Love science fiction and time travel? We have the books for you!
Forget about just historical fiction and romance novels - we're talking about the best time travel books in the sci-fi genre. From dystopian worlds to time loops, outer space, and back in time, these books will take you on a wild ride through time. In this collection, among other books ranging from 2022 to 2024, you'll find gems like Flux and Atomic Anna, both gaining popularity. While time travel is a common theme among these books, there's a large variety of books that will appeal to all readers. Now, get ready to journey through time and space with these thrilling time travel books.
Myriad
by Joshua David Bellin
Myriad has been in so many timestrands she's lost count - hiding from her feelings about her brother's death she works to prevent crimes from happening but finds herself committing one instead...
Agent Miriam Randle works for LifeTime, a private law enforcement agency that undertakes short-term time travel to erase crimes before they occur. Haunted by the memory of her twin brother's unsolved murder at the age of six, Miriam thinks of herself as Myriad--an incarnation of the many lives she's lived in her journeys to rearrange the past.
When a routine assignment goes wrong and Miriam commits a murder she was meant to avert, she is thrown into the midst of a conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of LifeTime. Along with her partner Vax, Miriam flees into the past in an attempt to unravel the truth before LifeTime agents catch up with her.
But then her brother's killer reappears, twenty years to the day since he first struck. And he's not through with the twin who survived, not by a long shot.
Holmes Coming
by Kenneth Johnson
Dr. Amy Winslow tells the story: in foggy, nighttime San Francisco a jogging SFPD captain is savagely attacked by a Bengal tiger which then vanishes. In her ER, Amy labors unsuccessfully to save the captain's life, then consoles his aggrieved closest friend, Lt. Luis Ortega. Neither suspects their lives will intertwine in a life-or-death mystery.
The next day, checking on former patient Mrs. Hudson at her Victorian house isolated in Marin County's forest, Amy discovers in the cellar a secret, cobweb-covered 1899 electrochemical laboratory containing a Jules Verne-esque steam-punk sarcophagus out of which springs a wild-eyed, half-mummified, crypt-keeper-like man who injects himself with something before falling dead at her feet. Amy barely revives him.
He claims to be a real-life Victorian master chemist and detective named Holmes, who allowed Conan Doyle to write stories based on his cases, though was slightly annoyed when Doyle changed his real first name to the catchier Sherlock. Becoming uninspired by 1890s crime, Holmes devised this method to hibernate for a century to investigate future mysteries.
Amy assumes he's a lunatic. His Scotland Yard identity papers were stolen while he slept, so it takes her a while to realize his amazing story is true.
Respectably handsome when cleaned up, Holmes is still the same brash, egoistic, uber-English, cocaine-addicted, non-feminist genius--but now a century out of sync--so his still-brilliant deductions are sometimes laughingly or dangerously wrong. Holmes and Amy, his reluctant new Watson, find themselves unexpectedly attracted to each other while perilously involved in reclaiming his proof of identity, aided by cybersavvy street teen Zapper. It's all connected to the horrific death-by-tiger, only the first of several bizarre, mystifying murders being committed by an exquisitely fiendish descendant of Holmes' Victorian archenemy, Professor Moriarty.
The tone is classic Holmes--plus a refreshing twist of fish-out-of-water humor with a surprising spark of real romance.
Cryo
by Blake P Fisher
Struggling to deal with the life he left behind, Louis King finds himself in a strange new world hundreds of years into the future. Behind the gilded façade of the magnificent city lies a society of exploitation and deceit. Adjusting to his new life, he must find a way that he fits into his altered existence while trying to grasp the fact that everyone and everything that he left behind is now entirely gone. As something brews in the depths of the city, he is faced with the arduous choice of becoming a part of what is unfolding around him, or settling in to this new world.
Time's Mouth
by Edan Lepucki
Ursa possesses a very special gift. She can travel through memory and revisit her past. After she flees her hometown for the counterculture glory of 1950's California, the intoxicating potential of her unique ability eventually draws a group of women into her orbit and into a ramshackle Victorian mansion in the woods outside Santa Cruz. Yet Ursa's powers come with a cost. Soon this cultish community of sisterhood takes an ominous turn, prompting her son, Ray, and his pregnant lover, Cherry, to flee their home for Los Angeles and reinvent themselves far from Ursa's insidious influence. But escaping their past won't be so easy. A series of mysterious events forces Cherry to abandon their baby, leaving Ray to raise Opal alone.
