Get ready to jump back to the future with these top-tier time-travel books
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20 Best Time-Travel Books, According to a Librarian
Updated on Dec. 12, 2024
Journey through the ages with these time-travel books
What makes time-travel books so fascinating? A key genre of the science fiction ecosystem, these novels let readers fulfill their fantasy of exploring another era. Traveling through time pops up everywhere on the page and the screen, each with different ways of explaining the phenomenon: Some authors utilize a machine or device to hurl their protagonists through the timeline, some use magic, some use nature and some just coast on vibes without any real explanation of how it works. Time travel gives authors a chance to play fast and loose with historical facts, to experiment with paradoxes and butterfly effects, and to use the past and future to comment on the present.
For more than a decade, I’ve been a librarian and book critic specializing in science fiction and fantasy. Reading isn’t just a fun hobby for me—it’s also my job, and I do a lot of it. I especially love all the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey chaos of time-travel fiction. Although there are plenty of silly and weird time-travel books, the whole subgenre can’t be painted with the same broad brush. More than a few of these books were nominated for prestigious literary awards and are staples on “best books of all time” lists.
Read on for my list of 20 of the best time-travel books that transport you to other times and places, and get you thinking about your own relationship with the world. To fit the theme, this list will run backward, starting with the most recently published title and ending with a 19th-century classic book.
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The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
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Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch
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Only a Monster by Vanessa Len
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Weird Fishes by Rae Mariz
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One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
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& This Is How to Stay Alive by Shingai Njeri Kagunda
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Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen
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This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
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The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz
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Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson
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Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield
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The Girl From Everywhere by Heidi Heilig
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Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
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How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
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The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
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Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
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Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
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Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
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Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
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The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
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The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
For fans of: Flux by Jinwoo Chong
We’re starting things off with one of the best new books about time travel. The sci-fi rom-com The Ministry of Time just came out in May 2024, but it’s already racking up the accolades. In a near-future version of the U.K., we meet Graham Gore, formerly a first lieutenant on the Terror, a real-life 19th-century ship that met disaster and cannibalism in a failed attempt to sail the Arctic’s Northwest Passage. Gore is an “expat,” someone plucked from the past who relies on a “bridge,” a civil servant with the titular Ministry who helps time refugees settle into their new lives. Gore is joined by a survivor of the Great Plague of London, a veteran of World War I’s Battle of the Somme and a soldier from the 17th-century English Civil War.
As a romance blooms between Gore and his bridge (our charming, unnamed narrator), their working relationship gets more complicated. Filling out the romance is an action-packed thriller, a surprising conspiracy and some scathing critiques of British colonialism. I was hooked from the moment I saw that striking cover.
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Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch
For fans of: The Book of Love by Kelly Link
How does traveling through time by swimming sound? In Thrust, Laisvė, a young girl living in 2085, is growing up in a world where human greed has pushed us past the ecological tipping point: The sea levels have risen so much that the Statue of Liberty is now entirely underwater. She’s also seen tragedy up close and personal when her mother was killed and again when her baby brother was kidnapped. When her life is threatened, Laisvė takes her mother’s advice and uses the water to move through time. From the 19th century to the late 20th, Laisvė experiences the worst of what the U.S. has to offer, yet never fails to find good people striving for freedom.
Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2023 novel will challenge you, not just in terms of plot structure but also narrative style. However, the reward more than makes up for the effort. It’s intense, unsettling, at times almost hallucinatory, and utterly unmissable.
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Only a Monster by Vanessa Len
For fans of: Wicked Fox by Kat Cho
Time-travel books aren’t very common in young adult fiction these days, especially in the fantasy genre, which makes the 2022 novel Only a Monster all the more appealing. Joan, a biracial 16-year-old, gets her dream summer job at the historic Holland House. But all her plans collapse when she learns that her family members are actually time-traveling monsters—and that the cute boy she has a crush on at work is the heir to a long line of monster hunters. With the help of another teen monster, Aaron, she jumps back to the 1990s seeking safety. Instead, all she finds is more danger. This thrilling, intense YA story shows how time travel can be used to hold conversations about race, the diaspora and complex family dynamics.
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Weird Fishes by Rae Mariz
For fans of: The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed
Want a weird time-travel book? You got it. The wildly creative novella Weird Fishes is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Ceph is a squid-esque sentient sea creature living in an underwater community. As a scientist, her curiosity pulls her into a journey from the deepest parts of the ocean toward the surface to better understand the strange creatures who live in the shallows, and the even stranger beings up on dry land. This is a first-contact story in which humans are the aliens.
