shara Wheeler'

She gets a chance to find out when, after a night of drunken revelry on her 40th birthday that ends with her passing out in an empty guardhouse, she wakes up to find herself in her childhood bed in her father’s home, 16 years old again. The guardhouse, she discovers, is a time portal. On one side, it’s her 16th birthday, and on the other, her 40th, and the changes she makes to her past are reflected in her future. It’s eerily similar to "Time Brothers,” the sci-fi novel about time-traveling brothers her father authored, that made her dad a popular staple at nerd conventions. 

What would you change, if you could go back to 16? Would you sleep with your crush at your birthday party? Do drugs? Shave your head? Beg your father to quit smoking? Tell him you love him more?

Alice does it all, trying to engineer a happier future – one that doesn’t include her father on his deathbed on her 40th birthday. With each trip back to 16, she gets a better understanding of her father, who’d seemed so old when she was a kid but now seems so young. 

“Alice and her father had always been such good friends,” Straub writes. “It was luck, she knew, plain luck, that gave some families complementary personalities. So many people spent their lives wishing to be understood. All Alice wanted was more time.”

“This Time Tomorrow” is technically a time travel book, but not the way Alice’s father’s book is. Straub is not so much concerned with time travel mechanics, the butterfly effect, or killing baby Hitler (or whatever the 1990s equivalent of that moral test would be). Straub is concerned with love – its different forms and expressions, how it evolves over time, and how we can be better at giving and accepting it. 

Love, too, for her own father, horror novelist Peter Straub, whom she thanks in the acknowledgments "for receiving this book as it was intended, as a gift.”

Because even if you could go back and change everything else, the love would remain the same. 

'Managing Expectations': Minnie Driver writes about life, Hollywood (and Harvey Weinstein)

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The 10 best time travel novels

Posted by Mal Warwick | Reading Recommendations , Science Fiction | 0

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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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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Emma Straub about her new novel, This Time Tomorrow, in which the central character is turning 40 — but wakes up and is age 16 again.

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10 Best Time Travel Books to Read in 2022

There are a lot of great time travel books out there, which makes it challenging to find the right book that fits your needs. And why not? We all have different tastes. 

However, reading and enjoying fantasy and science fiction books like the metaverse , or focusing on stories with interesting time travel components, are some broad suggestions that can be helpful.

This guide will show the top time travel books that offer a unique perspective on time travel, including its potential consequences. Regardless of the book, one thing is for sure: you’ll experience thrilling and enjoyable adventures. 

Let’s dive in! 

Top 10 Time Travel Books 

1. the future of another timeline – annalee newitz .

Time travel has existed in the universe of Another Timeline since the beginning of time in a geologic phenomenon called the “Machines.”

Tess belongs to a member of the Daughters of Harriett. This group is dedicated to ensuring a better future for women by modifying the timeline at crucial times in history.

They run into the Comstockers, a sexist group with the opposite goal. There’s murder, time travel, geek references, punk rock concerts, and an editing dispute.

This is one of the best time travel books you’ll have time to enjoy! 

2. An Ocean Of Minutes – Thea Lim 

There is a catastrophic flu pandemic in the United States. So when Polly’s partner Frank falls ill, she decides to purchase a one-way ticket to the future to pay for his treatment.

Polly is sent to a time when America is divided, and she has no money or connections; they agree to meet again in the future.

This brilliantly written and devastating tale about dystopia, time travel, the severity of existence in an alien world, and a character study of a typical person trying to make sense of it all. 

If you want the best time travel books, check this novel out! 

Related: 10 Bedtime Stories for Adults in 2022

3. Kindred – Octavia E. Butler 

This book is a time travel historical fiction novel that deals with slavery and racism.

Dana is an African American woman pulled through the years to Antebellum, Maryland, to celebrate her birthday in 1976. Rufus, a small white child about to drown, is saved by her and finds himself staring down the barrel of his father’s rifle.

She’s brought back into her current only for short periods to save her own life, returning soaked and filthy to her living room. 

She is repeatedly dragged back into the past, where she encounters the same young man. Finally, Dana realizes her connection to Rufus and the battle she faces throughout those horrible experiences.

This is a thought-provoking, fascinating novel that should be required reading for various reasons, not the least of which is the possibility of time travel.

4. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut 

In a technical sense, this novel isn’t about time travel. But, on the other hand, within an incorporated portion of its story, the novel undoubtedly leans on and fractures various rectal tropes. 

Pilgrim is drafted into the army during World War II and serves as a Chaplain’s Assistant until the Germans capture him in Germany. He survived the Dresden bombing and went on to become an optometrist. Things start to spiral out of control.

This novel is a story about Billy Pilgrim, a war veteran who appears to suffer from PTSD and psychological harm. 

Billy can also be unstuck in time’, traveling to various elements of his life in no specific sequence, with no control. For example, one minute, he is at his daughter’s wedding; the next, he is being abducted by aliens. 

Regardless, it’s one of the best time travel books to read. 

Related: 10 Best Places to Read a Book in NYC

5. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger 

This book is a science fiction story involving time travel events and an incredibly romantic story. In Audrey Niffenegger’s novel, two key characters will ensure that the plot remains intriguing for you. 

You meet Clare and Henry, a couple with an unconventional connection due to Henry’s significant and life-altering illness. He has a condition known as Chrono-Displacement Disorder, and he’s the only person to develop it. 

Henry has been traveling across time and history since he was a child. And Henry has no control over when he goes, how long he stays, or which year he returns.

Clare falls in love with this man because she sees something extraordinary in him that is well worth the trouble she is about to go through as she watches her husband, Henry, live a very uncertain life. 

