books about time space

Architecture
Art History
Design & Illustration
Fashion & Style
Modern and Contemporary Art
Photography
How to Invest
Behavioural Economics
Development Economics
Economic History
Financial Crisis
Globalization Books
World Economies
Climate Change Books
Environmental Ethics
The Best Cookbooks
Food & History of Food
Wine & Drinks
Death & Dying
Family & Relationships
Sex & Sexuality
American History
Ancient History (up to 500)
Modern History (1800-1945)
History of Science
Historical Figures
Military History
English Grammar & Usage
Books for Learning Languages
Linguistics
Best Biographies
Artists' Biographies
Classical Music & Opera
Film & Cinema
The Prehistoric World
Plants, Trees & Flowers
Ancient Philosophy
Ethics & Moral Philosophy
Great Philosophers
Social & Political Philosophy
Foreign Policy & International Relations
Human Rights
Mental Health
Neuroscience
Psychoanalysis
Psychology Research
Best Atheist Books
Religious History Books
Maths & Statistics
Popular Science
Physics Books
Football (Soccer)
Sport & Sporting Culture
Artificial Intelligence/AI Books
Digital Age
History of Technology
Classic English Literature
American Literature
World Literature
Literary Criticism
Literary Figures
Classical Studies
NEW Fiction
Comics & Graphic Novels
Fairy Tales & Mythology
Historical Fiction
Crime Novels
Science Fiction
Short Stories
Thrillers (Books)
South Africa
United States
Arctic & Antarctica
Afghanistan
Myanmar (Formerly Burma)
Netherlands
Kids Recommend Books for Kids
High School Teachers Recommendations
Novels & Novelists
Ages Baby-2
Books for Teens and Young Adults
Best Kids Books of 2022
Best Books for Teens of 2022
Best Audiobooks for Kids
Prizewinning Kids' Books
Popular Series Books for Kids
Environment
Best Kids' Books of 2022
New Science Books
New Climate Books
New Psychology Books
New Philosophy Books
New Math Books
New Economics Books
New History Books
New Physics Books
New Memoirs
New Biography
New Fiction
New World Literature
New Historical Fiction
Actors Read Great Books
Books Narrated by Their Authors
Best Audiobook Thrillers
Best History Audiobooks
Nobel Literature Prize
Booker Prize
Baillie Gifford Prize
Royal Society (science)
Wolfson Prize (history)
Walter Scott Prize
Arthur C Clarke Prize
Pushkin House Prize
Audie Awards

Make Your Own List

The best books on Time

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

Our experience of time is only weakly related to the fundamental realities of physics, says the physicist and best-selling author Carlo Rovelli . Here he selects five works for understanding the nature of time in its truer sense.

Interview by Caspar Henderson

The Odes by Horace

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

The Direction of Time by Hans Reichenbach

Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point by Huw Price

The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, or The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way by Nagarjuna

1 The Odes by Horace

2 in search of lost time by marcel proust, 3 the direction of time by hans reichenbach, 4 time's arrow and archimedes' point by huw price, 5 the mūlamadhyamakakārikā, or the fundamental wisdom of the middle way by nagarjuna.

Where is a good place to begin when thinking about the nature of time? In the Confessions , Augustine suggested that time — at least as we experience it — is nothing other than the tension of consciousness itself.

The richness of the problem of time is precisely that we can start addressing it from all sorts of places. ‘Time’ is the single most used noun in the English language. It has a multiplicity of meanings.

My interest in time didn’t start with Augustine. It grew from the surprise learning that physics shows that our common ideas about time do not work well for the real world, as soon as we study it with more precision. The precise time of the clocks is something different from the time of our experience.

After a long detour, however, I have indeed ended up thinking that Augustine is basically right: what we call ‘time’ in our everyday life, the time of our experience, has something to do with clocks, but much more to do with what happens in our brain and in our emotions.

Your new book, The Order of Time , describes that detour. It takes us through the insights of Aristotle, Newton and Einstein and others. What are some of crucial junctions and turning points?

The first are the big surprises from the physics of the last two centuries. I describe three of them: first, time passes at different speed depending where you are: you age faster up in the mountains than down by the sea; second, the notion of the ‘present’ only makes sense in a bubble around us, there is no ‘present’ objectively defined all over the universe; third, the distinction between past and future is only statistical and due to our incomplete knowledge of the world. These are facts that have been discovered and confirmed. Each of them demolishes one aspect of our common understanding of time. That common understanding, where time is unique, the same all over the universe and the future is fundamentally different from the past, is adequate for our daily life, but is inadequate for understanding the nature at large.

“Our common understanding, where the future is fundamentally different from the past is inadequate for understanding the nature at large”

The concept of time that Newton used in building mechanics is equally inadequate. It works well at our scale but fails when velocities are very high or when the gravitational field is strong. Einstein understood this a century ago, and over the last hundred years it has become increasingly clear that the world is precisely as he deduced. Aristotle gave a much more general definition of time, which is that it is simply a way of counting the changing of things. Time defined in this manner does not have all the features that we intuitively and conventionally attribute to time (and that are physically wrong in the vast universe!). For instance, time defined in this way does not need to be the same all over the universe. So, in a sense, we are going back to the Aristotelian definition of time.

Each chapter of The Order of Time opens with verses from your first book choice, the Odes of Horace. What do you value in this poet of ancient Rome ?

