Here are 90 books that Time Travel for Love and Profit fans have personally recommended if you like
Time Travel for Love and Profit.
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I’m a fan of all things spooky! I especially love ghost stories, which is probably abundantly clear from my own novels. I’ve been known to frequent old graveyards, seek out haunted places, and sneak into abandoned buildings for inspiration—and the adrenaline rush! This fascination started when I was a young girl and my dad brought me a YA ghost mystery home from the library—every week, he would have the librarian help him pick out books for me, and I would devour the stack immediately, then re-read until the next library day! My favorite ghost stories have a mix similar to what I write—a tension-filled romance combined with a spooky, suspenseful haunting.
I fell in love with Jennifer Donelly’s writing when I discovered her historical romance trilogy The Tea Rose, and then devoured her YA novel A Northern Light. So when I found out she had published a YA book with history, young love, and a ghost mystery, I was all in!
In this story, the past and the present are once again woven together, adding fascinating and horrific details of the French Revolution as the main character navigates her new and strange life in Paris. The Catacombs beneath the city play a role in the plot, and it was this setting that made me determined to visit this creepy location myself one day—which I did!
The labyrinth of man-made tunnels wind their way into an underground maze that is filled with the relocated human bones of over 6 million bodies, which line the walls in macabre designs. Exploring the “Land of…
Readers of If I Stay and Elizabeth George will love Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly, author of the award-winning novel A Northern Light. Revolution artfully weaves two girls’ stories into one unforgettable account of life, loss, and enduring love; it spans centuries and vividly depicts the eternal struggles of the human heart.
BROOKLYN: Andi Alpers is on the edge. She’s angry at her father for leaving, angry at her mother for not being able to cope, and heartbroken by the loss of her younger brother, Truman. Rage and grief are destroying her. And she’s about to be expelled from Brooklyn Heights’…
I've always been obsessed with time travel, which transcends science fiction and offers ways to experience and reinterpret history, explore philosophical ideas, comment on the past, and imagine the future. I love the possibilities for humor and character development and plot twists across every genre and audience. One feature of all of the books I’ve chosen for this list is that they’re about contemporary young people and grounded in real lives, and time travel happens in all sorts of ways: through magical, mysterious forces, an app, tap shoes, a diary, a rideshare vehicle. I’m less interested in imaginary worlds and more fascinated by the way time travel can shed light on our own times.
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.
I've always been obsessed with time travel, which transcends science fiction and offers ways to experience and reinterpret history, explore philosophical ideas, comment on the past, and imagine the future. I love the possibilities for humor and character development and plot twists across every genre and audience. One feature of all of the books I’ve chosen for this list is that they’re about contemporary young people and grounded in real lives, and time travel happens in all sorts of ways: through magical, mysterious forces, an app, tap shoes, a diary, a rideshare vehicle. I’m less interested in imaginary worlds and more fascinated by the way time travel can shed light on our own times.
I’m cheating a little here, since protagonist Ailey Benjamin Lane is not quite a teenager—he’s only eleven.
But I love how this book celebrates dance—Ailey is a tap dancer with big dreams whose grandfather had similar, though thwarted, talents and dreams. And I love the window into Black history in 1930s Harlem when, feeling discouraged, Ailey puts on what turn out to be a pair of magical shoes and is transported to the past, where he meets his twelve-year-old grandfather.
Ailey is faced with the classic time traveler dilemma of wanting to help his grandfather overcome his fears while avoiding changing the past so much that it will affect Ailey’s own future.
I learned from this book—and since I was writing about gymnastics, time travel, and the fraught history of adoption politics, I found this book a wonderful model for evoking a passion, a culture, and a history.
Journey back to 1939 Harlem in this time-travel adventure with an empowering message about believing in yourself and persevering. Eleven-year-old Ailey Benjamin Lane, a gifted dancer, is certain that he'll land the role of the Scarecrow in his school s production of The Wiz. But when a classmate overshadows him at auditions, a deflated Ailey confides in his Grampa that he is going to give up dancing. Not ready to give up on Ailey, Grampa shares a story from his past. As a young boy, Grampa gave up his dreams of tap dancing even after the unofficial Mayor of Harlem,…
I've always been obsessed with time travel, which transcends science fiction and offers ways to experience and reinterpret history, explore philosophical ideas, comment on the past, and imagine the future. I love the possibilities for humor and character development and plot twists across every genre and audience. One feature of all of the books I’ve chosen for this list is that they’re about contemporary young people and grounded in real lives, and time travel happens in all sorts of ways: through magical, mysterious forces, an app, tap shoes, a diary, a rideshare vehicle. I’m less interested in imaginary worlds and more fascinated by the way time travel can shed light on our own times.
This book was released a couple of days before my list was due, but I was captivated by the description of it as “Back to the Future meets Joy Luck Club.” And Throwbackengaged me immediately.
I sped through the story of Samantha Kang who, unable to connect to her mom and worried about her grandmother’s health, finds herself thrown back from 2025 to 1995. There, she gets to know her teenage mom and her grandmother in a whole new way.
The contrasts between the post-pandemic gender-fluid TikTok generation and the regressive attitudes of the analog 1990s are brilliantly highlighted, Sam’s social-media savvy voice pitch-perfect, her observations about race, class, gender, pop culture, and being the child and grandchild of immigrants incisive and provocative, humorous and relatable.
I was glad I waited for this novel before I completed my list!