Now a teenager and still heartbroken over the abandonment of the mother she never knew, Opal must journey into her own past to reveal the generations of secrets that gave rise to the shimmering source of her family's painful legacy.
From the forests of Santa Cruz, to the 1980s glam of Melrose Avenue to a solitary mansion among the oil derricks off La Cienega Boulevard, and brimming with the double-edged capacity of memory to both heal and harm, Time's Mouth is a poignant and evocative excavation of the bonds that bind families together.
Midnight on the Marne
by Sarah Adlakha
France, 1918. Nurse Marcelle Marchand has important secrets to keep. Her role as a spy has made her both feared and revered, but it has also put her in extreme danger from the approaching German army.
American soldier George Mountcastle feels an instant connection to the young nurse. But in times of war, love must wait. Soon, George and his best friend Philip are fighting for their lives during the Second Battle of the Marne, where George prevents Philip from a daring act that might have won the battle at the cost of his own life.
On the run from a victorious Germany, George and Marcelle begin a new life with Philip and Marcelle's twin sister, Rosalie, in a brutally occupied France. Together, this self-made family navigates oppression, near starvation, and unfathomable loss, finding love and joy in unexpected moments.
Years pass, and tragedy strikes, sending George on a course that could change the past and rewrite history. Playing with time is a tricky thing. If he chooses to alter history, he will surely change his own future--and perhaps not for the better.
Atomic Anna
by Rachel Barenbaum
Three brilliant women.
Two life-changing mistakes.
One chance to reset the future.
In 1986, nuclear scientist Anna Berkova is asleep in her bed in the Soviet Union when Chernobyl's reactor melts down. The energy surge accidentally sends her through time. When she wakes up, she's in 1992 and discovers Molly, her estranged daughter, shot in the chest. Should Anna travel in time to save her daughter or stop Chernobyl?
Anna goes to '60s Philadelphia, where Molly is coming of age as an adopted refusenik in a family full of secrets. Molly finds solace in comic books, drawing her own series, Atomic Anna. But when she meets volatile Viktor, their romance sets her life on a dangerous course. Anna then seeks out Molly's daughter, Raisa, in the '80s. Raisa is a lonely teen and math prodigy, who finds new issues of Atomic Anna in unexpected places. Each comic challenges her to solve equations leading to two impossible conclusions: Time travel is real and so is the strange old woman claiming to be her grandmother.
These three remarkable women must work together across time to prevent the greatest nuclear disaster of the twentieth century, but simply because you can change the past, does it mean you should?
Sterling Karat Gold
by Isabel Waidner
Sterling Beckenbauer is plunged into a terrifying and nonsensical world one morning when they are attacked, then unfairly arrested, in their neighborhood in London. With the help of their friends, Sterling hosts a trial of their own in order to exonerate themselves and to hold the powers that be to account.
Sterling Karat Gold, in the words of Kamila Shamsie, is "a madly brilliant and deeply sane novel that reveals surrealism as possibly the most effective way of talking about the political moment we find ourselves in." In it, Isabel Waidner concocts a world replete with bullfighters, high fashion, DIY theater, the Beach Boys, and time-traveling spaceships. The acclaimed winner of the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize for fiction that breaks the mold and extends the possibilities of the form, this novel explores the phantasmagoric nature of contemporary life, especially for nonbinary migrants, and daringly revises how solidarity and justice might be sought and won. Sterling Karat Gold couldn't be a better North American introduction to a writer with an irresistible style and unforgettable vision.
A Coin for the Ferryman
by Megan Edwards
In 1999, an elite interdisciplinary team headed by Nobel laureate Andrew Danicek gathered in California to carry out a ground-breaking time-travel experiment. While the rest of the world remained unaware, Julius Caesar was successfully transported from the last day of his life to a specially-constructed covert facility. Four days of conversation with historians and Latin scholars were planned, followed by Caesar's return to the moment from which he was extracted. But despite the team's meticulous efforts to maintain secrecy and plan for all possible exigencies, a kidnap attempt plunges Caesar into peril. Fully aware that the future of civilization may hang in the balance, one team member must summon strength she didn't know she possessed to return Caesar to the Ides of March.
The shocking details of Caesar's visit and its effect on subsequent events have been protected by draconian nondisclosure agreements....until now.
Going, Going, Gone!
by Steve Hermanos
An earthquake decimates San Francisco's baseball stadium. Two players and their manager are trapped. With water rising, the trio crawls through a gash in the wall. Naked and penniless, they climb through the muck onto shore. Downtown San Francisco is on fire. They can not find their stadium, or any new buildings, or the parking lot with their fancy cars. No one has a cell phone to call for help.
