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7 Gripping Travel Thrillers That Will Make You Happy to Staycation

Canceled summer plans have put me in quite a slump. Fortunately, books give me a brief reprieve from my now mundane and isolated life. And for a little added zest, sometimes I’ll pick up a thriller to throw in some suspense to my day! After reading these travel thrillers packed with sudden disappearances, unsolved deaths, and creepy murders, a staycation doesn’t seem half bad. I can guarantee these page-turning vacation thrillers will make you happy to be safe on your couch this summer.  

As a writer for a travel magazine, Lo Blacklock is assigned the project of a lifetime: travel for a week on a luxury cruise for a story. But when things suddenly take a turn for the worst, she realizes she is way in o ver her head.  One night   Lo witnesses a woman being thrown overboard. However, the next morning the ship carries on as if nothing happened, and all passengers remain accounted for. Desperately trying to convey the tragedy she witnessed,  Lo  has a restless, uneasy journey packed with surprise twists.    

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After Tanya Dubois leaves her husband’s lifeless body at the base of the stairs of their home, she trades in her clothes, hair, and name for a new identity. In her desperation, she trusts Blue, another woman eager to leave the present behind. Together they set off on a fugitive’s race through the country,  living off the grid  as  various  identities. But as Tanya  is chased through her travels by her dark secret, readers are left wondering if she will ever be able to outrun her past.     

With its white-knuckled plot and unforeseeable twists, it’s no wonder Off the Shelf readers consider this Lisa Lutz thriller a must-read. After leaving her husband’s body at the base of the stairs, Tanya flees town and meets an ally, Blue, along the way. From heart-stopping escapes and devious deceptions, readers are left to wonder: can she possibly outrun her past?

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To say Winifred needs a vacation would be an understatement. After the death of her brother, the end of her fifteen-year marriage, and feeling burnt-out by her job,  Win i  feels defeated.  So  when her best friends decided to take an  excursion  together, she is all in. Their journey begins with a hiking a nd rafting adventure in the Allagash Wilderness, but  things quickly  take a dark turn. A freak accident leaves the women stranded and separated from their raf t and supplies. When they seek refuge in a nearby campground, long-kept  secrets  between the girls begin to emerge.   

A “raw, relentless, and heart-poundingly real” (Ruth Ware, New York Times bestselling author) thriller set against the harsh beauty of the Maine wilderness, The River at Night charts the journey of four friends as they fight to survive the aftermath of a white water rafting accident.

Winifred Allen needs a vacation.

Stifled by a soul-crushing job, devastated by the death of her beloved brother, and lonely after the end of a fifteen-year marriage, Wini is feeling vulnerable. So when her three best friends insist on a high-octane getaway for their annual girls’ trip, she signs on, despite her misgivings.

What starts out as an invigorating hiking and rafting excursion in the remote Allagash Wilderness soon becomes an all-too-real nightmare; a freak accident leaves the women stranded, separating them from their raft and everything they need to survive. When night descends, a fire on the mountainside lures them to a ramshackle camp that appears to be their lifeline. But as Wini and her friends grasp the true intent of their supposed saviors, long buried secrets emerge and lifelong allegiances are put to the test. To survive, Wini must reach beyond the world she knows to harness an inner strength she never knew she possessed.

With intimately observed characters and visceral prose, The River at Night “will leave you gasping, your heart racing, eyes peering over your shoulder to see what follows from behind” (Mary Kubica, New York Times bestselling author). This is a dark exploration of creatures—both friend and foe—that you won’t soon forget.

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Erin and Mark embark on their dream honeymoon to the tropical island of Bora Bora, but as they are scuba diving during this beautiful vacation, they spot something in the water. Th ey are left to decide whether to tell people about their  findings or  leave the secret between themselves. Their decision triggers a chain of nightmarish events.  Packed with twists, this novel will have you flying through its pages to  uncover  the lies characters are desperately clinging to.   

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Teo is a loner, with no friends or company other than his  paraplegic  mother and her dog. That is until he meets Clar ice, an aspiring screenwriter working on a screenplay about three friends who embark on a summer  road trip  through Brazil. As Teo becomes more and more obsessed with Clarice, he  kidnaps  her and embarks on his own twisted  journey through Brazil. He forces them to travel the same route that Clarice’s characters were meant to travel in her play. Teo is convinced that he just needs more time to prove to Clarice that they are meant f or each other, but as the days drag on, he sinks himself further and further into his tense and  disturbing  obsession.     

Sylvie, the beautiful, brilliant, successful older daughter of the Lee family, flies to the Netherlands for one final visit with her dying grandmother—and then vanishes. Amy’s sheltered younger sister has always looked up to Sylvie, but now that she is gone,  it's  her turn to step up.  Amy retraces Sylvie’s steps, flying back to the last  place  that she was seen.  But in this excursion, Amy unravels secrets  Sylvie  kept hidden that reveals more about their complicated family than she could have ever imagined.   

Take a trip to the lake this summer with ALL THESE BEAUTIFUL STRANGERS. Grace Fairchild, a beautiful young wife, vanishes at her parents ’  lake house, leaving behind her seven-year-old daughter , Charlie. Years later,  seventeen-year-old Charlie is desperate to let go of her tragic past life. She dives deep into the “it” crowd at her high school and taps into the elite secret society that  terrorizes  faculty and administration.    To become an official member of the  elite  crowd, Charlie must partake in a diabolical scavenger hunt. But as Charlie sinks deeper into this new life and her past  slowly begins to reveal herself, she becomes unsure  whether  she will survive her past family truth or her current life’s path.  

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19 Best Time Travel Thriller Books of All Time

Following his massively successful novel Under the Dome, King sweeps readers back in time to another moment—a real life moment—when everything went wrong: the JFK assassination. And he introduces readers to a character who has the power to change the course of history.

Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.

Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life – a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

Claire is catapulted into the intrigues of a world that threatens her life, and may shatter her heart. Marooned amid danger, passion, and violence, Claire learns her only chance of safety lies in Jamie Fraser, a gallant young Scots warrior. What begins in compulsion becomes urgent need, and Claire finds herself torn between two very different men, in two irreconcilable lives.

Conscripted into service for the United Nations Exploratory Force, a highly trained unit built for revenge, physics student William Mandella fights for his planet light years away against the alien force known as the Taurans. “Mandella’s attempt to survive and remain human in the face of an absurd, almost endless war is harrowing, hilarious, heartbreaking, and true,” says Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Junot Díaz—and because of the relative passage of time when one travels at incredibly high speed, the Earth Mandella returns to after his two-year experience has progressed decades and is foreign to him in disturbing ways.

Based in part on the author’s experiences in Vietnam, The Forever War is regarded as one of the greatest military science fiction novels ever written, capturing the alienation that servicemen and women experience even now upon returning home from battle. It shines a light not only on the culture of the 1970s in which it was written, but also on our potential future.

Falling in love with the daughter of its leader, Mad Newton, he returns to the present to face a difficult choice, whether or not to save her. And be part of the New Beginning.

But this year’s Passover Seder will be different−Hannah will be mysteriously transported into the past…and only she knows the unspeakable horrors that await. Winner of the National Jewish Book Award.

Rant Casey will die a spectacular highway death, after which his friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short, violent life. With hilarity, horror, and blazing insight, Rant is a mind-bending vision of the future, as only Chuck Palahniuk could ever imagine.

Time (Manifold #1) by Stephen Baxter. The year is 2010. More than a century of ecological damage, industrial and technological expansion, and unchecked population growth has left the Earth on the brink of devastation.

Battling national sabotage and international outcry, as apocalyptic riots sweep the globe, he builds a spacecraft and launches it into deep space. The odds are a trillion to one against him. Or are they?

A pull of the Time Machine’s lever propels him to the age of a slowly dying Earth.  There he discovers two bizarre races—the ethereal Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks—who not only symbolize the duality of human nature, but offer a terrifying portrait of the men of tomorrow as well.

Published in 1895, this masterpiece of invention captivated readers on the threshold of a new century. Thanks to Wells’s expert storytelling and provocative insight, The Time Machine will continue to enthrall readers for generations to come.

Polly Churchill’s next assignment will be as a shopgirl in the middle of London’s Blitz. But now the time-travel lab is suddenly canceling assignments and switching around everyone’s schedules. And when Michael, Merope, and Polly finally get to World War II, things just get worse.

For there they face air raids, blackouts, and dive-bombing Stukas—to say nothing of a growing feeling that not only their assignments but the war and history itself are spiraling out of control. Because suddenly the once-reliable mechanisms of time travel are showing significant glitches, and our heroes are beginning to question their most firmly held belief: that no historian can possibly change the past.

Spin (Spin Saga #1) by Robert Charles Wilson. One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.

Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who’s forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently #1) by Douglas Adams. What do a dead cat, a computer whiz-kid, an Electric Monk who believes the world is pink, quantum mechanics, a Chronologist over 200 years old, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poet), and pizza have in common?

Time’s Eye (A Time Odyssey, #1) by Arthur C. Clarke. In an instant, Earth is carved up in time and reassembled like a huge jigsaw puzzle. Suddenly the world becomes a patchwork of eras, from prehistory to 2037, each with its own indigenous inhabitants.

The explanation for this cataclysmic event may lie in the ancient city of Babylon, where two groups of refugees from 2037—three cosmonauts and three U.N. peacekeepers—have detected strange radio signals. The peacekeepers find allies in nineteenthcentury British troops and in the armies of Alexander the Great.

The cosmonauts join forces with the Mongol horde led by Genghis Khan. Both sides set out for Babylon, vowing to win the race for knowledge—as a powerful and mysterious entity watches, waiting.

The truth is, Enoch is the last surviving veteran of the American Civil War and, for close to a century, he has operated a secret way station for aliens passing through on journeys to other stars. But the gifts of knowledge and immortality that his intergalactic guests have bestowed upon him are proving to be a nightmarish burden, for they have opened Enoch’s eyes to humanity’s impending destruction. Still, one final hope remains for the human race…though the cure could ultimately prove more terrible than the disease.

Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, Way Station is a magnificent example of the fine art of science fiction as practiced by a revered Grand Master. A cautionary tale that is at once ingenious, evocative, and compassionately human, it brilliantly supports the contention of the late, great Robert A. Heinlein that “to read science-fiction is to read Simak.”

“Person of Interest”: Mystery Short Fiction By Terry John Malik

Deep in the stacks of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, young scholar Diana Bishop unwittingly calls up a bewitched alchemical manuscript in the course of her research.

Debut novelist Deborah Harkness has crafted a mesmerizing and addictive read, equal parts history and magic, romance and suspense. Diana is a bold heroine who meets her equal in vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont, and gradually warms up to him as their alliance deepens into an intimacy that violates age-old taboos. This smart, sophisticated story harks back to the novels of Anne Rice, but it is as contemporary and sensual as the Twilight series-with an extra serving of historical realism.

Déjà Dead (Temperance Brennan #1) by Kathy Reichs. Another crime thriller with time travel theme. Her life is devoted to justice; for those she never even knew. In the year since Temperance Brennan left behind a shaky marriage in North Carolina, work has often preempted her weekend plans to explore Quebec.

The Passion by Jeanette Winterson. A magical, wonderful modern classic about the destinies of Napoleon’s faithful cook and the daughter of a Venetian boatman.

Set during the tumultuous years of the Napoleonic Wars, The Passion intertwines the destinies of two remarkable people: Henri, a simple French soldier, who follows Napoleon from glory to Russian ruin; and Villanelle, the red-haired, web-footed daughter of a Venetian boatman, whose husband has gambled away her heart. In Venice’s compound of carnival, chance, and darkness, the pair meets their singular destiny.

Ehd’s a caveman living on his own in a harsh wilderness. He’s strong and intelligent, but completely alone. When he finds a beautiful young woman in his pit trap, it’s obvious to him that she is meant to be his mate. He doesn’t know where she came from, she’s wearing some pretty odd clothing, and she makes a lot of noises with her mouth that give him a headache. Still, he’s determined to fulfill his purpose in life – provide for her, protect her, and put a baby in her.

With only each other for company, they must rely on one another to fight the dangers of the wild and prepare for the winter months. As they struggle to coexist, theirs becomes a love story that transcends language and time.

But Connie also bears witness to another potential outcome: a dystopian society of grotesque exploitation. One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow.

The Daughter of Time (Inspector Alan Grant #5) by Josephine Tey. A great crime fiction with time travel theme. Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, recuperating from a broken leg, becomes fascinated with a contemporary portrait of Richard III that bears no resemblance to the Wicked Uncle of history. Could such a sensitive, noble face actually belong to one of the world’s most heinous villains—a venomous hunchback who may have killed his brother’s children to make his crown secure?

Or could Richard have been the victim, turned into a monster by the usurpers of England’s throne? Grant determines to find out once and for all, with the help of the British Museum and an American scholar, what kind of man Richard Plantagenet really was and who killed the Little Princes in the Tower.

Mystery Tribune’s Reading Lists are the best way of zooming in on the most notable books across crime, mystery, horror and thriller genres. To view our collection of reading lists, please visit  here .

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15 Vacation Thrillers in Time for Summer

Device Free Weekend

by Sean Doolittle

This fast-paced thriller is both a great read for a vacation and set during a vacation. Six college best friends of the most successful social media platform’s founder agree to go with him on an all-expenses-paid retreat to a luxurious tropical locale—and there’s only one catch: this weekend will be device-free. When the friends awake in his villa to find him gone, and a tablet in his place, they’re off to the races on a wild treasure hunt turned investigation.

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Who is Maud Dixon?

by Alexandra Andrews

Florence Darrow has always felt she was destined for greatness, but after a disastrous affair with her married boss, she starts to doubt herself. All that changes when she sets off for Morocco with her new boss, the celebrated but reclusive author Maud Dixon. Amidst the colorful streets of Marrakesh and the wind-swept beaches of the coast, Florence begins to feel she’s leading the sort of interesting, cosmopolitan life she deserves.

But when she wakes up in the hospital after a terrible car accident, with no memory of the previous night—and no sign of Maud—a dangerous idea begins to take form. . . 

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You Shouldn't Have Come Here

Jeneva Rose

Grace Evans, an overworked New Yorker looking for a total escape from her busy life, books an Airbnb on a ranch in the middle of Wyoming. When she arrives at the idyllic getaway, she’s pleased to find that the owner is a handsome man by the name of Calvin Wells—and he’s eager to introduce her to his easygoing way of life. But there are things Grace discovers that she’s not too pleased about: A lack of cell phone service. A missing woman. And a feeling that something isn’t right with the ranch.

Despite her uneasiness, the two bond and start to fall for one another. However, as her departure date nears, things change for the worse. What began as a playful romance soon turns into a complicated web of lies. Grace grows wary of Calvin as his infatuation for her seems to have morphed to obsession. Calvin fears that Grace is hiding something from him—including her reason for staying at his ranch to begin with. Vacation flings typically end in heartbreak, but for Grace and Calvin, it’ll be far more destructive.

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around April 25, 2023. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

Rachel Hawkins

Emily and Chess are both writers, but different kinds. Emily is a crime novelist struggling both in her personal life and to get her next draft going, and Chess is a social media self-help sensation. Though they’ve been friends for decades, their relationship has always been somewhat fraught. But on the grounds of both getting some writing done and reconnecting, Emily agrees to go with Chess to an Italian villa… one with a complicated history involving either a tragic drug-induced accident or something far more sinister. When the past starts to weave itself into the present, all the women involved have some important decisions to make, and some important truths to decide upon.

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The Cabin at the End of the World

Paul Tremblay

In another novel set in a remote cabin, Eric, Andrew, and their daughter Wen vacation to a lake in New Hampshire, and shortly after they arrive, Leonard arrives. Leonard is huge, but he’s young and friendly, and he tells Wen that even though her dads won’t want to let him and his group into their house, they have to. The fate of the world is in their hands. What happens after that is a wild series of high-stakes ultimatums that could prevent (or cause) the apocalypse.

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The Only Survivors

Megan Miranda

A decade ago, two vans filled with high school seniors on a school service trip crashed into a Tennessee ravine—a tragedy that claimed the lives of multiple classmates and teachers. The nine students who managed to escape the river that night were irrevocably changed. A year later, after one of the survivors dies by suicide on the anniversary of the crash, the rest of them make a pact: to come together each year to commemorate that terrible night. To keep one another safe. To hold one another accountable. Or both. Their annual meeting place, a house on the Outer Banks, has long been a refuge. But by the tenth anniversary, Cassidy Bent has worked to distance herself from the tragedy, and from the other survivors. She’s changed her mobile number. She’s blocked the others’ email addresses. This year, she is determined to finally break ties once and for all. But on the day of the reunion, she receives a text with an obituary attached: another survivor is gone. Now they are seven—and Cassidy finds herself hurling back toward the group, wild with grief—and suspicion. Almost immediately, something feels off this year. Cassidy is the first to notice when Amaya, annual organizer, slips away, overwhelmed. This wouldn’t raise alarm except for the impending storm. Suddenly, they’re facing the threat of closed roads and surging waters...again. Then Amaya stops responding to her phone. After all they’ve been through, she wouldn’t willfully make them worry. Would she? And—as they promised long ago—each survivor will do whatever he or she can do to save one another. Won’t they?

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We Were Never Here

Andrea Bartz

Emily is having the time of her life—she's in the mountains of Chile with her best friend, Kristen, on their annual reunion trip, and the women are feeling closer than ever. But on the last night of their trip, Emily enters their hotel suite to find blood and broken glass on the floor. Kristen says the cute backpacker she'd been flirting with attacked her, and she had no choice but to kill him in self-defense. Even more shocking: The scene is horrifyingly similar to last year's trip, when another backpacker wound up dead. Emily can't believe it's happened again--can lightning really strike twice? Back home in Wisconsin, Emily struggles to bury her trauma, diving head-first into a new relationship and throwing herself into work. But when Kristen shows up for a surprise visit, Emily is forced to confront their violent past. The more Kristen tries to keep Emily close, the more Emily questions her friend's motives. As Emily feels the walls closing in on their coverups, she must reckon with the truth about her closest friend. Can she outrun the secrets she shares with Kristen, or will they destroy her relationship, her freedom--even her life?

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around August 3, 2021. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

You Can Trust Me

Wendy Heard

Summer and Leo would do anything for each other. Inspired by the way each has had to carve her place in a hostile and unforgiving world, and united by the call of the open road, they travel around sunny California in Summer's tricked-out Land Cruiser. It's not a glamorous life, but it gives them the freedom they crave from the painful pasts they've left behind. But even free spirits have bills to pay. Luckily, Summer is a skilled pickpocket, a small-time thief, and a con artist--and Leo, determined to pay her own way, has learned a trick or two. Eager for a big score, Leo catches in her crosshairs Michael Forrester, a self-made billionaire and philanthropist. When her charm wins him over, Leo is rewarded with an invitation to his private island off the California coastline for a night of fabulous excess. She eagerly anticipates returning with photos that can be sold to the paparazzi, jewelry that can be liquidated, and endless stories to share with Summer. Instead, Leo disappears. On her own for the first time in years, Summer decides to infiltrate Michael's island and find out what really happened. But when she arrives, no one has seen Leo—she's not on the island as far as they know. Plus, there was only one way on the island—and no way off—for the coming days. Trapped in a scheme she helped initiate, could Summer have met her match?