"No one can blend family, humor, satire, and love into a single perfect story like Maurene Goo can . . ." - Marie Lu, No.1 New York Times bestselling author
Samantha Kang has always butted heads with her mom, Priscilla, who is a first-generation Korean American, a former high school cheerleader and expects Sam to want the same all-American nightmare. Meanwhile, Sam is a girl of the times who has no energy for cliched high school aspirations. After a huge fight, Sam is desperate to get away from Priscilla, but instead, finds herself thrown back. Way back.
I love time travel stories. And I especially love a good time-loop story, ever since first seeing Groundhog Day on cable as a kid one winter break. As a graphic novelist, I wanted to do something that's not really been done much before in the medium: use the visual language of comics to tell an exciting and compelling story of someone trapped in a repeating day, that really explores what the visual language of a comic book page can do with respect to time, and it's circular nature. With my book RetroActive (colored by Brad Simpson and lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou), I feel the team and I did just that.
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.
When Micajah Fenton discovers a crater in his front yard with a broken time glider in the bottom and a naked, virtual woman on his lawn, he delays his plans to kill himself. While helping repair the marooned time traveler’s glider, Cager realizes it can return him to his past to correct a mistake that had haunted him his entire life. As payment for his help, the virtual creature living in the circuitry of the marooned glider, sends Cager back in time as his ten-year-old self, knowing everything he’d known at eighty and gives him access to advanced equations of…
I love time travel stories. And I especially love a good time-loop story, ever since first seeing Groundhog Day on cable as a kid one winter break. As a graphic novelist, I wanted to do something that's not really been done much before in the medium: use the visual language of comics to tell an exciting and compelling story of someone trapped in a repeating day, that really explores what the visual language of a comic book page can do with respect to time, and it's circular nature. With my book RetroActive (colored by Brad Simpson and lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou), I feel the team and I did just that.
Reconnect is an off-the-books company that will use time travel to rescue people from the moments before their untimely deaths, or place willing customers in the past—for a fee, of course. But when a rescue mission goes badly, Reconnect agents Mark and Seth find themselves stuck in the past with the FBI in hot pursuit. What's more, their own company is looking to cover up their mistake by taking their lives.
This is a really fun graphic novel in the genre of time travel + crime thriller, by creators that have gone on to much success in the comics industry. They also happen to be friends of mine!
Reconnect agents Mark and Seth go back in time to save people from their
untimely demise - for a fee. But, when a rescue mission goes awry, both
agents find themselves trapped in the past and on the run from both the FBI, who
want to jail them, and their own employers who want to kill them to protect
their own dark and deadly secrets.
I love time travel stories. And I especially love a good time-loop story, ever since first seeing Groundhog Day on cable as a kid one winter break. As a graphic novelist, I wanted to do something that's not really been done much before in the medium: use the visual language of comics to tell an exciting and compelling story of someone trapped in a repeating day, that really explores what the visual language of a comic book page can do with respect to time, and it's circular nature. With my book RetroActive (colored by Brad Simpson and lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou), I feel the team and I did just that.
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.
I was a teacher and a professor who showed generations of students how to find x, how to prove figure 1 was similar to figure 2, how to make a machine search through millions of bits of data for an answer. An inspiration for a story struck me one day early in retirement as I was daydreaming. I began to write and have never stopped. It turns out that “if-then” is not so different from “what if.” The first is more like destiny, the second like free will. One is science, the other is fiction. “What if” has led me into strange lands.
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.
With only TAMMY - a slightly tearful computer with self-esteem issues - a software boss called Phil - Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0 - and an imaginary dog called Ed for company, fixing time machines is a lonely business and Charles Yu is stuck in a rut.
He's spent the better part of a decade navel-gazing, spying on 39 different versions of himself in alternate universes (and discovered that 35 of them are total jerks).…
I have read SF, starting with the classic Jules Verne, since I was a young teenager. Soon I discovered Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke, Ellison, Zelazny, Dick, all of whom lit up my mind with wondrous and sometimes dangerous visions of possible futures. During the COVID shutdown period, when our university went to online instruction, my wife convinced me to try my hand at writing in my favorite genre. Previously I had written a textbook, How Films Tell Stories (listed here at Shepherd), but never any fiction, so I wrote Temporal Gambit, a time-travel adventure combined with themes of first contact, artificial intelligence, and alternate history. I then followed it with a sequel. I hope you enjoy.
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.
At forty-three Jeff Winston is tired of his low-paid, unrewarding job, tired of the long silences at the breakfast table with his wife, saddened by the thought of no children to comfort his old age. But he hopes for better things, for happiness, maybe tomorrow ...
But a sudden, fatal heart attack puts paid to that. Until Jeff wakes up in his eighteen-year-old body, all his memories of the next twenty-five years intact. If he applies those memories, he can be rich in this new chance at life and can become one of the most powerful men in America.
To be honest, and this will sound strange, but suspense is the air I breathe. I’m a pretty calm, boring human being, and the only thing that gets my heart pumping are films, TV, books, and video games in this genre. Suspense and thrillers are genres that make up ninety percent of the entertainment that I consume, and one hundred percent of the entertainment that I write.
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.
'ONE OF THE FICTION HIGHLIGHTS OF THE DECADE' Judy Finnigan, Richard and Judy Book Club
Featured in the Richard and Judy Book Club, the BBC Radio 2 Book Club and the Waterstones Book Club Winner of the John W. Campbell Award Shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award
SOME STORIES CANNOT BE TOLD IN JUST ONE LIFETIME
No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, Harry always returns to where he began, a child with all the knowledge of a life he has already lived a dozen times before.
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