I have a passion for Horace. A dear friend of my youth, who is not with us anymore, gave me as a gift, long ago, a small book with a choice of Horace’s Odes [note: Rovelli is referring to In questo breve cerchio , which contains Italian translations by Giulio Galetto]. I have been carrying this with me since ever, and re-reading it often. Horace is probably the greatest poet in Latin, and has many sides. There is an aulic, or courtly, aspect of his poetry, which I dislike, and is related to his official role of poet of the empire. But then there is an intimate and lyrical side of him which is marvellous, because it merges the clarity and concreteness of his visual, colourful, classical style, with a subtle modulation of universal sentiments which are deeply human — above all the soft melancholy of the running away of time. Horace is the great cantor of time, of the effect of the flight of time upon our deepest emotions. There is nothing screaming in him, no romantic exaggeration, and yet there is an intensity of emotion that reaches deep inside us and seems to capture the essence of what is to be human, and mortal. Consider this:

Perhaps God has many more seasons in store for us or perhaps the last is to be this winter that guides back the waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea to break against the rough pumice cliffs. You must be wise. Pour the wine and enclose in this brief circle your long-cherished hope.

Your second choice is In Search of Lost Time . What does Marcel Proust bring to our understanding of time?

Proust’s reflection on the nature of time is deep and spread over his writing. Reflect for a moment: the three thousand pages of his magnificent novel, packed with people, emotions, parfums, reflections, are not presented as happening in reality, but as emerging from the memory of the protagonist. A vast universe hidden among the folds of his brain, in the few inches between his ears. Proust’s art thus brings to life a key intuition that we can find in thinkers ranging from St Augustine to Husserl, and which I think is crucial for understanding our experience: the fact that the time of our experience is only weakly related to the time of physics. Mostly, it is a space, a clearing, opened up by our memories and anticipations. What we call time in our daily life is these memories and anticipations.

In The Order of Time you write that “perhaps the emotion of time is precisely what time is for us.”

The main message of my book is that time is a multilayered notion. What we mean when commonly say ‘time’ is a rather stratified concept, most layers of which refer to aspects of reality that have more to do with the specific functioning of our brain than to the simple structure of physical reality. We often make the mistake of forgetting this, and attribute to the external world what is really the emotional coloring that the external world generates in us. So, yes, to some extent the emotion of time is precisely what time is for us.

Your third choice, The Direction of Time , is the final work of a philosopher of science of the mid-20th century. What is its enduring importance?

Hans Reichenbach analysed the implications of discoveries about time made by physicists with the clarity that characterises analytical philosophy at its best, and remains a master for most of the philosophy of space and time. But his book is not widely known today, and this is a pity because it contains fundamental ideas, which are correct and are often disregarded.

“ the growth of entropy is the only law of physics that distinguishes the past from the future”

For instance, he was the first, as far as I know, to fully grasp the implications of the fact that the growth of entropy is the only law of physics that distinguishes the past from the future. This means that the existence of traces, memories and causation are just byproducts of entropy growth. This is a shocking realisation, which I believe has not been fully digested yet. He writes lucidly, and the book remains a model of clarity about the nature of time.

Broadly speaking, entropy is a measure of the disorder in the system. Entropy growth is, therefore, increasing disorder. A cup of coffee left on a table cools down: the heat, instead of remaining concentrated in one place, and in that sense ordered, dissipates. Is that about right?

Yes! Entropy is a fancy name to indicate the amount of disorder. Things naturally tend to get out of order for the simple reason that there are many ways of being in disorder and only few of being in order. Therefore random motion disorders: if you shake a box full of numbered balls you do not expect then to find them in the right order given by their numbers. The big surprise of the physics of time direction is that this disordering appears to be the single and only source of the difference between past and future.

What makes your fourth choice Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point by Huw Price worth our attention?

I consider Huw Price one of the best living philosophers and I have learned a lot from several of his books. His book about time teaches us an important lesson: we are so used to think time as naturally oriented that we instinctively think that the future is determined by the past even if we try not to. The Archimedes’ Point of the title is Huw’s metaphor for a correct external a-temporal perspective in thinking about time. Archimedes famously said that if had a point outside the world to place his lever, he could move the world. Huw asks us to do so conceptually about time.

Tell us about your final choice The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, or The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way , a text by Nagarjuna with a commentary by Jay L. Garfield

This is a book from a very different cultural universe. I include it here because I stumbled upon it, without previously knowing anything about it, while writing my book, and it had a very strong impact on me. Nagarjuna was a Buddhist monk of the second century and this book is a major philosophical text in the Buddhist tradition. Garfield is a contemporary analytical philosopher and his commentary has been essential for me to open up the ideas in the book. Nagarjuna’s philosophy is centred on the idea of the interdependence of all things and the absence of autonomous essence of anything. This implies that, in a precise sense, there is no ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is neither matter, nor energy, nor mind, nor platonic ideas, nor language, nor phenomena, nor Kantian noumen… It is just not there. I have found this a tremendously attractive and useful perspective.

Get the weekly Five Books newsletter

Do you regard the riddle of time as essentially solved, at least in terms of the underlying physics?

No, I don’t. I do think that we are beginning to understand the complexity of time and that we have an overall picture that makes sense; but there are several aspects of this picture that are still unclear, including for the physics. Why, for instance, was entropy low in the past? Is this just a feature of the universe we happen to inhabit, or is it our peculiar perspective on the universe that gives us this impression, like the apparent rotation of the heavens? This is one of the questions I am working on now, and where I hope better understanding will come.

May 11, 2018

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Support Five Books

Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount .

©Jamie Stoker

Carlo Rovelli

Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist. He is director of the quantum gravity research group of the Centre de Physique Théorique in Marseille, and his books Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and Reality is Not What It Seems were international bestsellers translated into forty-one languages. His most recent book published in English is Anaximander and the Nature of Science (2023). Like all of Rovelli's popular physics books, it's short (less than 200 pages).

Oliver Burkeman on Time Management Books

Catherine Conybeare on The Best Augustine Books

Annalee Newitz on The Best Time Travel Books

William Newman on Isaac Newton Books

Edith Hall on Aristotle Books

Marc Wittmann on Time and the Mind Books

Dava sobel on the early history of astronomy.

Philip Plait on Books on the Wonders of The Universe

Jim Baggott on Quantum Physics and Reality Books

Andrew Robinson on Albert Einstein Books

Andrew Lawrence on Astronomy, Physics and People Books

Athene Donald on Women in Science Books

Carlo Rovelli on Time Books

Jim baggott on writing about physics.

James Owen Weatherall on Physics and Financial Markets Books

Dan Hooper on The Best Books on the Big Bang

Juliet Davenport on Renewable Energy Books

David Goldberg on Cosmology Books

Tom Clarke on Being Inspired by Science Books

Jim Al-Khalili on Physics Books that Inspired Me

Marcus Chown on Cosmology Books

Timothy J. Jorgensen on Radiation Books

Kate Lee on The Best Physics Books for Teenagers

Pedro G Ferreira on The Universe

Jerry McNerney on Clean Energy Books

Richard Wolfson on Nuclear Books

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.

What makes us tick … a worker inside the clock face of St Stephen’s clock tower, housing the Big Ben bell in London.

Top 10 books about time

From St Augustine’s philosophy to HG Wells’s science fiction, these are some of the best books about a subject that is both very familiar and very strange

T ime is the most commonly used noun in the English language, yet we hardly understand what it is. The purer physical and mathematical aspects of time continue to be debated by the great minds of cosmology, and there are excellent books on that subject, from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time to Richard Muller’s more recent Now: The Physics of Time . But I’ve always been drawn to the more tangible and human questions: how do our cells tell time, and how does that telling seep upward into the neurobiology, psychology, and consciousness of our species? How is it that our smartphones and wristwatches manage to consistently agree on what time it is? And the clocks inside us, how pliable are they? Can they be made to speed up, slow down, go backward? Why does time preoccupy us, and is there anything we can do about it?

The search for answers to these questions consumed me for several years as I wrestled them into my latest book, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation . What began as an intellectual journey morphed into something between a pastime and an obsession, accompanying me through one job and another, the birth of my children, pre-school, grade school, beach vacations, and countless cancelled dinner dates and blown deadlines. It was meant to be a book about time that I finished on time; it became a meditation on living life and not wanting time to end. Along the way, I read a great many books by other authors that dealt with time in one way or another; these are some of my favourites.

1 . Confessions by St Augustine Departing from Zeno, Aristotle, and the other early Greek philosophers who struggled to understand the physics of time, Augustine, writing in the fourth century, was the first to talk about time as an internal experience – to ask what time is by exploring how it feels to inhabit it. He noted that what we call three tenses are really just shades of one: our present experience of the past (otherwise known as memory); our present experience of the future (anticipation), and our present experience of the present (attention). “In you, my mind, I measure time,” he wrote – the credo for any modern scientist studying the perception of time.

2. The Time Machine by HG Wells Still great after all these years! Unlike other time-travelling characters of late 19th-century literature, Wells’s hero isn’t a passive agent: he has a device with which he aims himself at the moment, past or future, of his choice. Wells was steeped in the latest scientific literature on memory, consciousness, visual perception, suggestion and illusion, and the opening chapter of this novel is effectively a short course on then-current notions of time perception. When the moment arrives to send a model of the time machine on its maiden voyage, it’s the psychologist who flicks the switch.

3. Time Travel by James Gleick The Time Machine is just the starting point for Gleick’s joyous and engrossing survey of our species’ preoccupation with the (entirely impossible) possibility of time travel. Cyberspace, time capsules, predestination; Dr. Who, Parmenides, Nabokov – Gleick is at home in every intellectual territory. Essential reading for those wanting to understand why the present is no longer enough for us.

Disney’s A WRINKLE IN TIME, an epic adventure based on Madeleine L’Engle’s timless classic directed by Ava DuVernay.

4. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle A high-school girl and her gifted brother, aided by three otherworldly women — the Mesdames Who, Which and Whatsit – exploit a wrinkle in space-time to battle a giant disembodied brain. One of my best-loved books as a kid and now a favourite of my own children.

5. Your Brain Is a Time Machine by Dean Buonomano Buonomano, a neuroscientist at the University of California Los Angeles, is one of the leading scientists trying to understand how the brain tells and navigates time. Here, he takes the reader on a tour of the latest research, from the workings of our neurons to the notion of “mental time travel” – how we project ourselves into the past and future. Why does time seem to flow? Do we have one clock in us or many? It’s a fun and fascinating exploration and very accessible.

6. A Tenth of a Second by Jimena Canales Seconds have been around since ancient Egypt as a quantifiable subunit of time. But the 10th of a second is fairly new, made accessible in the mid-19th century by advances in clock technology. Candles, a historian at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, recounts the emergence of this tiny yet vital window of time and its profound impact on the sciences, from astronomy to experimental psychology, and on society. Studies of reaction times, for instance, reveal that the speed of thought is not infinite: the impulse to lift a finger doesn’t translate instantaneously into action, and the time lag (yes, about a 10th of a second) enabled scientists for the first time to put consciousness under the proverbial microscope.

7. Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton An entertaining and lush history of humankind’s efforts to visually represent time, from 1450 to the present. There’s a lavish diagram from 1862 showing the differences in time around the world – and the clear need for time zones. (Noon in Washington, DC, was 5:08 pm in London, 5:17 pm in Paris, and 6:14 pm in Vienna.) There’s the April 1912 Marconi North Atlantic Communication chart, which tracked ships, including the Titanic, at points in time rather than by their location; there’s even a chronological board game developed by Mark Twain. Timeless.

Vladimir (David Dawson) and Verloc (Toby Jones) in the BBC’s adaptation of The Secret Agent.

8. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad On 15 February 1894, a bomb exploded prematurely near the Greenwich Royal Observatory in London, killing the young French anarchist who carried it. Was it meant to destroy the observatory? Conrad thought so. The building housed a clock that defined Greenwich Mean Time, the standard time for the nation and, since 1884, the baseline for the entire world – as a symbol of industrialisation and government reach it would have been a tempting target. The evidence is circumstantial, but it was strong enough to fuel his 1907 novel, in which a porn-shop owner and secret government agent named Adolf Verloc is caught up in an anarchist terror plot.

9. The Clockwork Muse by Eviatar Zerubavel An essential guide for any anxiety-prone writer, this book makes the highly useful point that, in terms of actually getting anything done on a day-to-day basis, organising one’s schedule is more important than inspiration. Zerubavel, a sociologist, has also written eloquent books on the social history and meaning of calendars and the week.

10. Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps by Peter Galison Galison, a historian of science at Harvard, explains relativity better than any other writer out there, but this book does far more, painting a rich portrait of the technological and cultural landscape in which the science arose. With improvements in time-keeping, map-making, and communication, and the invention of time zones and railroad schedules, accurate time became a commodity to be bought, sold and distributed. How do we come to agree on what time it is right now ? That question began as very practical one, Galison argues, but quickly consumed philosophy and physics – and it required Einstein and Poincaré to answer.

10 mind-bending books on the nature of time

Carl Sagan once said that “Books break the shackles of time.” He was talking about how books allow you to peer into the past, but books can also offer us a better, more accurate understanding of the nature of time, no matter how bizarre that nature really is. This list offers 10 books on time ranging from the simple to the complex, the entertaining to the academic, and everything in between.

1. A Brief History of Time

Predictably, this list must begin with Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time . Some may have held off on reading it due to the daunting subject matter — his book may have sold 10 million copies, but Hawking was well aware of its reputation as “ the most popular book never read “

Rest assured, A Brief History of Time was written specifically for those of us who don’t know our quarks from our gluons. It briefly covers the origin, development, and future of the universe but in a comprehensive, digestible, and — most importantly — enthusiastic way. Here’s an excerpt:

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

2. The Order of Time

Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist at Axis-Marseille University best known for his Seven Brief Lessons on Physics . Like A Brief History of Time , The Order of Time is designed for the layman, but Rovelli’s style differs significantly Hawking’s. Rovelli writes in a lyrical, almost poetic style, supplementing the heady physics of time with quotes from figures such as Shakespeare and the Greek philosopher Anaximander. It’s a pleasant read, but the combination of hard science and philosophy particularly lends itself to the audio book version narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch . You can listen to a sample of the audio book in the video below.

3. Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time

There are few concepts more crucial to our modern understanding of time than the theory of relativity, most famously elaborated by Albert Einstein. However, Einstein’s theory didn’t emerge from a vacuum; his contemporaries were hard at work on relativity, including his rival, Jules Henri Poincaré.

In essence, the theory of relativity showed that there was no such thing as a universal time; time flows differently for different systems. In Einstein’s Clocks, Poincar é’s Maps: Empires of Time , author Peter Galiso n explores the extraordinary period of history when this theory was discovered. Rather than serving as a solely scientific exploration of time, Galison’s book has been described as “part history, part science, part adventure, part biography.”

4. Your Brain is a Time Machine

Part of what makes learning about the physics of time so fascinating is how wildly it differs from our intuitive understanding of time. Though we can conduct experiments and analyses to develop an objective conceptualization of time, we’re still stuck with the way our squishy brains like to perceive time. But thinking that our “natural” view of time is less interesting would be wrong.

Physicists and philosophers espouse the idea of eternalism — that there is no fundamental difference between the past, present, and future. “There is absolutely nothing particularly special about the present: under eternalism now is to time as here is to space,” writes neuroscientist Dean Buonomano in Your Brain is a Time Machine . But in our perception, “now” is the most important aspect of time, the only accessible portion of it.

In his book, Buonomano explores the myriad ways our brains and bodies keep track of time, how we travel through time in our own way, and how this biological sense of time clashes or connects with the physics of time.

5. Slaughterhouse Five

You don’t have to stick to hard science to build an understanding of time. In fact, doing so would provide a lopsided picture of time, leaving out the crucial fact that we are subjective individuals with unique points of view.

To learn more about this aspect of time, we have to turn to literature: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five traces the contours of how time affects us, our memory, and most of all how trauma distorts our sense of it.

Billy Pilgrim, the book’s antagonist, survives the firebombing of Dresden by hiding out in a slaughterhouse — an event that Vonnegut lived through himself — only later to become unstuck in time, forced to witness the events of his life randomly, without any control, over and over again:

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all events in between.

6. The Dialogues

One of the intractable problems with physics is how darn abstract it is. Getting a good understanding of science sometimes requires the use of visual aids. That’s why The Dialogues made this list; though it doesn’t focus specifically on time, it does cover the nature of time, along with numerous other subjects in the sciences as portrayed through illustrated conversations.