The fantastic narration of the novel and the well-thought-out concept inside have earned this book one of the best time travel books. 

6. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells 

This book is primarily about one character, referred to as the Time Traveler throughout the narrative, and is never given a name.

He has a Time Machine technology that enables him to be suddenly transported into any time and year he chooses, whether past or present.

When he first puts his new invention to the test, he chooses a destination only a few hours away. But then, he experiences a watershed moment in his life: the machine works, and he is eager to put it to the test. 

He soon reaches the limit of his abilities and travels 800,000 years into the future. The people, buildings, terrain, and practically everything in the world he winds up in are entirely different from the one he came from.

This novel is among the best time travel books these days! 

Related: 10 Books to Read in 2022

7. A Murder In Time – Julie McElwain 

Kendra Donovan is a significant figure at the FBI until a botched raid results in the murder of half of her squad and discovering an FBI mole. She’s determined to find the man responsible for killing her squad after she heals from her wounds. 

But when she arrived in England, she found herself in 1815. Unfortunately, Kendra is mistaken for a lady’s maid and is forced to swiftly adjust to the period while attempting to return to her timeframe. The Kendra Donovan series consists of five volumes, so if you enjoy time travel books about mysteries, don’t miss them.

8. 11/22/63 – Stephen King 

11/22/63 is a time travel novel for fans of historical fiction. The plot of 11/22/63 revolves around Jack Epping. But, of course, he’s just your regular Joe, a British high school English teacher trying to make ends meet. In other words, until his friend Al shows him a secret storeroom that doubles as a time portal. 

This time vortex transports Jack to a specific afternoon in 1958, during the era of Elvis Presley and huge American automobiles. Al entrusts Jack with a monumental task that will alter the course of history. What is his mission? To avert J. F. Kennedy’s assassination!

Related: 10 Ways to Develop a Reading Habit

9. The Girl From Everywhere – Heidi Heilig 

Nix has spent sixteen years on her father’s ship, sweeping across the world and as the daughter of a time traveler through the centuries. Nix has seen modern-day New York City, nineteenth-century Hawaii, and other worlds are only known via myth and legend.

But when her father jeopardizes her very survival, it all ends. In this epic first fantasy, Rae Carson meets Outlander. 

Nix’s father can sail his ship to any place and time if there is a map. But now that he’s found the one map he’s been looking for—1868 Honolulu, the year Nix’s mother died in childbirth—life, Nix’s whole existence, is on the line. 

No one can predict what would happen if her father alters history. It can obliterate Nix’s future, her goals, her exploits, and her relationship with Kash, the charming Persian thief who has been a member of their crew for two years.

10. Recursion – Blake Crouch 

Recursion follows Barry Sutton, a New York City officer investigating a strange occurrence known as Father False Memory Syndrome. This mystery ailment leads random people to remember entire lifetimes they have never lived. 

Many people commit suicide due to their inability to cope with the flood trauma of those unfamiliar recollections.

Then there’s Helena Smith, a brilliant scientist who has committed her life to develop technology that will help us save our most treasured memories. But unfortunately, she unintentionally creates a far more powerful and dangerous system than she expected.

Related: 10 Amazing Jobs for Book Lovers in 2022

Conclusion 

All of the books discussed in this article tell a unique and thrilling story. And it’s safe to say that they’ve been hailed as some of the best time travel books available if you prefer stories that fit that description. 

If you’re looking for a way to pass the time while having a good time, these novels will meet your needs.

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16 Books About Time Travel

Full of adventure, time travel books have a little something for everyone! I personally love time travel books that travel to the past and preferably more than one place in the story. One of my favorite time travel YA books is The Girl From Everywhere by Heidi Heilig. On her father’s ship, Nix travels through time, depending on what map they use.

Time travel opens an even wider world for readers to discover through history and even into the future. This list includes both chapter books and middle grade titles for readers from ages 6-12. A lot of these would also make really great read aloud titles as well.

But, I will say, I was extremely disappointed in the distinct lack of diversity when it comes to time travel books for kids. There is more diversity in time travel books for teens, but I struggled to find more than just a few books BIPOC characters. If you know of others, please share in the comments below. Check out these great time travel books to share with your young readers!

Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

Abraham Lincoln, Pro Wrestler

(Time Twisters) by Steve Sheinkin

Amazon | Bookshop

Well, you can believe some of it. There is some real history. But also hijinks. Time travel. And famous figures setting off on adventures that definitely never happened―till now. Time is getting twisted, and it’s up to two kids to straighten things out.

When Abraham Lincoln overhears a classroom of kids say “history is boring,” he decides to teach them a lesson. Lincoln escapes from 1860―to pursue his dream of becoming a professional wrestler! Now siblings Doc and Abby have to convince Lincoln to go back to Springfield, Illinois, and accept the presidency . . . before everything spins out of control!

On the Blue Comet

by Rosemary Wells

One day in a house at the end of Lucifer Street, on the Mississippi River side of Cairo, Illinois, eleven-year-old Oscar Ogilvie’s life is changed forever. The Crash of 1929 has rippled across the country, and Oscar’s dad must sell their home–with all their cherished model trains–and head west in search of work. Forced to move in with his humorless aunt, Carmen and his teasing cousin, Willa Sue, Oscar is lonely and miserable–until he meets a mysterious drifter and witnesses a crime so stunning it catapults Oscar on an incredible train journey from coast to coast, from one decade to another. Filled with suspense and peppered with witty encounters with Hollywood stars and other bigwigs of history, this captivating novel by Rosemary Wells, gorgeously illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline, resonates with warmth, humor, and the true magic of a timeless adventure.