André Velez, the self-absorbed superstar; Johnny Blent, the faithful-to-his-wife rookie infielder; and their baseball-is-life manager, Bucky Martin, have been transported through time into the 1906 earthquake. Can they figure out what happened? Or how to get back to their 21st-century lives?
In a world without television cameras, social media, or Sabermetrics, the players make money the only way they know how. But the 1906 they're inhabiting isn't one from our history books. Soon, the three find themselves part of an international baseball challenge against the rump remnant of the Confederacy and its all-star team, featuring Walter Johnson, Martín Dihigo, Ty Cobb, and Ty's murderous, menacing baseball brothers.
Sea of Tranquility
by Emily St John Mandel
Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.
When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.
A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.
Flux
by Jinwoo Chong
Four days before Christmas, 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, 28-year-old Brandon loses his job after a hostile takeover of his big-media employer, and 48-year-old Blue, a key witness in a criminal trial against an infamous now-defunct tech startup, struggles to reconnect with his family.
So begins Jinwoo Chong's dazzling, time-bending debut that blends elements of neo-noir and speculative fiction as the lives of Bo, Brandon, and Blue begin to intersect, uncovering a vast network of secrets and an experimental technology that threatens to upend life itself. Intertwined with them is the saga of an iconic '80s detective show, Raider, whose star actor has imploded spectacularly after revelations of long-term, concealed abuse.
Flux is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America.
Cassandra in Reverse: A Reese's Book Club Pick (Original)
by Holly Smale
A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK
"Fascinating...witty...self-deprecating...We meet Cassandra on the worst day of her life. She's getting fired, her boyfriend dumps her, and her roommates hate her. On that same day, she discovers she has the power to go back in time. You'd think you would know how this book is going to end, but it really surprised me. There's a twist at the end that I did not see coming!" --Reese Witherspoon (Reese's Book Club June '23 Pick)
Then, something truly unexpected happens: Cassie discovers she can go back and change the past. One small rewind at a time, Cassie attempts to fix the life she accidentally obliterated, but soon she'll discover she's trying to fix all the wrong things.
A Quantum Love Story (Original)
by Mike Chen
Grieving her best friend's recent death, neuroscientist Mariana Pineda's ready to give up everything to start anew. Even her career--after one last week consulting at a top secret particle accelerator.
Except the strangest thing happens: a man stops her...and claims they've met before. Carter Cho knows who she is, why she's mourning, why she's there. And he needs Mariana to remember everything he's saying.
Because time is about to loop.
In a flash of energy, it's Monday morning. Again. Together, Mariana and Carter enter an inevitable life, four days at a time, over and over, without permanence except for what they share.
But just as they figure out this new life, everything changes. Because Carter's memories of the time loop are slowly disappearing. And their only chance at happiness is breaking out of the loop--forever.
This Time Tomorrow
by Emma Straub
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
On the eve of her fortieth birthday, Alice's life isn't terrible. She likes her job, even if it isn't exactly the one she expected. She's happy with her apartment, her romantic status, and her independence, and she adores her lifelong best friend. But her father is ailing, and it feels to her as if something is missing. When she wakes up the next morning, she finds herself back in 1996, reliving her sixteenth birthday. But it isn't just her adolescent body that shocks her, or seeing her high school crush--it's her dad, the vital, charming, forty-something version of her father with whom she is reunited. Now armed with a new perspective on her own life and his, some past events take on new meaning. Is there anything that she would change if she could?
The Possibilities
by Yael Goldstein-Love
Hannah is having a bad day. A bad month. A bad year? That feels terrible to admit, since her son Jack was born just eight months ago and she loves him more than anything. But ever since his harrowing birth, she can't shake the feeling that it could have gone the other way. That her baby might not have made it. Terrifying visions of the different paths her life could have taken begin to disrupt her cozy, claustrophobic days with Jack, destabilizing her marriage and making her husband concerned for her mental health. Are the strange things Hannah is seeing just new-mom anxiety, or is something truly weird and sinister afoot? What if Hannah really did unlock a dark force during childbirth?
When Hannah's worst nightmare comes true and Jack disappears from his crib, she must tap into an extraordinary ability she never knew she had in order to save him: She must enter different versions of her life while holding on to what is most important to her in this one to bring her child back home.
From the intimate joys of parenthood to the cosmic awe of the multiverse, The Possibilities is an ingenious and wildly suspenseful novel that stares down into the dizzying depths of maternal love, vulnerability, and strength.