7. From Eternity to Here

Sean Carroll’s From Eternity to Here focuses on a specific characteristic of time and offers a theory on how time operates. Carroll’s book examines what physicists refer to as the arrow of time, or the idea that time always seems to be moving in one direction — into the future, forward, and not backward.

There’s no real reason for this to be the case, however. Why doesn’t time flow backward? In his book, Carroll posits that it could be because the Big Bang wasn’t the start of the universe, that conditions from before the Big Bang have determined that the arrow of time flows forward. Carroll explains this possibility in his TED Talk in the video below:

8. A World without Time

Einstein’s theory of relativity set the scene for our modern understanding of time, but for logician Kurt Gödel — a lifelong friend of Einstein’s — it also revealed a bizarre conclusion. Gödel argued that in any universe where the theory of relativity was true, time could not exist at all.

In A World Without Time , Palle Yougrau covers Einstein’s and Gödel’s friendship, the underpinnings of Gödel’s time-less philosophy, and how modern cosmologists and philosophers seem to have forgotten all about Gödel.

9. The Fabric of the Cosmos

Physicist Brian Greene lays out the fundamental nature of the universe in this book, dedicating one out of its five parts to time and experience. In it, he explores the flow of time, how the laws of physics apply equally as well when time flows backwards as it does when it flows forwards, and the nature of time in the quantum realm.

Greene also explores many other aspects of the universe, including some ideas that are controversial amongst scientists, making this a valuable read for those interested in more than just time. “Cosmology,” writes Greene, “is among the oldest subjects to captivate our species. And it’s no wonder. We’re storytellers, and what could be more grand than the story of creation?”

10. The Direction of Time

Hans Reichenbach was a philosopher of science from the 20 th century, and as such, his perspective is a little different than that of career physicists. In his work, The Direction of Time , Reichenbach analyzed the philosophical implications of the many exciting findings of the theorists of his day. In fact, Rovelli, author of The Order of Time , cited it as one of his favorite books on time. In a review of The Direction of Time , Rovelli writes ,

He was the first, as far as I know, to fully grasp the implications of the fact that the growth of entropy is the only law of physics that distinguishes the past from the future. This means that the existence of traces, memories and causation are just byproducts of entropy growth. This is a shocking realisation, which I believe has not been fully digested yet.

A Trusted Friend in a Complicated World

RD.COM Arts & Entertainment Books Best Books & Must-reads

22 Time Travel Books That’ll Transport You to Another Time and Place

The best time travel books of every genre will make you laugh, cry and fall in love as you transcend time

Our editors and experts handpick every product we feature. We may earn a commission from your purchases.

Time travel that will truly transport you

Time marches on, as the saying goes—but time travel books have us asking, Does it really?

Books about time travel artfully challenge our perceptions. Skillfully bending our minds and flexing the limitations of time, these great works change our perspective on what’s possible.

And the best books about time travel go even further. For a time travel tale to become a classic book in its own genre, it mustn’t be defined by the party trick of the time jump. In fact, that’s often just the starting point of a deeper, layered story, as time travel books can be any genre, or even cross genres!

For instance, time travel can be historical fiction, where characters visit the past and the book is firmly grounded by facts and recorded events. In the other direction, time travel stories can be futuristic, like these books that predicted the future . They often go into science fiction territory, complete with alternative worlds and intergalactic strife. Post-apocalyptic settings are also popular, and parallel universes too. Some time travel tales even end up on lists of banned books , like Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.

But in an ideal work, the concept of time travel is held together by stories of universal—and timeless—shared experiences: A quest for love, a need to save. A yearning for redemption, forgiveness, even power. Joy and humor, or a sense of poignancy, regret, fear and loss.

The time travel books on this list differ in genre and type—award winners, classics, new releases, diverse authors and characters—but all have one thing in common: the humanity that shines through and transcends time to make a time travel book truly transportive.

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

The Time Machine Wells Ecomm Via Amazon.com

1. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

Arguably the classic time travel book, published all the way back in 1895, The Time Machine is one of the oldest time travel stories and is largely credited with the popularization of the genre. In it, the Time Traveller, a Victorian English scientist and inventor, explains why he’s starting his weekly dinner party late: He lost his time machine and had to find it in the future—in 802,701 A.D. In this future, there are two human species: the innocent and childlike Eloi, and the savage, frightening Morlocks, who have his machine. Wells tears down capitalism, satirizes the decadence of his own time and speculates on evolution and the fourth dimension. It’s no wonder the novel has inspired two feature films, two TV series and several comic book adaptations .

Get Reader’s Digest’ s Read Up newsletter for more entertainment, humor, cleaning, travel, tech and fun facts all week long.

Outlander Complete Hardcover Series Ecomm Via Amazon.com

2. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

Outlander is the first in an ongoing series that’s now a hugely popular TV series as well. It was initially (and for the author, begrudgingly) classified as a romance novel when it was published in 1991, but it’s so much more than that. Through its now nine novels, it’s become a story of enduring love and relationships forged and held through space, time and historical events.

British combat nurse Claire Randall is on a second honeymoon in Scotland with her husband, Frank, after they’ve been reunited at the close of WWII. Claire’s having a lovely time reconnecting when a solo outing puts her in proximity to pagan-era standing stones, which jarringly transport her 200 years into the past, to the start of the doomed Jacobite rebellion. Mishaps and tense circumstances lead her into the orbit and later protection of one Jamie Fraser, who becomes a force more powerful than the stones of Craigh na Dun … And that’s just the start of a sweeping historical tale that crosses oceans, offers intrigue and mystery, and takes us to the middle of another war, closer to home.