Dinosaurs Before Dark

(Magic Treehouse) by Mary Pope Osborne

Where did the tree house come from?

Before Jack and Annie can find out, the mysterious tree house whisks them to the prehistoric past. Now they have to figure out how to get home. Can they do it before dark…or will they become a dinosaur’s dinner?

The Glass Sentence

by S. E. Grove

She has only seen the world through maps. She had no idea they were so dangerous. Boston, 1891. Sophia Tims comes from a family of explorers and cartologers who, for generations, have been traveling and mapping the New World—a world changed by the Great Disruption of 1799, when all the continents were flung into different time periods.  Eight years ago, her parents left her with her uncle Shadrack, the foremost cartologer in Boston, and went on an urgent mission. They never returned. Life with her brilliant, absent-minded, adored uncle has taught Sophia to take care of herself.

Then Shadrack is kidnapped. And Sophia, who has rarely been outside of Boston, is the only one who can search for him. Together with Theo, a refugee from the West, she travels over rough terrain and uncharted ocean, encounters pirates and traders, and relies on a combination of Shadrack’s maps, common sense, and her own slantwise powers of observation. But even as Sophia and Theo try to save Shadrack’s life, they are in danger of losing their own.

The Last Last-Day-of-Summer

by Lamar Giles

Otto and Sheed are the local sleuths in their zany Virginia town, masters of unraveling mischief using their unmatched powers of deduction. And as the summer winds down and the first day of school looms, the boys are craving just a little bit more time for fun, even as they bicker over what kind of fun they want to have. That is, until a mysterious man appears with a camera that literally freezes time. Now, with the help of some very strange people and even stranger creatures, Otto and Sheed will have to put aside their differences to save their town—and each other—before time stops for good.

The Last Musketeer

by Stuart Gibbs

On a family trip to Paris, Greg Rich’s parents disappear. They’re not just missing from the city – they’re missing from the century. So, Greg does what any other 14-year-old would do: He travels through time to rescue them. 

Greg soon finds out that his family history is tied to the legendary Three Musketeers. But when he meets them, they’re his age, and they’ll only live long enough to become true heroes if he can save them. 

To rescue his parents, Greg must assume the identity of a young Musketeer in training and unite Athos, Porthos, and Aramis – but a powerful enemy is doing everything possible to stop him. 

The Library of Ever

by Zeno Alexander

With her parents off traveling the globe, Lenora is bored, bored, bored―until she discovers a secret doorway into the ultimate library. Mazelike and reality-bending, the library contains all the universe’s wisdom. Every book ever written, and every fact ever known, can be found within its walls. And Lenora becomes its newly appointed Fourth Assistant Apprentice Librarian.

She rockets to the stars, travels to a future filled with robots, and faces down a dark nothingness that wants to destroy all knowledge. To save the library, Lenora will have to test her limits and uncover secrets hidden among its shelves.

The Lincoln Project

(Flashback Four) by Dan Gutman

In  New York Times  bestselling author Dan Gutman’s all-new series, which blends fascinating real history with an action-packed and hilarious adventure, four very different kids are picked by a mysterious billionaire to travel through time and photograph some of history’s most important events. This time, the four friends are headed to 1863 to catch Abraham Lincoln delivering his famous Gettysburg Address.

They’ll have to work together to ask the right questions, meet the right people, and capture the right moment. And most important—not get caught! Back matter separating fact from fiction and real black-and-white photographs throughout make Flashback Four the perfect mix of true history and uproarious fun. Young readers will love reading the hilarious story, while still learning about a crucial moment in American history.

The Magic In Changing Your Stars

by Leah Henderson

Eleven-year-old Ailey Benjamin Lane, a gifted dancer, is certain that he’ll land the role of the Scarecrow in his school’s production of  The Wiz.  But when a classmate overshadows him at auditions, a deflated Ailey confides in his Grampa that he is going to give up dancing. Not ready to give up on Ailey, Grampa shares a story from his past. As a young boy, Grampa gave up  his  dreams of tap dancing even after the unofficial Mayor of Harlem, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, encouraged him to perform. Robinson also gifted him a special pair of tap shoes.

A curious Ailey tries on the shoes and is instantly transported back to 1930s Harlem. There he meets a young street tap dancer and realizes it’s his grandfather. Ailey thinks he can help the 12-year-old version of his Grampa face his fears, but he must tread lightly—if Ailey changes the past, can it affect his future, and will he ever make his way home? Featuring an all-Black cast of characters and many moments infused with Black culture and history, this is a time-travel adventure that has been waiting to be told.

The Mona Lisa Key

(Time Castaways) by Liesl Shurtliff

Mateo, Ruby, and Corey Hudson’s parents don’t have too many rules. It’s the usual stuff: Be good. Do your homework. And never ride the subway without an adult, EVER. But when the siblings wake up late for school, they have no choice but to break a rule. The Hudson siblings board the subway in Manhattan and end up on a frigate ship in Paris…in the year 1911.

As time does tell, the Hudson family has a lot of secrets. The past, present, and future are intertwined—and a time-traveling ship called the  Vermillion  is at the center. Racing to untangle the truth, the kids find themselves in the middle of one of the greatest art heists of all time.

And the adventure is just getting started.

