This Is How You Lose the Time War
Amal El-Mohtar, 2019
Science fiction Travel & natureContemporary fictionRomance
Two rival time-travelling agents fall in love through letters hidden across history—a slender, lyrical war story about intimacy as sabotage. A slender, lyric duel of letters, full of longing and time-bent wonder, with a war humming underneath.
Feels like longing and wonder. About love, time and war.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy epistolary romance, intricate time travel, and prose that savors longing more than battle. The letters hop across eras and voices, so the shifting settings can be demanding to track.
Why read it
It offers a short, intense read about intimacy as sabotage, where two clever voices make history feel both vast and personal.
A page from the book
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. Amal El-Mohtar.Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone wrote the novel by exchanging letters in character, each voicing one of the two correspondents.
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Questions readers ask
- Is This Is How You Lose the Time War for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy epistolary romance, intricate time travel, and prose that savors longing more than battle. The letters hop across eras and voices, so the shifting settings can be demanding to track.
- What is This Is How You Lose the Time War like?
- A slender, lyric duel of letters, full of longing and time-bent wonder, with a war humming underneath. Feels like longing and wonder. About love, time and war.
- What should I read after This Is How You Lose the Time War?
- If you liked This Is How You Lose the Time War, try The Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger), Daughter of Smoke & Bone (Laini Taylor) and Happy Place (Emily Henry).
A taste of the feed
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.
The Time Traveler's Wife · Audrey Niffenegger
It is very hard to see the thing everyone else already sees.
It is a condition of monsters that they do not perceive themselves as such. The dragon, you know, hunkered in the village devouring maidens, heard the townsfolk cry ‘Monster!’ and looked behind him.
Daughter of Smoke & Bone · Laini Taylor
How a friendship quietly becomes the person you can't unlove.
He’s become my best friend the way the others did. Bit by bit, sand passing through an hour glass so slowly, it’s impossible to pin down the moment it happens. When suddenly, more of my heart belongs to him than doesn’t, and I know I’ll never get a single grain back.
Happy Place · Emily Henry
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