What The Wind Knows Harmon Ecomm Via Amazon.com

3. What the Wind Knows by Amy Harmon

To Outlander fans who bemoan the “Droughtlander” between TV seasons and wait years between new book releases, the satellite stories and novellas by Diana Gabaldon are sometimes not quite enough. For them, 2019 Amazon Charts, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post bestseller What the Wind Knows might be just the salve they need.

In this love story, Anne Gallagher journeys to her beloved grandfather Eoin’s childhood home in Ireland to scatter his ashes, only to find herself traveling much farther than intended—to 1921, in fact, as the rebellion ripens. She comes under the care of a Dr. Thomas Smith and his ward, who shares her grandfather’s name, and she’s mistaken for the boy’s long-lost mother . Anne goes along with the mistaken identity … but for how long?

4. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Prisons banning this book, citing “racial antagonism,” is the first clue that it’s a time travel book that goes far beyond predictable tropes. Published in 1979, this first-person account of Black novelist Edana (Dana) Franklin begins quickly, shockingly, with an arm amputation. It barely slows down as readers are transported as suddenly as the main character between 1976 Los Angeles and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation, where Edana meets her ancestors and experiences their horrors through a modern-day lens.

This is particularly jarring as she becomes enmeshed in the lives of the white planter and Black freewoman- cum -enslaved person and concubine from her family tree, a stark contrast from her loving interracial marriage. In what the author has called a “grim fantasy,” this powerful book shines a bright light into our history’s darker corners, making Kindred a must-read book about racism in many academic circles.

This Is How You Lose The Time Way Mohtar Gladstone Ecomm Via Amazon.com

5. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This short book proves that depth doesn’t necessarily require length. This Is How You Lose the Time War has been called “a story about a feeling” rather than a plot, but that doesn’t mean the latter isn’t there. In a creative telling between two gifted authors—each writing only as their characters, Red and Blue, in a back-and-forth exchange—the novella follows the rival time-traveling military agents from a warring future as they first taunt each other then fall in love over the course of correspondence … all while engaging in various missions to change events from the past and ensure the survival of their faction in the present/future.

It’s cleverly written and hugely emotive, so it’s no surprise this pair of sci-fi writers won BFSA, Nebula and Hugo Awards and the book was optioned for television in 2019, the year it was published, with the caveat that the Sapphic element was “not up for negotiation.”

The Future Of Another Timeline Newitz Ecomm Via Amazon.com

6. The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

While it’s disturbing that misogyny and control of women is often a theme in futuristic science fiction or dystopian feminist books , when it’s done well, it’s incredible fodder. This contemporary work of speculative fiction released in 2019 does it masterfully, taking us to an existence that includes geologic wormhole generators and archeological features known as the “Machines.” Using the Machines are the Daughters of Harriet (Tubman), whose work revolves around changing key moments in history to make the future better for women. Tess is one of these underground Daughters fighting their misogynistic nemesis, the Comstockers. But when her path crosses with punky 17-year-old Beth, things get even messier as characters start to question who they really are and who they want to be.

Here And Now And Then Book Ecomm Via Amazon.com

7. Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen

In this highly acclaimed debut novel by Asian American author Mike Chen, time travel is normal … and so is Kin Stewart, a suburban San Francisco dad working in IT and trying to stay connected with his wife and daughter. But this “reality” isn’t real reality, as Kin is actually a secret agent of the Temporal Corruption Bureau, an agency formed by the U.N. in 2098 to chase down “temporal criminals”—time travelers seeking to change the past to ensure their own lucrative futures.

On a mission gone awry 18 years ago, Kin found himself stranded in the 1990s. Making the most of the situation, made easier by love, he begins to forget his future as he builds a life in the present. That is, until an extraction team arrives to force him back to a life he no longer remembers, and he learns what lengths he’ll go to for the love of a daughter who was never supposed to exist.

The Time Traveler's Wife By Audrey Niffenegger Via Amazon Ecomm

8. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The Time Traveler’s Wife is one of the best books made into movies, having earned the Exclusive Books Boeke Prize and British Book Award. A debut novel, this tragic and epic romance published in 1991 centers around librarian Henry DeTamble and his artist wife, Clare Anne Abshire. Henry has a genetic disorder that causes spontaneous time travel, which he’s suffered from since he was 5 years old. When he finally meets his future wife, it’s in 1991, but she’s actually known him for most of her life. As their paths cross through the years, they share a deep love, a child, a life … all with the shadow of missing chapters and lengthy disappearances hovering over them. This emotional story is over all too soon, making its fans that much more excited about the upcoming HBO Max adaptation.

How To Live Safely In A Science Fiction Universe Yu Ecomm Via Amazon.com

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

Time travel books don’t have to be heavy tearjerkers—they can (and should!) also elicit tears of laughter, as this hilarious and conversational romp does. In a very meta move, author Charles Yu writes a self-help book for Charles Yu, the time machine repairman living in Minor Universe 31, that can be used to solve the mystery of where his father vanished after he invented the first time machine. He’s handed this book by his future self—the author—as he lays dying from a technically self-inflicted gunshot wound, since the trigger was pulled by his present self. And that’s just the beginning of this sci-fi loop with his sidekicks, a sad time machine called TAMMY and a nonexistent dog named Ed.