Rescue on the Oregon Trail

(Ranger In Time) by Kate Messner

Meet Ranger! He’s a time-traveling golden retriever who has a nose for trouble . . . and always saves the day! Ranger has been trained as a search-and-rescue dog, but can’t officially pass the test because he’s always getting distracted by squirrels during exercises. One day, he finds a mysterious first aid kit in the garden and is transported to the year 1850, where he meets a young boy named Sam Abbott. Sam’s family is migrating west on the Oregon Trail, and soon after Ranger arrives he helps the boy save his little sister. Ranger thinks his job is done, but the Oregon Trail can be dangerous, and the Abbotts need Ranger’s help more than they realize!

Saving Lucas Biggs

by Marisa De Los Santos and David Teague

Thirteen-year-old Margaret knows her father is innocent, but that doesn’t stop the cruel Judge Biggs from sentencing him to death. Margaret is determined to save her dad, even if it means using her family’s secret—and forbidden—ability to time travel.

With the help of her best friend, Charlie, and his grandpa Josh, Margaret goes back to a time when Judge Biggs was a young boy and tries to prevent the chain of events that transformed him into a corrupt, jaded man. But with the forces of history working against her, will Margaret be able to change the past? Or will she be pushed back to a present in which her father is still doomed?

Told in alternating voices between Margaret and Josh, this heartwarming story shows that sometimes the forces of good need a little extra help to triumph over the forces of evil.

Stealing the Sword

(Time Jumpers series) by Wendy Mass

Chase and Ava find an old suitcase filled with strange objects. One of the objects looks like a dragon-headed doorknob… Suddenly Chase and Ava find themselves jumping back in time to King Arthur’s castle! They meet the king’s wizard Merlin and soon discover what the dragon-headed doorknob  really  is. It turns out they have an important job to do: They must save the king! But a bad guy is after them… How will Chase and Ava get back home? They will need to act fast to find out!

Time Traveling With a Hamster

by Ross Welford

My dad died twice. Once when he was thirty-nine and again four years later, when he was twelve.  On his twelfth birthday, Al Chaudhury receives a letter from his dead father. It directs him to the bunker of their old house, where Al finds a time machine (an ancient computer and a tin bucket). The letter also outlines a mission: travel back to 1984 and prevent the go-kart accident that will eventually take his father’s life. But as Al soon discovers, whizzing back thirty years requires not only imagination and courage, but also lying to your mom, stealing a moped, and setting your school on fire—oh, and keeping your pet hamster safe. With a literary edge and tons of commerical appeal, this incredible debut has it all: heart, humor, vividly imagined characters, and a pitch-perfect voice.

Time Villains

by Victor Piñeiro

Javi Santiago is trying his best not to fail sixth grade. So, when the annual invite any three people to dinner homework assignment rolls around, Javi enlists his best friend, Wiki, and his sister, Brady, to help him knock it out of the park.

But the dinner party is a lot more than they bargained for. The family’s mysterious antique table actually brings the historical guests to the meal…and Blackbeard the Pirate is turning out to be the worst guest of all time.

Before they can say avast, ye maties, Blackbeard escapes, determined to summon his bloodthirsty pirate crew. And as Javi, Wiki, and Brady try to figure out how to get Blackbeard back into his own time, they might have to invite some even zanier figures to set things right again…

A Wrinkle In Time

by Madeleine L’Engle

It was a dark and stormy night; Meg Murry, her small brother Charles Wallace, and her mother had come down to the kitchen for a midnight snack when they were upset by the arrival of a most disturbing stranger.

“Wild nights are my glory,” the unearthly stranger told them. “I just got caught in a downdraft and blown off course. Let me sit down for a moment, and then I’ll be on my way. Speaking of ways, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.”

A tesseract (in case the reader doesn’t know) is a wrinkle in time. To tell more would rob the reader of the enjoyment of Miss L’Engle’s unusual book.  A Wrinkle in Time , winner of the Newbery Medal in 1963, is the story of the adventures in space and time of Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin O’Keefe (athlete, student, and one of the most popular boys in high school). They are in search of Meg’s father, a scientist who disappeared while engaged in secret work for the government on the tesseract problem.

If you’re interested in purchasing any of the titles above from my list of 16 Books About Time Travel , please use my affiliate links for Amazon or Bookshop. When you purchase from the links above, I will earn a commission as an affiliate.

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Booklist Queen

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37 Mind-Bending Time Travel Books

Jump into the best time travel books and discover the mind-bending scenarios only possible in the best time travel fiction.

The other night at dinner, I was asking my kids whether they would like to travel to the past or the future. The myriad replies included visiting the dinosaurs and flying in a spaceship across the galaxy.

The linear nature of our lives means that we can only imagine a different way of experiencing time. The best time travel books use this impossibility to create mind-bending scenarios for us to contemplate.

Today, I wanted to share with you some of my favorite time travel books, along with a whole slew of intriguing books with time travel to fire up your imagination.

Have fun exploring the twisty what-if scenarios in these time traveling books and let me know your favorites in the comments!

Don’t Miss a Thing

Best Time Travel Books

The Time Traveler’s Wife

Audrey niffenegger.

When you think of the best books about time travel, Audrey Niffenegger’s debut novel comes to mind. In this classic love story, art student Clare and librarian Henry try for a sense of normalcy as Henry time shifts through their life. Henry has Chrono-Displacement Disorder; he unexpectedly gets pulled to important emotional moments in his past and future life. A mind-bending romance that is a must-read for any fan of time travel books.

Publication Date: 2003 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Stephen King

Stephen King seems to write amazingly in every genre, and time travel fiction is no different. In 11/22/63 , English teacher Jake Epping discovers that this friend Al has a portal in his diner storeroom that leads back to 1958. As Jake emerges into the past, he starts by trying to change the life of one of his students and eventually concocts a plan to prevent President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. But playing with time always has unintended consequences.