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Talented Mr Ripley

Patricia Highsmith

Nothing gets me more excited to travel than a vacation period piece. Set in 1955 on the Amalfi Coast, the young striver Tom Ripley arrives in Italy on the assignment to retrieve the playboy son of a rich man. Bedazzled by Dickie Greenleaf’s extravagant galivanting, Tom becomes more obsessed with him and his lifestyle, and he reveals himself to be an amoral, low-level confidence man who is also, strangely, very likeable.

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They All Fall Down

Rachel Howzell Hall

Delighted by a surprise invitation, Miriam Macy sails off to a luxurious private island off the coast of Mexico with six other strangers. Surrounded by miles of open water in the gloriously green Sea of Cortez, Miriam is soon shocked to discover that she and the rest of her companions have been brought to the remote island under false pretenses—and all seven strangers harbor a secret. Danger lurks in the lush forest and in the halls and bedrooms of the lonely mansion. Sporadic cell-phone coverage and miles of ocean keeps the group trapped in paradise. And strange accidents stir suspicions, as one by one . . .

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The Vacation

T. M. Logan

It was supposed to be the perfect getaway: Kate and her three best friends, spending a week with their families in a luxurious villa in the south of France. Through the decades they’ve stayed closer than ever, and seven days of drinking crisp French wine and laying out under the dazzling Mediterranean sun is the perfect celebration of their friendship. But soon after arriving, Kate discovers an incriminating text on her husband’s cell phone. A text revealing that he’s having an affair. And that the other woman is one of her best friends. But which one? Trapped in paradise with no one to trust, Kate is determined to find out who has put her marriage—and a lifelong friendship—in jeopardy. But as she closes in on the truth, she realizes that the stakes are higher than she ever imagined. Everyone on the trip has secrets…and someone may be prepared to kill to keep theirs hidden.

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Mary Kay McBrayer is the author of  America’s First Female Serial Killer: Jane Toppan and the Making of a Monster.  You can find her short works at  Oxford American,   Narratively, Mental Floss , and  FANGORIA,  among other publications. She co-hosts  Everything Trying to Kill You , the comedy podcast that analyzes your favorite horror movies from the perspectives of women of color. Follow Mary Kay McBrayer on  Instagram  and  Twitter , or check out her author site here.

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Jetset Jansen

Travel Blogger

Vacation Thriller Books to Read on a Trip

By Ashley   |    Updated On: March 8, 2024   |   Leave a comment

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While my first love is travel, my second love is thrillers. And when you combine the two, you get vacation thriller books. Thrillers that transport you to exotic locations, snowy chalets or sinister islands, while throwing you into a gripping story. If you’re a fan of thrillers and travel, here are some of the books I’ve read that take you to a new destination.

Vacation Thriller Books by Destination

The Alps go through 8 countries with the majority of them being in Austria, Switzerland, France and Italy . There’s just something about a snowy setting. Dramatic views and snowy peaks are always a good setting for a vacation thriller book.

By Ruth Ware – A small tech company heads to a beautiful mountain chalet in the Alps for some team bonding. Except tensions are high. Too high. One by one, team members show up dead, but who’s behind it and will anyone survive?

The Sanatorium

By Sarah Pearse – Elin is at a newly renovated hotel in the Alps but something isn’t quite right about it’s history as a Sanatorium. A snow storm has them stranded in the mountains just as someone disappears. When a body is found, they aren’t sure they’ll make it out alive.

The Bahamas are incredibly beautiful and any book set here will immediately transport you to that island life. Plus, there are many islands to explore, some inhabited, some not.

She Started It

By Sian Gilbert – 4 friends are invited to an extravagant bachelorette party by an old classmate of theirs who wasn’t quite in their inner circle. With all expenses paid and curiosity blooming, they head to the Bahamas only to find out that the past might not have been forgotten, or forgiven.

From desert plains, to mountainous landscape, to the subantarctic tip–Chile has a variety of different landscapes for thrilling settings and exploration.

We Were Never Here

By Andrea Bartz – Emily and Kristen are on their annual backpacking trip in Chile when an incident occurs and a man ends up dead. However, a similar instance occurred on their last trip and Emily can’t help but question the parallels and her friendship.

Egypt is one of my favorite countries. It has amazing history with incredible architecture and there are so many landmarks worth seeing. You know you’re in for an adventure with books set in Egypt.

Death On the Nile

By Agatha Christie – A beautiful socialite heads to Egypt on her honeymoon. But a death occurs while this small group is sailing down the Nile and the famous detective, Hercule Poirot, must find the killer amongst them.

Books set in England give you rolling green hills, coastal cliffs, or cities that offer a mix of modernity and old-world charm. My time in London was spent roaming the streets, taking a Jack the Ripper tour and touring the historic buildings in the area.

The IT Girl

By Ruth Ware – Hannah Jones meets April, the ultimate IT girl, when she starts her schooling at Oxford. Though roommates, they quickly become friends, but by the end of the year April is dead. Now, ten years later, Hannah is confronted with a theory that she might have sent the wrong man to prison.

From the vineyards of the French countryside to the bustling streets of Paris, readers will be able to discover France and the many beautiful areas within the country. Though I’ve only been to Paris and didn’t quite love it as a tourist, it makes for a great book setting, as it’s full of historic buildings and different neighborhoods.

The Paris Apartment

By Lucy Foley – Jess heads to Paris to visit her brother Ben, only to find that he’s missing once she arrives. The apartment he has is uncharacteristically nice and the residents act suspicious. The more she searches for her brother, the more she begins to thing everyone has something to hide.

The Greek islands are a popular place for a European summer. One of my first international trips first included a Mediterranean cruise and the islands were so fun!

By Alex Michaelides – An ex-hollywood starlet invites her friends to a private Greek island but tensions are high. The secrets start unraveling until someone ends up dead.

Ireland was a chaotic trip for us. We attempted a road trip through the green country without a plan and saw some things, but missed some things. But as a thriller reader, you’ll definitely appreciate the coastal cliffs.

The Guest List

By Lucy Foley – A high profile wedding is set to take place on a secluded island cliff off the coast of Ireland. The past starts to unravel between old friends just as a storm blows in. But someone ends up dead and there’s no way off the island.

Transport to the seaside towns of Portugal , the sprawling city of Lisbon or the more mountainous regions to explore castles and palaces. There’s plenty of character in the tiled buildings and cobblestone streets for a thrilling setting.

2 Nights in Lisbon

By Chris Pavone – A woman wakes up in Lisbon to find her husband missing. In the morning, she goes to the police. In the afternoon, she receives a ransom note for €3 million and is forced to reach out to the person who ruined her life because they are the only person who can help.

My family ended up going to Scotland before meeting me in Ireland and the only thing they could do while traveling Ireland was talk about how great Scotland was. So chances are, if you like Ireland, you’ll also like Scotland.

Rock Paper Scissors

By Alice Feeney – A couple takes a romantic getaway to a snowy chapel in Scotland. Hopes of repairing their relationship start to dwindle as secrets they’ve hidden start to surface. *This twist will make you flip back through the book!

South Pacific

The South Pacific is a dream location with some of the most beautiful islands in the world. If you’re heading to a beach destination, books set here will be sure to give you all the tropical vibes.

Reckless Girls

By Rachel Hawkins – 6 new friends head to the deserted Meroe Island with a creepy past. It’s paradise, until a stranger shows up putting them all on edge. When one person goes missing and another ends up dead, questions arise about how well they all really know each other.

Something in the Water

By Catherine Steadman – On their honeymoon in Bora Bora, Erin and Mark discover something in the water. Instead of telling someone, they choose to keep it a secret, which sets off a chain of life-changing events.

Located in SE Asia, Sri Lanka is known for its stunning landscapes and cultural heritage, and books set here will take you on a deep dive through a rich culture.

You’re Invited

By Amanda Jayatissa – Amaya is in Sri Lanka for her ex-best friend’s wedding once she finds out the groom is her ex. When the bride goes missing, everyone looks at Amaya. *This is like a Crazy Rich Asians version of high society in Sri Lanka with such great insight.

There’s many, many places and books I could include here but I’m going to try and keep it to specific destinations that are more of the tourist hot spots.

Outer Banks

Made more famous because of the Outer Banks TV show (which is great), the Outer Banks takes you to secluded coastal homes along a barrier island chain off North Carolina.

The Only Survivors

By Megan Miranda – 10 years ago, two vans crashed into a ravine and only 9 students escaped the river. Now there are 7 and each year they come together at the Outer Banks to commemorate that night. Or to make sure they keep quiet about what really happened.

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40 Best Time Travel Books To Read Right Now (2024)

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Travel back in time with the best time travel books, including engrossing thrillers, romance, contemporary lit, and mind-bending sci-fi.

Table of Contents

Best Time Travel Books

Books about time travel promise to not only transport you across time periods and space – Doctor Who-style – but also tesser you into new dimensions and around the world. Most readers already know about classics like The Time Traveler’s Wife , A Christmas Carol , and The Time Machine .

For romance time travel, grab In A Holidaze or One Last Stop . For contemporary and new time travel books, Haig’s The Midnight Library and Serle’s In Five Years captivated our hearts and minds.

Recursion re-kindled our love for science fiction, and Ruby Red transported us to 18th-century London. Books like Displacement promise intuitive and raw commentary about generational trauma and racism in graphic novel form.

Below, find the best time travel novels across genres for adults and teens, including history, romance, classics, sci-fi, YA, and thrilling fiction. Get ready to travel in the blink of an eye, and be sure to let us know your favorites in the comments. Let’s get started!

Contemporary & Literary Fiction

If you enjoy contemporary and literary fiction filled with strong main characters, these are some of the best books in the time travel genre. Uncover new releases as well as books on the bestseller lists. Of course, we’ll share a few lesser-known gems too.

In Five Years by Rebecca Serle

Would your life change if you had one seemingly real dream or premonition? What if some key facts were missing but you had no idea? Can we change the future?

One of the best books about time travel and friendship, don’t skip In Five Years . In fact, we read this New York City-based novel in half a day. Have the tissue box ready.

Dannie nails an important job interview and is hoping to get engaged. Of course, this is all a part of her perfect 5-year plan. Dannie has arranged every minute of her life ever since her brother died in a drunk driving accident.

On the night of Dannie’s “scheduled” engagement, she falls asleep only to have a vision of herself 5 years into the future in the arms of another man. Did she just time travel or could this be a dream? When Dannie arrives back in 2020, her life goes back to normal. …That is until she meets the man from her dream.

We were expecting In Five Years to be a time travel romance story; however, this is a different type of love and one of the best books about strong friendships .

Read In Five Years : Amazon | Goodreads

Before the coffee gets cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Translated by Geoffrey Trousselot | We just love Japanese literature . One of the most debated time travel books among our readers – you’ll either love it or hate it – Before the coffee gets cold takes place at a cafe in Tokyo, Japan.

Along with coffee, this 140-year-old, back-alley cafe lets visitors travel back in time. Four visitors at the cafe are hoping to time travel to see someone for the last (or first) time. The way each patron views the cafe says a lot about them. The details and repetition are everything.

True to the title, visits may only last as long as it takes for the coffee to grow cold. If they don’t finish their coffee in time, there are ghostly consequences.

Before the coffee gets cold asks, who would you want to see one last time, and what issues you would confront?

Along with the many rules of time travel, these visitors are warned that the present will not change. Would you still travel back knowing this? Can something, anything, still change – even within you?

The story has a drop of humor with a beautiful message. We shed a tear or two. Discover even more terrific and thought-provoking Japanese fantasy novels here .

Read Before the coffee gets cold : Amazon | Goodreads

If you are looking for the most inspiring take on time travel in books, Haig’s The Midnight Library is it. This is one of those profound stories that make you think more deeply . TWs for pet death (early on) and suicide ideation.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Imagine if you could see your other possible lives and fix your regrets. Would that path be better? Would these changes make you happier?

Set in Bedford, England, and at a library , Nora answers these questions as she intentionally overdoses on pills. Caught in the Midnight Library – a purgatory of sorts – Nora explores books filled with the ways her life could have turned out. She tries on these alternative lives, pursuing different dreams, marrying different people, and realizing that some parts of her root life were not as they seemed on the surface.

Find hope and simplicity in one of the most authentic and heaviest time travel novels on this list. Haig addresses mental health through a new lens that is both beautiful and moving.

With a team full of avid readers and librarians, discover our top selections featuring more books about books .

Read The Midnight Library : Amazon | Goodreads

The Two Lives of Lydia Bird by Josie Silver

Some of the best time travel books are those with alternate realities, including The Two Lives of Lydia Bird . There are content warnings for prescription pill addiction and more.

Set in England, Lydia and Freddie are planning their marriage when the unthinkable happens. Freddie dies in a car accident on the way to Lydia’s birthday dinner. In a matter of seconds, Lydia’s world falls apart. She isn’t sure how she will survive. When Lydia starts taking magical pink sleeping pills, she enters an alternate universe where Freddie is alive and well.

Caught between her dream world and real life, Lydia must decide if she will give in to her addiction – living in a temporary fantasy world – or give it up completely.

While the repetitive and predictable plot drags a bit – slightly hurting the pacing – the overall story shows emotional growth and the nature of healing after loss. And, as Lydia soon learns via her dreams, no love is perfect. Maybe her future was destined to be different anyway, which is reminiscent of Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library .

Read The Two Lives of Lydia Bird Jose Silver : Amazon | Goodreads

The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August by Claire North

If you are looking for more suspenseful books about time travel and like Groundhog Day , check out The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. However, this is not just one day on repeat; instead, this is a lifetime.

Harry August is repeatedly reborn into the same life, retaining his memories each time. No matter what Harry does or says, when he lands on his deathbed, he always returns back to his childhood, again and again. On the verge of his eleventh death, though, a girl changes the course of his life. He must use his accumulated wisdom to prevent catastrophe.

Read The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August : Amazon | Goodreads

An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim

When it comes to time travel books, An Ocean of Minutes is one of the most original takes about time travel’s effects on alternate history.

Polly and Frank are deeply in love in 1981 when a pandemic devastates the planet. By the end of 1981, time travel (invented in this alternate reality in 1993) has been made available.

Because of this invention, individuals can sign on to work for the TimeRaiser corporation in order to escape or save their loved ones in the present. Due to a flaw in the technology, though, they can only transport people for 12 years. This prevents them from stopping the pandemic by just 6 months.

When Frank gets ill, Polly signs up, both agreeing they will meet back up in 1993. Now alone in the future, Polly has to learn to navigate a world she has less than zero preparation for. In this world, she is a time refugee, bonded to TimeRaiser without a physical cent to her name.

Lim uses the time travel mechanic to cleverly explore the subject of immigration, forcing the reader to follow Polly blindly into a world they should know, but don’t. This is what makes An Ocean of Minutes one of the most unique time travel novels on this reading list.

Read An Ocean of Minutes : Amazon | Goodreads

Time Travel In Science Fiction

For fantasy and sci-fi lovers, take a quantum leap into fictional worlds, quantum physics, possible futures, black holes, and endless possibilities. See if you can tell the difference between the real world and new dimensions.

Recursion by Blake Crouch

Recursion is one of our all-time favorite time travel books to gift to dads who love sci-fi. Can you tell what we gave our dad for Christmas one year?

In Recursion, no one actually physically time travels – well, sort of. Instead, memories become the time-traveling reality.

Detective Barry Sutton is investigating False Memory Syndrome. Neuroscientist Helena Smith might have the answers he needs. The disease drives people crazy – and to their deaths – by causing them to remember entire lives that aren’t theirs. Or are they!?

All goes to heck when the government gets its hands on this mind-blowing technology. Can Barry and Helena stop this endless loop?

Recursion is also a (2019) Goodreads Best Book for Science Fiction.

Read Recursion : Amazon | Goodreads

This Is How You Lose The War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar 

A Goodreads runner-up for one of the best science fiction novels (of 2019) – and one of the shortest time travel novels on this list – This Is How You Lose The Time War follows two warring time-traveling agents falling in love through a letter exchange.

Red and Blue have nothing in common except that they travel across time and space and are alone. Their growing and forbidden love is punishable by death and their agencies might be onto them.

In a somewhat beautiful yet bizarre story, we watch as Red and Blue slowly fall for each other and confess their love. They engage in playful banter and nicknames. Every shade of red and blue reminds them of each other.

The first half of the novel is a bit abstract. You might wonder what the heck you’ve gotten yourself into. However, once you get your feet planted firmly on the ground of the plot, the story picks up and starts making more sense.

We can’t promise you’ll love or even understand This Is How You Lose The Time War – we aren’t sure we do. However, this is truly one of the most unique sci-fi and LGBTQ+ time travel romance books on this reading list – written by two authors. Also, maybe crack out the dictionary…

Explore even more of the best LGBTQ+ fantasy books to read next.

Read This Is How You Lose The War : Amazon | Goodreads

All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai

A debut novel, All Our Wrong Todays is both a humorous and entertaining time travel book that speaks to how we become who we are.

In 2016, technology perfected the world for Tom Barren. However, we all know that perfection doesn’t equate to happiness. Barren has lost his girlfriend, and he just happens to own a time machine… Now, Barren has to decide if he wants to keep his new, manipulated future or if he just wants to go back home to his depressing but normal life.

Read All Our Wrong Todays : Amazon | Goodreads

Here And Now And Then by Mike Chen

Imagine getting trapped in time and starting over. That’s exactly what happens to IT worker, Kin Stewart, in one of the bestselling science fiction time travel books, Here And Now And Then .

Stewart has two lives since he is a displaced time-traveling agent stuck in San Francisco in the 1990s. He has a family that knows nothing about his past; or, should we say future. When a rescue team arrives to take him back, Stewart has to decide what he is willing to risk for his new family.

Here And Now And Then is a time travel book filled with emotional depth surrounding themes of bonds, identity, and sacrifice. Find even more books set in San Francisco, California (and more!).

Read Here And Now And Then : Amazon | Goodreads

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is one of the most unusual books about time travel out there.

Our protagonist Charles Yu lives in a world where time travel exists and is readily available to the average person. And yes, he is named after the author, and yes, it is as meta as it sounds; and yes, this is just the beginning of this speculative fiction time travel book.

Charles Yu’s day job is spent repairing time machines for Time Warner Time. But in his free time, he tries to help the people who use time travel to do so safely and to counsel them if things have gone wrong.

It’s no surprise that Charles’ entire life revolves around time travel since his father invented the technology many years ago. And then he disappeared. In fact, Charles is also trying to find out just what happened to his dad, and where – or when – he’s gone.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe won’t be for everyone, but it’s one of the best time travel books if you want delightfully meta, fantastically non-linear, and very very weird.

Read How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe : Amazon | Goodreads

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

For beautiful, lyrical time travel novels about found family and love, The Vanished Birds is a must-read.

Nia Imani exists outside of time and space. She travels in and out of the world through a pocket of time with her space crew. They emerge to trade or sell goods every eight months. But eight months for them is 15 years for everyone else.

She has lived this way for hundreds of years. Though she has her crew, and there are people she shares connections with sporadically throughout their lives, she is lonely. And although she barely ages, she watches friends and lovers grow old and die.

