Mind-Bending Novels About Time Travel

In the not too distant future, amid rising waters and an encroaching police state, a young girl uses her unparalleled gifts to help vulnerable figures throughout history. Laisvė is known as a carrier, a person who can harness the power of objects to carry her through time. When she comes across a special talisman, it connects her with women from the past two centuries, all struggling to survive. Laisvė must weave through time in order to save their lives–and their shared dream of freedom.

On the eve of her 40th birthday, Alice takes stock of her life. She likes her job, her friends, and she’s generally happy, even if her life isn’t as exciting as she thought it might be. Additionally, her father is ailing, and it feels as if something is missing. When Alice wakes up the next morning, she finds herself transported back to the ‘90s, reliving her 16th birthday. But it isn’t her adolescent body that shocks her, or seeing her high school crush, it’s her dad: the charming 40-something version of her father with whom she is reunited. Armed with this new perspective on her life, is there anything that she would change if she could?

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is another must-read in the canon of time travel literature. This is the story of Billy Pilgrim, an American soldier in World War II who becomes “unstuck in time”. Vonnegut’s novel follows Pilgrim’s seemingly random journey forward and backwards through the events of his own life, which includes meetings with aliens and experiencing the firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war. Slaughterhouse-Five is considered one of Vonnegut’s most autobiographical novels, as he, like Pilgrim, also survived the firebombing of Dresden as a POW.

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 shock wave, unleashed by a stunning discovery–and what’s in jeopardy is not our minds but the very fabric of time itself.

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her birthday when she is instantly transported to the antebellum South, summoned to save a drowning man, the white son of a plantation owner. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, each stay lasting longer than the last. As she is put in ever more dangerous situations, Dana isn’t sure if her life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

Chuck Palahniuk’s Rant is the story of a small-town troublemaker turned into a (literally) rabid time-traveling murderer and cult figure. Featuring super-secret nighttime demolition derbies, characters whose family are more like family poles, and time travel paradoxes that make stepping on a butterfly seem tame, Rant is as disgusting and hilarious as you would expect. There was a movie in the works, but it seems to have slipped into Development Hell. Or maybe that’s just in our own timeline?

Do you ever look back on a decision you’ve made and thought, how might my life be different if I chose a different option? What if there was a place where you could see all the different versions of your life? That place is the Midnight Library, filled with millions of books, each telling a different version of your life. But would any of these other lives truly be better?

It’s 2016, and in Tom Barren’s world, technology has solved all of humanity’s problems. 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 he finds a 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.

A government agent tasked to investigate the slaughter of a Navy SEAL’s family learns that it, and other acts of horrific violence, may be connected to a secret time travel program tasked with preventing the end of the world. As a veteran of the program, the agent knows the tolls it take on participants — she’s suffered dearly in the line of service, too — but will that be enough to stop the bloodshed?

A novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes readers 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. 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.

Scottish Highlands, 1945. Claire Randall, a former British combat nurse, is just back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon when she walks through a standing stone in one of the ancient circles that dot the British Isles. Suddenly, she is transported to 1743, to a Scotland torn by war and raiding clans. Marooned amid danger, passion, and violence, Claire learns her only chance of safety lies in Jamie Fraser, a gallant warrior. What begins in compulsion becomes urgent need, and Claire finds herself torn between two very different men, in two irreconcilable lives.

Ready to get meta? In How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, author Charles Yu introduces us to Charles Yu: a customer service tech who repairs time machines in a minor alternate universe under contract to Time Warner Time. In between service calls, Yu and his dog (which may or may not exist) search for his father, lost somewhere in a pocket dimension of his own. Maybe one in a book …

Lydia and Freddie had a love for the ages. Together for more than a decade, Lydia thought their love was indestructible. But on Lydia’s twenty-eighth birthday, Freddie died in a car accident. Caught in an endless cycle of grief, Lydia’s best friend and sister try to help her take her first steps back into the world, and perhaps even open herself up to love again. But then, Lydia is pulled through the doorway to her past, able to live a life with Freddie where none of the tragic events have happened. But there’s an emotional toll to returning to a world where Freddie, alive, still owns her heart. Because there’s someone in her new life, her real life, who wants her to stay.

A ship captain, unfettered from time. A mute child, burdened with unimaginable power. A millennia-old woman, haunted by lifetimes of mistakes. In this captivating debut of connection across space and time, these outsiders will find in each other the things they lack: a place of love and belonging. A safe haven. A new beginning. But the past hungers for them, and when it catches up, it threatens to tear this makeshift family apart.

The traveler sped through Eli Teague’s life long ago. With her tricorne hat, flintlock rifle, and steampunked Model-A Ford, she was a living anachronism, and an irresistible mystery–and she was gone as soon as she arrived, in a cloud of gunfire and a squeal of tires. So when Eli sees her again, he’s determined to get some answers, embarking on a breakneck chase across the country and through two centuries of history–with nothing less than America’s past, present, and future at stake.