Island of Time (Main)
by Davis Bunn
The Geneva branch of Interpol - the international agency tasked with policing magic and the arcane arts - is where careers go to die. Action is rare as Switzerland banned magic seven hundred years ago. That's how Agent Jackson Burnett likes it.
But then reports of an explosion lead Jackson to the home of businessman Bernard Bouchon. What's there is unfathomable: The family and their possessions have vanished into ash.
Jackson's enigmatic new partner Luca Tami, a blind Talent able to perform magic, suspects powerful supernatural forces are at play. The family weren't killed . . . they've been erased from time. With all traces of the family disappearing, the case is hours away from being forgotten.
How can Jackson solve a crime no one remembers happening? He must find a way to remember. He must discover who is behind the spell and why. Dangerous magics are in use, and it's clear those controlling them won't let anyone stand in their way.
How to Be Remembered
by Michael Thompson
On an ordinary night in an ordinary year, Tommy Llewellyn's doting parents wake in a home without toys and diapers, without photos of their baby scattered about, and without any idea that the small child asleep in his crib is theirs.
That's because Tommy is a boy destined to never be remembered.
On the same day every year, everyone around him forgets he exists, and he grows up enduring his own universal Reset. That is until something extraordinary happens: Tommy Llewellyn falls in love.
Determined to finally carve out a life for himself and land the girl of his dreams, Tommy sets out on a mission to finally trick the Reset and be remembered. But legacies aren't so easily won, and Tommy must figure out what's more important--the things we leave behind or the people we bring along with us.
Hopeland
by Ian McDonald
When Raisa Hopeland, determined to win her race to become the next electromancer of London, bumps into Amon Brightbourne--tweed-suited, otherworldly, guided by the Grace--in the middle of a London riot, she sets in motion a series of events which will span decades, continents and a series of events which will change the world.
From rioting London to geothermal Iceland to the climate-struck islands of Polynesia, from birth to life to death, from tranquillity to terror to joy, Raisa's journey will encompass the world. But one thing will always be true.
The Book of Doors
by Gareth Brown
Cassie Andrews works in a New York City bookshop, shelving books, making coffee for customers, and living an unassuming, ordinary life. Until the day one of her favorite customers--a lonely yet charming old man--dies right in front of her. Cassie is devastated. She always loved his stories, and now she has nothing to remember him by. Nothing but the last book he was reading.
But this is no ordinary book...
It is the Book of Doors.
Inscribed with enigmatic words and mysterious drawings, it promises Cassie that any door is every door. You just need to know how to open them.
Then she's approached by a gaunt stranger in a rumpled black suit with a Scottish brogue who calls himself Drummond Fox. He's a librarian who keeps watch over a unique set of rare volumes. The tome now in Cassie's possession is not the only book with great power, but it is the one most coveted by those who collect them.
Now Cassie is being hunted by those few who know of the Special Books. With only her roommate Izzy to confide in, she has to decide if she will help the mysterious and haunted Drummond protect the Book of Doors--and the other books in his secret library's care--from those who will do evil. Because only Drummond knows where the unique library is and only Cassie's book can get them there.
But there are those willing to kill to obtain those secrets. And a dark force--in the form of a shadowy, sadistic woman--is at the very top of that list.
The Infinite Miles
by Hannah Fergesen
Fans of Claudia Gray and Kelly Link will love Hannah Fergesen's wild and poignant debut--a wacky time-traveling sci-fi odyssey wrapped in an elegiac ode to lost friendship and a clever homage to Doctor Who.
To save the future, she must return to the beginning. Three years after her best friend Peggy went missing, Harper Starling is lost. Lost in her dead-end job, lost in her grief. All she has are regrets and reruns of her favorite science fiction show, Infinite Odyssey.
Then Peggy returns and demands to be taken to the Argonaut, the fictional main character of Infinite Odyssey. But the Argonaut is just that ... fictional. Until the TV hero himself appears and spirits Harper away from her former best friend. Traveling through time, he explains that Peggy used to travel with him but is now under the thrall of an alien enemy known as the Incarnate--one that has destroyed countless solar systems.
Then he leaves Harper in 1971.
Stranded in the past, Harper must find a way to end the Incarnate's thrall ... without the help of the Argonaut. But the cosmos are nothing like the technicolor stars of the TV show she loves, and if Harper can't find it in herself to believe--in the Argonaut, in Peggy, and most of all, in herself--she'll be the Incarnate's next casualty, along with the rest of the universe.