One such person is Kaeda, who meets Nia for the first time when he is 7. The next time he sees her, he has aged 15 years, while she is only months older. She continues to come every 15 years of his life, always looking the same.

Then one day a mysterious, mute boy falls from the sky into Nia’s life. His name is Ahro, and there’s something extra special about him. Something that could revolutionize space travel forever. And now there might be people after Ahro who won’t love him the way Nia does.

If you love a character-driven book with exquisite prose – and a few time warps – this is one of the best time travel books for you.

Read The Vanished Birds : Amazon | Goodreads

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

Night Watch is one of the most fun and thrilling books about time travel. It’s also a bit ridiculous and very very British.

Why can’t policing just be simple? All Sam Vimes wanted to do was capture and arrest a dangerous murderer. But thanks to those damned wizards and their experiments, he and the killer have both been accidentally thrown back in time thirty years.

And to top it off, the man who would have become a mentor to young Sam Vimes in the past has been killed in the process! How’s Vimes going to get this all sorted out?

The City Watch he’s spent years improving is just a bunch of semi-competent volunteers at this point. He’s got no money, no clothes, and no friends. But at least he’s making enemies fast. Can he catch the killer, stop history from not repeating itself, and get home to his family? Oh, and the city’s about to dissolve into civil war. Typical.

Night Watch is perfect if you prefer your time travel books to be fantasy-based.

P.S. There may be mild spoilers for previous books in the Discworld series, but this can be read as a standalone. And if you only ever read one Discworld novel, this is one of the best there is – and so far the only one of the Discworld books with time travel!

Read Night Watch : Amazon | Goodreads

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

The Future of Another Timeline is one of the few time travel books to explore history through a feminist lens.

In 1992, Beth – a high school senior – and her friends Heather, Lizzy, and Soojin attend a riot grrl concert with Heather’s boyfriend Scott. But afterward, one of Scott’s not-so-funny sexist jokes gets out of hand and Lizzy accidentally kills him. Now they’re on the run, and the bodies just keep piling up.

Meanwhile, in 2022, Tess is part of a group of women and non-binary people working together to change history. They have the use of five time devices which only allow them to travel backward and back to the present day – but never forwards.

Beth and Tess come from two wildly different times (1992, and 2022, respectively). But, while Beth is busy making history, Tess is quite literally trying to change it. However, both of them want the same thing: a better world. When their worlds collide, will they be able to save each other – and the world?

The Future of Another Timeline is a time travel fiction celebration of feminism and queerness with lots of sci-fi and punk rock thrown in. This is one of the best time travel novels for those who enjoy stellar women making history .

Read The Future of Another Timeline : Amazon | Goodreads

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

The Kingdoms is wildly imaginative and sure to enchant fans of time travel books, alternative history stories, and tales about parallel universes.

In 1898 Joe Tournier steps off a train and suddenly can’t remember anything that comes before that moment. The world he now finds himself in is as foreign to him as it is to us: an alternate history/reality where the UK lost the Battle of Trafalgar and is now a French colony.

In this world, the British are kept as slaves. Napoleon is a popular name for pets, and tartan is outlawed. Since Joe arrives on a train from Glasgow speaking English and wearing tartan, there is some speculation he might be from The Saints, a terrorist group based in Edinburgh fighting for freedom.

But all Joe remembers is the fading image of a woman and the name Madeline. Although he is identified by his owner and brought “home,” Joe is determined to find this Madeline. And his resolve is only strengthened when he receives a postcard signed ‘– M’ and dated 90 years in the past.

Discover even more books about Scottish culture, history, and everyday life.

Read The Kingdoms : Amazon | Goodreads

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

The Light Brigade is one of the best time travel stories for anyone who loves character-driven tales or books about war and conflict.

As war wages on Mars, the military has devised the perfect soldier to fight on the frontlines: being made of light. The Light Brigade, as they’re called back home, is made up of soldiers who have undergone a procedure that breaks them down into atoms capable of traveling at the speed of light. They are the perfect soldiers, but broken people.

The book follows one such soldier, Dietz, an eager new recruit who is experiencing battle out of sync with everyone else. Because of this, she – and we – see a different reality of the war than the one presented by the Corporate Corps. As Dietz becomes more and more unstuck in time, she becomes more and more unsure of her own sanity and the role she is playing in this war.

Read The Light Brigade : Amazon | Goodreads

The Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way

You Look Like Death Volume 1 | Now a popular (and excellent) Netflix TV show, The Umbrella Academy is one of the best time travel books of all time.

One day, forty-seven children are suddenly and inexplicably born to women who were not previously pregnant. Eccentric millionaire Reginald Hargreeves goes around the world buying as many of the surviving children as he possibly can. He is able to get seven.

These children, it turns out, all have superpowers (except, it seems, for the unremarkable Number Seven aka Vanya). They become the crime-fighting group: The Umbrella Academy.

Fast forward several years, and Number Five, whose special power is that he can travel in time a few seconds or minutes per go, has mysteriously appeared after Hargreeves dies. And now he brings warning of an apocalypse – one which he insists none of his siblings will survive.

The Umbrella Academy series currently has three volumes, all packed with tales of time travel, parallel worlds, family drama, and lots of epic battles. We’ve absolutely loved this time travel book series so far; we can’t wait to see what Gerard Way does with future installments.

Discover even more great books with music, musicians, and bands.

Read The Umbrella Academy : Amazon | Goodreads

Historical Fiction

Travel back in time to witness wars and history. See what happens if you try to rewrite the future. Many of these historical fiction books with time travel promise to teach you more.

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

We have a plethora of Agatha Christie fans amongst our Uncorked Readers , and Turton’s The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evenlyn Hardcastle is inspired by Christie.

Similar to Levithan’s Every Day , each day, Aiden wakes up in a different body from the guests of the Blackheath Manor. Trapped in a time loop, Aiden must solve Evelyn Hardcastle’s murder to escape. In the process, he navigates the tangled web of secrets, lies, and interconnected lives of the guests. Can he identify the killer and break the cycle?

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is an award-winning historical thriller and one of the best time travel novels if you enjoy Downton Abbey and Groundhog’s Day . Discover even more great books set at hotels, mansions, and more.

Read The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle : Amazon | Goodreads

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

Travel back in time to Scotland in one of the most well-known time travel book series (and now TV series) of all time. Outlander is a part of pop culture. A New York Times bestseller and one of the top 10 most loved books according to The Great America Read, get ready to enter Scotland in 1743.

Claire Randall, a former British combat nurse, walks through an ancient circle of stones and is transported into a world of love, death, and war. This is a place of political intrigue, clan conflicts, and romantic entanglements. Claire must navigate the unfamiliar landscape while grappling with her feelings for the dashing Jamie Fraser.

Encounter even more cult-classic books from the ’90s like A Game Of Thrones , which is perfect for fantasy map lovers .

Read Outlander : Amazon | Goodreads

11/22/63: A Novel by Stephen King

Written by bestselling author, Stephen King, 11/22/63 is one of the best award-winning time travel books for historical fiction lovers. Set in 1963 when President Kennedy is shot, 11/22/63 begs the question: what if you could go back in time and change history?

Enter Jake Epping in Lisbon Falls, Maine.  Epping asks his students to write about a time that altered the course of their lives. Inspired by one of those haunting essays, Epping enlists to prevent Kennedy’s assassination.  How is this time travel possible? With the discovery of a time portal in a local diner’s storeroom…

11/22/63 is one of the most thrilling and realistic books about time travel, according to both critics and readers.

Read 11/22/63 : Amazon | Goodreads

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

If you are looking for historical fiction novels about time travel that address slavery and racism, be sure to check out Butler’s Kindred. This is also one of the best books published in the 1970s .

One minute Dana is celebrating her birthday in modern-day California. The next, she finds herself in the Antebellum South on a Pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. Dana is expected to save the plantation owner’s son from drowning. Each time Dana finds herself back in this time period as well as the slave quarters, her stays grow longer and longer as well as more dangerous.

Examine the haunting legacy and trauma of slavery across time. For younger readers, there is also a graphic novel adaptation . Discover more books that will transport you to the South .

Read Kindred : Amazon | Goodreads

What The Wind Knows by Amy Harmon

A bestseller and Goodreads top choice book, if you devour historical Irish fiction, What The Wind Knows will transport you to Ireland in the 1920s.

Anne Gallagher heads to Ireland to spread her grandfather’s ashes. Devastated, her grief pulls her into another time. Ireland is on the verge of entering a war, and Anne embraces a case of mistaken identity. She finds herself pulled into Ireland’s fight for Independence at the risk of losing her future life. She also falls for another main character and doctor, Thomas Smith.

What The Wind Knows is one of the best time travel novels that both romance and fantasy readers can appreciate. Witness connections that transcend time.

Read What The Wind Knows : Amazon | Goodreads

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

Known for being one of the best time travel books for thriller lovers, The Shining Girls also has the reputation as the spookiest novel on this reading list.

Kirby Mazrachi is the last shining girl – a girl with a future and so much potential. Harper Curtis is a murderer from the past meant to kill Mazrachi. However, Kirby is not about to easily go out without a fight, leading her on one violent quantum leap through multiple decades.

As Kirby races against time to track down a serial killer and unravel the mysteries of the House, encounter themes of resilience, fate, and the shining spirit that can transcend even the darkest forces.

Read The Shining Girls : Amazon | Goodreads

Time Travel Romance Books

We love a good time-travel romance novel, but we also understand how hard it can be to hold onto love when time is so unstable. From queer love stories set on trains to holiday celebrations, fall in love across time with these books.

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

From bestselling author, Casey McQuiston of Red, White, & Royal Blue – one of our favorite LGBTQ+ books for new adults – don’t miss the most-talked-about book (from 2021), One Last Stop.

Twenty-three-year-old August is quite the cynic and living in New York City. Up until now, August has jumped schools and towns as often as you change a pair of socks. August has also never been in a serious relationship and wants to find “her person.” August’s life suddenly changes, though, when she meets a beautiful and mysterious woman on the train.

Jane looks a little…out of date… and for good reason; she’s from the 1970s and trapped in the train’s energy. August wants nothing more than to help Jane leave the train, but does that mean leaving her too?

A feel-good, older coming-of-age story, laugh out loud and be utterly dazzled as you follow love across time and space. You’ll cozy (and drink) up in the parties and community surrounding August. One Last Stop is one of the all-time best LGBTQ+ time travel books – and perfect if you enjoy books that take place on trains .

Read One Last Stop : Amazon | Goodreads

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The Time Traveler’s Wife is one the top time travel romance novels – and not just because the story features a librarian . We are so biased.

Henry and Clare have loved each other pretty much forever. Unfortunately, Henry has Chrono-Displacement Disorder, sporadically misplacing him in time. Of course, this time-traveling dilemma makes Clare’s and Henry’s marriage and future together pretty darn interesting.

Grab some Kleenex as they attempt to live normal lives and survive impending devastation. The Time Traveler’s Wife has also been made into a romantic movie classic . Watch even more fantasy movies with romance .

Read The Time Traveler’s Wife : Amazon | Goodreads

In A Holidaze by Christina Lauren

If you are looking for a sweet and sexy holiday rom-com set in Utah, grab In A Holidaze by Christina Lauren.

Mae leaves her family and friend’s Christmas vacation home after drunkenly making out with an old childhood friend. Blame the spiked eggnog. Unfortunately, Mae’s secretly in love with her best friend’s brother, Andrew. On the ride to the airport, Mae wishes for happiness just as a truck hits her parent’s car. 

Mae lands in a time-travel loop where her dreams start coming true.  Is it too good to last?   What happens when she isn’t happy once again? Is she trapped?

For holiday books about time travel, this one is sure to put you in the Christmas spirit if you enjoy movies like Holidates  or  Groundhog’s Day . It’s light with a happy ending – typical of this author duo. We also recommend In A Holidaze if you are looking for Christmas family gathering books – a big request we see here at TUL.

P.S. Did you know that Christina Lauren is a pen name for a writing duo, Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings? Christina Lauren also wrote The Unhoneymooners , which was also hilariously enjoyable and set on an island .

Read In A Holidaze : Amazon | Goodreads

A Knight In Shining Armor by Jude Deveraux

For cozy time travel romance books and a feminist tale set abroad, try A Knight In Shining Armor .

Dougless Montgomery is weeping on top of a tombstone when Nicholas Stafford, Earl of Thornwyck, appears. Although this armor-clad hunk allegedly died in 1564, he stands before her about to embark on a journey to clear his name. Convicted of treason, Montgomery vows to help her soon-to-be lover find his accuser and set the record straight.

Read A Knight In Shining Armor : Amazon | Goodreads

The Night Mark by Tiffany Reisz

Set in South Carolina, if you love lighthouses and beach vibes, you’ll find something enjoyable in the time travel romance, The Night Mark .

After Faye’s husband dies, she cannot move on and recover. Accepting a photographer job in SC, Faye becomes obsessed with the local lighthouse’s myth, The Lady of the Light.

Back in 1921, the lighthouse keeper’s daughter mysteriously drowned. Faye is drawn into a love story that isn’t hers and becomes entangled in a passionate and forbidden love affair.

Read The Night Mark : Amazon | Goodreads

The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston

Anyone who likes their time travel books to have a magical love story should pick up The Seven Year Slip for their next read. It’s one of our favorite magical realism novels .

When Clementine’s aunt dies, she inherits her fancy New York apartment on the Upper East Side. Although Clementine would really rather have her aunt back and can’t imagine living in her home, she eventually forces herself to move in and inhabit her aunt’s space.

And not long after, she wakes up to discover a strange man in her living room… except it’s not her living room, it’s her aunt’s… from seven years ago. Clementine’s aunt always said her apartment held a touch of magic; sometimes it created time slips that brought two people together when they were at a crossroads.

But what happens when you start to fall for someone stuck seven years in the past? Clementine knows there’s no future together, but she also can’t let go of this link to her aunt.

Like her previous speculative fiction romance, The Dead Romantics , Ashely Poston’s unique time travel tale is full of heartache and grief. However, it will also make you swoon. Basically, this one is a must if you are a fan of time travel romance books.

Read The Seven Year Slip : Amazon | Goodreads

Classic Books

No time travel reading list would be complete without the classics. Below, uncover just a few great time travel novels that started it all.

The End of Eternity by Issac Asimov

The End of Eternity is said to be one of Asimov’s science fiction masterpieces. This is also one of the most spellbinding books about time travel – although some criticize the story for its loopholes.

Harlan is a member of the elite future known as an Eternal. He lives and works in Eternity, which like any good time travel novel, is located separately from time and space.

Harlan makes small changes in the timeline in order to better history. Of course, altering the course of the world is dangerous and comes with repercussions, especially when Harlan falls in love.

Read The End of Eternity : Amazon | Goodreads

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

It goes without saying that Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is one of the most famous and best time travel books for classic lovers – and a literary canon-worthy Christmas novel.

Ebenezer Scrooge is a greedy, lonely, and cruel man who truly has no Christmas spirit. Haunted by the ghosts of the past, present, and future, Scrooge must find the ultimate redemption before it’s too late. Does he have a heart?

Find even more classic and contemporary ghost books , including a few unique takes on ghosts.

Read A Christmas Carol : Amazon | Goodreads

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five is a somewhat bizarre time travel book about finding meaning in our sometimes fractured and broken lives. It’s also one of the most popular books published in the ’60s .

Similar to The Time Traveler’s Wife, Billy Pilgrim is “unstuck” in time in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Drafted into World War II, Pilgrim serves as a Chaplain’s assistant until he is captured by the Germans. He survives the bombing at Dresden and ultimately becomes a married optometrist. Things get a little wild…

Suffering from PTSD, Billy claims that he is kidnapped by aliens in a different dimension. Like most time travel novels, the story is out of order and Billy travels to different parts of his life.

Aliens come in all shapes and sizes; have more alien encounters with this reading list .

Read Slaughterhouse-Five : Amazon | Goodreads

A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain

First published in 1889, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is one of the most popular classic and satirical time travel novels that’s set close to our childhood home. Having grown up in CT close to the old Colt factory, this story makes us smile.

Hank Morgan supervises the gun factory and is knocked unconscious. Upon waking, he finds himself in Britain about to be executed by the Knights of King Arthur’s Round Table in Camelot.

Morgan uses his future knowledge to his advantage, making him a powerful and revered wizard, which unfortunately doesn’t quite save him as he hopes. Not to mention that Morgan tries to introduce modern-day conveniences and luxuries to a time period that isn’t quite ready for them.

Read A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court : Amazon | Goodreads

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

The Time Machine is one of the best frontrunner time travel books of all time. Published in 1895, the Time Traveler recalls his exhausting time travel adventures to incredulous believers. He even disappears in front of them.

Blended with fantasy and science fiction over the course of 800,000 years, the Time Traveler battles “bad guys.” He also loses his time machine, debatably falls in love, and meets the underground dwelling Morlocks.

Read The Time Machine : Amazon | Goodreads

Young Adults Books

For young adults and teens – plus adults who appreciate YA – read the best middle-grade and high school time travel books. We’ve included more time travel graphic novels and manga here too.

Displacement by Kiku Hughes

For historical YA graphic novels , Displacement is one of the must-read books about time travel that will teach young readers about generational trauma, racism, politics, and war.

Follow Kiku, who is displaced in time, back to the period of U.S. Japanese incarceration [internment] camps – essentially glorified prisons – during WW2. Kiku begins learning more about her deceased grandmother’s history, which mirrors the horrid actions under former President Donald Trump. How can Kiku help stop the past from repeating itself, and more so, how can we?

In a simplistic but powerful style of storytelling, Hughes’s emotional YA WW2 book is accessible to young readers. Displacement is also one of the shorter and quicker books with time travel on this list. Find even more LGBT+ graphic novels to read – one of our favorite genres.

Read Displacement : Amazon | Goodreads

The Girl From Everywhere by Heidi Heilig

Changing the past can be pretty tempting. We’ve even seen that The Flash cannot resist. However, altering the course of history can be dangerous…

The first of two YA time travel books, Nix is the daughter of a time traveler. Her dad can sail anywhere on his ship, The Temptation. Her dad has his own temptation, though: to travel back to Honolulu in 1868, the year before her mom dies in childbirth. Nix’s father threatens to possibly erase her life and destroy a relationship with her only friend.

Discover even more great books about maps. Or, travel via armchair with these ship books.

Read The Girl From Everywhere : Amazon | Goodreads

Ruby Red by Kerstin Gier

Translated by Anthea Bell | If you are looking for time travel in books and enjoy YA historical fiction, try Ruby Red , which is the first in the Ruby Red Trilogy.

Gwyneth Shepherd quickly learns that she can easily time travel, unlike her cousin who has been preparing her entire life for the feat. Gwyneth wants to know why such a secret was kept from her. There are so many lies. Gwyneth time travels with the handsome Gideon back and forth between modern-day and 18th-century London to uncover secrets from the past.

Back in our MLIS and library days, Ruby Red was one of our favorite YA time travel books to recommend since so few knew about the series. Just a small warning that this enemies-to-lovers trope is a tad sexist, though. Find books like Ruby Red on our books with red (and more colors) in the title reading list .