Joining her on this unsettling path through unchartered territory is Iliokai, a seal-like storyteller who, along with other sea creatures, can move through time via interdimensional vortexes—think the Bermuda Triangle but on a smaller scale. Some creatures use these “time gyres” to escape the humans hunting them, and sometimes those sailors also get sucked in and deposited in times and seas wholly unfamiliar. Although the main plot isn’t strictly about time travel, Rae Mariz’s 2022 climate-fiction short book is so remarkable, it was the very first story I thought of while creating this list.
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One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
For fans of: Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers
Casey McQuiston is one of the most popular LGBTQ romance authors working today, and for good reason. Red, White & Royal Blue was a runaway success as a bestseller and later a TV show, and their other books are just as beloved. Of them all, 2021’s One Last Stop is my favorite.
August came to New York City trying (and failing) to leave behind her difficult childhood. While riding the Q line, she meets Jane Su, a jaded young woman we soon learn was yanked out of the 1970s and somehow trapped for all eternity on a grungy, malfunctioning subway train. Things get more urgent when August learns the Q is about to be decommissioned. It’s up to August to figure out how to either send Jane back to the past or keep her here in the present so they can build a life together in the future.
The time travel in this novel is more time-slip than machines or magic. But the romance is swoon-worthy, and the characters are easy to fall in love with.
& This Is How to Stay Alive by Shingai Njeri Kagunda
For fans of: Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi
After her brother Baraka, a queer Kenyan teen, takes his life, Nyokabi is bereft and adrift. He had his reasons, but that doesn’t make her grief any less consuming. With a gift of a magic potion, Nyokabi is able to travel back to when her brother was still alive. She longs to give him reasons to live but learns that meddling in the past creates uncontrollable ripples in the future.
This was originally published as a short story, and Shingai Njeri Kagunda expanded it into their debut novella & This Is How to Stay Alive, which eventually became one of my favorite fiction books of 2021. Kagunda took home an Ignyte Award (which celebrates diversity in sci-fi, horror and fantasy) for Best Novella for this Afro-surrealist book, so you know it’s worth reading.
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Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen
For fans of: The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas
The emotional 2019 novel Here and Now and Then opens in the suburbs of San Francisco in the late 1990s, where Kin Stewart is currently stranded. After a mission goes awry, Kin, a time-traveling secret agent for the Temporal Corruption Bureau, is unable to return to his family in 2142. Eventually, Kin builds a new life in the past, with a wife and child of his own. But when the future suddenly reappears, Kin’s new life becomes the same kind of anomaly he once used to eliminate.
Mike Chen uses time travel and the grandfather paradox (if you went back in time and killed your grandfather, would you cease to exist?) to meditate on parenthood, relationships and grief. It’s a beautifully written Asian American book that’s impossible to put down.
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This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
For fans of: A Necessary Chaos by Brent Lambert
Here’s how this novel’s tagline would go: Two female assassins fall in love across time and space while trying to kill each other. Need more? Red and Blue are special agents working for their respective shadowy employers who manipulate the world for their financial benefit. They jump between eras and locales, planting the seeds for their success and the other’s destruction. At first, their letters are full of gloating and taunting, but then they turn to begrudging respect, and then to a love so powerful, they defy their own keepers.
This Is How You Lose the Time War was a hit among sci-fi fans, including yours truly, when it first came out in 2019. Thanks to a Twitter user with the profile name of “Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood” who recommended it to his thousands of followers, it got a new wave of fans in 2023. People who never read science fiction were suddenly clamoring for this weird enemies-to-lovers book told through letters. If, for whatever reason, you missed the frenzy, I hope my recommendation convinces you to give it a try.
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The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz
For fans of: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
In the early 1990s, a gang of punk-rocking teenage girls takes bloody retribution on abusive men. In 2022, a scientist and secret agent for the Daughters of Harriet, a group of vigilantes, alters the timeline to protect her present from the fascist, bigoted, patriarchal Comstockers who want to reduce women to second-class citizens. The three groups collide, and their bloody war spills across time and space.