Publication Date: 8 November 2011 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Diana Gabaldon

One of the ultimate time travel romance books, Gabaldon’s Outlander series creates a sweeping love triangle. Recently returned from serving as a WWII nurse, Claire Randall decides to take a second honeymoon with her husband. When she steps through a standing stone in the British Isles, she finds herself transported back to 1743 in war-torn Scotland. As Claire allies with the great warrior James Fraser, she must decide between the love of two completely men in two completely different times.

Publication Date: 1 June 1991 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Blake Crouch

America has fallen victim to False Memory Syndrome – a disease where victims are driven mad by memories of a life they never lived … or have they? It’s up to NYPD cop Barry Sutton and neuroscientist Helena Smith to figure out how to stop this epidemic, even as reality is shifting all around them. You’ll have a hard time putting this one down, so you’ll certainly want to pick up a copy before the film adaptation hits Netflix.

Publication Date: 11 June 2019 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

Stuart turton.

On the 19th anniversary of their son’s murder, Lord and Lady Hardcastle throw a party with the same guests as that fateful day long ago. At 11 pm, Evelyn Hardcastle is murdered. In a Groundhog Day -esque fashion, Aidan Bishop must relive this day 8 times, but from the perspective of eight different witnesses. His task: identify Evelyn’s murderer, or do it all over again. Evelyn Hardcastle will throw you into a brilliant game of Clue as you see the same events from multiple viewpoints. Just ignore the why this happening and jump right into the mystery come to life, with plenty of fun twists and turns along the way.

Publication Date: 8 February 2018 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Save for Later

Recent Books on Time Travel

Wrong Place Wrong Time

Gillian mcallister.

Just after midnight, Jen is watching out the window for her teenage son Todd to come home when she sees him murder an older man right outside their house. With her son in custody, Jen goes to be in despair but wakes to find the day starting all over again. Caught in a time loop, Jen must find out the impetus for the murder and try anything she can to stop it.

Publication Date: 2 August 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

One Italian Summer

Rebecca serle.

One Italian Summer is a time travel novel about grieving and understanding a parent. When her mother dies just before their planned mother-daughter trip to Italy, Katy decides to still spend the summer exploring the Amalfi coast as she grieves. Magically, Katy meets a younger version of her mother, giving Katy a whole new perspective on her mother as a person.

Publication Date: 1 March 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

This Time Tomorrow

Emma straub.

On the eve of her 40th birthday, Alice feels satisfied with everything in her life except her distant relationship with her father. When she wakes up the next day, she finds she has been transported back in the past to her 16-year-old self. Now with the eyes of an adult, Alice sees it as an opportunity to connect with her father and correct past mistakes.

Publication Date: 17 May 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

One Last Stop

Casey mcquiston.

One of the most anticipated time travel books of 2021 comes from the author of Red, White & Royal Blue . Cynical August doesn’t believe life will ever change until she develops a crush on a girl from her subway commute. Jane is perfect and the highlight of August’s every day. But when August and Jane finally meet, August realizes that somehow Jane actually lives in the 1970s. A time-defying romance perfect for your summer reading list.

Publication Date: 1 June 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Faye, Faraway

Helen fisher.

Faye is a happily married mother of two who still feels the ache of the loss of her mother as a child. When she suddenly finds herself transported back in time, she has the opportunity to befriend her mother. Faye, Faraway is a slow heartfelt debut novel that spends most of the story contemplating the psychology of time travel, faith, and the relationship between parents and children.

Publication Date: 26 January 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Time Travel Books for Your Reading List

The Midnight Library

In the Midnight Library, there are two books – one book for the life you’ve lived and one for the one you could have lived. After attempting suicide, Nora Seed finds herself there. Now she must decide which book to choose from. What if she had made different choices? Would her life have been any better? All of us have regrets, and by allowing Nora the possibility to redo her life, Haig does a brilliant job showing how we can never predict the outcomes of our choices. A thoroughly enjoyable read that intimately talks about the pain depression and second-guessing has on our life.

Publication Date: 29 September 2020 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

In Five Years

Dannie Cohan knows exactly where she’ll be in five years – until the night of her engagement. In her post-engagement bliss, she has a vision of herself in five years engaged to someone else. She doesn’t think much of it, until years later when she finds he is dating her best friend. While the premise sounds light-hearted, partway through the story, beach read goes out the window and thought-provoking steps in. You’ll feel compelled to know if the vision came true and surprised at how well Serle counters your expectations.

Publication Date: 10 March 2020 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Rainbow Rowell

Sitcom writer Georgie McCool knows her marriage is struggling, but she can’t pass up the chance to pitch the pilot show she’s been dreaming about for years, even if it means missing Christmas. While he’s away, she finds that calling Neal on the landline results in her talking to a younger version of her husband in the days just before he proposed. With the time-traveling communication messing with her head, Georgie recalls her courtship with Neal and ponders what to do about her marriage.

Publication Date: 8 July 2014 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Oona Out of Order

Margarita montimore.

On New Year’s Eve in 1982, Oona Lockhart is faced with a life-changing decision: travel abroad to continue her studies in London or pursue fame as a member of her boyfriend’s rock band. As the clock strikes midnight and Oona turns 19, she faints and wakes up as a fifty-year-old. Thus begins the mixed-up time travel life of Oona, where every year she gets to randomly experience her life at different stages. One of the best recent books with time travel, Oona Out of Order explores if we can change our destiny while having fun highlighting the differences between decades.

Publication Date: 25 February 2020 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

In a Holidaze

Christina lauren.

