Gripping Time-Travel and Multiple-Life Fiction
Lexicon by Max Barry
Emily Ruff is recruited into an exclusive school in Virginia, where students aren’t taught history, geography, and mathematics—they are taught to persuade. Students learn to use language to manipulate minds, wielding words as weapons. The best graduate as “poets,” and enter a nameless organization with an unknown purpose. Emily becomes the school's most talented prodigy, while a seemingly innocent young man is rendered a pawn in a dangerous power struggle.
The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
Kirby Mazrachi, the sole surviving victim of a time-traveling serial killer who began his murder spree in Depression-era Chicago, tries to hunt him down in 1989 along with help from an ex-homicide reporter.
My Name is Memory by Ann Brashares
Daniel, a soul with a rare ability to remember his past lives, has shared multiple lifetimes with the reincarnations of Sophia. He arrives in the present, frustrated that their time together has always been cut short and hopeful that Sophia's burgeoning memories can help them overcome past-life challenges.
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
Dana, a modern-day Black woman, finds herself repeatedly transported from her home in California to the antebellum South, where she must make sure that Rufus, the plantation owner's son, survives to father Dana's ancestor.
Timeline by Michael Crichton
In the Dordogne region of France, archaeologists make a shocking discovery at a medieval site. Suddenly they are swept off to the headquarters of a secretive multinational corporation that has developed an astounding technology. Now this group is about to get a chance not only to study the past, but to enter it as well.
A Shortcut in Time by Charles Dickinson
Surprised when a hasty dash down a familiar walk in Euclid, Illinois, sends him back in time fifteen minutes, artist Josh Winkler becomes increasingly alarmed at the appearance of a lost young woman who claims to be from 1908.
The 13th Hour by Richard Doetsch
A tale told in reverse finds an innocent man sitting in jail after being accused of his wife's murder and given an opportunity by a stranger to go back in time to discover what happened, an opportunity that poses a painful dilemma.
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
In a world where one can literally get lost in literature, Thursday Next, a Special Operative in literary detection, tries to stop the world's Third Most Wanted criminal from kidnapping characters, including Jane Eyre, from works of literature.
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
Hurtled back through time more than two hundred years to Scotland in 1743, Claire Randall finds herself caught in the midst of an unfamiliar world torn apart by violence, pestilence, and revolution and haunted by her growing feelings for James Fraser, a young soldier.
The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer
Born as an old man, Max Tivoli lives his life aging backwards, falling in love and living an odd, sometimes terrifying life in San Francisco at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Winter Sea by Susanna Kearsley
In the spring of 1708, an invading Jacobite fleet of French and Scottish soldiers nearly succeeded in landing James Stewart in Scotland to reclaim his crown. Now, Carrie McClelland hopes to turn that story into her next bestselling novel. Carrie creates a heroine named for one of her own ancestors and starts to write. But when she discovers her novel is more fact than fiction, Carrie wonders if she might be dealing with ancestral memory, making her the only living person who knows the dangerous truth of what happened 300 years ago – a truth that may destroy her.
11/22/63 by Stephen King
High-school English teacher Jake Epping is enlisted by a friend to travel back in time to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a mission for which he must befriend troubled loner Lee Harvey Oswald.
Every Day by David Levithan
Known to him/herself only as "A," the narrator of this novel wakes up every morning in the body of a different person. This constant, inexplicable change has made A unusually circumspect, mature, and careful not to alter anything that would impact the lives of those whose bodies s/he's inhabited. It makes for a lonely existence…until A falls in love with a girl named Rhiannon and breaks those rules, just to see her again.
An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim
When time travel was invented in 1993, it seemed like the perfect answer to stopping the devastating 1981 pandemic--but they can only transport people 12 years, leaving them just short of a world-saving answer. That doesn't stop a company from capitalizing on rescuing specific people, but when Polly arrives in her new time, she finds herself alone in a strange new world.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
In order to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, a detective travels hundreds of years in the past and meets a young Englishman exiled to Canada in 1912 and a famous writer who lives on a moon colony but is on a book tour on Earth in 2203 when rumors of a new pandemic create panic.
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
A fierce competition is underway, a contest between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood to compete in "a game," in which each must use their powers of illusion to best the other. Unbeknownst to them, this game is a duel to the death, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will.
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
An ode to George Orwell's "1984" told in alternating male and female voices, 1Q84 relates the stories of Aomame, an assassin for a secret organization who discovers that she has been transported to an alternate reality, and Tengo, a mathematics lecturer and novice writer.
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Passionately in love, Clare and Henry vow to hold onto each other and their marriage as they struggle with the effects of Chrono-Displacement Disorder, a condition that heaves Henry involuntarily into the world of time travel.
The Map of Time by Felix J. Palma
Characters real and imaginary come vividly to life in this whimsical triple play of intertwined plots, in which a skeptical H. G. Wells is called upon to investigate purported incidents of time travel and to save lives and literary classics, including Dracula and The Time Machine, from being wiped from existence.
The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley
In 1898, Joe Tournier steps off a train and into a different world: one in which the French won at Trafalgar and made the British their slaves. Scots are particularly looked on with suspicion--too bad Joe is wearing a tartan! His only link to his past and the world that should have been is the name Madeline.
The Chronicles of St. Mary's by Jodi Taylor
In this funny, offbeat series, Madeleine Maxwell, new recruit to St. Mary's Institute of Historical Research, discovers that the society members travel through time to thwart time-traveling terrorists and investigate major historical events.
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
The classic novel of the future follows the Time Traveler as he hurtles one million years into the future and encounters a world populated by two distinct kinds of people, the childlike Eloi and the frightening Morlocks.
Blackout by Connie Willis
Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place, with scores of time-traveling historians being sent into the past. But now the time-travel lab starts to cancel assignments and switch around everyone’s schedules. And when Michael, Merope, and Polly finally get to World War II, things just get worse. Suddenly the once-reliable mechanisms of time travel are showing significant glitches, and the travelers begin to question their most firmly held belief - that no historian can possibly change the past.
Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson
A young Arab-Indian computer hacker-for-hire who goes by the handle Alif becomes an enemy of the state after his computer program catches the eye of the iron-clad security presence known as the Hand. A secret book of the mystical jinn may be his sole salvation as well as a gateway to unimaginable power.
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
When time travel becomes not just possible but readily available, someone has to clean up the messes. Charles Yu's father invented the technology and then disappeared, leaving him with a nearly impossible muddle in this delightfully meta book.