The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger, 2003
Romance FantasyTravel & natureScience fiction
A marriage lived out of order: Henry vanishes into his own past without warning, and Clare spends a life waiting for him to come back. A tender, lyrical romance that moves back and forth in time, with longing and quiet suspense threaded through a marriage lived out of order.
Feels like longing and tenderness. About time, love and freedom.
Who it’s for
You may like this if you enjoy love stories with a speculative twist and are patient with a marriage told out of sequence. The shifting chronology can feel demanding if you want a straightforward timeline.
Why read it
It gives you a love story shaped by absence and return, and makes ordinary waiting feel strange and precious.
A page from the book
The one thing he can still govern is his own body.
Running is many things to me: survival, calmness, euphoria, solitude. It is proof of my corporeal existence, my ability to control my movement through space if not time, and the obedience, however temporary, of my body to my will. Audrey Niffenegger.Niffenegger is a printmaker and book artist who teaches book and paper arts at Columbia College Chicago and has made limited-edition books by hand.
Books that feel like this
Where to get it
Some of these links earn us a small commission, at no cost to you. It keeps BookFeed free.
Questions readers ask
- Is The Time Traveler's Wife for me?
- You may like this if you enjoy love stories with a speculative twist and are patient with a marriage told out of sequence. The shifting chronology can feel demanding if you want a straightforward timeline.
- What is The Time Traveler's Wife like?
- A tender, lyrical romance that moves back and forth in time, with longing and quiet suspense threaded through a marriage lived out of order. Feels like longing and tenderness. About time, love and freedom.
- What should I read after The Time Traveler's Wife?
- If you liked The Time Traveler's Wife, try This Is How You Lose the Time War (Amal El-Mohtar), Dear John (Nicholas Sparks) and In the Likely Event (Rebecca Yarros).
A taste of the feed
What do you bring someone who has all of time?
I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.
This Is How You Lose the Time War · Amal El-Mohtar
Some love stories are made mostly of the time in between.
I fell in love with her when we were together, then fell deeper in love with her in the years we were apart. Our story has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. And although this is the way all stories unfold, I still can’t believe that ours didn’t go on forever.
Dear John · Nicholas Sparks
What an agreement can't do: make two people stop belonging to each other.
He wasn’t mine. I wasn’t his. That was the agreement we’d made. And yet he was always mine. I was always his.
In the Likely Event · Rebecca Yarros
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
Keep reading in the feed