With her love life in shatters, Maelyn Jones is devastated to find this will be her last Christmas spent with her family at the snowy Utah cabin. As she drives away, a car crash sends her into a time loop to relive the same Christmas vacation over and over again. Now she must figure out how to end the time loop so she can live happily ever after. A lighthearted romance with a Groundhog Day premise perfect for your holiday reading list.

Publication Date: 6 October 2020 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Classics Books on Time Travel

Octavia E. Butler

In 1976, Dana, a young African-American writer, finds herself inexplicably sent back through time to a pre-Civil War plantation in Maryland. After saving a drowning white boy, she finds herself back in Los Angeles. Over and over, Dana finds herself returning to the plantation, which she realizes is where her ancestors lived. As her stays in the past become longer, Dana becomes entangled in the plantation and is forced to make harder and harder choices to survive. Octavia Butler’s genre-bending novel is a must-read among time travel books.

Publication Date: June 1979 Amazon | Goodreads

The Time Machine

H. g. wells.

In this classic story which pioneered time travel fiction and coined the word “time machine,” the time traveler pulls a lever and transports himself 800,000 years in the future. On a dying Earth, he meets two strange races – the innocent childlike Eloi and the Morlocks, brutal underground dwellers. Highlighting class conflict, The Time Machine warns against the assumption of the inevitable progress of mankind.

Publication Date: 1895 Amazon | Goodreads

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

After being hit over the hit, Hank Morgan wakes up to find himself miraculously in King Arthur’s Camelot. The nineteenth-century mechanic sets out to modernize the medieval era with electricity and gunfire, quickly creating chaos. Mark Twain’s imaginative satire sharply criticizes his contemporary culture, with interesting parallels to our world today. 

Publication Date: 1889 Amazon | Goodreads

Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt vonnegut.

How to describe Slaughterhouse-Five? In this postmodern anti-war science fiction World War II novel, the unreliable narrator tells the tale of Billy Pilgrim, a time-traveling man being held in an alien zoo. Through flashbacks, we relive Billy’s capture during the Battle of the Bulge, life as a POW working in a slaughterhouse (Slaughterhous #5) during the Dresden firebombing, and his subsequent life after the war. If you can get past Vonnegut’s strange style, his discussion of fate, free will, and death earn it its place among the best classic time travel books. For, “so it goes.”

Publication Date: 31 March 1969 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The End of Eternity

Isaac asimov.

Andrew Harlan is an Eternal, tasked with sifting through past and present centuries to monitor progress and, when necessary, changing things to ensure things play out how his organization wishes. When Andrew falls in love with a non-eternal, he must decide where his loyalties lie and at what cost his happily ever after ending is worth.

Publication Date: 1955 Amazon | Goodreads

Interesting Time Travel Novels

This Is How You Lose the Time War

Amal el-mohtar and max gladstone.

If you love more literary books on time travel, you’ll want to pick up this award-winning novella. In a world devastated by war for generations, two rival agents, known simply as Red and Blue, are tasked with securing the best possible outcome for her side. When an unlikely correspondence sparks between them, their romantic bond threatens to change both the past and the future.

Publication Date: 16 July 2019 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Night Watch

Terry pratchett.

As policeman Sam Vimes chases notorious serial killer Carcer, they are both caught up in a magical storm. Unexpectedly finding themselves in the past, Carcer ends up killer Vimes’s mentor John Keel. Now on the eve of Revolution, Vimes must impersonate Keel and act as the mentor to his younger self while trying to capture the killer without ruining the timeline. Although the 29th book in the Disc World series, Night Watch can be read as a standalone novel.

Publication Date: 2002 Amazon | Goodreads

Sea of Tranquility

Emily st. john mandel.

In 1912, a young man hears a violin playing in the Canadian woods, an event that a videographer captures in the present day. Two hundred years later, a famous writer includes a similar haunting scene in one of her books. Decades later, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts is hired to investigate this anomaly in time, one that has the potential to disrupt the universe’s timeline.

Publication Date: 5 April 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Dream Daughter

Diane chamberlain.

In 1970, Caroline Sears is devastated to learn her newborn daughter has a heart defect that cannot be cured. Except, her brother-in-law declares there is a cure. Hunter claims to be a time traveler from the future who promises that if she jumps to 2001, she can have fetal heart surgery and save her baby. Now Carly must decide what she believes and whether she should take a leap of faith.

Publication Date: 2 October 2018 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Accidental Time Machine

Joe haldeman.

After dropping out of grad school, Matt Fuller finds himself in a dead-end job working as a research assistant at MIT. When he accidentally creates a time machine while studying gravity and electromagnetic forces, Matt assumes he has nothing to lose by taking a jump in time. Every time each jumps, he travels further into the future, getting tangled into more and more complicated situations and hoping that with one more jump he can return to his present.

Publication Date: 2007 Amazon | Goodreads

Michael Crichton

In France, an archaeology professor leads a group of graduate students researching two fourteenth-century towns. When Professor Johnston flies back to America to handle their shady sponsors, the students begin to unearth his modern-day possessions buried in the ruins at the dig site. Quickly they are whisked away to a secret site and told that they must travel back to the time of knights if they are to save their professor.

Publication Date: 16 November 1999 Amazon | Goodreads

Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict

Laurie viera rigler.

A Jane Austen-obsessed woman wakes up one day to find herself back in Regency England. Now Courtney must pretend to be the Miss Jane Mansfield whose life she seems to be inhabiting. All while dealing with the inconveniences of the nineteenth century and handling chaperones, seducers, and unwanted marriage proposals. When she meets the enigmatic Mr. Edgeworth, Courtney is flooded with Jane’s memories of him and wonders if Jane might have judged him wrongly.

