Top Ten Time-Travel Books Involving Love
Disclaimer: I haven’t read all of these yet, but eventually I will. So let’s pretend I already have, and it will feel kind of like time travel!
This list is mostly not romances, but includes novels where love plays a large role along with the time travel – mostly romantic love, sometimes not.
My list starts with the book that started my love affair with time-travel love stories when it came out in 2003: The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.
1. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Next is one of my top ten favorite books of all time, probably, but I don’t think of it primarily as a love story, so that’s why I didn’t put Doomsday Book by Connie Willis at #1 on this list. It won the Hugo Award in 1993.
2. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (1992)
3. To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis (2010)
The next two on my list are also by Connie Willis! The first ends on a cliffhanger, but lucky readers of it now don’t have to wait a year for the second book. It’s really one huge story divided into two big ones.
These four are all set in the Oxford Time Travel universe. Blackout and All Clear are perfect for fans of stories set in the London Blitz as well as for fans of time-travel rom-coms and big books.
4. Blackout by Connie Willis (2010)
5. All Clear by Connie Willis (2011)
Next is the classic example of the time-travel love story. I want to listen to the audio edition because I like Campbell Scott as a narrator. Also, his backwards name is appropriate for a time-travel story.
6. Time and Again by Jack Finney (1970)
7. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (1979)
Dana, the main character of Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, is a Black woman in an interracial marriage with a white man. While Kindred is not a romance in any sense of the word, the relationship of Dana and Kevin is important to the story, especially as their races cause them to experience time traveling back to the time of slavery in the American South together in vastly different ways.
Probably many readers think of my #8 first when they think of time-travel love stories. (Outlander by Diana Gabaldon is probably the only book in this list that actually falls into the romance genre.)
Davina Porter‘s audiobook narration of Outlander is absolutely amazing. I tried the next book in the sequence in print, unable to find the audio, and it just wasn’t the same, so I never went on with the rest of the Outlander books.
8. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (1991)
The next one is still on my TBR, and it’s more about the love of a father for his daughter than romantic love, but I don’t care and I’m still going to count Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen as a story about love for Valentine’s Day.
9. Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen (2019)
I found my #10 on a Book Riot list of Best Time-Travel Romance Novels and I added it to round off my list. Author Tiffany Reisz is best known for erotica, but apparently The Night Mark is a departure from her usual.
Jessica Pryde describes it on Book Riot as “part love story, part supernatural, part mystery.”
10. The Night Mark by Tiffany Reisz (2017)
I also want to read all the books on the list of 20 Best Time Travel Novels from Book Riot and all the books on the list of 8 Time Travel Books with a Unconventional Twist from Read It Forward, but most of them didn’t fit into the Valentine’s Day theme.
I’m sharing this with Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, so you’ll find other Top Ten Valentine’s Day-themed book lists there!