Read Ruby Red : Amazon | Goodreads

Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

A little creepier for young adult time travel novels, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is all about time loops. We’ve only read the first in this eerie series that mixes manipulated vintage photography with a suspenseful and chilling story.

Jacob discovers a decaying orphanage on a mysterious island off the coast of Wales. Known as Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, the building isn’t exactly abandoned… Jacob runs into peculiar children who might be more than just ghosts.

If you are looking for Kurt Vonnegut-esque time travel books for teenagers, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is for you. Find even more great adult and YA haunted house books to add to your reading list .

Read Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children : Amazon | Goodreads

A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle

One of the most well-known books about time travel for families – made even more popular by Oprah and Mindy Kaling, A Wrinkle In Time , is the first book in The Time Quintet .

Although a time travel book series for elementary and middle-grade students – and also a 1963 Newbery Medal winner – adults will love the lessons and whimsical sci-fi quality of A Wrinkle In Time.

Meg Murray and her brother, Charles Wallace, go on an adventure in time to find and rescue their father. Their dad disappeared while working for the government on a mysterious tesseract project.

Watch this thrilling time travel adventure mixed with a coming-of-age story and a little girl power, too.

Read A Wrinkle in Time : Amazon | Goodreads

Orange by Ichigo Takano

Translated by Lasse Christian Christiansen and Amber Tamosaitis | This YA sci-fi romance manga is one of the most endearing time travel books you’ll ever read.

On the first day of 11th grade, Naho oversleeps for the first time ever. She also receives a letter that claims to be sent from herself 10 years in the future. The letter tells her both of the two big things that will happen to her that day as proof of sender: she will be late, and there will be a new kid in class named Naruse Kakeru from Tokyo who will sit next to her.

Naho is unsure if she trusts the letter, or whether or not she should heed its warnings – especially since it talks about past regrets and trying to undo them.

Orange is an adorable, but heartbreaking time travel manga that teaches us the meaning of friendship, love, regret, and so much more. If you’re looking for the best books about time travel for teens, Orange is the perfect option (and adults will love it too).

Read Orange : Amazon | Goodreads

If you devour the time travel genre, don’t miss these great movies…

If you enjoy books that take you back in time, you might also appreciate these top movies with time loops . Would you be able to fix past mistakes, fall in love, and you know, maybe not die this time? Find out if these protagonists succeed.

Travel Back In Time With These Reading Lists:

• Best ’90s Books
• Iconic ’80s Books
• Best WWII Historical Fiction

Christine Frascarelli

Dagney McKinney

45 Comments

Hi, nice list but just FYI you have one of the novels named incorrectly: it should be All Our Wrong Todays, not All Our Wrongs Today.

Thanks for letting us know! Every year, this list grows, and sometimes we miss a few mistakes.

The Things Are Bad Series by Paul L Giles is the funniest, most insightful time travel books I’ve ever read. It has everything!

Thanks so much for the review and rec!

Dream Daughter by Diane Chamberlain is an engrossing time travel book that I enjoyed immensely.

Our readers and contributors are big Diane Chamberlain fans. Thanks!

A huge time travel fan. A great list. Another time travel book recommendation: Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montemore. Wonderful story.

Thank you so much for the kind words and recommendation! We’ll have to check it out.

Great list, thanks. I also love seeing all the recommendations in the comments. I would add the Chronos Files series to your list. And, of course, the film ABOUT TIME, which is fantastic!

Thanks so much for the recommendations. We appreciate it!

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The 35 Best Books About Time Travel

Here's what to read after you finish Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series.

Every item on this page was chosen by a Town & Country editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

Gabaldon first published Outlander —the book that would eventually inspire the television series starring Caitriona Balfe as Claire and Sam Heughan as Jamie —in 1991, and the ninth novel in the series, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone , came out in November 2021.

Ahead of the seventh season of Outlander , now's the perfect time (ha) to dive into time travel books. From time traveling romance to alternate realities to murder mysteries, there's something for everyone here.

The Time Traveler's Wife

Any list about time travel books must begin with The Time Traveler's Wife , right? This bestselling novel tells the love story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who inadvertently travels through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Plot sound familiar? The book was adapted into a 2009 film starring Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana, and a 2022 TV show starring Theo James and Rose Leslie .

Read more: 20 of the best Time Travel Films Ever Made

A Murder in Time

Kendra Donovan is a rising star at the FBI, until one disastrous raid when half her team is murdered and a mole in the FBI is uncovered. After she recovers from her wounds, she's determined to find the man responsible for the death of her team—yet upon her arrival in England, she stumbles back in time to 1815. Mistaken for a lady's maid, Kendra is forced to quickly adapt to the period as she figures out how to get back to her own timeline. There are five books in the Kendra Donovan series , so if you love a time travel mystery, don't miss these.

Author Octavia Butler is a queen of science fiction, and Kindred is her bestselling novel about time travel. In it, she tells the story of Dana, a Black woman, who is celebrating her 26th birthday in 1976. Abruptly, she's transported back to Maryland, circa 1815, where she's on a plantation and has to save Rufus, the white son of the plantation owner. It's not just a time travel book, but one that expertly weaves in narratives of enslaved people and explores the Antebellum South.

Faye, Faraway

Diana Gabaldon herself called Faye, Faraway "a lovely, deeply moving story of loss and love and memory made real , " so you know it's going to be good. The plot focuses on Faye, a mother of two, who lost her own mother, Jeanie, when she was just 8 years old. When Faye suddenly finds herself transported back in time, she befriends her mother—but doesn't let on who she really is. Eventually, she has to choose between her past and her future.

The Eyre Affair

In this version of Great Britain circa 1985, time travel is routine. Our protagonist is Thursday Next, a literary detective, who is placed on a case when someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Brontë's novel.

Bonus: The Eyre Affair is the first in a seven book series following Thursday.

The River of No Return: A Novel

Lord Nicholas Davenant is about to die in the Napoleonic Wars in 1812, and wakes up 200 years later. But he longs to return back in time to his love, Julia. When he arrives in modern society, a mysterious organization called the Guild tells him "there is no return," until one day, they summon him to London and he learns it's possible to travel back through time. A spy thriller that's also historical romance that's also time travel... Say less.

One Last Stop

Casey McQuiston's second novel ( following Red, White, and Royal blue, which is going to be a major motion picture this summer ) is a queer time-loop romance set on the Q train in New York City, and it's riveting. August is 23, working at a 24-hour diner, and meets a gorgeous, charming girl on the train: Jane. But she can't seem to meet up with her off the Q train—until they figure out Jane is stuck in time from the 1970s. How did she travel through time? Can August get Jane unstuck? Will they live happily ever after!? The questions abound.

What the Wind Knows

Anne Gallagher grew up hearing her grandfather’s stories of Ireland. When she returns to the country to spread his ashes, she is transported back in time to 1921—and is drawn into the struggle for Irish independence. There, she meets Dr. Thomas Smith, and must decide whether or not she should return to her own timeline or stay in the past. As one reviewer wrote on Amazon, What the Wind Knows is a "spectacular time travel journey filled with love and loss."

The Midnight Library: A Novel

Imagine a library with an infinite number of books—each containing an alternate reality about your life. That's the plot of The Midnight Library , where our protagonist Nora Seed enters different versions of her life. She undoes old breakups, follows her dream of becoming a glaciologist, and so much more—but what happens to her original life?

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: A Novel

In this novel from Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland, magic existed—until 1851. A secret government organization, the Department of Diachronic Operations (or D.O.D.O. for short), is dedicated to bringing magic back, and its members will travel through time to change history to do so. As Kirkus Reviews wrote , the novel "blend[s] time travel with Bourne-worthy skulduggery." It's a delight for any fans of science fiction, with a slow burn romance between military intelligence operator Tristan Lyons and linguist Melisande Stokes.

This Is How You Lose the Time War

Cowritten by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers, this epistolary romantic novel tells the story of two time-traveling rivals who fall in love. Agents Red and Blue travel back and forth throughout time, trying to alter universes on behalf of their warring empires—and start to leave each other messages. The messages begin taunting but soon turn flirtatious—and when Red's commander discovers her affection for Blue, they soon embark down a timeline they can't change.

The House on the Strand

Set at an ancient Cornish house called Kilmarth, where Daphne du Maurier lived from 1967, The House on the Strand story follows Dick Young, who has been offered use of Kilmarth by an old college friend, Magnus Lane. Magnus, a biophysicist, is developing a drug that enables people to travel back to the 14th century, and Dick reluctantly agrees to be a test subject. The catch: If you touch anyone, you're transported back to the present. As the story goes on, Dick's visits back to the 1300s become more frequent, and his life back in the modern world becomes unstable.

The Kingdoms

It’s 1898 and there’s a man named Joe, who lives in London, which is, in this alternate historical, a part of the French Empire as in this version of the past, Britain lost the Napoleonic Wars. Joe has gotten off a train from Scotland and cannot remember anything about who he is or where he’s from. He soon returns to his work, and after a few years, he is sent to repair a lighthouse in Eilean Mor in the Outer Hebrides. Joe then finds himself a century earlier, on a British boat with a mysterious captain, fighting the French and hoping for a future that is different than the one he came from. If you're into time travel and queer romance and alternate history, this is for you.

The Future of Another Timeline

In 1992, 17-year-old Beth agrees to help hide the dead body of her friend's abusive boyfriend. The murder sets Beth and her friends on "a path of escalating violence and vengeance" to protect other young women. In 2022, Tess decides to use time travel to fight for change around key moments in history. When Tess believes she's found a way to make an edit to history that actually sticks, she encounters a group of time travelers bent on stopping her at any cost. Tess and Beth's lives intertwine, and war breaks out across the timeline.

Shadow of Night

The sequel to A Discovery of Witches , the plot of Shadow of Night picks up right where the story left off: With Matthew, a vampire, and Diana, a witch, traveling back in time to Elizabethan London to search for an enchanted manuscript. You really need to read the first book before reading Shadow of Night , but the series by Deborah Harkness is a swoony magical romance.

And: It's now a TV show! ( Season one is streaming on Amazon Prime Video .)

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

In The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, the same day happens again and again. Each day, Evelyn Hardcastle is murdered at 11:00 p.m at Blackheath. And each day, our protagonist Aiden Bishop wakes up in the body of a different witness—and tries to solve her murder. He only has eight days, and it's a race against time to solve Evelyn's murder and to escape the time loop.

Recursion: A Novel

In 2018 New York City, detective Barry Sutton fails to talk Ann out of jumping off a building. But before Ann falls to her death, she tells him she is suffering from False Memory Syndrome—a new neurological disease where people are afflicted with memories of lives they never lived. The dissonance between their present and these memories drives them to death. This is best read unspoiled, but it's undoubtedly a time travel story you haven't read before.

On the eve of her wedding day, Shay Garrett looks into her grandmother's antique mirror and faints. When she wakes up, she's in the same house—but in the body of her grandmother, Brandy, as a young woman in 1900. And Brandy awakens in Shay's body in the present day in 1978. It's like Freaky Friday , but with time travel to the Victorian era.

Here and Now and Then

Kin Stewart is a time traveler from 2142, stuck in 1990s suburban San Francisco. A rescue team arrives to bring Kin back to his timeline—but 18 years too late. Does Kin stay with his "new" family, and the life he's built for himself in San Francisco, or does he return to his original timeline? He's stuck between two families—and ultimately, this is a time travel tale about fatherhood.

A Knight in Shining Armor

Originally published in 1989, this romance novel features a present-day heroine and a knight from the 16th century who fall in love. Per the book's description: "Abandoned by a cruel fate, lovely Dougless Montgomery lies weeping upon a cold tombstone in an English church. Suddenly, the most extraordinary man appears. It is Nicholas Stafford, Earl of Thornwyck…and according to his tombstone he died in 1564. Drawn to his side by a bond so sudden and compelling it overshadows reason, Dougless knows that Nicholas is nothing less than a miracle: a man who does not seek to change her, who finds her perfect, fascinating, just as she is. What Dougless never imagined was how strong the chains are that tie them to the past…or the grand adventure that lay before them."

Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma , a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram .

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Six Novels That Bring Together Mystery and Time Travel

Literature that tests the boundaries of time itself..

H.G. Wells was not the first author to explore time travel as a literary device, but he popularized the concept in ways that had never been done before. I’ve always been drawn to time travel in all genres—from sci-fi to suspense, from romance to action adventure—but my particular favorite is mixing the time-bending element with a good mystery.

Depending upon how it’s done, it can add to the tension—a race against time as our characters try to return to their own era—or it can allow readers to explore the past through modern eyes. In my own  In Time  mystery series, I’ve enjoyed the fish-out-of-water sensation that my main character—a modern-day woman and brilliant FBI agent—experiences after being tossed back to the Regency period in England. As women then were second-class citizens without the ability to even vote, not only does she have to deal with personal obstacles, but she also cannot tap into her usual arsenal of forensic tools to solve crimes.

Whether time travel is being used to wrap a mystery in an extra, innovative layer or is allowing readers to view humanity and history through a different lens, the theme is brilliantly done in the books that I’ve listed below.

Lightning , Dean Koontz

The moment I read  Lightning , I fell in love with the characters and the story’s complexity, so I was shocked to later learn that Dean Koontz actually had to fight to get this book published. I was not shocked that after he finally succeeded, the novel was wildly successful. From the first page, I was plunged into a not-so-natural phenomenon of flashing lightning in the middle of a snowstorm, from which a mystery man emerges and becomes inexplicably linked to the life of the main character, Laura. In typical Koontz fashion, Lightning weaves together a plethora of elements—heroism, heartbreak, love, humor, and plenty of bad guys. The time-travel aspect is lightly done, but with a twist that literally leaves you gasping.

Recursion , Blake Crouch

I didn’t think I could go down a more twisted rabbit hole than when I read Blake Crouch’s  Dark Matter , but he simply blew my mind with  Recursion . Time travel is often portrayed as an external process, relying on Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which teased the notion that space and time could be bent to create a wormhole or vortex. Crouch, however, went  inward , by proposing the possibility that we could use our own memories to be propelled back to any point in our lives. The concept is fascinating, and there were many points at which I had to put down the book to simply  think  about what I had just read. Of course, in Crouch’s tale there is as much danger and devastation in going back to tweak your own timeline as there is if you were to jump into a time machine and return to the days of the dinosaurs, stepping on an insect that would then change life as we know it (à la Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect).

Timeline , Michael Crichton

No one has ever blended science—both fact and theory—into action adventure quite like Michael Crichton. He delves into the mechanics of time travel in such a masterful way that the incomprehensible becomes a head-nodding moment. Even better, it doesn’t slow down the story, which begins as a puzzle and evolves into an escapade, when a modern-day professor is trapped in the Middle Ages, with his band of scientifically minded students following to rescue him. I loved learning about the history of this particular time, especially seen through the eyes of scientists. Of course, human nature remains consistent through the centuries, which means there is plenty of avarice, betrayal, and cruelty to keep readers white-knuckled with worry over whether our protagonists will escape with their lives.

The Shining Girls , by Lauren Beukes 

Serial killers often escape detection by jumping jurisdictions, both in real life and in fiction. Lauren Beukes takes this to a mind-bending extreme by having a delusional psychopath jumping decades—from the Great Depression to the early ’90s—after discovering a house that is a time-traveling portal. When a woman survives her vicious attack, she becomes obsessed about finding her would-be murderer, and the puzzle pieces begin to slowly snap together. The writing is beautiful, the crimes brutal. This is not a book for the faint of heart, but if you have the courage, it’s well worth the read.

11/22/63 , by Stephen King

Traveling back in time with the purpose of changing history—and therefore the future—is an idea that has been explored in movies, TV (the old  Twilight Zone  had a few thought-provoking episodes on the subject), literature, philosophical discussions, and even in science classes. Yet Stephen King boldly—and brilliantly—explored the concept with perhaps the biggest do-over of all time with our main character, Jake (aka George), trying to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating John F. Kennedy.

The Time Machine , by H.G. Wells

It’s impossible to do a list of time-travel books without including the granddaddy of them all,  The Time Machine . Written in 1895, Wells imagined the future—802701 A.D., to be precise—when his Time Traveler narrator recounted his journey there (and beyond). I had read  The Time Machine  years ago, but I thought I needed to reread the novella again before officially including it in this list. While I had fond memories of the story, I also have fond memories of  The A-Team . Not everything stands the test of time (no pun intended). Thankfully,  The Time Machine  is worth the read and reread. Wells’ Time Traveler recounts his journey into the future, where human beings have undergone a Darwinian evolution—or, rather, a devolution, since humanity does  not  fare well. Even though it was written in the Victorian Age, it is a cautionary tale that will resonate for today’s reader, too.

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Julie McElwain

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16 Thriller Books That'll Give You Instant Goosebumps

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We’re still a few months out—at least—from being able to get our thrills at amusement parks, sporting events, and escape rooms, but adrenaline junkies still have one place to turn to get their fix: the bookshelf. For fans of heart-pounding stories of crime and suspense, nothing makes for a better escape from reality than a good thriller novel. Fortunately for such people, we’ve kept track of the very best. Read on for a list of our top 16 thrillers from the 21st century and beyond.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

There’s a reason Gillian Flynn is a household name: She is the queen of the 21st-century suspense novel, her prose compulsively readable, her troubled heroines—and villainesses—cultural icons in themselves. Whichever of her books is your favorite, there’s no denying that Gone Girl , the zeitgeist-shaping story of a missing woman and the husband under suspicion for her disappearance, is a post-recession classic.

The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

If Gillian Flynn is the queen of modern suspense, Ruth Ware is the knight presiding over the Round Table. Oft likened to a modern-day Agatha Christie, Ware excels at thrillers set within the confines of close spaces—such as  The Woman in Cabin 10 ,  set aboard a cruise ship where a travel journalist witnesses a murder. When she can find no evidence that the victim was ever aboard, writer Lo begins to question her own sanity.

Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha

The Guest List by Lucy Foley

Relative newcomer Lucy Foley has honed her unique brand of reverse-whodunit suspense down to a science—and thank goodness for that. As in The Hunting Party , Foley’s breakout thriller from 2018, The Guest List —set at a ritzy wedding-gone-wrong on a remote Scottish isle—starts with a murder, and then plays a game of keep-away with the victim’s identity until the very last pages.

You, Volume 1 by Caroline Kepnes

We all owe Caroline Kepnes a debt for penning the source material that gave us Penn Badgley’s terrifying performance as Joe Goldberg on the hit Netflix serial-killer show You— but the original book is nothing to sneeze at either. The first in a series (Books 3 and 4 are on the way, according to Kepnes), this pitch-perfect thriller bucks genre conventions by taking us inside the mind of the killer himself.

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

God is a woman, but make it “the original master of the psychological thriller.” Though Patricia Highsmith may be best known today as the author of the classic lesbian romance Carol , she actually made a name for herself in the mid-20th century as the author of gripping suspense novels like Strangers on a Train (yes, as in the Hitchcock film) and Deep Water . Not to mention, she is the pen behind the fantastic  Ripliad series, which traces the footsteps of a brilliant—and dangerous—con artist.

