Time Travel and Parallel Universes
January 10, 2024
If you’re the type that thinks about the ‘what ifs’, those moments where there was a fork in the road, then these books are for you. This is your chance to live vicariously through characters who get to explore alternate possibilities, live different lives and rewrite their history.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Imagine the existence of a magical library filled with books containing not only your life story as it is, but every variation of the life you could have lived, if you had made different choices along your life’s journey. If you had the chance to live these alternate lives, would you?
In The Midnight Library, Nora Seed, having reached rock bottom, has the opportunity to explore what might have been. In doing so, she must look within to discover what really makes life worth living.
Recursion by Blake Crouch
Can we trust our memories? NYC cop Barry Sutton is tasked with investigating a terrifying new phenomenon dubbed ‘False Memory Syndrome’, where people are being driven mad by memories of a life they never had.
Meanwhile, Neuroscientist Helena Smith is developing groundbreaking technology to help preserve memories. Both Barry and Helena hold the key to deciphering this puzzle. Together they must join forces to confront their deepest fears to battle the evil that threatens to disrupt the very fabric of time.
The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
This fast-paced whodunnit will keep you guessing right up to the end.
Aiden Bishop is trapped in his own Groundhog Day! Evelyn Hardcastle will die every day until he can identify her killer and end the cycle. To complicate things further, every time the day begins again at Blackheath Manor, Aiden wakes up inhabiting the body of a different guest. Some of his hosts prove more helpful than others, and no one is quite what they seem…
The Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel
A novel of time travel and love, Sea of Tranquility spans five hundred years and involves four different timelines: in 1918, Edwin St. Andrew, an exile of British polite society is travelling through Canada; in 2020, Mirella Kessler is searching Manhattan for her former friend, Vincent Alkatis Smith; in 2203, writer Olive Llewellyn is embarking on a book tour from her home on the second colony of the moon; and in 2401, detective Gaspery-Jacques Roberts is investigating an anomaly that links all four timelines and slowly reveals their interconnected stories.
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
The world is dying when an agent of the Commandant finds a letter saying, “Burn before reading, Signed Blue”. So begins a correspondence between two rival agents in a war that spans the vastness of time and space. Now what started as a taunt, or a battlefield boast, turns into something more. Something dangerous. Something that could alter the past and the future. The discovery of their shared bond risks everything.
The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley
Is it worth changing the past to save the future, even if it costs you everyone you’ve ever loved?
Joe Tournier has amnesia. His first memory is of stepping off a train in England, a nineteenth-century French colony. The only clue Joe has about his identity is an old postcard of a Scottish lighthouse that arrives in London the same month he does. The postcard is signed with the letter “M,” but whomever wrote it seems to know him better than he knows himself, and he’s determined to find out who M is. The search for M will lead Joe from French-ruled London to rebel-owned Scotland, and then onto the battleships of the former Royal Navy. Swept out to sea, Joe will rewrite history, and discover himself.
This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub
If you could travel back to your youth, would you?
Alice is about to turn forty. Life isn‘t awful. Although her job isn’t exactly right for her, she likes it. She‘s happy with most aspects of her life, but her dad is unwell, and it feels like something is missing. Astonishingly, she wakes up the next morning in 1996, reliving her sixteenth birthday. But the biggest shock is seeing her dad healthy and full of life again. Given this new perspective on her own life and his, events of the past take on new meaning. What could she change, and should she?