10 Best Time Travel Books Where the Past and Present Cross Paths!
Who hasn't dreamt of stepping through a portal into the past, or being catapulted into a future beyond our imagination? It's a notion that has enthralled readers and writers for a long time, resulting in an abundance of brilliant time travel novels and comics. So, for those of you who love bouncing around time zones from the safety of your own armchair, this list is for you. We have expertly curated a list of 10 standout time travel narratives where characters reckon with the complexities of space-time continuum. Whether you recognize the paradoxical consequences of altering the past or relish in futuristic fantasies, time travel presents an intriguing playground for readers. These stories reach back into history, hurtle into the distant future, and sometimes even do both. Prepare to be transported through centuries, to question the concept of time itself, and to meet a host of unforgettable characters. No delorean, Tardis, or quantum realm needed, all you need is to turn the page. Jump into these tales where the past, present and possibly the future cross paths on some utterly exhilarating adventures. Buckle up readers, here are the 10 best time travel books that are sure to bend your minds and captivate your hearts. Time's a-wasting, so let's get started!
『11/22/63』
Includes book club kit with discussion questions and author interview.
Author | Stephen King |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Release Date | Jan 26, 2016 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Time Traveler's Wife』
A most untraditional love story, this is the celebrated tale of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who inadvertently travels through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare’s passionate affair endures across a sea of time and captures them in an impossibly romantic trap that tests the strength of fate and basks in the bonds of love. “Niffenegger’s inventive and poignant writing is well worth a trip” (Entertainment Weekly).
Author | Audrey Niffenegger |
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Price | $8.99 |
Publisher | Night Bookmobile Editions |
Release Date | Apr 30, 2021 |
Source | Google Books |
『Sea of Tranquility』
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space. One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads “One of [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times 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.
Author | Emily St. John Mandel |
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Price | $11.99 |
Publisher | Vintage |
Release Date | Apr 05, 2022 |
Source | Google Books |
『Before the Coffee Gets Cold』
*NOW AN LA TIMES BESTSELLER* *AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER* The first book in the five million-copy bestselling magical realism series If you could go back in time, who would you want to meet? In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee—the chance to travel back in time. Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn’t so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most important, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold. Prepare to meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the cafe’s time-travelling offer in order to: confront the man who left them receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by Alzheimer's see their sister one last time, and meet the daughter they never got the chance to know. Heartwarming, wistful, mysterious and delightfully quirky, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s internationally bestselling novel explores the age-old question: What would you change if you could travel back in time? Meet more wonderful characters in the rest of the captivating Before the Coffee Gets Cold series: Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Book 1) Tales from the Cafe (Book 2) Before Your Memory Fades (Book 3) Before We Say Goodbye (Book 4) Before We Forget Kindness (Book 5) Before the Coffee Gets Cold - Boxed Set (Books 1-3)
Author | Toshikazu Kawaguchi |
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Price | $13.52 |
Publisher | Harlequin |
Release Date | Nov 17, 2020 |
Source | Google Books |
『An Ocean of Minutes』
A shortlisted finalist for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the ALA 2019 Reading List for Science Fiction “Thea Lim’s An Ocean of Minutes is that rare thing—a speculative novel that is as heartfelt as it is philosophical. In lucid prose, Lim lays bare the complexities of migration and displacement, while offering a clear-eyed meditation on the elusive nature of human devotion.” —Esi Edugyan, Man Booker Prize Finalist and author of Washington Black “Lim paints a strange and unfamiliar world with her novel, full of fascinating social commentary on class differences, racism, and sexism.” —The Los Angeles Times In September 1981, Polly and Frank arrive at the time travel terminal at Houston Intercontinental Airport. One will travel, and one will stay. America is in the grip of a deadly flu pandemic. Frank has caught the virus and Polly will do whatever it takes to save him, even if it means risking everything. So she agrees to a radical plan—time travel has been invented in the future to thwart the virus. If she signs up for a one-way-trip into the future to work as a bonded laborer, the company will pay for the life-saving treatment Frank needs. Polly promises to meet Frank again in Galveston, Texas, where she will arrive in twelve years. But when Polly is re-routed an extra five years into the future, Frank is nowhere to be found. Alone in a changed and divided America, with no status and no money, Polly must navigate a new life and find a way to locate Frank, to discover if he is alive, and if their love has endured. “Lim’s enthralling novel succeeds on every level: as a love story, an imaginative thriller, and a dystopian narrative” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Author | Thea Lim |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Gallery Books |
Release Date | Jun 04, 2019 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Midnight Library: A GMA Book Club Pick』
The #1 New York Times bestselling WORLDWIDE phenomenon Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction | A Good Morning America Book Club Pick | Independent (London) Ten Best Books of the Year "A feel-good book guaranteed to lift your spirits."—The Washington Post The dazzling reader-favorite about the choices that go into a life well lived, from the acclaimed author of How To Stop Time and The Comfort Book. Don’t miss Matt Haig’s latest instant New York Times besteller, The Life Impossible, available now Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig's enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.
Author | Matt Haig |
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Price | $13.99 |
Publisher | Penguin |
Release Date | Sep 29, 2020 |
Source | Google Books |
『This Time Tomorrow』
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER “The pages brim with tenderness and an appreciation for what we had and who we were. I could not have loved it more."—Ann Patchett “One of the most moving and intelligent time travel novels I have ever read. Nostalgic, wise, funny, and filled with love."—Gabrielle Zevin “The kind of book that will make you laugh, make you cry, and make you call the people you love. Exceptional."—Emily Henry What if you could take a vacation to your past? With her celebrated humor, insight, and heart, beloved New York Times bestseller Emma Straub offers her own twist on traditional time travel tropes and a different kind of love story. 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?
