Love Comeback? Readers share 89 books like Comeback...

From the moment I first began listening to the audiobook, I fell in love with this story. I was all in the moment Ryland Grace stumbled through answering the question “What is 2 plus 2?” The layering of the story, the threat to Earth concept, the educational presentation of very high-level scientific concepts to an audience of all ages, and the way Andy Weir made this reader feel so many emotions over a rock just keep drawing me back to it.

I literally just finished another listen less than a month ago and already want to go back to a story. I still don’t see many people talking about it. And the ending? Every story has its own perfect dismount landing, and this one nailed it.

I can only speak from my experience and, wow, this book hooked me right at the end of that first chapter, “but it’s happening faster.” Now to go into what that means, I will remain spoiler-free, but my jaw dropped. And the story only ramped up after that.

I love stories where the protagonist finds themselves in genuine peril, and Claire puts Harry August in a particular type of peril that truly had me terrified for his well-being in every chapter. The best type of suspense escalates in every chapter and it escalates here in this book in the best possible ways.

What would you do if you could go back and inhabit your 10-year-old-self with your adult mind? What would you do differently? What would you try to keep the same? Who would you save? In a more finite version of living-life-over-again, Micajah Fenton goes from being a suicidal octogenarian, to a time-traveler with the aid of an otherworldly spacecraft that lands on his property.

This book is full of rich and beautiful character moments in the bayou of mid-century Louisiana, and the Silicon Valley of the 1980s, that juxtaposes nicely against the hard sci-fi premise of UFOs and AI holograms. A Gift of Time was just that; a gift, one that brought a tear to my eye on more than one page.

Perhaps the most kindred title to my own book, Here and Now and Then is the story of Kin Stewart, and time-traveling spy from the year 2142, who becomes stranded in the 1990s after a botched mission. Having assimilated to life in the past, even marrying and starting a family, Kin's got a bad bout of brain fog and amnesia resulting from the ordeal, (time travel is hard!). And then, his rescue team shows up 18 years too late. They bring with them the revelation that Kin has only been gone for 2 weeks relative to their time.

While admittedly full of some heavy-handed “this author clearly loves Star Trek and soccer” dialogue in the beginning, once this book finds its feet, it really takes off and is a fun romp, with a cool look into the author's speculative future.

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. 

I loved this book because it has mathematics to the nth degree! Some of it in the form of inside jokes like “easy to use partial differential equations” that made me laugh out loud. Some of it, such as “equations that had sadness as a constant,” are in a “techno-poetic” style that I strive to achieve in my own writing. But this “meta-science fiction” novel is also filled with musings on writing and creativity. The self-referential recursion of a book within a book within a book makes the paradoxes of time travel even more interesting. The “reality portions” in which the main character pursues his quest to “find his father” are as deep and well done a theme as any I have read in sci-fi.

Wow! Wowie! To be honest, I am not someone who ever knows the ending of a thriller. I guess whatever part of the brain decides if you'll be good at solving mysteries, I don't have it! And every time I thought I knew where Gillian was leading me, the reader, I was always very wrong.

I really loved the powerful message of the strength of mothers throughout this book. I liked that this was time travel, but not so complicated that I couldn't follow it. I loved how this book explored the idea of "what if" and second chances in a really unique and compelling way. It was absorbing and fast-paced, and it definitely went down easy for me.

If you could go back and change something about your life, would you?

The hero of this story inadvertently finds himself returning to his past time and again, each instance trying to follow a different path to success or happiness. But just as he finds what he thought he wanted, the cycle begins again. 

I adored this novella from 2021 and the made-for-TV movie based on it.

Seventeen-year-old Mark is trapped in a Groundhog-day-like time loop with no real desire to break out of a situation that releases him from looming responsibilities. Then he meets evanescent and brilliant fellow time-looper Margaret, and the two set out to discover the wonders of the eternal day in which they’re stuck.

The story is charming, funny, and sweet. It was released during the pandemic at a time when a lot of us felt stuck in our own time loops, and its attention to detail and moving discovery of Margaret’s dark secret prompted me to appreciate the tiny perfect moments of my own seemingly endless and repetitive days. 

This book has this wonderful dichotomy of feeling both fully familiar with other great, classic epic fantasy stories while simultaneously standing proud in its own right.

I tore through this book and this trilogy because they toed the line of nostalgia for classics like Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time while maintaining a more modern voice and more accessible pacing. Any time an author can pack the same degree of epic-ness into a smaller (but by no means small) story, I am all in.