Black Water Rising by Attica Locke

You already know Attica Locke’s work, whether or not you realize it: The author is also an accomplished screenwriter who counts Empire, When They See Us, and  Little Fires Everywhere among her TV credits. But it’s her acclaimed debut novel, set in 1980s Texas and following a down-on-his-luck lawyer who gets in over his head after saving a woman from drowning, that you should know now.

An Untamed State by Roxane Gay

Bad Feminist , this is not. Released the same year as her breakout essay collection, Roxane Gay’s debut novel tells the story of a Haitian-American woman who is kidnapped and subjected to brutal torture when her wealthy Haitian developer father refuses to pay her ransom.

The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani

Remember The Nanny Diaries ? Well, this is like if someone brushed the pages of that book with arsenic. Inspired by a real-life event that took place on the Upper West Side in 2012, Leïla Slimani’s first book to be published in the United States starts with the unthinkable: A nanny murders the two children in her charge, then attempts to kill herself. The story then jumps back in time several months, inviting readers to try and figure out how—and why—this terrible thing happened.

They All Fall Down by Rachel Howzell Hall

Who doesn’t love a good “strangers united by a horrifying secret” thriller? In one-time James Patterson collaborator Rachel Howzell Hall’s heart-pumping standalone novel, seven people are invited to travel to a remote private island, only to find that they have been summoned there under false pretenses—and their mysterious host has a deadly agenda.

Misery by Stephen King

When it comes to books that thrill and terrify, Stephen King is the GOAT. Newcomers to his work could do worse than to start with Misery , which follows popular writer Paul Sheldon as he gets rescued from a snowy car accident by superfan and former nurse Annie Wilkes—only to discover that he is now in even greater danger.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Part domestic thriller, part Kafka-esque allegory, Han Kang’s Man Booker International Prize–winning three-part novel centers on a woman who decides to become a vegetarian after waking from an awful, blood-drenched nightmare. Sounds innocuous, right? It’s not: The Vegetarian is brutal and unrelenting, following its main character through sexual assault, eating disorders, and psychological torment.

The Good Son by You-Jeong Jeong

Ah, the unreliable narrator—a staple trope of the suspense genre. When 25-year-old Yu-jin wakes to the discovery of his mother’s dead body at the bottom of the stairs of their sleek apartment, he realizes that he has no recollection of the night before other than the vague memory of his mom calling his name. As he desperately searches for the truth of what happened that night, Yu-jin unearths some family secrets that can’t be reburied.

Those Bones Are Not My Child by Toni Cade Bambara

Toni Cade Bambara’s These Bones Are Not My Child  isn’t just a gripping thriller; it’s a masterwork of American literature. (Just ask Toni Morrison—she was Bambara’s editor and longtime friend.) Published posthumously and set against the backdrop of the Atlanta child murders of 1979-1981, Bambara’s last novel follows a mother whose worst nightmare is realized when her teenage son goes missing.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Released in Stieg Larsson’s native Swedish in 2005 and in English in 2008, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo introduced the world to hacker-vigilante Lisbeth Salander—and became a near-instant literary phenomenon in the process. The first novel of Larsson’s posthumously published Millennium  series sets Lisbeth and her co-protagonist Mikael Blomkvist on the trail of a woman from a wealthy family who mysteriously disappeared 40 years prior.

You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott

Megan Abbott’s name may not be as widely known as that of Gillian Flynn, but she is equally as essential a writer for fans of suspense and thriller fiction, and You Will Know Me showcases the author at her best. Abbott’s novel follows Katie and Eric Knox, the intense stage parents of a 15-year-old gymnastics star, as news of a violent death disrupts the community of Olympic gymnastics hopefuls to which the Knoxes belong.

Keely Weiss is a writer and filmmaker. She has lived in Los Angeles, New York, and Virginia and has a cat named after Perry Mason.

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Blog – Posted on Friday, Dec 21

23 best psychological thriller books that will mess with your head.

Here’s an experiment: pick the name of a New York Times bestseller, HBO limited series, or Ben Affleck-starring blockbuster out of a hat. Chances are, it’ll be a psychological thriller book. If there’s one genre having its moment in 2018, it’s this one. And aside from capturing the attention of the cultural zeitgeist, this genre is affectionately called “horror lite” (or “grip lit,” or “horror except it’s too good for the genre”) for a reason.

Be it a backwoods murder mystery, a gothic period piece, or a prestigious drama that just happens to be about an arsonist, these are the best psychological thriller books that dive into the brain of the bad guy… and make you question your own brain along the way.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great psychological thrillers to read, you can also take our 30-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized thriller recommendation  😉

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1. I Know Where She Is by S.B. Caves

A lot of people here are probably just looking for the next Gone Girl . Well, look no further. Ten years after her daughter's disappearance, Francine receives a mysterious note bearing just five words: I know where she is. With her life once again turned upside down, she goes back on the hunt for the truth behind the abduction. Things get dark, and you might find yourself calling in sick just so you can stay home and finish this heart-stopping debut novel from British author S.B. Caves.

2. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Or, you might simply be looking for the next title from Gone Girl ’s author, Gillian Flynn. Whether that’s the case or not, Sharp Objects is a must-read for any fan of the tightly-structured thriller. It was recently adapted into an HBO Limited Series, but if you haven’t yet caught Amy Adams’ award-worthy performance as a traumatized investigative journalist hunting down a murderer in her hometown, do yourself a favor: hold off until you’ve read the book first.

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3.  Big Little Lies  by Liane Moriarty

Speaking of HBO adaptations, Liane Moriarty’s story of a group of Monterey housewives banding together made waves when Reese Witherspoon turned it into a rousing feminist miniseries. Five women in a picturesque coastal town realize that their Instagram-perfect lives are not all they appear to be as they uncover the undercurrents of domestic abuse and assault running through their community. Given Moriarty’s knack for believable characters and compelling prose, this thrill-filled take on First Wives Club is a must-read.

4. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

If Netflix is more your speed, this book has spurred a TV adaptation, too. But with an author like Margaret Atwood at the helm, refusing to read the book first is inexcusable. Alias Grace tells the true story of mild-mannered servant Grace Marks and the double murder she’s been accused of. It’s told through the eyes of a doctor struggling to understand criminal behavior — and to reconcile Grace’s nature with the nature of her crime. In other words, it's like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in a meticulous period setting that will delight fans of historical fiction.

5. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Just like Alias Grace, this is another thrilling period piece by an all-time great female author that's resurfaced thanks to Netflix. But that's where the similarities end. Aspiring ghostbuster Dr Montague rents an infamous haunted house for the summer, along with three other guests who’ve experienced the supernatural. Predictably, things get scary.

Published in 1959, Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece harks back to the gothic horror of the nineteenth century, but ultimately settles into psychological thriller territory as Jackson creates ghosts that mirror the trauma of her troubled protagonists.  

6. The Snowman by Jo Nesbø

Norway’s first serial killer has a very specific modus operandi: he only hunts married mothers, and he always leaves a snowman at the scene of the crime. Fans of Thomas Harris will be eager to join Nesbø’s Detective Harry Hole as he unravels this bizarre mystery to stop the killer in his tracks.

The Snowman was recently adapted into a critical and commercial flop starring Michael Fassbender but don’t let that put you off. There’s a good reason why Nesbø has sold over 33 million copies worldwide.

7. Misery by Stephen King

Thanks to this hit novel (and its film adaptation), “I’m your number-one fan” is now officially the creepiest thing you can say to any author. Blame Annie Wilkes, the nurse who tends her favorite author Paul Sheldon back to health after a car crash in rural Colorado. She’s obsessed with his character Misery Chastain — so how will she react when she realizes that he’s killed Chastain off in his latest novel?

Stephen King is undoubtedly best known for his horror novels, and let’s be clear — this seminal work about the dark side of fandom, is pretty darn horrifying. But at its core, Misery is a tale of obsession, madness, and isolation: the perfect mix for a good dose of thrills.

8. Into The Water by Paula Hawkins

Psych thriller buffs might already be familiar with The Girl On The Train , but Paula Hawkins’ sophomore effort (and highly anticipated follow-up to her first New York Times bestseller) weaves a mind-warping tale told by 11 (yes, 11) different characters. Jules Abbott returns to her hometown after the mysterious death of her sister to care for her newly orphaned niece.

Fans of Hawkins’ cinematic prose and Hitchcock-esque influences will find this novel just as gripping as her smash-hit debut.

9. The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn

When your novel’s been out for only a year and is already being optioned for a motion picture, you know you’re doing something right.

The Woman in the Window stars Anna Fox, an agoraphobe living alone in Manhattan. She has two best friends: her wine and her window. As she gets to know (i.e. starts spying on) her neighbors, she witnesses a violent undercurrent to their happy facade… but who will believe a homebody wino? Both a riveting spin on the psych thriller craze and a meditation on mental illness and agoraphobia, there’s no question that the time is right for this contemporary take on Rear Window .

The gripping international bestseller about motherhood gone awry.

Eva never really wanted to be a mother and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin's horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.

10.  We Need to Talk About Kevin  by Lionel Shriver

A genre that deals exclusively in themes of murder and mental illness can get pretty heavy, but it doesn’t get much heavier than We Need to Talk About Kevin . When her son is arrested for killing nine classmates, Eva Khatchadourian looks back on his childhood for warning signs she might have missed. Published in 2003, this story about a fictional school shooting has taken on a new poignancy as these tragedies become increasingly commonplace. There’s nothing common, however, about this vivid portrait of the psyche of a sociopath and a shattered mother trying to come to terms with it.

11. Room by Emma Donoghue

In fact, like Lionel Shriver’s book, many great psychological thriller books find traction in pulling their plots straight from headlines. This is certainly the case with Room , a mind-blowing take on the Fritzl abduction case. Trapped for seven years in her captor's basement, life has been hell for the character we know as 'Ma'. But for her son, Jack (from whose perspective the story is told), the room is all he's ever known. This thriller doubles as a heartbreaking coming-of-age saga about learning to see the world in a different way (and is now an Academy Award-winning movie to boot).

12. The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine

Amber Patterson’s plain upbringing renders her invisible in the upscale community of Bishops Harbor, Connecticut. She watches her neighbor, Daphne Parrish, with her perfect marriage and life of luxury — and decides that she wants in on it. Did you ever wish to read The Talented Mr. Ripley , only newer, timelier, and scarier? If so, this posh, feminist homage to the 1955 classic is the thriller for you.

13. Sin by Josephine Hart

Psych thrillers are certainly having a moment today, but they were inescapable in the ‘90s. While the late Josephine Hart might be best known for the 1992 film adaptation of her debut novel Damage , her Sin is the quintessential ‘90s thriller: when her family dies in a car accident, Elizabeth is adopted by her aunt and uncle — but her cousin Ruth has other plans.

Lust, envy, and just about every other sin take the forefront in this novel that’s perfect for fans of… well, any movie Sharon Stone ever starred in.

14. Sunburn by Laura Lippman

Sentenced (and then pardoned) for the murder of her husband, Polly abandons her family for a waitressing job in small-town Delaware. There, she meets the charming traveling salesman Adam, who also decides to take a job at the restaurant with her. But why did he decide to hang up his hat in the middle of nowhere?

A modern east coast spin on the private detective genre, this 2018 pageturner is one part psychological thriller, one part classic noir, and the perfect read for the flight back to your parents’ place this Thanksgiving.

15. The Elizas by Sara Shepard

This novel by Sara Shepard ( Pretty Little Liars ) doesn’t have a long-running TV show on Freeform, but maybe it should.

Eliza Fontaine nearly drowns for the fifth time. The first four were suicide attempts, so who could blame her parent for not believing her when she tells them she was pushed. Not to mention that Eliza is a novelist who's working on her debut novel, which gives this alluring tale of memory loss and attempted murder a wickedly meta layer. For any aspiring psych thriller writer, this is the place to start.

16. Bellevue Square by Michael Redhill

Jean Mason leads a pretty normal life right up to the point when she's alerted to a doppelgänger roaming about the city park. And to make things worse, the two strangers who inform her then turn up dead. This 2017 release sticks to the “grip lit” script at first before flipping the audience’s expectations upside down and turning into a beast all unto its own.

Saying any more would spoil it, but this is a must-read for fans of mistaken identity, murder writers, and (okay, fine) the supernatural.

17. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Family buys home. Home lights on fire. Family blames daughter? When the Richardson family’s house burns down, the people of Shaker Heights suspect an inside job, and all eyes are on Izzy, the black sheep of the family. But the next door neighbors are so close they might as well be family, too…

This is the aforementioned arson-mystery-meets-family-drama, and you’d be hard-pressed these days to find a library without a copy of Little Fires Everywhere on the hold shelf. But its popularity is anything but unearned, and if you’re a thriller lover who hasn’t yet plunged into Celeste Ng’s fiery novel, it’s high time you did.

18. The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison

This is not your mother’s Secret Garden . In the courtyard of a remote mansion, a man known as “The Gardener” keeps flowers, trees, and a group of kidnapped women he calls his “butterflies.” This one comes with ample social proof: at the time of writing, The Butterfly Garden is the #1 bestselling psychological thriller on Amazon. This is for a good reason: it’s simply original . In a market oversaturated with cookie cutter thrillers, there’s just nothing else out there about a man who treats his imprisoned women like specimens in a bug collection.

19. See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt

Spinning a true story into a captivating thriller is easier said than done…  especially when that story occurred in Protestant New England in the late 19th century.

Lizzie Borden’s father and stepmother were murdered in Massachusetts in 1892, in what was eventually dubbed The Fall River Axe Murders. Lizzie was the primary suspect but was eventually acquitted. Since then, the murders have been the subject of countless books but none strike quite so chilling a tone as Sarah Schmidt’s powerful work of historical fiction .

20. Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin

Perhaps the most surreal (in the true sense of the word) psychological thriller on the market, Fever Dream distances itself from the pack in almost every way. It’s a slim, play-like novel with magical realist undertones, crisply translated from the Argentinian original.

Still, at its heart it is a thriller, and an excellent one: a woman wakes up in a hospital bed, and a mysterious boy (not hers) kneeling beside her unravels how she got there. This mind-bending novel is perfect for fans of Gillian Flynn and Gabriel Garcia Marquez alike.

21. The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch

Science fiction and thrillers don’t always go hand-in-hand, but when synthesized correctly, the results are stunning. Such is the case with The Gone World , in which Shannon Moss, a time travelling NCIS agent, uncovers a conspiracy across multiple decades. Think Michael Crichton meets Stieg Larsson in this fusion of classic noir, dystopian fiction, and pure psychological thrills.

22. Idaho: A Novel by Emily Ruskovich

Idaho is another decade-spanning thriller, though this one is much more grounded in reality. Because of her savior complex, Ann is drawn to a shattered and broken man named Ward, who she quickly marries. But Ward’s trauma stemming from his first marriage runs deeper than usual — his first wife Jenny murdered their 6-year-old daughter.

It’s more literary than your average thriller, but check this one out if you want an unapologetic look at a family crumbling under the weight of dementia, distance, and, of course, murder. It is a thriller, after all.

The World's Bestselling Mystery \'Ten . . .\' Ten strangers are lured to an isolated island mansion off the Devon coast by a mysterious \'U.N. Owen.\' \'Nine . . .\' At dinner a recorded message accuses each of them in turn of having a guilty secret, and by the end of the night one of the guests is dead. \'Eight . . .\' Stranded by a violent storm, and haunted by a nursery rhyme counting down one by one . . . one by one they begin to die. \'Seven . . .\' Who among them is the killer and will any of them survive?

23. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is known for popularizing the murder mystery, but there’s an argument to be made that she invented the psychological thriller, too — and with her best selling novel, no less.

Ten people, all guilty of crimes they were never punished for, find themselves on an island under mysterious circumstances… and then start to die one by one. Though its structure resembles a classic whodunnit, the meat of And Then There Were None is pure psychology: a collection of criminals grappling with the guilt of their crimes, the motivations behind them, and the knowledge that their pasts are about to catch up to them.

24. In the Dark Dark Wood by Ruth Ware

In a dark, dark wood

There was a dark, dark house

And in the dark, dark house there was a dark, dark room

And in the dark, dark room....

Well, you'll have to keep reading to find out the rest.

25. The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

From the outside, Alicia Berenson's life looks perfect. She lives in a big house in London with her famous painter-husband. But when Alicia murders her husband late on evening when he comes home from work, all illusions of perfection are gruesomely shattered.

Years after the crime, Alicia hasn't spoken a single word. She now lives in a secure forensic unit in North London, hidden away from the world that's hungry to know the truth behind this domestic tragedy. Especially eager is criminal psychotherapist Theo Faber, who is finally getting his chance to talk to Alicia after years of trying to unravel her mysterious case. Why did she do it? Why won't she talk? As Theo delves deeper and deeper into the Berenson file, his own motivations begin to warp, and his search for the truth threatens to consume him.

26. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

The morning of Nick and Amy Dunne's fifth wedding anniversary, Amy goes missing, and Nick becomes the prime suspect in her disappearance. The ensuing investigation reveals cracks in the seemingly gleaming foundation of the Dunne's marriage: Nick seems to be obsessed with the shape of Amy's head, and Amy's journals reveal a level of perfectionism that could drive any partner to the edge.

Gillian Flynn's bestselling novel is about all the lies beneath the underbelly of a marriage, asking the question: how well do we really know the ones we love?

27. My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing

As with most domestic thrillers, My Lovely Wife features what appears to be a normal couple who've gone down the path of convention: they got married and moved to the suburbs, where they raised their children. All was well. Until they got bored.

After fifteen years of marriage, the nameless narrator and his titular wife are looking for ways to inject some excitement into their relationship. While some couples might go on a trip or decide to learn a new skill together, Downing's protagonists have opted for something decidedly more sinister . As they embark on a murderous new hobby, one question begins to loom: can they get away with it?

28. Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter

Everyone deals with grief differently. After Julia goes missing her mother goes on to create a new life for herself. The father becomes obsessed with looking for clues about Julia's disappearance, only to turn up perennially empty-handed. Her two sisters, Claire and Lydia also become estranged from their family.

Now, twenty years later, another young girl has gone missing, and her case contains haunting echoes of Julia's. The connections between this new disappearance and their sisters' causes Claire and Lydia to reunite, and they soon embark down a chilling path as they discover secrets that change everything they thought they knew about their sister, and the past.

29. Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

When Maggie Holt was a child, her parents packed her up and fled from their home, Baneberry Hall, in the dead of night. Their reason for fleeing was eventually document in a book by Maggie's father, called House of Horrors — a recount of the ghostly encounters with malevolent spirits at Baneberry Hall.

While the book is nonfiction, Maggie doesn't believe a word of it, and, frankly, she's tired of being asked about it. She's also not phased in the slightest when, 25 years after their escape, Maggie returns to Baneberry Hall to restore it. Of course, the secrets of Baneberry Hall don't wait too long before beginning to reveal themselves to Maggie, and she starts to realize that maybe House of Horrors really was more fact than fiction.

30. Hidden Bodies by Caroline Kepnes

If you were morbidly captivated by the Netflix series You , you'll likely enjoy Hidden Bodies : it's the sequel to Kepnes' debut book that the TV show was adapted from.

