10 Breathtaking Time Travel Books to Read
time travel cover
Time travel is a concept that has existed in fiction for hundreds of years, continuing to intrigue despite it remaining a hypothetical concept. Enjoy our selection of the 10 Best Time Travel Books to Read.
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10 Breathtaking Time Travel Books to Read
Recursion by Blake Crouch
At first, it looks like a disease. An epidemic that spreads through no known means, driving its victims mad with memories of a life they never lived.
But the force that’s sweeping the world is no pathogen. It’s just the first shockwave, unleashed by a stunning discovery – and what’s in jeopardy is not just our minds.
In New York City, Detective Barry Sutton is closing in on the truth – and in a remote laboratory, neuroscientist Helena Smith is unaware that she alone holds the key to this mystery . . . and the tools for fighting back.
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Billy Pilgrim – hapless barber’s assistant, successful optometrist, alien abductee, senile widower and soldier – has become unstuck in time. Hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse in Dresden, with the city and its inhabitants burning above him, he finds himself a survivor of one of the most deadly and destructive battles of the Second World War. But when, exactly? How did he get here? And how does he get out?
Travel through time and space on the shoulders of Vonnegut himself. This is a book about war. Listen to what he has to say: it is of the utmost urgency.
11/22/63 by Stephen King
What if you could go back in time and change the course of history? WHAT IF the watershed moment you could change was the JFK assassination? 11.22.63, the date that Kennedy was shot – unless . . .
King takes his protagonist Jake Epping, a high school English teacher from Lisbon Falls, Maine, 2011, on a fascinating journey back to 1958 – from a world of mobile phones and iPods to a new world of Elvis and JFK, of Plymouth Fury cars and Lindy Hopping, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life – a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.
Kindred by Octavia Butler
In 1976, Dana dreams of being a writer. In 1815, she is assumed a slave.
When Dana first meets Rufus on a Maryland plantation, he’s drowning. She saves his life – and it will happen again and again.
Neither of them understands his power to summon her whenever his life is threatened, nor the significance of the ties that bind them.
And each time Dana saves him, the more aware she is that her own life might be over before it’s even begun.
Octavia E. Butler’s ground-breaking masterpiece is the extraordinary story of two people bound by blood, separated by so much more than time.
Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock
Meet Karl Glogauer, time traveller and unlikely Messiah. When he finds himself in Palestine in the year 29AD he is shocked to meet the man known as Jesus Christ – a drooling idiot, hiding in the shadows of the carpenter’s shop in Nazareth. But if he is not capable of fulfilling his historical role, then who will take his place?
Expanded from the NEBULA-winning 1966 novella, BEHOLD THE MAN is one of the greatest books of Moorcock’s long and varied career. Intense, delicate and brutal, it explores the psyche of one man as he faces his ultimate fate. One he knows he cannot avoid.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
In 1912, eighteen-year-old Edwin St. Andrew crosses the Atlantic, exiled from English polite society. In British Columbia, he enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and for a split second all is darkness, the notes of a violin echoing unnaturally through the air. The experience shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later Olive Llewelyn, a famous writer, is traveling all over Earth, far away from her home in the second moon colony. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling 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 time, he uncovers a series of lives upended: the exiled son of an aristocrat 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.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, Harry always returns to where he began, a child with all the knowledge of a life he has already lived a dozen times before.
Nothing ever changes – until now.
As Harry nears the end of his eleventh life, a little girl appears at his bedside. ‘I nearly missed you, Doctor August,’ she says. ‘I need to send a message.’
This is the story of what Harry does next, and what he did before, and how he tries to save a past he cannot change and a future he cannot allow.
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
The Time Machine is the first and greatest modern portrayal of time-travel. It sees a Victorian scientist propel himself into the year 802,701 AD, when he is initially delighted to find that suffering has been replaced by beauty, contentment and peace. Entranced at first by the Eloi, an elfin species descended from humans, he soon realizes that they are simply remnants of a once-great culture – now weak and childishly afraid of the dark. They have every reason to be afraid: in deep tunnels beneath their paradise lurks another race – the sinister Morlocks.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
A civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test whether time-travel is feasible. Her role is to work as a ‘bridge’: living with, supporting and monitoring expat ‘1847’ – Commander Graham Gore, a former Victorian polar explorer.
Gore, an adventurer by trade, soon adjusts to this bizarre new world of washing machines, feminism and Spotify; and during a long, sultry summer the pair move from awkwardness to friendship to something more.
But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. C an love triumph over the histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy that history when it is living in your house?
The House on the Strand by Daphne Du Maurier
When Dick Young’s friend, Professor Magnus Lane, offers him an escape from his troubles in the form of a new drug, Dick finds himself transported to fourteenth-century Cornwall.
There, in the manor of Tywardreath, the domain of Sir Henry Champerhoune, he witnesses intrigue, adultery and murder. The more time Dick spends consumed in the past, the more he withdraws from the modern world.
With each dose of the drug, his body and mind become addicted to this otherworld, and his attempts to change history bring terror to the present and put his own life in jeopardy.
If you enjoyed 10 Breathtaking Time Travel Books to Read, check out 10 Best Hard Sci-Fi Books of All Time