I’ve been a fan of Newitz for a while now, first through their journalism work and then through their thoroughly entertaining science fiction books. This 2019 novel, The Future of Another Timeline, is the perfect introduction for new fans and a must-read for old ones. If you liked the “competing factions wage war up and down the timeline” element from previous pick, This Is How You Lose the Time War, put this book on your TBR list.
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Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson
For fans of: All Systems Red by Martha Wells
At first glance, 2018’s Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach might seem like a rather straightforward story about a crew of scientists who get tangled up in the distant past, but author Kelly Robson sure does love her layers and nuance. It’s 2267, and decades of incredible human effort in staving off ecological collapse has finally paid off. Humanity retreated to underground “habs” while the surface boiled, all except for the scientists who dedicated their careers to restoring ecosystems. Minh is one of those experts, focusing her work—and her eight tentacle-like prosthetic limbs—on river restoration.
When she and her team are sent back to 2000 BCE to survey the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, futuristic technology encounters an ancient Mesopotamian king. A clash of cultures and different ways of interacting with the local environment turns a clever premise into a stunning work of environmental sci-fi blended with historical fiction.
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Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield
For fans of: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
As you can tell, the last few years have seen a crush of time-travel books. The 2018 novella Alice Payne Arrives has a lot of competition, but it stands out from the pack with its enthralling characters, high-stakes adventure and captivating narrative.
Alice Payne is a bisexual and biracial noblewoman in 18th-century England. She’s also secretly a highway robber known as the Holy Ghost, who torments the countryside with her robot sidekick Laverna. Meanwhile, 350 or so years in the future, Prudence Zuniga is sick to death of time travel, after trying to alter the past to prevent the violence and disasters of the future to no avail. When Prudence meets Alice, they get caught in the crosshairs of the cold war between the Farmers, who want to send people from the future to live peaceful lives in the past, and the Guides, who want to prune historical events to make the future less tumultuous.
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The Girl From Everywhere by Heidi Heilig
For fans of: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
In 2017’s The Girl From Everywhere, Nix has lived her entire life on her father’s time-traveling pirate ship. Under Nix’s navigation and her father’s command, the crew of the Temptation sail between eras using maps, both real and fictional. His holy grail, though, is a map that can bring him to Honolulu in 1868 so he can save his beloved from her deathbed, an act that would reunite them but would also completely alter Nix’s existence. When they finally make their way to the idealized past, Nix has a powerful choice to make, one that will change their future forever.
I will never pass up an opportunity to recommend one of my all-time favorite YA fantasy novels. If I could give a copy of this book for teens to every young adult I know, I would. There is nothing I don’t love about it. It’s a wild adventure, a charming romance, an honest look at mental illness and a heartfelt examination of familial bonds.
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Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
For fans of: The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai, translated by Jesse Kirkwood
The striking 2015 Japanese novel Before the Coffee Gets Cold, translated to English, features four interconnected short stories. In a nondescript cafe down a forgotten alley in Tokyo, a coffee shop hosts a special chair that can send whoever sits on it temporarily back through time. Unlike other time-travel stories, this book is less about trying to fix the past than coming to terms with the present. It’s a bittersweet reflection on lives lost and paths not taken.
Author Toshikazu Kawaguchi was a playwright before he transitioned to print fiction, and the theatricality of the storytelling adds a riveting element to a rather simple premise. I could easily picture this on the stage, with the actors moving in and out of a fixed set. It made the book feel grounded despite the magical undercurrent.
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How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
For fans of: The Martian by Andy Weir
For time-travel nerds who want some multiverse kookiness sprinkled in, the 2010 book How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is for you. Charles Yu—yes, the author and the protagonist have the same name—is a low-level nobody working for Time Warner Time, a company from the future that operates alternate universes as playgrounds for the wealthy. Charles has a possibly fictional pet dog and a chatty yet anxious computer program keeping him company, but he’s still unbearably lonely. As he searches for his missing father across the timelines, he finds more than he bargained for … including himself.
Its classic sci-fi feel reminiscent of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, tons of nerd-culture references and an inventive if disorienting structure makes it hard not to be delighted by this novel.
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The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
For fans of: An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim
If ever there was a romance novel that was guaranteed a spot on every time-travel book list, it’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. Since it was published in 2003, it has attracted adoring book fans like Swifties to a concert merch table. It also features one of the most unique forms of time travel I’ve ever read. Henry, our titular time traveler, has a strange genetic condition that pulls him through time. He has no control over his ability, and it constantly disrupts his life. Clare first meets him when she’s a child, but when they meet again when she’s 20, he’s younger than he was before. This time, they fall in love, building a life on an unstable foundation. Their romance is one for the ages, even with an ending that is still just as shocking all these years later.
