14 Time-Traipsing Novels for Leap Year
NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 5379811
With Leap Year and Daylight Savings Time just around the corner, many of us find ourselves thinking about time more than we normally might. Here are some novels that reimagine how time works or refuse to abide by its linear rules as well as some great reads about time travel.
Books About Time
The Age of Miracles
by Karen Thompson Walker
The Earth’s rotation is catastrophically slowing down, and while governments opt to keep a 24-hour schedule, renegade groups disregard the clock and stick to the lengthening days. A suburban family must deal with profound upheaval.
Oona Out of Order
by Margarita Montimore
On New Year’s Eve every year, Oona will randomly be transported to a different year of her life. But her past self has written a letter that will help guide her through the time hops.
Here
by Richard McGuire
This graphic novel imagines a single patch of land, and what occurred there over the course of decades and centuries, from prehistory to the present to post-apocalypse.
Life After Life
by Kate Atkinson
Ursula Todd, born in 1910, repeatedly dies and reincarnates into the same life to correct her mistakes of the past, and to possibly save the world.
Counter-Clock World
by Philip K. Dick
Time has started moving in reverse, and the dead are reanimating. A religious leader with millions of fanatical followers poses a particular threat.
Einstein's Dreams
by Alan Lightman
Each chapter in this novel imagines time functioning in a different way. In some, you know the future. In others, everyone lives only 24 hours. In meditative prose, we learn that everything is relative.
Books About Time Travel
This is How You Lose the Time War
by Amar El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Two time traveling agents work for opposite sides, one for the tech-focused Agency and the other for the organic-focused Garden. They rebraid each other’s strands and undo each other’s work, only to find their own lives woven together.
Kindred
by Octavia Butler
A 20th-century black woman is transported back to the Antebellum South to save a white boy who will eventually become her ancestor.
The Shining Girls
by Lauren Beukes
A reporter and a victim who survived an attack are trying to track down a time-traveling serial killer who gives his victims little trinkets and then returns decades later to kill them.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
by Mark Twain
A 19th-century factory worker loses consciousness and awakens in King Arthur’s England. He tries to impose his industrial, technological, democratic, and moral views with mixed results.
All Our Wrong Todays
by Elan Mastrai
The protagonist accidentally erases the futuristic utopia of 1950s science fiction and instead finds himself stuck in a recognizable and disappointing 2016. Should he try to fix his mistake, or will this life be better in the long run?
The Eyre Affair
by Jasper Fforde
Literary detective Thursday Next must capture the villian before he invades favorite works of literature, removes characters, and alters the classics forever.
How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
by Charles Yu
A time-travel-machine repair man tries to find his father, a time-travel pioneer who disappeared.
The Time-Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
In this touching love story, a man suffers from Chrono-Displacement Disorder, where he is involuntarily dropped into different times. He encounters his wife at various stages in her life, and their relationship develops in unexpectedly rich ways.