Author | Emma Straub |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Penguin |
Release Date | May 16, 2023 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Endless Vessel』
Combining the wonder of The Midnight Library , the inventiveness of Ready Player One, and the artistry of Cloud Atlas, this novel by the bestselling author of The Oracle Year and Anyone explores the way we’re all connected—and what can happen when we lose our capacity for joy. A few years from now, in a world similar to ours, there exists a sort of “depression plague” that people refer to simply as “The Grey.” No one can predict whom it will afflict, or how, but once infected, there’s no coming back. A young Hong Kong based scientist, Lily Barnes, is trying to maintain her inner light in an increasingly dark world. The human race is dwindling, and people fighting to push forward are increasingly rare. One day, Lily comes across something that seems to be addressing her directly, calling to her, asking her to follow a path to whatever lies at its end. Is this the Endless Vessel to happiness? She leaves her life behind and sets out through time and space to find out. From its opening heart-stopping scene in the present day at the Louvre in Paris, through the earthly meetings between Lily and her loved ones past and present, to a shocking and satisfying conclusion in a truly enchanted forest, Charles Soule has channeled history, science and drama to create a story for the ages—a story of hope and love and possibility. This is a novel you will not soon forget.
Author | Charles Soule |
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Price | $13.99 |
Publisher | HarperCollins |
Release Date | Jun 06, 2023 |
Source | Google Books |
『All Our Wrong Todays』
“Entertainingly mixes thrills and humor.”—Entertainment Weekly “[An] amazing debut novel....Dazzling and complex....Fearlessly funny storytelling.”—The Washington Post “Instantly engaging....A timeless, if mind-bending, story about the journeys we take, populated by friends, family, lovers, and others, that show us who we might be, could be—and maybe never should be—that eventually leads us to who we are.”—USA Today Elan Mastai's acclaimed debut novel is a story of friendship and family, of unexpected journeys and alternate paths, and of love in its multitude of forms. It's 2016, and in Tom Barren's world, technology has solved all of humanity's problems—there's no war, no poverty, no under-ripe avocadoes. Unfortunately, Tom isn't happy. He's lost the girl of his dreams. And what do you do when you're heartbroken and have a time machine? Something stupid. Finding himself stranded in a terrible alternate reality—which we immediately recognize as our 2016—Tom is desperate to fix his mistake and go home. Right up until the moment he discovers wonderfully unexpected versions of his family, his career, and the woman who may just be the love of his life. Now Tom faces an impossible choice. Go back to his perfect but loveless life. Or stay in our messy reality with a soulmate by his side. His search for the answer takes him across continents and timelines in a quest to figure out, finally, who he really is and what his future—our future—is supposed to be. Filled with humor and heart and packed with insight, intelligence, and mind-bending invention, All Our Wrong Todays is a powerful and moving story of life, loss, and love.
Author | Elan Mastai |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Penguin |
Release Date | Feb 20, 2018 |
Source | Google Books |
『Here and Now and Then』
From the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Brotherhood A Goodreads Choice Awards 2019 Semifinalist One of BookBub’s Best Science Fiction Books of 2019 One of Book Riot’s Best Books of 2019 So Far One of The Nerd Daily’s Best Debut Novels of 2019 Featured in The Millions “A Year in Reading” One of Entropy’s Best Fiction Books of 2019 He’ll go anywhere and any when to save his daughter Kin Stewart is an everyday family man: working in IT, trying to keep the spark in his marriage, struggling to connect with his teenage daughter. But his current life is a far cry from his previous career…as a time-traveling secret agent from over a century in the future. Stranded in suburban San Francisco since the 1990s after a botched mission, Kin has kept his past hidden from everyone around him, until one afternoon, his “rescue” team arrives—eighteen years too late. Their mission: return Kin to 2142, where he’s been gone only weeks, not years, and where another family is waiting for him. A family he can’t remember. Torn between two lives, Kin’s desperate efforts to stay connected to both will threaten to destroy the agency and even history itself. With his daughter’s very existence at risk, he will have to take one final trip to save her—even if it means breaking all the rules of time travel in the process. “Heartfelt and thrilling… Chen’s concept is unique, and [his characters’] agony is deeply moving. Quick pacing, complex characters, and a fascinating premise.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
Author | Mike Chen |
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Price | $14.99 |
Publisher | MIRA |
Release Date | Jan 29, 2019 |
Source | Google Books |
In conclusion, without a shadow of a doubt, these novels will knock your socks off! Vibrantly presenting an enthralling dance where past and future twirl together seamlessly, each storyteller takes you on a one-of-a-kind journey, in a DeLorean or TARDIS of words, if you may. Sure, we've all fantasized about hopping in a time machine at least once, right? Who hasn't yearned to witness history unfurling, or explore the uncharted waters of the future? These books not only indulge this curiosity, but they also share introspective tales, asking questions about consequence, responsibility, and the rippling effect of one's actions. Each brings something new to the table - a fresh perspective on time travel, a heart-rending love story, a chilling science fiction adventure, or a suspenseful historical mystery. Remember, as you flip open these books, you're not just a reader, but an adventurer, poised on the precipice of time, ready to plunge into the swirling vortex of the past and future. So brew your favourite cup of tea, curl up in your most comfortable nook, and get ready to time-travel. Bon voyage, reader!
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