A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthurs Court Twain Ecomm Via Amazon.com

10. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain

Mark Twain’s 1889 story begins when a conk on the head mysteriously transports engineer Hank Morgan to medieval times … and not the re-creation kind you’d find in modern-day Connecticut. With his “modern” foresight and sensibilities, he convinces the court that he’s a magician and tries to use his “powers” for good, which then turns into a masterful satirical take on feudalism, monarchy and the Industrial Revolution. How masterful? Critics in Great Britain were offended at this “direct attack on … aristocratic institutions,” as Twain himself gleefully reported the feedback, while modern critics consider this a foundational work in books about time travel, even inspiring movies like A Kid in King Arthur’s Court .

Slaughterhouse Five Vonnegut Ecomm Via Amazon.com

11. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Named one of Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels, this 1969 novel by sci-fi powerhouse Kurt Vonnegut is wrenching, engrossing, jarring and fantastical, as well as incredibly honest. Considered one of the greatest anti-war books of all time, it follows main character Billy Pilgrim’s trek through the horrifying firebombing of Dresden, capture by the German army and time as a prisoner of war—a mirroring of the author’s own firsthand experience as an American serviceman. However, via an unreliable narrator and a jumping, nonlinear structure “in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from,” we’re also transported there as past, present and future occur simultaneously. Sound confusing? Better read the book!

12. Invictus by Ryan Graudin

Who doesn’t like a good heist? A clever rapscallion and spirited thief? Enter Invictus main character Farway McCarthy, the product of a time traveler from the year 2354 … and a gladiator from ancient Rome. Farway’s longtime dream was to explore history firsthand, but his test scores led to a rejection from the official government program. Instead, he became a time-traveling, treasure-hunting pirate of sorts, captaining a crew through time to steal priceless objects to sell on the black market. Then he meets mysterious Eliot, who strong-arms her way into his diverse crew (which includes a pet red panda named Saffron) and twists up his life as they continue on madcap adventures with plenty of funny banter to ease things along.

05 A Wrinkle In Time By Madeleine Lengle Via Amazon

13. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

This Newbery Medal , Dequoya Book and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award winner is one of the best children’s books ever written . Since 1962, A Wrinkle in Time has served as a gateway to time travel books, a captivating entry into sci-fi and the world of other worlds. But what has given it such incredible longevity is that it’s also a coming-of-age story. Ugly duckling pre-teen Meg Murray, accompanied by her mild but highly gifted little brother Charles Wallace and well-liked classmate Calvin O’Keefe, jumps through space and time to save her father, a brilliant physicist who went missing attempting to tesseract—that is, to create a fifth-dimensional bridge between time and space. This first book in the Time Quintet series introduces self-reflection, acceptance, spirituality, purpose and science in ways that resonate through generations.

When You Reach Me Stead Ecomm Via Amazon.com

14. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

This Newbery Medal Award winner for children and young adults is part sci-fi, part mystery and very much an ode to another era—one where kids on Manhattan’s Upper West Side were self sufficient, single mothers aspired to compete on game shows and kids got punched in the face with minimal adult blowback. Our first-person narrator is Miranda Sinclair, a sixth-grader in the late 1970s who starts getting mysterious notes asking her to write “letters” about things that haven’t happened yet in order to eventually save the life of a friend. Like A Wrinkle in Time , which also makes important cameos in this book, this is just as much a coming-of-age story about friendship , love, forgiveness, redemption and independence as it is about time travel.

Ruby Red Trilogy Boxed Set Gier Ecomm Via Amazon.com

15. Ruby Red by Kerstin Gier

Another amazing book for teens , this 2009 young adult novel opens up a trilogy about Gwendolyn (Gwyneth in some translations) Shepherd, a 16-year-old contemporary time traveler from London who was never supposed to be a time traveler. It runs in her blood, but it was always supposed to be her cousin who had the gene; it was her cousin who was prepared for this responsibility given to the females in her family. Ill-prepared and untrained, she takes on the mantle of the final time traveler of the family, learning how to control her time jumps via supplying her blood to the chronograph time machine that helps smooth out these leaps of faith. How she navigates getting plunged into romance, history and young adult politics is why you keep reading.

One Last Stop Mcquiston Ecomm Via Amazon.com

16. One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

Coming of age isn’t a one-time event limited to pre-teens, and especially not in modern times, as economics oftentimes extend the transition into adulthood. This present-day romance , one of Bookpage’s top ten for 2021, is as timely as it is time travel-y as it “investigates” the relationship formed between bisexual former amateur detective August and Chinese lesbian Jane … who just so happens to be from the 1970s. This enormously representative, inclusive romp is a fun take on time travel and dating in today’s New York City, with a lot of heart to go along with the heart-eyes entertainment. This one’s a perfect summer beach read .

17. Replay by Ken Grimwood

What if life after death was life before your death? That’s the premise of Replay , a 1988 World Fantasy Award–winning novel about Jeff Winston, who suffers a heart attack at age 43 only to wake up in 1963, 18 years old and back in Emory University. He does this on repeat, able to change the events before his death but not circumvent it. However, each new “replay” restarts him several hours after the last round, and he learns he’s not the only one when he meets another replayer named Pamela Phillips. In his replays, he makes amends, falls in love, searches for other replayers, attempts to go public and, most important, works toward surviving beyond the countdown to his final replay with the love of his many lives.

This Time Tomorrow Straub Ecomm Via Amazon.com

18. This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

One of the most anticipated books of 2022, This Time Tomorrow is another take on waking up as your younger self. This humorous tale celebrates love, but not romantic love— familial love. The main character, Alice, is turning 40; because 50 is the new 30, she’s fine with aging, and she feels her life is in a decent place, except for her father’s declining health. She wakes up the next day in 1996, though, newly 16 years old instead of 40, with all the baggage that comes along with it. But what strikes her most is seeing her 40-something dad through the eyes of her four decades of lived experience, learning that her past is more than she remembered.

