Einstein’s big idea was that the amazing speed of light holds the key to everything from the untold power of the atom to the possibility of time travel to follow in the footsteps of his genius. The speed of light is the same for everyone is one of the strangest in physics, but it’s been shown by hundreds of experiments. The speed of light is going to be the same, no matter how fast you’re moving towards it or away from it. If an object moves fast enough through space, it can alter its passage through time.
So time travel is a fascinating science for the romance reader. Many movies and books are available online about time travel because this trope has huge popularity and fans. If you are one of them, then welcome to my book review!
17 Time Travel Romance Books
Time travel adds adventure, fantasy, and thrilling in the romance category, making a story complex. But if you take the time to understand and read twice, it seems very easy to read. Most of the time, time-traveling plots are boring, but the romance trope makes it interesting.
The sci-fi lover likes this type of story. As a sci-fi and romance reader, I love reading time travel stories. So I have a long list for you that will review 17 popular time travel romance books. Let’s go!
1. Dragonflight (Dragonriders of Pern)
This is the first book in the Dragonriders of Pern series. The time-traveling element at the end of this novel resolves the entire plot. The dragons in this world can teleport instantly from one place to another. You will discover that they can do that in time as well. It’s something that the characters also discover, allowing them to resolve the plot.
It is a creative adventure novel with the perfect amount of romance. By this story, you could go back in time and make some changes that would alter the course of your existence without your past self noticing that you were there without anything in your memory changing. Being able to gain insight into some weird stuff at the time.
Author: Anne McCaffrey
Average Rating: (4.7 /5)
Category: Epic Fantasy
Number Of Pages: 299
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Kindle | Mass Market Paperback
2. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
This was another one of those books that I read when I was in my early teens. That shaped many things about me as a person and my reading habits. The story introduces Remus Lupin, a popular character in the entire series. The entire mini adventure at the end, when Harry and Hermione go back with Time-Turner. Also, they retrace all of their steps, and you see everything that’s going on in a slightly different light.
You will realize that Buckbeak is not dead, and you’ve had this emotional revelation about Sirius and Remus and their past relationship with Harry. You’re so invested in the idea that they can save more than one innocent life tonight, but they’re such dreadful consequences for if they see themselves and then the realization that they don’t see themselves. But Harry sees his Patronus and imagines his father coming to save him. So, it’s an emotionally charged ending to this book.
Author: J.K. Rowling
Average Rating: (4.9 /5)
Category: Fantasy & Magic
Number Of Pages: 435
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle
3. Night Watch (Discworld)
It is a guard’s novel about Commander Sir Samuel Vimes of the City Watch. At the beginning of the book, he has a run-in with a hardened criminal who sends him back in time to the city watch of his youth. He spends the entire novel in his past timeline, trying to figure out if he’s ever going to be able to come back to the present. The fascinating thing about this one is that author describes the dual timeline.
Vimes meets his younger self and introduces himself to his younger self as someone completely different. From then on, he has to be around his younger self and figure out how he will try and come back to his present.
At this time, he’s married with a child, and he’s a commander of the watch as opposed to this past. In the past, he’s hung around and tried to give his younger self-life advice. So it’s hilarious to see how a man lives through two different timelines with different plots with romance and comedy.
Author: Terry Pratchett
Average Rating: (4.8 /5)
Category: Science Fiction Fantasy, Comedy
Number Of Pages: 480
Available: Mass Market Paperback | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | Audio CD
4. All Clear
The books in the All Clear series are about Oxford academics that have access to time travel. Oxford University in the future sends people back in time to various periods of history to figure out what it was like and then come back and write PhDs about it. Also, it’s impossible to change anything in the past. So in these two books, which are more one very long book that had to be published in two volumes rather than the book and its sequel.
Different academics are sent back to London and other parts of England during the Blitz to observe what’s going on in the story. Something happens that means that they’re stuck there. There’s a problem with the technology, and they have to stay. As someone in London, someone is working with evacuees in the north of England. There’s someone at Dunkirk. So there are a lot of stories woven together, which are romantic and war fiction.
Author: Connie Willis
Average Rating: (4.4 /5)
Category: Historical Fiction
Number Of Pages: 656
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | Audio CD
5. Woman on the Edge of Time
The protagonist in this book is Connie, who suffers from mental health issues and lives in poverty. She has escaped from a mental health facility where she was mistreated. Moreover, she runs into this weird person who tells her they’re from the future, and she gets plucked out of her life and taken into this weird, utopian future. There are a lot of questions about gender, the nuclear family, and how children are raised.