Joe Goldberg is now thirty-something and has been hiding his murdered victims in New York City for the past ten years. But he's determined to put his sinister past behind him and get a new fresh start in Los Angeles. And things seem to be off to a good start in the city of angels: Joe gets a job in a bookstore and spends his spare time eating guacamole and flirting with his journalist neighbor.

Finally, it seems like Joe might get was he's always wanted: to be in love, and be loved in return. The thing about love, Joe learns, is that it has a way of shining a light onto the parts of yourself you'd rather keep hidden — in Joe's case, hidden at all costs .

Hungry for more? Check out the 43 best true crime books of all time to discover how truth really can be stranger than fiction.

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20 Must-Read Time Travel Books

Dana lives in East Haven, CT. She works for that Ivy League institution down the street and tries to read as many books as possible in her free time. Audiobooks and print books get equal love. Also, she unapologetically judges books by their covers and makes way too many playlists (c'mon, books need a soundtrack too!). Follow her on Twitter @lucyhenley115 .

View All posts by Dana Lee

Hear me out, there’s a sub-genre of sci-fi that that has a touch of anything you could ever want: time travel books. The best time travel books come in all packages: adventure, historical fiction, romance, social commentary, mystery, humor, poetry. It really has it all. So, if you can still recite the opening credits of Quantum Leap from memory, this list is for you. Enjoy these must-read time travel books.

Here and Now and Then  by Mike Chen

Kin is a time-traveling agent from the year 2142 who gets stuck in 1990s San Francisco after a botched mission, and his rescue team shows up 18 years too late after he’s already built a life for himself. Here and Now and Then has all those warm and fuzzy sci-fi feels with just the right amount of Doctor Who level angst . Kin dealing with the circumstances of time travel and the consequences it brings about is super compelling and emotional and so, so worthy of a Murray Gold score.

The Future of Another Timeline  by Annalee Newitz

In the world of Another Timeline , time travel has been around since forever in the form of a geologic phenomena known as the “Machines.” Tess belongs to a group called the Daughters of Harriett, determined to make the future better for women by editing the timeline at key moments in history. They run up against the misogynistic group called the Comstockers working towards the opposite goal. There’s time travel, murder, punk rock concerts, nerd references, and an edit war. As Newitz recently said in an extra of their podcast, Our Opinions Are Correct , history is a  “synthesis of good fuckery” and I can’t think of a better phrase to describe this book than that.

An Ocean of Minutes  by Thea Lim

There is a deadly flu pandemic in America. Polly’s boyfriend Frank gets sick and she signs up for a one-way ticket to the future to work off the cost of Frank’s cure. They agree to meet up in the future, but Polly is rerouted to a later time where America is divided and she has no connections and no money. This is a really gorgeously written and heart-wrenching story about time travel, dystopian society, the brutality of survival in an unfamiliar world, and a character study of a normal person dealing with it all.

Kindred  by Octavia Butler

Dana is an African American woman celebrating her birthday in 1976 California when she is pulled through time to Antebellum Maryland. She saves a young white boy named Rufus from drowning and finds herself staring down the barrel of his father’s rifle. She is pulled back to her present just in time to save her life, appearing back in her living room soaked and muddy. She is repeatedly pulled back to the past encountering the same young man.  Over the course of these harrowing episodes, Dana realizes her connection to Rufus and the challenge she is faced with. This is a brilliant, thought-provoking, and intense book that is required reading for so many reasons least of which is time travel.

Alice Payne Arrives  by Kate Heartfield

Alice Payne Arrives is a quick romp through time with some truly amazing female characters. Alice Payne is a half-black queer woman in 1788 England living in her father’s deteriorating mansion. She’s also a notorious masked highway robber and her partner is an inventor. Prudence is a professional time traveler from the 22nd century working fruitlessly to try and change one small event in 1884. The two women cross paths and work together to put Prudence’s plan to end time travel in motion. This novella packs a lot of action and time travel goodness and there’s a sequel called Alice Payne Rides . It also contains one of the realest lines of any of the time travel books I’ve read: “2016’s completely fucked.”

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe  by Charles Yu

Charles Yu is a time machine repairman searching for his missing father, “accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and Ed, a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog.” He receives a book from his future self that could help him locate his father. The book is called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and he wrote it. Hi, this book is super cool, fun, clever, and weird in the best ways. It has the highest distinction I can give a sci-fi book and that is warm and fuzzy.

The Psychology of Time Travel  by Kate Mascarenhas

Four female scientists invent time travel in 1967. One of the scientists, Bee,  suffers a mental breakdown just before they’re about to go public with their findings. The other three exile Bee from the project to save face. Fifty years later time travel is a normal part of life and a huge business. It’s regulated by the Conclave, founded by three of the original scientists, which seeks to self govern all aspects of time travel. The Psychology of Time Travel  serves up time travel with a locked-door mystery and the payoff of alternating perspectives and timelines slowly coming together.

The River of No Return  by Bee Ridgeway

At the moment of his death on a Napoleonic battlefield, Lord Nicholas Falcott wakes up in the 21st century. He’s recruited by a time travel agency known as The Guild for training. Julia Percy lives in 1815 England and after the death of her grandfather seeks to find her place in a world where meddling with time is commonplace. There’s a whole lot going on here: romance, betrayal, double-agents, and drawing on emotion to facilitate time jumps, leading to my favorite line: “Though really they were probably both insane. Two grown men dressed up like Mr. Darcy, holding hands behind a tree, trying to pull themselves by the heart strings back to the long ago.”

This is How You Lose the Time War  by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Blue and Red are fighting on opposite sides of an endless time war. They begin to exchange letters on the battlefield, first as a boast, then as an exploration of friendship across enemy lines, and finally as a romance. I have previously described this as “poetic sci-fi realness.” I could be more professional and say that this is an epistolary work of rival agents forming a bond despite their opposition, but like I can’t okay. This book is so intricate and beautiful and the letters are not on paper, they could be in the dregs of a teacup or the rings of a tree, and I’m not crying you’re crying.

All Our Wrong Todays  by Elan Mastai

Tom is a misfit in a utopian world, and he goes back in time and accidentally screws up the future. This mishap leaves him stranded in our 2016, but what we think of as the real world is a dystopian wasteland to Tom. He eventually finds different versions of everything he knows and maybe even his soulmate. Tom has to decide whether to fix the timeline and bring back utopia or live in this new version of the world he’s created. Probably me as a time traveler, tbh.

The Fire Opal Mechanism by Fran Wilde

The Fire Opal Mechanism  is technically a sequel to The Jewel and Her Lapidary , but it can definitely be read as a stand-alone. Ania is a librarian at the last university desperately trying to save as many books as she can. All the other universities have fallen to the Pressman, an extremist group bent on destroying all the world’s books and replacing them with a generic, self-updating compendium available to everyone regardless of economic class. Jorit, branded a thief, is on the run just trying to survive long enough to afford passage on a ship away from all these problems. They team up and inadvertently discover time travel, but will it help them fix the present? This is really beautifully written, especially the passages about books: “Touching a book, for Ania, was like touching a person’s fingertips across the years. She could feel a pulse, a passion for the knowledge the book contained.”

The Silver Wind  by Nina Allan

The Silver Wind  is a series of stories linked by the character Martin Newland. Each story is like an alternate universe brought about by time machines and time travel. As Allan describes on her website : “While the overarching theme of this book might properly be found in Martin’s struggle with infinity, its individual chapters deal with those small acts of creative defiance that determine our transcendence of ordinary mortality.” A thoroughly thought-provoking déjà vu experience.

What the Wind Knows by Amy Harmon

Anne Gallagher travels to Ireland to scatter the ashes of her beloved grandfather. She is pulled back in time to the Ireland of 1921 and is mistaken as the long-lost mother of a young boy. She assumes this identity and is drawn into the lives of those around her and the political unrest of the time. It’s a historical romance perfect for fans of Outlander.

The Shining Girls  by Lauren Beukes

What if time travel fell into the hands of a criminal?  The Shining Girls  is the story of serial killer named Harper Curtis who stumbles upon an abandoned house in Depression-era Chicago that allows him to travel in time. He chooses his victims and visits them at different times of their lives before returning for the kill. Kirby survives Harper’s attack and, along with a former homicide reporter, tries to unravel the mystery before anyone else dies. This book is wild, W-I-L-D. There’s a lot of violence, so it might not be for everyone, but it’s such an interesting take on the time travel story.

Version Control  by Dexter Palmer

Set in the near-future, Rebecca works in the customer support department of the dating site where she met her husband Phillip. He is a scientist building a causality violation device (definitely not a time machine!). But Rebecca can’t help but feel that there’s something wrong with the present. So, this is kind of about living with technology and kind of about relationships and overcoming tragedy and also time travel. Intelligent and poignant but make it sci-fi.

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler  by Ryan North

Starting out with an FAQ guide to your rented time machine, How to Invent Everything humorously goes through the history of well, everything. From how to determine what time period you have landed and are now stuck in to inventing language and electricity it’s a very Hitchhiker’s Guide -ish look at history presented as a guide for creating the things you’ll miss when you’re stranded in an earlier timeline than your own.

Time After Time  by Lisa Grunwald

It’s 1937 and Joe Reynolds is a hard-working railroad man at Grand Central Station. Nora Lansing is an aspiring artist and the last thing she remembers is her train crashing in 1925. They meet at the big clock and Joe walks Nora home, but she disappears in the street. She reappears one year later and meets Joe again. Realizing she’s jumping in time and trapped in Grand Central for mysterious reasons that might have something to do with Manhattanhenge, Nora and Joe try to unravel the mystery before she disappears again. For me this was a time travel books mashup of The Clock meets Kate & Leopold meets Gentleman in Moscow and I was very about it.

TimeKeeper  by Tara Sim

TimeKeeper takes place in an alternate Victorian world where time is controlled by clock towers. Danny is a young clock mechanic enamored with his new apprentice, who turns out to be the Enfield clock spirit, Colton. Bombings at other towers start to occur and broken clocks mean the towns they oversee will be frozen in time. The romance between Danny and Colton is very adorable and the race against literal time is an exciting backdrop. It’s the first in a trilogy.

Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick

If you’re a time travel fan then this sentence from the publisher’s summary is sure to get you excited, “World-renowned paleontologist Richard Leyster’s universe changed forever the day a stranger named Griffin walked into his office with a remarkable job offer…and an ice cooler containing the head of a freshly killed Stegosaurus.” Time travel allows a group of scientists to go back and study dinosaurs up close in their natural environment. If you are now humming the Jurassic Park theme, please know, So. Am. I.

Just One Damned Thing After Another (Chronicles of St. Mary’s) by Jodi Taylor

There is so much going on in this whirlwind adventure that if you blink you’ll miss a major plot point.  Just One Damned Thing After Another  is just the first book in a series of the adventures of St. Mary’s Institute of Historical Research as they rattle around through time trying to answer history’s unanswered questions. There are currently 11 books published and forthcoming and a ton of short stories that fill in the blanks between adventures. Taylor also has a spinoff time travel series, The Time Police, with the first book just out called Doing Time .  It follows three hapless new time police recruits as they try to keep the timeline straight.

Looking for more of the best time travel books? Check out these timey-wimey posts:

Time Travel Romances

7 of the Best Alternate Timeline Books

The Lack of Black Characters in Time Travel Romance

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Top Sci-fi Books

25 of the Best Time Travel Books

Welcome to Top Sci Fi’s countdown of the 25 best time travel books on the market. A mix of classics and modern novels have been chosen. The books offer unique and thought-provoking twists on time travel. If you like the sound of any of the books on the list, you can enjoy two for free by signing up for Audible's one month free trial .

The Time Machine

By HG Wells

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HG Wells is one of the true titans of the scifi genre and The Time Machine is one of his finest stories. This time travel tale focuses on the story of a Time Traveller who has ventured hundreds of thousands of years beyond his own time. The level of imagination shown in the story is especially impressive when the reader considers Wells published The Time Machine in 1895. The story was the first to help Wells breakthrough as an author and remains essential reading for time travel fans.

By Stephen King

Stephen King is well known as a horror author, but in 11/22/63 he shows is a more than capable master of time travel fiction. This is a story which explores one of the most interesting chapters in American history and showcases the humanity behind the history books. As always, King presents a gripping, character-focused story full of twists and turns guaranteed to keep you guessing until the very last page.

Slaughterhouse 5

By Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 is proof that time travel fiction can be critically acclaimed and have literary merit at the same time. Slaughterhouse 5 is a time travel book with a powerful antiwar message. Vonnegut entertains while making his point through the use of masterfully crafted characters including memorable members of the British military. Slaughterhouse 5 is the ideal time travel novel for a reader with discerning literary taste.

A Wrinkle in Time

By Madeleine L'Engle

The Time Quintet series begins with A Wrinkle in Time. This time travel novel tells the story of a family who are interrupted by a mysterious visitor. The fact that the father of the family has been carrying out mysterious scientific work is no coincidence. A Wrinkle in Time is a captivating story of rescue and time travel which is the perfect introduction to L’Engle’s series.

By Michael Crichton

Timeline is a combination of classic time travel fiction with pure page turner thriller elements. A group of brave men and women are sent back six centuries into the fast with a vital mission. They are fighting for far more than their own survival. Timeline has been praised for making some of the complex scientific theories which would make time travel possible understandable for a layman reader.

The End of Eternity

By Isaac Asimov

The End of Eternity is a classic take on the time travel genre by science fiction mastermind Isaac Asimov. The book’s main character is Andrew Harlan, a man tasked with the cosmic role of Eternal. This job requires Andrew to travel back and forth through time, making adjustments to its course where needed. However, Andrew soon makes the decision to begin twisting the direction of time for his own purposes.

The Accidental Time Machine

By Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman is one of the most talented modern science fiction writers, and The Accidental Time Machine is perfect for those new to his work, as well as existing fans. The story tells the tale of a scientific researcher who accidentally creates a time machine. Deciding that time travel is more alluring than his present life, the scientist sets off on a time traveling adventure that scifi fans are sure to love.

Somewhere in Time

By Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson tells the story of a man seeking his soulmate by traveling back in time to iconic past eras. Somewhere in Time is a story of mortality, love, and the concept of a soulmate. The story is an interesting take on the time travel genre, and was popular enough at the time of publication to be adapted into a major movie.

Flashforward

By Robert J Sawyer

Robert J Sawyer makes use of a fascinating premise to tell the story of Flashforward. This time travel novel is based in a world where everyone has blacked out for a couple of minutes. This naturally causes widespread death and destruction and significantly disrupts life on Earth. However, the people who survive the blackout have been given glimpses of their own future, drastically altering their behavior as a result.

The Time Ships

By Stephen Baxter

The Time Ships is Stephen Baxter’s homage to classic time travel science fiction. This time travel novel makes use of classic ideas, characters, and concepts from the world of science fiction. The Time Ships is an authorised and direct sequel to HG Wells’ classic The Time Machine. Updating such a classic text is a mammoth task, but Baxter has managed it, much to the delight of time travel fans.

The Anubis Gates

By Tim Powers

Tim Powers imagines a world where time traveling is such a commonplace activity that it requires guides to accompany those who make the journey. Brendan Doyle is one such guide who manages to get stranded in the past during the course of a routine journey. Stuck in an ancient time which is far from his own, Doyle becomes mixed up in a complex plot where his actions will have a crucial role to play in the final outcome.

By Rysa Walker

Rysa Walker begins The Chronos Files with Timebound, a story of genetic time travelers who must use their ability to positively impact events in the present. Timebound explores the complexities that come with altering the past, and the way that doing so can have unintended consequences for the present day. Timebound is a superb time travel novel as it makes the personal implications of changing time relatable and moving.

The Devil's Arithmetic

By Jane Yolen

Jane Yolen offers a time travel novel with genuine depth in The Devil’s Arithmetic. The story is about the Holocaust and presents an unflinching look at the atrocities which took place. Although the story is often presented to young adults, readers of any age are sure to find meaning and interest in its pages. Although the subject matter is upsetting, this story of a young American Jewish girl traveling back in time is an important read.

The Chronoliths

By William Gibson

Robert Charles Wilson’s The Chronoliths is a time travel novel telling the story of a slacker called Scott Warden. Scott is drifting through life when a major event happens which disrupts humanity and its collective understanding of the nature of reality. Although Scott Warden is only interested in looking out for himself, he keeps getting drawn into the story’s events, and it soon becomes clear why.

By Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter

The first installment in A Time Odyssey is Time’s Eye, a collaborative work from two masterful time travel writers, Stephen Baxter and Arthur C Clarke. Time’s Eye looks at what happens when a mysterious group of beings known as The Firstborn plunge the Earth into chaos, mixing up many different timelines into a single ‘present’. Historical figures and relatable everyday characters all have a role to play in getting to the bottom of these strange events.

Up The Line

By Robert Silverberg

Up The Line is a time travel novel considering the practicalities and temptations faced by a Time Courier, someone whose job it is to accompany time tourists back to a significant historical event, again and again. The book’s main character, Judson, eventually learns that it is possible to break the rules, and Up The Line explores the consequences when this occurs.

Time Travelers Never Die

By Jack McDevitt

Time Travelers Never Die sees a linguist and the son of a scientist embarking on an unexpected adventure through time. The two are in search of a missing scientist who is feared to be lost somewhere in time. Many significant periods from Earth’s history feature in their quest. The two have a rule to never visit the future - a rule which is eventually violated with significant ramifications.

Now Wait for Last Year

By Philip K Dick

Philip K Dick is one of the most significant authors in the science fiction genre, and Now Wait for Last Year is a time travel tale which causes you to question the very nature of time itself. The story is exciting and features an intergalactic war as well as engaging and relatable human characters. This is one of the more obscure Philip K Dick novels and is one of his most imaginative and creative.

Faces in Time

By Lewis Aleman

Lewis Aleman makes his mark on the time travel genre with Faces in Time, the story of a man racing back through history to prevent the woman he loves making a massive mistake. He ends up making plenty of enemies along the way, and finds himself chased by an ever growing cast of adversaries. Faces in Time explores the vast personal cost which can be associated with time travel, and explores what would motivate us to take such a drastic journey.

Time on My Hands

By Peter Delacorte

Time on My Hands is a time travel novel exploring what happens when a travel writer is offered a trip like no other - a trip through time. In order to receive this journey, the writer is given a task to carry out. Time on my Hands looks at both the big picture implications of traveling back in time with knowledge of the future, and also considers the personal questions we would have to answer.

Towards Yesterday

By Paul Antony Jones

Towards Yesterday is a fascinating spin on the time travel genre, as it deals with an entire human population being sent back in time, rather than the usual situation of one or two individuals. The entire population of 2042 are sent a quarter of a century back into the past. Towards Yesterday has an incredible set of unconventional characters, coupled with a unique premise, and is guaranteed to be hard to put down for all fans of time travel science fiction.

All Our Yesterdays

By Christin Terrill

Cristin Terrill uses All Our Yesterdays to tell the story of Em. Em is trapped in her present reality, at least until she finds a very unusual note. The note is from none other than her future self and orders her back in time to prevent an event from taking place. All Our Yesterdays is a Young Adult time travel tale which is likely to appeal to fans of the genre of any age. Christin Terrill offers a gripping look at the personal implications of a mission spanning the eras of time.