Books About Parallel Universes

Dark Matter

I know parallel universe stories aren’t quite the same as time travel, but they are so irresistibly fun I couldn’t help but highlight a few. Walking home one night, Jason Dessen is kidnapped and forced into an alternate reality. He’s been thrust into the multiverse, a world where instead of marrying his wife when she got pregnant with their child, he single-mindedly persevered on with his research. Although the middle was a bit slow, Crouch’s premise will boggle your mind and the story concludes with a thrilling finale.

Publication Date: 26 July 2016 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Two Lives of Lydia Bird

Josie silver.

After the death of her fiance, Lydia is struggling to cope. Thanks to an experimental sleeping pill, she gets a chance to live the life she would have had with her fiance in her dreams. However, living in her dream life is messing with her waking life. Which life should she choose? Silver does an excellent job showing how much grief has changed Lydia and how dangerous it is to interfere with the grief process.

Publication Date: 3 March 2020 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Haruki Murakami

If you are craving something a bit different, you might want to try this mind-bending work from famed Japanese author Haruki Murakami. In 1984, Aomame notices strange discrepancies and finds she has entered a parallel version of her life, 1Q84. Quickly caught up in a religious cult, Aomame wonders what is truly real. Meanwhile, ghostwriter Tengo accepts an assignment to rewrite a book, a decision that changes his whole life and leads him closer to Aomame.

Publication Date: 29 May 2009 Amazon | Goodreads

Dean Koontz

After his wife Michelle left years ago, Jeffy Coltrane has tried his best to make a good life for him and his seven-year-old daughter, Amity. One day, the local eccentric leaves a mysterious device at their house, warning them they must never use it. Once Jeffy and Amity realize it allows you to travel between parallel universes, they question what life would have been like if Michelle hadn’t left. But other people are after the device, wanting to use it for their own nefarious purposes.

Publication Date: 6 October 2020 Amazon | Goodreads

Again Again

E. lockhart.

While recovering from a devastating breakup and dealing with her brother’s opioid addiction, Adelaide Buchwald is spending her summer as a dog walker. When Adelaide meets a cute new boy, you get to see all the possibilities of how her life could unfold that summer – what was versus what might have been. 

Publication Date: 2 June 2020 Amazon | Goodreads

Time Travel Books for Kids and Teens

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Ransom riggs.

One of the most popular time travel books for teens is Ransom Riggs’s unique young adult series that mixes vintage photography with fantastical storytelling. Jacob never quite believed his grandfather’s outlandish tales of a magical orphanage. When Jacob starts having nightmares about the stories, his parents send him to the remote island in Wales to show him that there is nothing to fear. Instead, he meets a collection of peculiar and potentially dangerous children caught in a time loop.

Publication Date: 7 June 2011 Amazon | Goodreads

Kerstin Gier

Although sixteen-year-old Gwen’s family is quite eccentric, she has been able to live a normal life as a London teenager. Until she finds out that the time-traveling gene which runs in her family didn’t skip over her as everyone thought. Not having been inducted into the mysteries of time travel, Gwen is unprepared for the unexpected jumps into the past and must rely on her time-traveling counterpart Gideon, a stunningly gorgeous and insufferable know-it-all teenage boy.

Publication Date: 2009 Amazon | Goodreads

Before I Fall

Lauren oliver.

Another popular choice among YA time travel books is Lauren Oliver’s story of a popular high schooler caught in a time loop. At Samantha Kingston’s high school, February 12th is “Cupid Day,” a day of valentines and roses and a big party. At the end of the night, Samantha dies in a terrible accident, only to wake up the next day to relive it all over again. As Samantha learns that small changes can make dramatic differences, she is forced to finally give serious thought to her actions.

Publication Date: 14 February 2010 Amazon | Goodreads

The Time Travelers

Linda buckley-archer.

Originally published as Gideon the Cutpurse , Linda Buckley-Archer’s time travelers series follows Peter Schock and Kate Dyer. After a brush with an antigravity machine, they find themselves back in 1763. There the two children meet ally with Gideon, a local street urchin, to get back the machine from Gideon’s nemesis, the evil Tar Man.

Publication Date: 5 June 2006 Amazon | Goodreads

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

J. k. rowling.

How can I end a list of time travel novels without the Harry Potter time travel book? And no, I don’t mean the poorly written sequel Harry Potter and the Cursed Child . In his third year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Harry Potter’s life is seriously curtailed as the infamous killer Sirius Black is on the loose and bent on killing our favorite boy wizard.

Publication Date: 8 July 1999 Amazon | Goodreads

What are Your Favorite Time Travel Books

What do you think? Would you want to jump to the future or visit the past? What time travel novels am I missing from my list? As always, let me know in the comments!

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Recommended

Reader Interactions

Fatheya says

April 13, 2021 at 3:27 pm

Thank you for this excellent list, Rachael. I’m a very big fan of time travel books. I’ve read several of these books and several others are on my TBR. There’s one book I would recommend adding to the list: A Knight in Shining Armor by Jude Devereaux. It’s a lovely time travel romance.

April 14, 2021 at 12:48 pm

Wow! I love this list. Thanks so much!

I am a huge fan of Outlander. I’ve read them all and Diana has finished book 9!!!! Publication date still pending, but cannot wait for more Jamie and Claire. The combo of accurate historical info and time travel and LOVE is irresistible. Gabaldon is an excellent writer.