I was surprised because a lot of the time, with time travel stories, it’s about how you go back and change the past without changing it. But at the same time, it was cool to have a glimpse of a future and then have the protagonist’s choice. So in this book, there are many elements: science fiction, feminism, fantasy, and romance.
Author: Marge Piercy
Average Rating: (4.4 /5)
Category: Dystopian Fiction
Number Of Pages: 376
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Kindle | Mass Market Paperback
6. The Time Traveler’s Wife
This is one of my all-time favorite books that I can reread repeatedly. It is a boy meets girl type story with a highly complex twist. The main characters are Henry and Clare. We find out that Henry has something called Chrono Displacement Disorder. It means he has a genetic mutation that causes him to disappear into various time points, sometimes with himself, sometimes in the past.
All of the places he goes back to being tied to emotional events in his own life. Clare is the love of his life, and you get alternating chapters from their points of view. But Clare meets Henry for the first time when she’s a little girl, and Henry doesn’t meet Clare until he’s in his 20s. So they’re constantly overlapping throughout history, and it’s a beautiful, heartbreaking, lovely time travel romance.
Author: Audrey Niffenegger
Average Rating: (4.4 /5)
Category: Time Travel Fiction
Number Of Pages: 500
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | Audio CD
7. Dark Matter
This is by far the most sci-fi of all of these picks, and it’s also a real thriller. Jason Dessen is an atomic physicist teaching at a local university and has a wife and daughter. He isn’t quite at the level of success that he wants to be, but he has a happy life. So he goes out to meet a friend for a drink one night and is drugged and abducted on his way home.
When he wakes up, he is in an alternate timeline where he is still Jason Dessen. But he is a very successful atomic physicist without a family. So he has to figure out what happened on Earth and whether his family still exists? It is a page-turner but scary and violent at some points.
Author: Blake Crouch
Average Rating: (4.5 /5)
Category: Mystery Thriller
Number Of Pages: 340
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle
8. A Wrinkle in Time (Time Quintet)
This one was written in 1963 and is still a mainstay of middle-grade sci-fi. The plot is hard to explain if you haven’t already read it. But it involves a Tesseract, quantum theory, and very mysterious neighbors that open doors into other worlds.
Our main character, Meg, and her little brother, Charles Wallace, go on a wild adventure to try and rescue their father, who has mysteriously gone missing. It still holds up. The language can be a little bit stilted by today’s standards. If you are not into reading the classic in its original form, I highly recommend checking out the graphic novel.
Author: Madeleine L’Engle
Average Rating: (4.6 /5)
Category: Sci-Fi Adventure
Number Of Pages: 218
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | Mass Market Paperback
9. A Traveler In Time
We have another classic published in 1939 and is still one of the gold standards of time travel in children’s fiction. Our main character, Penelope, is a sickly young girl. Her mother sends her to live in the country to get some fresh air with her family. So her family’s place in Derbyshire, England, is this ancient farmhouse steeped in history, and she’s drawn to a very particular area of the farmhouse.
Also, it turns out that she can step through a door into the 16th century, where she is suddenly embroiled in a plot to save Mary Queen of Scots. It’s one of the first examples of Time-Slip. So rather than have a device or a machine of some sort, there is a fantastical element to these stories where you can step back in time. If you are a fan of classic middle-grade literature with romance, I highly recommend picking this one up.
Author: Alison Uttley
Average Rating: (4.7 /5)
Category: European Historical Fiction
Number Of Pages: 336
Available: Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | Mass Market Paperback
10. The Storm Keeper’s Island (Storm Keeper)
This was time travel in a way that I had never seen presented before. Fionn goes to Arranmore Island, where his grandfather lives and his mother grew up. There’s magic sneaked into this island. Also, it turns out that his grandfather is the storm keeper, and he stores memories of the island and the people of the island in candles.
So within Arranmore Island, you can travel within like layers of memory of the island. But only within that one area by burning one of these candles. We included it in a past junior box, and it’s fantastic. The romance element is very short, but you will feel the adventure with time travel.
Author: Catherine Doyle
Average Rating: (4.7 /5)
Category: Multigenerational Family Life
Number Of Pages: 336
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle
11. A Handful of Time
Our main character, Patricia, is sent again to stay with family, but she doesn’t know because her parents are finalizing their divorce. So she is unbelievably unhappy and has to stay with this family that she’s barely met before. Her cousins think she’s sad and don’t want to spend time with her. Her aunt pities her and is sorry for her.