If I Never Get Back

By Darryl Brock

If I Never Get Back is a true treat for fans of baseball and fans of time travel science fiction. The story is based around a dissatisfied reporter who is sent back through time, and soon finds the past to be very much to his taste. Darryl Brock’s vivid descriptions of some of the most classic times in baseball history make the reader feel as if they have actually been on the journey!

Shadow of Ashland

By Terence M Green

The first book in the Ashland series, Shadow of Ashland, explores the implications of the Great Depression and how it resonates on through the ages. The book’s main character is Leo Nolan, who must keep his promise to his dying mother. His discovery is fascinating and leads him down the path of complex family discovery which will keep readers hanging on for the next book in the series.

The Shadow Hunter

By Pat Murphy

The Shadow Hunter is an incredibly imaginative time travel tale which mixes futuristic technology with the very earliest ancestors on Earth. Pat Murphy has updated the story since its original publication to more faithfully represent the story of The Shadow Hunter. This time travel novel is a fascinating mix of spirituality and science fiction which is sure to leave an impression on the reader long after the story ends.

Time Travel: Science Fiction or Fantasy

If you had to categorize time travel into a specific genre, what would it be? Many hardcore genre enthusiasts would be hard pressed to give you an answer. The casual passing fan will more than likely call science fiction. This may be due largely in part to the H.G. Wells Classic, The Time Machine . 

But does that mean all time travel books are SciFi?

Depends on how you look at it. There's a particular school of thought I like to follow. The question is not "What is it?" but "What's the methodology?". If we're hopping the timeline via Tardis, genetic ability, or a souped up DeLorean... then we're talking SciFi. 

But if spells, ancient beings, artifacts, or other forms of wizardry are employed... Fantasy. However, the lines tend to get blurred more often than not with both Fantasy geeks and SciFi nerds clamoring for control of the genre . 

Either way that does not change the fact that Time Travel books are freaking awesome and should be part of any bookavore's diet.

A Brief History of Time Travel in Science Fiction

Time loops, slips, and paradoxes: what's what.

When approaching a time travel theme, authors have so many to choose from. But what are the different angles they can take? What's the difference?

First, time loops. Books with time loops are rather interesting. This is where the character's repeatedly experience the same time period. Many times with the hopes of escaping via some redeemable action or changing the way events are to unfold. Remember that Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day ? Time loop.

Next up: Time slips. What are time slips? This is where the character travels through time often unexpectedly for an indeterminate amount of time. Books about time machines often times are NOT time slips. Time machines normally allow for a controlled venture throughout the timeline with a destination both in space and time predetermined. However, time slips occur due to seemingly random events and are either corrected by another seemingly random event. Or the character is just stuck and must learn to get by. Oh well.

Lastly, everybody loves a good time paradox. Time paradoxes are really neat stuff. This is when a character travels through time (normally to the past) to change an event and alter the future. These are primarily disruptive events and even have their own classification of paradox known as The Grandfather Paradox . Pretty much... What would happen if you went back in time and killed your own grandparents? Sorry Grandma. 

The Butterfly Effect

Not all time travel is just based purely on science fiction (or fantasy), but on some real world magic.

Mathematics.

The Butterfly Effect is one often used in time travel stories. Based off of real-life Chaos Theory , the butterfly effect states that even the simplest of actions causes a ripple in time. These ripples then eventually grow into waves which mature into tsunamis. 

For instance, if you were to go back in time and kill one locust during the dinosaur days... that may lead to the a mass hunger among certain flying lizards. This could cause those lizards to migrate towards the ocean for food. Which then causes them to evolve to be ocean creatures. That leading to survival after the extinction event. Leading to reptilian creatures to swarm the gene pool. Yadda yadda yadda... Lizard people. 

There's actually a movie dedicated to this called (That's right. You guessed it.) The Butterfly Effect starring Ashton Kutcher. But the most notable example of the butterfly effect in science fiction literature is A Sound of Thunder written by SciFi legend Ray Bradbury .    

Get These Best SciFi Time Travel Books for Free!

If you are interested in getting some of these science fiction cyberpunk books for free here are two ways in which you can do that: 

1. Audible's One Month Free Trial : You can download any two of the time travel books found on this list by signing up for Audible’s free trial. Audible is arguably the best audiobook service on the market. Even if you cancel your trial and decide not to continue with a membership, you can still keep the two books you chose.

1 thought on “25 of the Best Time Travel Books”

How the book “Time and Again” by Jack Finney is not on this list is beyond me. It’s like leaving babe Ruth off the list as one of the 25 greatest baseball players of all time

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17 Best Travel Adventure Books

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Dreaming of an adventure? These travel adventure books will spark your wanderlust!

While I am an avid traveler, I am also a bit of a wimp. The extent of my “extreme” travel adventures was attempting (and failing) to summit a volcano in Guatemala.

When it came down to it, I opted to stay in the warmth of my tent instead of scrambling the final 1,000 feet to the top in the pitch darkness at four in the morning.

So it’s safe to say that while I may not be that adventurous myself, I LOVE getting swept away reading about crazy adventures that happened to other people.

There is nothing like being on the edge of my seat as I read about people facing peril and defying death as they survive after being stranded in the wilderness, hiking solo across large swaths of land, or brave a deathly mountain summit. It transports me without leaving the comfort of home!

So if you are craving an adventure too, these are the best travel adventure books that will fuel your wanderlust and have you staying up late to finish them.

Where we love to grab our travel adventure books:

• Sign up for a free trial of Audible:  Get 30 days of free access to thousands of audiobooks, and one free premium title of your choice. Perfect for listening on the go!
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• Sign up for a free trial of Amazon Prime:  Get 30 days of a free trial offering free two-day shipping on all purchases, plus access to hundreds of new ebooks each month.

Best Travel Adventure Books

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

This travel memoir follows Cheryl’s journey hiking the Pacific Crest Trail solo. Driven by grief after her mother’s death, she embarked on a hike more than one thousand miles long at age twenty-six for an unforgettable experienced that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.

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Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

This gripping nonfiction account of a disastrous Mount Everest expedition is told in a way that will have you flipping the pages long through the night until you’ve finished it. Jon Krakauer is a journalist who was invited along on a fateful expedition that left several of his fellow hikers dead.

Bad Karma by Paul Wilson

In the summer of 1978, twenty-one-year-old Paul Wilson jumps at the chance to join two local icons on a dream surf trip to Mexico, unaware their ultimate destination lies in the heart of drug cartel country. This exhilarating travel memoir will make you feel like you are there.

Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris

Canadian Kate Harris dreamed of adventures ever since she was young. In between studying at Oxford and MIT, she set off with her childhood friend on the adventure of a lifetime: bicycling the Silk Road. Her memoir follows her journey exploring remote Central Asia by bike.

Tracks by Robyn Davidson

Robyn Davidson completed an epic adventure when she walked alone more than 1,700 miles through the Australian Outback with four camels and her dog at age twenty-seven. Tracks is her memoir detailing the experience and the people she met along the way.

The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston

Journalist Douglas Preston and a team of scientists embark on a harrowing adventure into the heart of Honduras, in search of a legendary lost city in the middle of the jungle.

Alone in Antarctica by Felicity Aston

Felicity Aston, physicist and meteorologist, took two months off from all human contact as she became the first woman, and only the third person in history, to ski across the entire continent of Antarctica alone. With just her cross-country skis, she embarked on an epic journey across the ice.

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

The Appalachian Trail is one of America’s biggest adventures, stretching over 2,100 miles from Georgia to Maine, a journey not for the faint of heart. Travel writer Bill Bryson tackles the trail and writes about his experience in this memoir, which is both funny and moving.

The Lost City of Z by David Grann

In 1925, a British explorer ventured into the Amazon rainforest in search of a fabled civilization. He never returned. Eighty years later, a journalist retraces his footsteps in an attempt to find out what really happened, and discover the truth of this mythical Amazonian city.

Wild by Nature by Sarah Marquis

Adventurer Sarah Marquis chronicles her ambitious journey hiking solo over 10,000 miles around the world, from the Gobi Desert to Siberia, in this travel memoir.

Touching the Void by Joe Simpson

This harrowing story follows two young hikers attempting to complete an unclimbed route in the Peruvian Andes when a horrific accident during their descent occurs.

438 Days by Jonathan Franklin

This is a remarkable true survival story about a Salvadoran fisherman working in Mexico when he got lost at sea for 438 days before washing ashore on the far side of the Pacific.

The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost

He expected paradise, but what he got was an entirely different story. This memoir chronicles the author’s hilarious two-year odyssey in the distant South Pacific island nation of Kiribati, and all the mishaps and misadventures he had along the way while he was there.

Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux

A rattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy, ferry, and train are just some manners of transportation Paul Theroux takes on his overland journey from Cairo to Cape Town. In the course of his epic voyage, he endures danger, delay, and dismaying circumstances.

The Beach by Alex Garland

This is the book that inspired thousands of backpackers to make their way to Thailand in search of paradise. This novel is about a young backpacker who arrives in Bangkok, learning about a mythical location known only as “The Beach” that is the closest thing to Eden on Earth.

Vagabonding by Rolf Potts

Part travel memoir and part practical how-to guide, this book provides advice for the art of long-term travel, as told by veteran budget traveler Rolf Potts.

In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson

Travel writer Bill Bryson provides a wonderful glimpse into traveling Australia in his book  In a Sunburned Country . He brings to life the land of the friendliest inhabitants, the hottest, driest weather, and the most peculiar and lethal wildlife to be found on the planet.

These are some of the best travel adventure books.

Have you read any of these travel adventure books? Do you have any other favorite books that I should add to this list? Let me know in the comments below!

Related:  25 Brilliant Travel Memoirs by Women

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The Best Thrillers of 2021

They may be (relatively) low on body counts, but the year’s most chilling, atmospheric reads will still set your pulse racing and your heart pounding.

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By Sarah Lyall

• Published Dec. 6, 2021 Updated Dec. 9, 2021

Taste in thrillers is so personal, so specific to a reader’s particular sensibilities. But the ones I like best tend to be (relatively) low on body counts, high on psychological intrigue and suspenseful right to the end. Luckily, lots of books fit that description this year. Here are my favorites.

The pandemic’s terrifying early days make a chilling backdrop to Catherine Ryan Howard’s 56 DAYS (Blackstone, 450 pp., $24.99) , set in Dublin in the spring of 2020. As the city hastily locks down, a young couple who have just met decide to take a chance, as so many did back then, and move in together. They’re perfect for each other except that their romance is based on an elaborate thicket of lies, and one of them is probably a murderer. The tension builds and builds. Don’t think you’ve figured it all out — there’s a shocking final twist.

Who knew that a novel about a bunch of brilliant yet psychopathic college students would end up being so enjoyable? Vera Kurian’s NEVER SAW ME COMING (Park Row, 400 pp., $27.99) is set at a fictional university in Washington, D.C., where a group of officially diagnosed psychopaths are receiving free tuition and board in exchange for participating in a study to see whether they can become noncriminal members of society. But someone is killing them, one by one, leaving the rest to decide whether to work alone or join forces to catch the culprit. You can’t help rooting for the narrator, whose own murderous intent doesn’t supersede her surprisingly strong moral compass.

Geling Yan’s THE SECRET TALKER (HarperVia, 150 pp., $23.99) is a quieter, subtler affair, focusing on the mysteries of the human heart. Its heroine is a Chinese woman living in California. Out of the blue, she receives an email from a stranger claiming that her husband, an American professor, doesn’t understand her at all, which may well be the case. She can’t help responding; it is so enticing to think that someone sees into your very soul, and the ensuing correspondence leads her to face up to her harrowing past while forcing a reckoning with her present. Who is the secret talker? How well do we know those we are closest to, and why is intimacy so painful?

Is there such a thing as a plot so perfect that it will produce a guaranteed best seller for whichever author uses it? That’s the irresistible premise, at least at first, of THE PLOT (Celadon, 336 pp., $28) , Jean Hanff Korelitz’s endlessly entertaining novel about a down-on-his-luck writer, an unpleasant student who has a great idea for a mystery and then vanishes, and the dangerous complications that follow the publication of a book based on his surefire concept. “The Plot” is long and intricate, but every word is worth it. As it hurtles to its unexpected and scary end, we are reminded that “plot” has more than one meaning.

Surely nothing could go wrong when a louche, heaving-with-sexual-innuendo male art teacher arrives at an Irish Catholic boarding school run by repressed nuns and populated by overheated adolescent girls. You don’t have to be a virginal schoolgirl yourself to imagine that this will not end well, as Rachel Donohue points out in her steamy debut, THE TEMPLE HOUSE VANISHING (Algonquin, 304 pp., paper, $16.95) . Years after the school closed down following a terrible scandal in which the teacher vanished with one of the girls, a journalist comes to investigate. The action switches between past and present as the full story — even more tragic, febrile and emotionally fraught than anyone realized at the time — unfolds.

The prolific and endlessly inventive British writer Anthony Horowitz could dash off a mystery set in the waiting line of the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, and it would still be a delight. A LINE TO KILL (Harper, 384 pp., $27.99) , the third in his fiendishly clever meta-series about the author “Anthony Horowitz,” a dimmer version of himself, finds the fictional Horowitz at an obscure literary festival with Daniel Hawthorne, the infuriating detective who treats him as little more than a secretary. The clues are opaque and the mystery seemingly unsolvable, until Hawthorne, a modern-day Holmes to Horowitz’s Watson, steps in with his elegant solution. Besides being a satisfying whodunit, the book is an extravagant satire of authors, agents, publishers and literary hangers-on, a knowing sendup of the author himself and a homage to the Golden Age of Mystery.

The most haunting character in Jennifer McMahon’s THE DROWNING KIND (Scout Press, 320 pp., $27) is the homicidal water in Brandenburg Springs, Vt., which grants wishes and heals afflictions, but not for free. “The springs exact a price equal to what was given,” one resident says ominously. Could dead people be living in its murky depths? It is true that the neighborhood suffers from an unusually high mortality rate. The narrative moves between 1929, when a new wife begs the springs to help her conceive a child, and the current day, when a social worker returns home to find her mentally unstable sister floating, face down, in the spring-fed swimming pool where their aunt died a generation earlier. Who will be next?

When he was just 8 years old, Wayland Maynard saw his father, the “gentle, prim, fastidious” barber in a small Vermont town, shoot himself in the head. The note that was left behind also serves as the title of Eric Rickstand’s strange and engrossing novel, I AM NOT WHO YOU THINK I AM (Blackstone, 229 pp., $25.99) . It’s both an intriguing message and a red herring, as Wayland attempts, years later, to find out the truth about his family. Here is an old-fashioned Gothic tale, involving, among other things, incest, riches, murder and a deadly fire. The reader will entertain many incorrect theories before arriving at the shocker of a finale. The most wrenching moment of all: when we find out what the note really signifies.

Northern Ireland’s brutal era of sectarian conflict did not end with the 1998 peace agreement, Flynn Berry reminds us in NORTHERN SPY (Viking, 278 pp., $26) , an icy and claustrophobic tale of a modern nation poisoned by ancient grievances. (Fruit fanciers will recognize that the title is a type of apple; it figures in the story.) As the book begins, a journalist glances at the TV and sees a horrifying sight — her beloved sister, caught on a security camera wearing a balaclava and robbing a gas station. Even worse: The sister appears to be a member of the Irish Republican Army, which puts the whole family in danger and touches off a tangled series of events involving police informants, weapons caches and double- and triple-crosses. Who’s spying on whom? Tragically, neutrality is not an option.

THE ANOMALY (Other Press, 400 pp., paper, $16.99) , the French novelist Hervé Le Tellier ’s enthralling new novel, arrived in America showered with Gallic praise and basking in the glow of the Prix Goncourt , which it won last year. All of it is richly deserved. The novel — a profoundly affecting examination of free will, fate, reality and the meaning of existence, cloaked in a high-concept plot that could have come from “The Twilight Zone” or “Black Mirror” — exists in that most excellent of Venn diagrams, where high entertainment meets serious literature. The story concerns the passengers of Air France Flight 006, which flew into a terrible storm and emerged into an inexplicable situation. Le Tellier, who laces the narrative with scientific theories and philosophical debates, writes with a light touch, aided by Adriana Hunter’s translation, even as he makes you care deeply about a disparate range of characters, from a gay Nigerian pop star hiding his sexuality to an abused young girl in Howard Beach who loves her pet toad. In the end, he invites us to consider the most basic and urgent of questions: If life is beyond our control and we will all die anyway, how should we live?

Sarah Lyall is a writer at large at The Times.

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to a character in Hervé Le Tellier’s novel “The Anomaly.” The abused young girl lives in Howard Beach and has a pet toad. She does not live in Brighton Beach with a pet turtle.

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Sarah Lyall is a writer at large, working for a variety of desks including Sports, Culture, Media and International. Previously she was a correspondent in the London bureau, and a reporter for the Culture and Metro Desks. More about Sarah Lyall

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5 new mysteries and thrillers for your nightstand this spring.

Bethanne Patrick

Welcome back, mystery and thriller devotees! These books will take you from murder in present-day Texas to cryptography in Cold War Berlin to an online community that might hold the solution to a missing-person case.

Happy reading!

Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera

Savannah Harper, the sweetheart of Plumpton, Texas, died from blows to her head. A few hours later, her best friend forever, Lucy Chase, was found wandering the town streets covered in blood. While Lucy was never formally charged with the murder, the community convicted her lock, stock and a full plate of barbecue. Five years later, Lucy has come home just as true-crime podcaster Ben Owens arrives to produce an episode of his show "Listen for the Lie."

As Ben encourages the tetchy, secretive Lucy to share her side of the story with him, she relaxes beneath his sunny, handsome gaze and starts to look at the truth. Unfortunately, truth doesn't matter much to the residents of Plumpton, who long ago made up their minds about a young woman whose persona chafes against their ideas of femininity. Fortunately, by the time you meet the Plumptonites, you'll have been mesmerized by Lucy's hilarious, self-deprecating first-person narration. "It's probably unfair to say that a podcast ruined my life," she tells readers, and then, as she talks about making dinner during which she'll break up with her clueless boyfriend: "Let this be a lesson to all the men out there who can't handle conflict — man up and dump your girlfriend, or you might end up living with a suspected murder indefinitely."

Podcast episodes interspersed between Lucy's chapters form a clever way for Tintera (already a bestselling YA author; this is her debut for adults) to draw out the suspense. Revealing too much about the other characters might ruin that cleverness, but it's important to note that even when the story has ended and the murderer found, there are secrets within secrets, the kind that women have long used to protect each other.

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Where You End by Abbott Kahler

Abbott Kahler's debut centers on a young woman named Katherine "Kat" Bird, who has a near-death experience after her car collides with a deer, and wakes to near-total amnesia. She remembers her twin sister, Jude, who tries to fill in all of the blanks in Kat's memory, but as Kat slowly recovers, she realizes Jude's recounting of events contradict her own.

