89 books like Lemongrass Hope

Being someone who often ponders life's "what ifs," I was quick to snap this novel up. The plot revolves around a suicidal woman, Nora Seed, who finds herself in a mysterious library between life and death, where each book serves as a portal to a different version of her life had she made alternative choices.

Though the story shares thematic elements with traditional time travel narratives—such as the exploration of alternate realities—it’s not time travel in the strictest sense. Instead, it has a dreamlike quality that offers a clever means to explore the deeply personal and relatable concept of self-discovery.

As Nora samples all the different lives she could’ve lived, I couldn’t help but reflect on my own life choices and the paths I didn't take…and be grateful for the ones I did.

When I was young, I quickly developed a taste for sci-fi. Thanks to my father, I also learned to love murder mysteries. I still remember us watching Columbo together.

My love for those genres makes it feel like The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle was written for me. At first glance, the setting is normal, a country house in the 1920s. The twist is that there’s a time loop, and the only way to break it is for the protagonist to solve the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle.

Even better, for every loop, the protagonist has his consciousness awakening in a different body, allowing him to experience the events through multiple points. This setting allows for a complex, dazzling narrative filled with twists and turns. I can’t recommend it enough.

This novel stopped me in my tracks with its disquieting premise: a mother witnessing her son commit a crime and then waking up each day further back in time, desperately searching for a way to prevent the terrible event. As a parent, I find this idea both terrifying and fascinating, as it taps into the innate desire to protect our loved ones at all costs.

Though not officially listed in the time travel category, Wrong Place Wrong Time is undeniably a time-bending story that cleverly highlights the enduring power of family bonds.

Maybe in Another Life takes readers on a what if journey, showing how one simple decision can change the entire course of your life.

It is a fascinating fictional story that showcases two different timelines side by side so readers can see the slight changes one decision made. TJR is a masterful storyteller and this novel serves as a fictional case study of what if? It’s a book guaranteed to make you think about your own choices and your own what ifs?

This book is a collection of small, powerful but sentimental stories around serious and personal themes that will tug at your heartstrings. Each story left me wanting more as the characters are forced to wrap up their quick journey into the past before their coffee gets cold. The sense of longing, loss, nostalgia, and community are central themes of this book, and it certainly made me reminisce about people and memories dear to my heart. 

Post-apocalypse and gritty science fiction doesn’t get any better than this collection. Harlan Ellison writes in a rough and unflinching style that, to me, was like watching a classic 80s action/sci-fi movie. And the novella in this book, A Boy and His Dog, is another favorite of mine. It’s bloody and raw and felt ahead of its time for its prose and structure. After reading it, I saw this was published over fifty years ago, yet it still resonated as something fresh and new.

I first read Slaughterhouse-Five as a callow college student, concluding with the certainty of youth that this was a brilliant but weird amalgam of dark humor and sci-fi wrapped inside an autobiographical anti-war screed. However, my real ‘duh’ moment came after rereading the book decades later.

The opening line, “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time” – tells you everything you need to know: It’s about PTSD, written from the inside looking out. Like Billy Pilgrim, I could see myself time-jumping and being abducted by aliens to escape the trauma of war. Interestingly, the term “PTSD,” the acronym for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, had not entered our lexicon when Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse Five in the 1960s. Poignant and personal, it's still a brilliant amalgam of dark humor and sci-fi. 

The speculative world that Mandel builds in Sea of Tranquility involves populations of humans who live in colonies on the moon.

But this is not really a novel about life on the moon. This is a time travel story that had to be set a couple hundred years in the future, and the moon colonies are, naturally, a part of human life in that time period.

The characters’ experience of life in a moon colony is ancillary to the time travel story; Mandel gives us just enough to make it seem real and true.

It may be obvious by now that I’m drawn to stories about complex characters, stories that aren’t afraid to be both humorous and gut wrenching.

Fourteen-year-old Nephele is another protagonist whose voice is immediately endearing, refreshing, and compelling. She’s an outsider, a brilliant math and science nerd who struggles to adjust socially to high school.

She invents a time travel app in order to relive her freshman year and do it right—but instead she becomes stuck in a time loop for ten years, encountering characters and surprises that help her to overcome her loneliness and find herself.

I love it that this book celebrates a smart, quirky character as she learns to look more deeply into her life and navigate her world. 

This is cheating a little bit because it’s about a modern-day American boy who gets whisked back to Shakespeare’s time and befriends the playwright as a young man.

Our young actor has to figure out why he’s been sent back to this time and escape before a terrible plague wipes out much of London. I bought this book at the Globe Theatre gift shop (!) on an overseas trip on the basis of Susan Cooper’s name alone.

She wrote The Dark Is Rising Series and this is a thrilling modern classic by her.