The most recommended time loop books

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.

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 book fascinated me. I love a book told backwards, which is really how this book is told.

Jen’s 18-year-old son commits murder. She doesn’t know the man he’s killed and she doesn’t know why he did it. The only thing she does know is that her life, and the life of her son, is over. Until she wakes up the next day to find that it is the morning of the murder. Can she stop it from happening?

Each night following she wakes up earlier and earlier, travelling backwards through time in hopes to solve the mystery of who her son kills and why before it ever happens. The unique premise kept me riveted until the surprising conclusion.

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!

I love time loop stories. This one was first penned as a short novella, and it’s now a movie. You probably know the setup: seventeen-year-old Mark is caught in a time loop, repeating the same day over and over, a la Groundhog’s Day.

But unlike other time loop stories, Mark accepts his fate; he even enjoys it. After all, there are no consequences for skipping class or telling his dad he’s thinking about a tattoo. Mark just goes with the flow. Until he meets Margaret, she’s the only other person in this time box who remembers the day before.

As they get to know each other, we see that Margaret is hiding something, and there’s more to this story than we knew. When the reveal comes, that’s when the writing in this story really shines.

Ransom Riggs has created quite the extraordinary book here. It also reads like a graphic novel of sorts as there are a lot of odd photos to accompany the text. It crosses genres rather seamlessly as well, between Urban YA to Fantasy to Horror to a Speculative fictional realm where Miss Peregrines' home resides. It is a rare read with well-developed characters and plot. The children are all quite odd, though strangely likable. If you want different, this is as different as it gets. Gave me chills of the good and ill-feeling variety. That’s what you want, yes? I do.   

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. 

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 book is a quintessential version of this type of narrative, following a new recruit, Keiji, as he relives the same battle against invading aliens known as Mimics, who also do their own hive-mind version of time looping.

I’ve always loved how time loop stories use repetition to progressively work through a situation, and following Keiji movement by movement, as he learns how to defeat the Mimics, I really felt like I knew what the experience of a time loop would be like. 

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.