5 mysteries and thrillers new this fall

5 new mysteries and thrillers for the start of summer

Did the sisters have an idyllic childhood, or were they raised in a cult? If the latter is true, why would Jude be trying to pretend it never happened? Kahler (who has written acclaimed nonfiction as Karen Abbott) constructs a thriller so perfectly paced that you actually will not be able to put it down. You'll be longing at each step to see how much Kat remembers and how much Jude complicates the memories. Each clue (there are few pictures of the sisters together, for example) has a flip side, a structural technique that works particularly well since the book is set in 1970s Philadelphia, with all of that city's grittiness, community, and culture.

Kahler based her novel on the real-life story of Alex and Marcus Lewis, 18-year-old British identical twins. In 1982, Alex awoke from a coma following a motorcycle accident and remembered nothing except his brother's name and face; Marcus decided to use the opportunity to invent new lives for them both. Kahler expands on their situation by going deeper into the effects of trauma for women and girls, making Where You End incredibly relevant, right up to the truly shocking ending.

The Night of the Storm by Nishita Parekh

Answer to a question you didn't ask: In the UK, the board game Clue is known as Cluedo, a portmanteau word for "clue" plus "ludo," the Latin for "I play." In Nishita Parekh's debut, a locked-room mystery that toys with everyone's memories of playing Clue, readers may want to keep that active verb in mind. Set in Houston among a group of upperclass suburban Desi friends, The Night of the Storm puts family drama above anything resembling, say, Cape Fear -style hijinks — but the word "storm" in the title can mean so many things.

Protagonist Jia Shah, single mom to Ishaan, decides they'll both shelter from Hurricane Harvey at her sister Seema's large home in Sugar Land. Seema's husband Vipul and some of his relatives make things more complicated for Jia, through both their busy presence and because Jia and Vipul have some sexual tension going on; one of the things that makes this book fascinating is the look at a second-generation immigrant family enjoying their new country while also feeling the pull of hereditary expectations.

If you're looking for a thriller — and this book is labeled one — you've come to the wrong place. The Night of the Storm resembles nothing so much as a Golden Age mystery, and if you appreciate those, you've come to the right place. Parekh has clearly read her Christie, Marsh, and Allingham; she also clearly relishes those authors and their attention to cohesion and convention. Come on in and shelter from this Storm with a truly unreliable cast of characters.

Rabbit Hole by Kate Brody

A decade ago, Teddy Angstrom's older sister Angie disappeared at age 18. When their father chooses suicide on the anniversary of Angie's death, the now 26-year-old Teddy leaves the private school in Maine where she teaches English for home to sort out family matters with her grieving mother. Teddy discovers Mark Angstrom had grown obsessed with Reddit boards about true crime, some of them specifically about Angie's case.

Her initial look at the discussions soon turns into an obsession equaling her father's, one that will pull her into the orbit of 19-year-old Mickey, a local college student with multiple tattoos and perhaps multiple motives for the assistance she gives Teddy. The weird friendship these women create reflects the darkness into which Teddy descends, continuing her addiction to the internet as she develops an addiction to alcohol, and accidentally outing herself as Angie's sister to the various members of the Reddit boards.

Brody wisely builds the suspense around Teddy's dissolution and paranoia, rather than focusing on the details of Angie's fate, creating an atmosphere so suffocating and panicky that readers will feel the effects of loss, grief, and confusion as surely as if they were inside Teddy's very smart and once better-adjusted mind. Teddy's longing not just for her sister's survival but for their ability to share life as 20-somethings marks her more indelibly than Mickey's body ink.

The Berlin Letters by Katherine Reay

Brilliant cryptographer Luisa Voekler, whose talent was nurtured by her grandfather's frequent code-based scavenger hunts, wants to move up in the CIA, but finds her career sidelined in the late 1980s as she translates World War II documents. One day she recognizes a tiny symbol that will lead her down a dangerous path. Her discovery involves her father, Haris, who remains in the East Berlin his family left in 1961 as the East German government put up a wall dividing the city.

Reay has written a number of novels based on Brontë and Austen characters, as well as a couple of lighthearted looks at women's friendships in Illinois, but in 2021 she turned to darker territory, setting books about spycraft in London, Moscow — and now Berlin and Washington, D.C. The cover of The Berlin Letters announces both its relatively recent time period, with the figure of a young woman dressed in contemporary clothing, yet also nods to the singularity of modern Berlin, with a backdrop of the Wall covered in graffiti and the trunk of an iconic East German Trabant or "Trabi" auto (known for being constructed from lightweight resin).

The author knows East and West Berlin inside out, discussing details like the houses on Bernauer Strasse that allowed inhabitants, for a time, to easily defect simply by walking out of their front doors. However, those details never overwhelm a fast-paced story told by father and daughter from their different vantage points, as Luisa learns the truth of her past, and both stories reach the shocking, history-making night when The Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989.

Bethanne Patrick is a freelance writer and critic who tweets @TheBookMaven and hosts the podcast Missing Pages.

The Ultimate Guide to 35 Popular Book Genres

S tep into any bookstore or library, and you'll find shelves of books organized by popular book genres. Of course, there's a division between fiction (made up) and nonfiction (true) stories, but the categories don't stop there. Understanding what makes each genre distinct can help you stride confidently to the shelf of books you're most likely to enjoy. If your summer reading list is packed with easy, breezy beach reads, you'll probably find plenty to love on the romance shelf as well. And if Stephen King's writing is more your speed? Well, it's to the horror section for you!

As more authors pump out cross-genre books, it can be tricky to track how many genres actually exist. There is no hard, fast number. Some librarians might say there are 14 or 15 genres of books, while some authors might quickly list off a few dozen. What we can say for sure is that book genres evolve just as language and tastes evolve. And one more thing to keep in mind: Age ranges—think middle-grade children's books , young adult and adult—are not genres. A book's genre depends on the style and themes, not the age-appropriateness of the material.

Below, discover 35 popular book genres, along with reading suggestions that include the best books of all time , mystery books , true-crime books , autobiographies , memoirs and more.

Join the free Reader’s Digest Book Club for great reads, monthly discussions, author Q&As and a community of book lovers.

The characters aren't real. The magic, mystery and monsters are made up. And the historical events are a backdrop for the author's imagination. But the adrenaline and excitement you feel while flipping the pages of a fiction book ? Well, that's just a benefit of reading .

Action and adventure

From swashbuckling sea adventures and jungle treks to sports stories and action-packed treasure hunts, the action and adventure book genre beckons readers with tales of derring-do. Of course, many action and adventure novels also cross into other categories. You'll spot action-packed plots in crime dramas, mystery novels, thrillers, science fiction and even fantasy. What makes a book fall into this category is that it keeps moving—think page-turning action in place of character contemplation or lush, evocative descriptions of the setting.

Beach reads

There's no singular definition for the beach read book genre, a class of easy, breezy novels perfect for poolside or seaside reading. So then what makes the perfect beach read? Whether the plot is driven by action or romance, the book should appeal to a broad swathe of readers. It shouldn't be too intellectually involved or require a detailed spreadsheet to understand the medley of characters or turns of events. In short, beach reads are easy and enjoyable stories. Bonus points for vacation-destination settings!

Classic books tend to be old and widely read. They frequently appear on high school English reading lists or college literature syllabi. Love them or hate them, the classics are here to stay. Their universal themes, from forbidden love ( Romeo and Juliet , anyone?) to evolving identity (as in Their Eyes Were Watching God ), have sparked book club discussions for decades. Unfortunately, most novels canonized as classics do not represent the diversity of today's readers. That's why it's important to read across book genres, incorporating both age-old authors and fresh voices into your reading routine.

Dark academia

Fancy a gothic story set in a boarding school or university? What about a novel peopled with academics who study the underworld or have visions of an alternate, darker reality? These are classic dark academia vibes. This genre is marked by dark plot twists against an academic backdrop. Dark academia books tend to fall into other genres as well—fantasy-tinged academic tales or murder in academia, for instance. That's why you may hear people calling dark academia a subgenre rather than a stand-alone genre.

Domestic fiction

Domestic fiction tends to be a realistic (rather than fantastical) portrayal of daily middle-class life. Conflicts are intimate and interpersonal, such as a friendship gone awry or a marriage gone bad. Often, these books are set in the suburbs or contemporary work environments. While these descriptions make the novels sound plodding and ordinary, great domestic fiction is anything but boring. Contemporary writers like Liane Moriarty and Celeste Ng have mastered the art of suspenseful domestic fiction that thrums with moral conundrums, dark secrets and unreliable narrators.

Cold, heartless politicians have overtaken society. Human rights are legally violated. Or maybe humanity's reliance on technology has created an inescapably numbed future. Whatever the specifics, the joys of the past have been stripped from daily life, and the future looks bleak. Welcome to dystopia! Dystopian fiction asks readers to imagine a world in which political structures have gone sideways. It's speculative and scary yet realistic enough to ask the reader, "Could this happen?"

Erotic fiction falls under the broader genre of romance fiction, but don't confuse these books for traditional romance novels or rom-coms. These books stand apart for their mature themes, provocative banter and steamy sex scenes. The erotic book genre could technically include explicit nonfiction too, but most fans of modern erotic romance reach for books with some character development and plot twists. While their subcategory is up for debate, many Colleen Hoover books like  It Ends With Us , have been dubbed "spicy" by #BookTok fans. But probably the most recognizable erotica novel is none other than Fifty Shades of Grey .

According to the Massachusetts College for Liberal Arts, the fairy-tale genre includes magical stories, "usually originating in folklore." Themes include heroism, coming of age and resourcefulness. Often, the hero or heroine ascends from rags to riches or obscurity to fame. Though most well-known fairy tales in the United States have European roots, the fairy-tale genre spans continents and cultures.

Fantasy has long been a popular book genre for readers who crave total escapism. From sword fights to sorcery and dragons to dire wolves, fantasy stories take readers on a journey that illuminates real-world lessons and truths through an entirely speculative setting. Within this sprawling category, you'll find subgenres like high fantasy (think Lord of the Rings ), portal fantasy (like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ), urban fantasy (like American Gods ) and more.

Graphic novel

Nope, graphic novels aren't the same as comic books. While these stories are told in a comic-strip format, they're longer and cover a wider range of book genres than comic books do. Stellar graphic novels include the same essential elements as any good read: dynamic characters, rising and falling action, and a compelling plot. And don't let anyone tell you they're not "real" books—Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus , a story about the Holocaust , even won the Pulitzer Prize.

Historical fiction

While historical fiction is constrained by time, the books are hardly stifled by the genre's bounds. Bestselling historical fiction novels span time and place: Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles sets up in ancient Greece. Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing transports readers to 18th-century West Africa. And E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime brings 20th-century New York City to life. Some historical fiction books are also romances. Others are thrillers or mysteries. What defines the genre is that the story uses real places and events as settings and plot points in a fictional story.

The horror genre offers speculative fiction in its most terrifying form. In other words, great horror books are realistic enough to be believable while still packing an adrenaline-surging punch. Bestselling author Stephen King breaks the genre into three subtypes: Gross-out, horror and terror. But you may find tinges of other genres within the mix, like the dark humor that runs through Grady Hendrix's The Final Girl Support Group or the simmering romance found in so many vampire novels . At the end of the day, though, what lands a novel in this category is the ability to scare readers silly.

The growing LGBTQ+ category spans a variety of book genres, from sweet romances to sci-fi thrillers to tender coming-out stories. What sets this genre apart is that a queer author weaves a story about a queer character. These books weren't always the bestsellers they are today. But over time, many LGBTQ+ authors paved the way for others to tell authentic stories from their own perspectives.

Literary fiction

It's common for readers to falsely equate literary fiction with the term literature . But literature includes any and all writing. Literary fiction, on the other hand, includes novels with a heavy emphasis on character development rather than a fast-paced plot. These books often exhibit a distinct writing style and strong social themes, such as grief, friendship and second chances. Not sure if a book qualifies as literary fiction? Look for a badge of honor; literary fiction titles are often award winners.

Magical realism

Magical realism is a book genre that infuses everyday life with fantastical elements. First popularized by Latin American authors , this style of sprinkling a little magic on top of the ordinary has taken the literary world by storm. While some book genres are defined by a single element (romance, for instance), magical realism typically includes three: a realistic setting, a touch of the supernatural (a hero with an uncanny ability to foretell the future, or a quirky aunt with telepathic powers, for instance) and a touch of poetry or literary style. If you're just dipping your toes into this book genre, start with the works of Gabriel García Márquez, a master of the genre.

An unexplained disappearance. Murder in the mansion. A jewel thief on the loose. Welcome to the land of mysteries! Mystery books can feature fun games of cat-and-mouse, sizzling romances between detectives or even old ladies playing the role of amateur sleuth, as is the case in some of the best cozy mysteries . Regardless of the characters or setting, any good mystery includes a crime, a detective-like protagonist and plot twists that eventually lead to a resolution. Most mysteries have witty dialogue, a few red herrings and enough clues to help the reader play an active role in guessing who committed the crime.

From epic love stories to swoonworthy beach flings, romance books tell the story of two people who are attracted to each other and must overcome some sort of obstacle to end up together. And wow, do these books sell! According to the Romance Writers of America, romance accounts for nearly a quarter of fiction books sold in the United States. Who doesn't love a good romantic comedy or enemies-to-lovers tale full of witty banter?

Science fiction

The science fiction book genre explores concepts outside the realm of reality. What if aliens exist? What if one aspect of society—politics, technology, even socioeconomic classes—became grossly exaggerated? How would life change? From space travel and alternate realities to dystopian fiction and time travel (subgenres of sci-fi), these books transport readers to whole new worlds.

Mysteries and thrillers often go hand in hand. But what makes the best thriller books shine are adrenaline-spiking tension, suspense and fast-paced action. Some psychological thrillers start as slow burns, but by the end, they'll have your heart racing and palms sweating as you follow the main characters to the sometimes-bitter end. Also, here is how to read faster to make the most of reading a thriller book.

Time travel

Time travel is a common theme in science fiction, but this subgenre overlaps with other book genres as well. The only requirement for a good time travel yarn is—you guessed it!—a primary character who traverses time in a nonlinear fashion. From Blake Crouch's mind-bending Recursion to Casey McQuiston's romantic comedy One Last Stop , time travel books delight readers with a plot that moves seamlessly from the future to the past.

Women's fiction

Women's fiction can include several book genres. This standard bookstore classification typically contains books written by female authors for women. Of course, men and nonbinary readers can undoubtedly enjoy so-called women's fiction. Women's fiction books frequently include domestic settings riddled with themes of friendship, love and marital strife.

Want to read about real people, real events and real issues? Nonfiction books are just what you're looking for.

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Art and photography

Art and photography books usually feature an artist's work alongside text commentary. The hefty, beautifully printed pages make excellent coffee table books —a thoughtful gift idea for book lovers . If a picture is worth a thousand words, these books are worth their weight in gold!

Autobiography

The distinction between biography and autobiography is easy: While biographies require an author to research someone's life deeply, autobiographies are written by the subject. From politicians to famous actors, the subjects of autobiographies inspire, educate and promote empathy for an experience vastly different from your own. These firsthand glimpses of life on the road less traveled make for powerful reading.

Biographies

Both autobiographies and biographies chronicle the life of an important figure. But biographies offer a peek into the experiences of someone who might not be available to share their own story, whether because they're long gone, not a writer or simply too busy. Of course, this means that biographies might not hold all the answers. They're often used to theorize about a famous person's motivations and relationships.

What makes a great cookbook? Clear instructions and ingredient lists, of course. Some of the best cookbooks also feature artfully plated photos that make you drool and captivating commentary on why each dish matters. Cookbook collectors flock to tomes that offer exciting or inspirational tidbits. From the history of an ingredient to the author's personal memories of a dish, cookbooks are more than just recipes—they're often an introductory guide to cuisines or new cooking techniques.

Also called anthologies, essay collections indeed are a genre of their own. Essays offer writers a chance to speak their truth in prose. Sometimes, an essay describes a scene or event. Other times, it argues a point (say, about race relations in America ) or tries to teach a lesson. While they may have varying lengths and forms, essays are always nonfiction.

How-to guides

One of the most practical genres of books, how-to guides offer exactly what the name implies: actionable plans and instructions for accomplishing a specific task. Some how-to guides offer general overviews of new skills (drawing, photography or sewing, for example). Others provide specialized instructions for readers who want to learn how to use a certain software program or woodworking technique. The best how-to guides include charts, graphs or other visuals to help readers learn as they go.

In the mood to laugh out loud? This is the book genre for you. While some novels incorporate humor, the humor genre includes nonfiction books written by comedians. From hilarious memoirs to sidesplitting anecdotes, top-notch humor books weave social commentary and real-life situations together with a lighthearted perspective.

It's easy to fret over the difference between memoirs and autobiographies. They're both nonfiction books about the author's life, right? Here's an easy way to spot the difference between these book genres: Autobiographies tell the author's whole life story in chronological order, while memoirs cover a collection of memories (often on a theme, such as travel, personal growth or growing up queer). Like autobiographies, excellent memoirs can inspire and educate readers through firsthand accounts from a new perspective.

Narrative nonfiction

The best narrative nonfiction sweeps readers into a story with a fully realized arc. In other words, the book reads more like a novel than an informational article or textbook. Most memoirs are narrative nonfiction, but not all narrative nonfiction comes in memoir form. For proof it spans genres, just look to the book that many say invented the format: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood , a true-crime story that's gripped readers for decades. Some authors of this genre tell their own stories, while others do deep research to tell someone else's story.

Ah, poetry. Does it have to rhyme? Or be separated into stanzas? Not anymore, dear readers! The best poetry evokes emotions. It makes the reader slow down and reflect. This genre tends to highlight the rhythmic or lyrical quality of language, yes, but many modern poets write in free verse rather than sticking to rhymes and meters.

Religion and spirituality

Almost any bookstore has a shelf set aside for the religion and spirituality genre. But which books can you expect to find there? Religion and spirituality includes many nonfiction subgenres. You might find the best books for your zodiac sign , astrology books , new-age guides, faith-based devotionals and more. The only criterion for this genre is that the book is about religion, spirituality or faith-based practice.

The ultimate nonfiction read, self-help books are one of the most practical book genres. Self-help books differ from how-to guides in that they're more about personal development than mastering a specific skill. Whether you're hoping to finesse your finances, develop a growth mindset or foster creativity, there's a self-help book for you.

Also known as "armchair travel," great travel books transport you outside your home. These adventurous tales often inspire future vacations through descriptions of places, people, foods and cultural customs. John Steinbeck, Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson all made a splash in this wanderlust-fueled book genre—but that doesn't mean you can't find new and exciting travel writers to follow. From Kate Harris's cycling trip along the Silk Road to Susan Lewis Solomont's time as an ambassador's wife in Spain, there's a travelogue waiting to whisk you away.

Like an episode of Unsolved Mysteries or 60 Minutes , true-crime books read like thrillers or murder mysteries (or the true-crime documentaries you gobble up like candy). The difference between these and your favorite James Patterson page-turner is that the crimes actually happened. Sometimes, the book ends with a satisfying resolution. Other times, the author simply presents the evidence and leading theories for readers to suss out for themselves.

• Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts : "Fairytales & Folktales"
• Vanderbilt University : "Three Levels of Terror"
• Romance Writers of America : "About the Romance Genre"

The post The Ultimate Guide to 35 Popular Book Genres appeared first on Reader's Digest .