19. The Paradox Hotel by Rob Hart

CrimeReads called this time-warping, darkly funny murder mystery “one of the most anticipated books of 2022,” and true to its genre, that claim passes the polygraph test. This fascinating book has time travel at its core. January Cole runs security at a hotel that well-heeled guests stay at between “flights” to the past, but soon enough, things start going awry beyond even dinosaur egg smuggling attempts, and the hotel is up for grabs as time travel technology faces privatization. While this is happening, a corpse appears that only January can see, a ghost child starts tagging along with her and she starts slipping more often into the past and future, forced to confront grief and memory as she does.

Time And Again Finney Ecomm Via Amazon.com

20. Time and Again by Jack Finney

This 1970 novel has gotten a fresh 50th anniversary makeover, where what’s old is new again in a book that Stephen King himself has called “ the great time travel story.” However, we prefer the 1995 edition, which features rich illustrations to go along with the story of advertising artist Si Morley, who’s recruited to join a covert government operation exploring time travel. Curious about a half-burned letter from 1882, he accepts the mission to return to New York City in that year, and the action moves quickly from there as he falls in love and is confronted with the classic conundrum faced by those caught between times.

21. 11/22/63 by Stephen King

While this legendary writer has raved about Jack Finney’s time travel novel, his own is no less remarkable. Released in 2011, this suspenseful thousand-page thriller about a 35-year-old English teacher in Maine won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and takes us back to the events leading to the titular one—the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Jack Epping is the hero here, and porting back to 1958 via his friend Al, the keeper of the portal, he attempts to prevent the historic crime as each trip back costs him only two minutes in present time. But because it’s Stephen King, of course there’s more to the story: a man in his adult GED program with a tragic family history, an unexpected falling in love and a lot of consequences to a lot of action. We’ll see how much makes it into the Hulu TV show !

The Shining Girls Beukes Ecomm Via Amazon.com

22. The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

Disappointed that Stephen King’s contribution sounds light on horror ? This 2013 book takes readers for a dark, gory and violent turn as it examines what would happen if time travel became a power abused by evil. Harper Curtis is his name, a perverted and deranged serial killer who comes across a portal in an abandoned house during Depression-era Chicago. He uses the portal to return to the past to first visit “the shining girls” at multiple points in their lives before finally killing them. However, things get complicated when one of his victims, Kirby, survives and recruits a former homicide reporter to break the cycle. Do they? Read it or let the suspense build watching the new Apple Original thriller series, soon to release eight episodes in the first chilling season.

We are no longer supporting IE (Internet Explorer) as we strive to provide site experiences for browsers that support new web standards and security practices.

We recommend our users to update the browser.

7 Must-Read Books on Time

What the second law of thermodynamics has to do with saint augustine, landscape art, and graphic novels., by maria popova.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME

With a foreword by none other than Carl Sagan , the book remains a fundamental sensemaking mechanism for understanding the cosmos, our place in it, how we got there, and where we might be going.

Perhaps most powerful of all is the human hope and scientific vision of Hawking’s ending:

If we find [a unified theory], it would be the ultimate triumph — for then we would know the mind of God.”

FROM ETERNITY TO HERE

This book is about the nature of time, the beginning of the universe, and the underlying structure of physical reality. We’re not thinking small here. The questions we’re tackling are ancient and honorable ones: Where did time and space come from? Is the universe we see all there is, or are there other ‘universes’ beyond what we can observe? How is the future different from the past?” ~ Sean Carroll

Sample Carroll’s entertaining and enlightening storytelling with his excellent talk from TEDxCaltech .

Full review here .

Movement, change, light growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue. […] My approach to the photograph is kept simple, almost routine. All work, good and bad, is documented. I use standard film, a standard lens and no filters. Each work grows, strays, decays—integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its height, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expressed in the image. Process and decay are implicit.” ~ Andy Goldsworthy

Goldsworthy was the subject of the excellent 2001 Scottish-German documentary Rivers & Tides: Working with Time — here’s a short excerpt for a taste:

CARTOGRAPHIES OF TIME

Cartographies of Time is easily one of the most beautiful books to come by in the past year, both a treasure trove of antique artwork and a priceless cultural timecapsule containing humanity’s understanding of time and place in the larger context of existence.

INTRODUCING TIME: A GRAPHIC GUIDE

THE TIME PARADOX

Sample the book with this charmingly so-bad-it’s-good trailer:

Our ability to reconstruct the past, to interpret the present, and to construct the future gives us the power to be happy.” ~ Philip Zimbardo

THE THIEF OF TIME

Procrastination is familiar and interesting but also puzzling. Although it is generally perceived as harmful and irrational, recent studies suggest that most of us procrastinate occasionally and many of us procrastinate persistently. Not even saints are immune. Saint Augustine records in his Confessions how, after years of sexual hedonism, he vowed to return to Christianity and prayed for chastity and continence — ‘only not yet.’ Although he ‘abhorred’ his current way of living and ‘earnestly’ wanted to change his course, he kept deferring any change until ‘tomorrow.'” ~ Chrisoula Andreou & Mark D. White

From the morality of it (is procrastination a vice?) to its possible antidotes (what are the best coping strategies?), the book is an essential piece of psychosocial insight. That is, if you get around to reading it.

— Published October 17, 2011 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/10/17/7-must-read-books-on-time/ —