Amazingly, I was not immediately sucked into the first book. I think I ran across it on a list of Romances. I picked it up from the library and did not finish it. Then the t.v. series came out and the first season was so well done, I was hooked. I went back to the book and actually watched and read in unison. I generally feel books are better than the television or movie versions, but in this case I used the books to dive deeper into these wonderful stories. The later seasons of the show are great too, but sometimes the omissions and switch ups in the stories can bug me. Why mess with a good thing. I bet they bug Diana Gabaldon too.

I know this will be very unpopular, but I did not like The Midnight Library. I liked the premise, but frankly did not think the book was all it was hyped up to be.

I’ve seen the Lydia Bird title and had not realized it was time travel related. So that will be a TBR for me! Also Faye, Faraway sounds good.

I am going to give my age away, but I was enthralled with the movie version of The Time Machine as a kid. The main actor was the very handsome Rod Taylor. I actually have it recorded on my DVR. It was on Movies! channel. Not sure how closely it follows H.G. Wells original. It has the scary Morlocks in it. I loved a good scare as a child. I was born the year this came out, but remember loving to watch when it was on television.

I think going back in time was always the draw for me as a child. I love history.

MamaNewtNewt says

July 24, 2021 at 3:13 pm

The Chronicles of St Mary’s series by Jodi Taylor us brilliant and there are so many of them.

August 17, 2021 at 8:29 pm

Thank you so much for your list, Rachael. I would add The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. It is 600 pages long, but I still read it in one sitting!

John Abraham says

March 31, 2022 at 8:19 am

I would recommend a book titled ‘Threads of Time by JP Harris’ aspects include actual accounts from individuals who may have slipped into other timelines or interdimensional locations..it also covers people who actually created devices as for example.In a terraced house in Bath, Somerset, UK, a retired watchmaker created a healing device that also had the additional capability of being used as a time machine.

Best Time Travel Books

Embark on a journey through time with this list of widely acclaimed time travel books. whether for adventure, historical exploration, or quantum conundrums, these titles have been recognized and repeatedly highlighted by top science fiction reviewers and readers alike..

• Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

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The Psychology of Time Travel: A Novel Paperback – October 11, 2022

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 336 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Crooked Lane Books
• Publication date October 11, 2022
• Dimensions 5.47 x 0.89 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1639101292
• ISBN-13 978-1639101290
• See all details

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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crooked Lane Books (October 11, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1639101292
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1639101290
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.47 x 0.89 x 8.25 inches
• #8,397 in Time Travel Fiction
• #68,225 in Women Sleuths (Books)
• #615,689 in Genre Literature & Fiction

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About the author

Kate mascarenhas.

Kate Mascarenhas is a writer.

Born in 1980, she is of mixed heritage (white Irish father, brown British mother) and has family in Ireland and the Republic of Seychelles. She lives in Birmingham with her partner.

After studying English at Oxford and Applied Psychology at Derby, Kate completed a Literary Studies and Psychology PhD at Worcester.

She has written three novels: The Psychology of Time Travel, The Thief on the Winged Horse, and Hokey Pokey.

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 30% 37% 25% 6% 2% 30%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 30% 37% 25% 6% 2% 37%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 30% 37% 25% 6% 2% 25%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 30% 37% 25% 6% 2% 6%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 30% 37% 25% 6% 2% 2%

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To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Customers say

Customers find the book enjoyable, delightful, and entertaining. Opinions are mixed on the thought-provoking premise, character development, and writing quality. Some find the premise interesting and fascinating, while others say it distracts them from the story.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the book enjoyable, wonderful, and delightful. They say the ideas are intriguing and worth pursuing further. Readers also mention the story has a positive feel and is exciting.

"... It’s delightful !I bought the Kindle edition on sale and it is unfortunately littered with formatting issues and typos...." Read more

"...And lastly, because I was transported into another world, a thoroughly entertaining and enjoyable world, for a few hours...." Read more

"I don't understand all the rave reviews. The book was good but not outstanding as I expected based on the reviews...." Read more

"...The story had a positive feel , even with the sad bits. It was all about women without trying to stress this point...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the book. Some mention it has an interesting premise and fascinating perspectives. However, others say it distracts them from the story and is a waste of time and effort.

"This is a story quite unlike anything I’ve read before. It’s a interesting premise and the plot resolves in a satisfying manner. But the women!..." Read more

"...For putting forth an enormous number of profound questions and then answering some of them...." Read more

" Unnecessarily hectic and unhelpful organization and arrangement of chapters seemingly in an effort to heighten the non-linearity of the book’s..." Read more

"I do not really know how to put my reaction to this book into words. Intricate , well grown characters in any timeline, gadgets, history of time..." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the character development in the book. Some mention the characters are wonderful and unique, while others say they're poorly developed and one-dimensional.

"...Intricate, well grown characters in any timeline , gadgets, history of time travel development....all thought out so well...." Read more

"...Come on!! From here it just gets worse and worse. Characters are weak and one dimentional and are just words on paper...characteristics and traits..." Read more

"...The characters are all well drawn , and many interesting issues are raised." Read more

"I liked the book but the many characters made story difficult to follow . The end was good and may follow it forward." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the writing quality of the book. Some mention it's well-written, easy to read, and witty. Others say the writing is weak, with typos and an idiosyncratic way of paragraphing dialog.

"...the author's debut novel because it is so well constructed and so solidly written ...." Read more

"...on sale and it is unfortunately littered with formatting issues and typos . I do not fault the author for this. But it’s pretty bad...." Read more

"...Her writing has a rich simplicity that serves the story without ever being distracting or out-of-tune...." Read more

"...—but what ruined the book for me was the author's idiosyncratic way of paragraphing dialog ...." Read more

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