The most recommended time loop books

It's often said that the movie is not as good as the book it was based on, but All You Need is Kill and Edge of Tomorrow are as good as each other for different reasons. They both share the same premise and a wry and kinetic plot that moves quickly and pulls no punches. Edge of Tomorrow broadens out the world of the book and - as a visual medium - delivers more visceral action scenes, but All You Need is Kill brings us closer to the characters, what made them and what drives them and provides a different story arc and ending - one a Hollywood Tentpole could not and would not attempt - that is at once sad and uplifting and absolutely right.

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!

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.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir is a masterpiece that completely blew my mind. It’s not just a story—it’s an adventure that takes you to another world, literally and figuratively. The blend of hard science and gripping storytelling kept me awake at night, unable to put it down. I found myself learning about physics, astronomy, and even chemistry in ways that were both fascinating and accessible. Andy Weir has a gift for making complex concepts feel exciting and integral to the plot. The story’s originality and the unexpected friendship between Ryland Grace and Rocky were so captivating that it made me daydream about changing my career to science. It’s rare for a book to be this thought-provoking, emotional, and fun all at once. I loved every page and couldn’t stop thinking about it long after I finished.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

This was time travel at its best. The book began with a crime. The main character travels back through time and makes discoveries that finally enable her to prevent the tragedy from happening. The nature of time and one's understanding of their personal history were explored in a thought provoking way that never slowed down the plot.