Recommendations

Books Like The Time Traveler's Wife

Best books to read after The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The Time Traveler's Wife asked what love looks like when you can't control when you're present — and made millions of readers devastated by the answer. These books share its emotional intensity, its unusual structure, and its interest in love as something that exists outside ordinary time.

  1. 1

    Her Fearful Symmetry

    by Audrey Niffenegger

    Niffenegger's second novel — twin sisters inherit their aunt's apartment next to Highgate Cemetery in London and encounter her ghost. Gothic, romantic, and deeply concerned with identity and love beyond death.

    Buy
  2. 2

    One Day

    by David Nicholls

    Nicholls's novel checks in on two characters — Emma and Dexter — on the same date, July 15th, every year for twenty years. The same structural interest in how love persists across time and change, with an ending that devastates in the same way.

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  3. 3

    Outlander

    by Diana Gabaldon

    A British woman is transported back to 1743 Scotland — the romance novel that most directly shares The Time Traveler's Wife's combination of time displacement, passionate love, and the ache of being separated from your person across time.

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  4. 4

    About Time

    by Richard Curtis

    A man discovers he can travel back in time and uses it to find love — the film rather than a book, but the closest emotional equivalent to The Time Traveler's Wife in its combination of time travel, love, and loss.

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  5. 5

    The Lovely Bones

    by Alice Sebold

    A 14-year-old girl narrates from heaven after her murder — the same structure of watching from outside time the people you love living out their lives, and the same tender devastation at what love and time take from us.

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  6. 6

    A Discovery of Witches

    by Deborah Harkness

    A witch and a vampire fall in love amid a world of magical creatures and competing factions — shares The Time Traveler's Wife's combination of supernatural premise and deeply felt romantic relationship.

    Buy
  7. 7

    The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

    by Taylor Jenkins Reid

    A reclusive Hollywood star tells her life story to an unknown young journalist — structured around the same question as The Time Traveler's Wife: what does love cost when it exists outside ordinary time and social convention?

    Buy
  8. 8

    All the Light We Cannot See

    by Anthony Doerr

    Doerr's Pulitzer Prize winner alternates between a blind French girl and a German boy during WWII — the same structure of two people circling toward each other, told with the same lyrical sensibility and the same sense that time conspires against love.

    Buy

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