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Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
For fans of: Timeline by Michael Crichton
In Doomsday Book, Kirvrin is a scholar at Oxford in 2054 who is about to travel back to 1320. Although her supervisor, Professor James Dunworthy, is stressing out over all the little failures and obstacles that pop up before her launch, he can’t do anything to dampen her excitement or stall her departure. But boy, do things go wrong! Kivrin ends up almost three decades late and right in the middle of the bubonic plague. While her mentor tries to figure things out while dealing with his own epidemic, Kivrin tries to adjust to the past while not making things worse.
Getting trapped in the past and mucking things up is one of my favorite time-travel tropes, and Connie Willis does it better than most. Her 1992 dark academia book is unflinching in its depictions of the brutality and banality of the distant past, but also refreshing in its exquisite detail and impeccable research.
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Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
For fans of: Beyond the Highland Mist by Karen Marie Moning
The Outlander novels are a staple of time travel and romance book series lists, and it’s no surprise why. The first book, Outlander, hit shelves in 1991, and the series is still going strong: The ninth book, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, came out in 2023, a tenth is being written, and the Outlander TV series is in its seventh season. Even the most anti-romance reader would be hard-pressed not to get hooked on this series. If you love historical fiction, action and adventure, war stories or romance, look no further.
In the first book, Claire Randall and her husband, Frank, are trying to reconnect in the wake of the immense tragedy and violence of World War II. A romantic trip to the Scottish Highlands and an ill-advised gambol through some standing stones drops her in 1743 Scotland. Torn between Frank in the future and the alluring Scottish Highlander Jamie Fraser in the past, Claire must make her choice before the magic of the stones makes it for her.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
For fans of: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Nearly every sci-fi fan goes through a Douglas Adams stage. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is many people’s first real introduction to the time-travel book genre, including mine. His influence on science fiction, not just in books but on radio, television and movies as well, cannot be understated. Several of the H2G2 books, as the series is known, revolve around time travel, but it’s the weirdness of the Dirk Gently series that earned Adams a spot on this list.
Inspired by two Doctor Who storylines Adams worked on, this 1987 novel features an eccentric detective, the ghost of a man desperate to leave his final message on an answering machine, the spirit of a body-hopping alien engineer, a device called an “Electric Monk” and a jaunt back to Somerset in 1797. I can’t tell you any more than that without spoiling the thrill of watching all these hilariously bizarre events unfold.
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Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
For fans of: Beloved by Toni Morrison
Reading Kindred for the first time was a life-changing experience. It was my first foray into Octavia Butler’s oeuvre, but not my last. I breezed through it in a day, then spent the rest of the weekend reeling from the experience. Published in 1979, this book about racism showed that time-travel fiction could do more than preach about social morality or explore scientific achievements.
The novel jumps between Los Angeles in 1976, the bicentennial of our nation’s founding, and a 19th-century pre–Civil War plantation in Maryland. Dana, a Black writer married to a White man, is dragged back in time to various points in her ancestors’ lives. The more she goes back, the longer she’s stuck there and the more enmeshed she becomes in historical events. She’s trapped between wanting to protect her family tree from racist violence and not wanting to erase herself from existence.
Butler’s novel is visceral and unapologetic, and it forces the reader to acknowledge how much of our present and future is determined by our past.
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The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
For fans of: Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
A scientist known only as “the Time Traveller” hops into his homemade time machine and travels to the year 802,701. There, he meets the Eloi, a society of passive humans rendered helpless by pleasure and comfort. Their enemies, the Morlocks, are vicious creatures lurking underground. They feed on the Eloi and use them as beasts of burden. Of course, our hero wants to save the future, but this may be too much even for a brave, intrepid model of Victorian sensibility.
Despite being published in 1895, The Time Machine isn’t the first work of time-travel fiction. That honor belongs to either Samuel Madden’s 1733 satire Memoirs of the Twentieth Century or any number of folktales, epic poems and mythology from ancient history, depending on what criteria you use. But when you ask someone to think of a time-travel book, this is often at the top of the list. The travails of our unnamed protagonist have entertained millions of readers for more than a century. It’s a classic for a reason!
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