So she spends a lot of time alone in one of the smaller cabins at this lake where her mom spent her summers growing up. She finds an old gold watch under the floorboards, and when she winds it, she goes back into the past, when her mother was twelve years old.
She is invisible in the time that she travels back to, so she’s watching her mom rather than becoming friends with her. But it’s a lovely family story, a coming of age story, and an excellent depiction of divorce for kids. So it’s multilayered, and you will love it.
Author: Kit Pearson
Average Rating: (4.8 /5)
Category: Classic Historical Fiction
Number Of Pages: 216
Available: Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | Mass Market Paperback
12. Making History
This is a take on the age-old question about what would you do if you could go back in time and stop Hitler? So the main characters in this one are a history grad student and an old German physicist. Through using a laptop time machine, he goes back and prevents Hitler from ever being born and then comes back to their time thinking done and dusted. The world is going to be better off.
It turns out they have very much changed the world for the worse. You can change the future by changing the past. It opens up all fun doors, and this is Stephen Fry at his best with social satire.
Author: Stephen Fry
Average Rating: (4.1 /5)
Category: Contemporary British & Irish Literature
Number Of Pages: 594
Available: Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle
13. So Close to You
This is the best historical time travel romance novel that You want to read twice. Lydia Bentley has heard crazy government conspiracy theory stories about the Montauk Project. But then she finds out that all the rumors are true, and she ends up embroiled in this crazy government plot time traveling back to meet her grandfather.
Somewhere along the way, she falls in love. I love this trilogy because of the history and the family secrets she discovers through her time-traveling adventures.
Author: Rachel Carter
Average Rating: (4.6 /5)
Category: Military Historical Fiction
Number Of Pages: 313
Available: Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle
14. The Time Paradox (Artemis Fowl)
This is the sixth book in the Artemis Fowl series, so you have to get through the rest of the series before reading this one. In this book, Artemis’s mother gets very ill, and the only thing that will cure her is the brain fluid of a lemur that has gone extinct.
So, they’re going back in time to save her from her terrible illness. There are all of these rules about time travel and using magic. Artemis Fowl fashion goes around, breaking all the rules and wreaking mayhem in the fairy world.
Author: Eoin Colfer
Average Rating: (4.7 /5)
Category: Action & Adventure Sci-Fi
Number Of Pages: 391
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | Audio CD
15. Gideon the Cutpurse (The Gideon Trilogy)
The story is about two children, Peter and Kate. They observe the science experiment when it goes wrong and open a time portal. Somehow they were sucked inside, and they emerged in 1763. Also, they meet a cutpurse, a thief named Gideon. An evil villain called the Tar Man is trying to use time travel technology for his evil ends.
So they spend the next three books, The Time Thief and the Time Quake, trying to stop the evil and trying to get back to their own time. There are all these side effects of time travel. So they’re dealing with the repercussions of the decisions that they made in the past.
Author: Linda Buckley-Archer
Average Rating: (4.3 /5)
Category: Medieval Fiction
Number Of Pages: 416
Available: Hardcover | Audio CD
16. The Time Bike (Hall Family Chronicles)
It has magical elements in it, but it’s mostly set in normal times in each of the books that children usually come across some magical artifact or some puzzle from the past. Once they’ve unraveled it, it does something magical or exciting. They’re living their everyday lives in the modern era for the most part. But then they’ll come across a magical artifact like a bike that will take them back in time.
So the two main characters are Eddy and Eleanor Hall. Eddy gets a new bike for his birthday, and it goes missing. Then he finds the time bike, and he goes on all adventures at different times and learns a little moral lesson at every spot he goes. I like the whole family chronicles because each book is so thoughtful. A lot goes into the plots and themes that are quite deep for children’s literature.
Author: Jane Langton
Average Rating: (4.5 /5)
Category: Sci-Fi Fantasy
Number Of Pages: 176
Available: Paperback | Hardcover
17. The Time Garden (Tales of Magic)
In this book, there are four siblings. They visit someone for the summer, and the people have a beautiful garden by the seaside. Whenever they pick a time like gimme time, crush it in their hands, and smell it. Then they wish to go to a certain time, and they are whisked away on adventures in the past.
One of the best things about this is a magical toad who lives in the garden and shepherds the children through their adventures and gives them advice, which they do not follow and get into trouble. So it’s completely unpredictable.
Author: Edward Eager
Average Rating: (4.4 /5)
Category: Classics Humor
Number Of Pages: 224
Available: Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle
Read More Similar Time Traveling Books: 7 Books Similar To Outland
Table of Contents
