Best Time Travel Books for Book Club

A most untraditional love story, this is the celebrated tale of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who inadvertently travels through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course.

Henry and Clare’s passionate affair endures across a sea of time and captures them in an impossibly romantic trap that tests the strength of fate and basks in the bonds of love.

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality.

One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life.

While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?

A riveting and romantic journey through time, The Rose Garden drops a modern woman into the middle of a historical fiction novel when she's thrown back to 18th century Cornwall—only to find that might just be where she belongs.

It’s New Year’s Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her.

At the stroke of midnight she will turn nineteen, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence.

As the countdown to the New Year begins, Oona faints and awakens thirty-two years in the future in her fifty-one-year-old body.

Greeted by a friendly stranger in a beautiful house she’s told is her own, Oona learns that with each passing year she will leap to another age at random.

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South.

Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him.

Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever—and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.

Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.

But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.

Jake's friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958.

And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination.

So begins Jake’s new life in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere.

Every turn leads eventually to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore.

Time-travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying.

Professor Simon Cross has spent his life searching for evidence of vampires and avoiding emotional entanglements.

When a mysterious accident transports Simon and his assistant, Elizabeth West, back in time, Simon finally finds both the proof that he's been looking for, and the romance that he hasn't.

In 1920s Manhattan, there are more than mobsters vying for power in the city's speakeasies.

When the local kingpin with a dark secret sets his sights on Elizabeth, day to day struggles become a fight for their very lives.

In an Arizona desert, a man wanders in a daze, speaking words that make no sense. Within twenty-four hours he is dead, his body swiftly cremated by his only known associates.

Halfway around the world, archaeologists make a shocking discovery at a medieval site. Suddenly they are swept off to the headquarters of a secretive multinational corporation that has developed an astounding technology.

Now this group is about to get a chance not to study the past but to enter it. And with history opened up to the present, the dead awakened to the living, these men and women will soon find themselves fighting for their very survival—six hundred years ago.

When Carly Sears, a young woman widowed by the Vietnam war, receives the news that her unborn baby girl has a heart defect, she is devastated.

It is 1970, and she is told that nothing can be done to help her child. But her brother-in-law, a physicist with a mysterious past, tells her that perhaps there is a way to save her baby.

What he suggests is something that will shatter every preconceived notion that Carly has. Something that will require a kind of strength and courage she never knew existed. Something that will mean an unimaginable leap of faith on Carly's part.

And all for the love of her unborn child.

When advertising artist Si Morley is recruited to join a covert government operation exploring the possibility of time travel, he jumps at the chance to leave his mundane 20th-century existence and step into the past.

But he also has another motivation for going back in time: a half-burned letter that tells of a mysterious, tragic death and ominously of “fire which will destroy the whole world.”

Traveling to New York City in January 1882 to investigate, he finds a Manhattan teeming with a different kind of life, the waterfront unimpeded by skyscrapers, open-air markets packed with activity, Central Park bustling with horse drawn sleighs—a city on the precipice of great things.

At first, Si welcomes these trips as a temporary escape but when he falls in love with a woman he meets in the past, he must choose whether to return to modern life or live in 1882 for good.

Our March 2023 Book Club PIck is a fantastic Irish time travel novel:

Anne Gallagher grew up enchanted by her grandfather’s stories of Ireland. Heartbroken at his death, she travels to his childhood home to spread his ashes. There, overcome with memories of the man she adored and consumed by a history she never knew, she is pulled into another time.

The Ireland of 1921, teetering on the edge of war, is a dangerous place in which to awaken. But there Anne finds herself, hurt, disoriented, and under the care of Dr. Thomas Smith, guardian to a young boy who is oddly familiar. Mistaken for the boy’s long-missing mother, Anne adopts her identity, convinced the woman’s disappearance is connected to her own.

Caught between history and her heart, she must decide whether she’s willing to let go of the life she knew for a love she never thought she’d find. But in the end, is the choice actually hers to make?