Six Brilliant Reads: Time Travel Fiction

If you loved the drama of the time travelling characters in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, you might enjoy the mind-bending scenarios in these books. All play around with the idea of time travel in different ways.

Elly Griffiths is a popular mystery series writer, already well-known for her Harbinder Kaur, Ruth Galloway and the Magic Men series. Her new series features Ali Dawson, a cold case detective who can travel back in time to solve historic cases. In the first book The Frozen People, she nips back to 1850s London to clear the name of the eccentric grandfather of a modern-day MP. While she’s literally stuck in Victorian times, her son has his own legal problems and there’s the possibility the two cases are linked.

Another author writing a time travel series is Santa Montefiore, known for her standalone romantic novels and the Deverill Chronicles saga. Her latest books make up the Timeslider series, which begins with Shadows in the Moonlight. We’ve still got the romance and dramatic settings, but with an investigator, Pixie Tate, who can time travel to solve cases. In the first book Pixie visits Cornwall to look for a child that disappeared a hundred years before. This case will require her to make a devastating choice.

New Zealand author Brian Walpert plays with the idea of time in Entanglement with three separate stories over three different periods. A memory-impaired time traveller is trying to mend a tragic mistake he made in 1977. In 2011, a novelist is doing research in Sydney at the Centre for Time and becomes attracted to a philosopher from New Zealand. And in 2019 a writer at a lake retreat is dealing with the collapse of his marriage following a tragedy. How are the stories connected and is it possible to change the past?

The Moon Represents My Heart is the whimsically titled novel by Pim Wangtechawat, which tells the story of the Wangs, a family of time travellers. When their parents fail to return from a journey into the past, Eva and Tommy are left grieving. While Eva tries to make a place for herself in the present, Tommy is pulled back into the past in search of the truth. Will his own history compromise his chances of happiness with the woman he falls for in 1930s Chinatown?

Daphne du Maurier helped invent gothic, country house drama in novels like Rebecca (1938) and My Cousin Rachel (1951). She also played with a time-travelling theme in The House on the Strand (1968). In this novel, Dick Young agrees to take an experimental drug at a house lent to him by his professor friend, Magnus Lane. The drug transports Dick to Cornwall of the 14^th century. As the book continues, he finds himself longing to abandon the present for more journeys back in time.

Natasha Pulley’s novel The Kingdoms takes us from an invented French-occupied London to a remote Scottish Island, supposedly where Joe Tournier, a British slave, came from. Or so the postcard he receives from the island would suggest. It reads, ‘Come home, if you remember’. Joe has flashes of a life he cannot remember, and this novel describes his battle to uncover the truth. Pulley writes inventive and engaging novels often with an element of fantasy and which are well recommended.

Posted by JAM

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