There’s a very particular kind of book that ruins you for a week. You finish it at one in the morning, sit in the dark, and quietly rearrange your entire life around the question it just asked: what would I do if I woke up tomorrow in my sixteen-year-old body, knowing everything I know now? Shawn Inmon has built a whole town out of that question, plus eighteen-odd books.
If you’ve torn through the Middle Falls Time Travel series and you’re now staring at your Kindle with the specific grief of a reader who has run out of road, then first, my condolences. Second, I write more or less the same sort of book Inmon does, only with worse weather and better biscuits, so you might want to see which of mine to start with before you go anywhere else. I built a page for exactly that. And for my American readers, who I have a devil of a job reaching: everything of mine sits on Amazon US, Kindle Unlimited, and audio. Wherever you found Shawn Inmon, you can find me too.
Here’s the short version of why I’m on this list at all. Inmon takes an ordinary, disappointed, middle-aged man, hands him his teenage life back with every memory bolted on, then watches him try not to make the same mess twice. I do almost exactly that, only my disappointed men live in suburban England, buy their Coke from a newsagent in 1986, and support a football team who let them down with total reliability. Same ache, different accent. I’ll come back to why our readers overlap so neatly. First, three other writers worth your evenings.
Ken Grimwood, the man who arguably started it
Before you read anyone else, read Grimwood’s Replay. It’s the granddad of this whole shelf, and it holds up. Jeff Winston dies at his desk in 1988, a forty-three-year-old stuck in a tepid marriage and a going-nowhere job, and opens his eyes back in his university dorm in 1963, eighteen again, with everything he learned still rattling around his head. So he lives it all over. Then he dies, and returns, and lives it again.
What lifts it above a clever gimmick is how flatly Grimwood plays the loop. He isn’t interested in the mechanics, the wires, or the how. He’s interested in the slow, uncomfortable discovery that a fresh start doesn’t hand you a fresh self; you drag the same you into every new go. It won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1988, and if you’ve spent a hundred hours in Middle Falls wondering whether Inmon’s characters can ever truly outrun themselves, Replay is the book asking that same question with the volume turned up. Fair warning: it will sit on your chest for days.
Jason Ayres, the same idea with a British accent
If Inmon’s small-town America agrees with you but you fancy trying the concept in a country where it rains sideways, Jason Ayres is your man. He’s a bestselling British time travel author who has quietly published more than twenty books since 2014, and his readers keep coming back for the same reason Inmon’s do: ordinary people, extraordinary circumstances, and a strong whiff of nostalgia over everything.
His best-known run is The Time Bubble, a fifteen-book series that kicks off when a group of friends discover a portal beneath a new railway line that flings anyone who steps through it forward in time. Minutes at first. Then hours. Then a teenage girl vanishes and the whole thing turns very dark indeed. He also writes A Year in the Life, a set of standalone time travel novels dropped into 1980s Britain, which is catnip if you like your second chances soundtracked by proper music and served with a Findus Crispy Pancake. Ayres builds his stories on the notion that tiny decisions quietly redraw an entire life, which is the exact belief the rest of us on this list keep circling.
Adrian Cousins, second chances in flares
Adrian Cousins writes what he cheerfully calls believable time travel: humour up top, a smattering of romance, a decent mystery underneath. His debut, Jason Apsley’s Second Chance, landed in 2021, and the series that grew out of it plants a modern, middle-aged bloke back in the 1970s and 1980s to sort out the life he thought he’d finished with. If the title alone makes you sit up, you’re precisely the reader he’s writing for.
He came to this the way a lot of us did, through a proper day job rather than a creative-writing degree; in his case, years in the cut and thrust of food retail before he sat down to tell stories instead. It shows, in the good way. His characters have mortgages, regrets, and a fine eye for a period detail, and there’s a warmth to the books that Inmon fans clock within a chapter. Start with Second Chance and you’ll understand why his readers work their way straight through the lot.
Why the same readers keep finding all of us
Line the five of us up and the family resemblance is almost embarrassing. Nobody here writes about a chosen one, a genius, or a scientist in a lab coat flipping switches. We write about the bloke in front of you in the queue, the one with the disappointing car and the marriage that went quietly flat, and we hand him the one thing every human over forty secretly wants: a do-over, with the cheat codes left in.
The period detail does a lot of the work. Inmon’s 1970s, Ayres’s 1980s, Grimwood’s swinging 1960s, my own Farnham of Space Invaders and Texan bars: the nostalgia isn’t wallpaper, it’s the emotional engine. It’s the reason a grown adult can well up over a Chopper bike. And under the comedy, every one of these books lands the same quiet, awkward truth: a second chance is a lovely idea, but it won’t fix a single thing unless the person taking it changes first. That’s the gut-punch that keeps readers moving from one of our names to the next, usually at two in the morning, usually promising themselves just one more chapter.
So if you want to know whether my books scratch the itch, start with The ’86 Fix. Craig Pelling is stuck managing an electrical store, trapped in a marriage with nothing left in the tank, and a school reunion tips him into a single weekend back in 1986, where he sets about fixing the lot. It’s funny for a good while, and then it isn’t, which is rather the point. If Thomas Weaver and Jeff Winston feel like old friends, Craig will slot in beside them without a fuss.
Frequently Asked Questions
What kind of books does Shawn Inmon write?
Shawn Inmon is an American author best known for the Middle Falls Time Travel series, which began with The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver in 2016. The books follow ordinary people who die and wake up at an earlier point in their own lives, memories intact, then are handed the chance to live it all again. Expect second chances, 1970s nostalgia, humour, and a strong emotional undertow.
Who are authors similar to Shawn Inmon?
If you love Shawn Inmon, try Ken Grimwood’s Replay, the British time travel novels of Jason Ayres and Adrian Cousins, and my own second-chance stories. All of us write about everyday people handed a do-over, with comedy on the surface and real feeling underneath.
Are there British authors like Shawn Inmon?
Yes. Jason Ayres and Adrian Cousins both write warm, funny British time travel fiction built on second chances and period nostalgia, and my own novels do much the same from a suburban English corner. Same do-over premise, different postcode.
What should I read after the Middle Falls Time Travel series?
Once you’ve finished Middle Falls, Ken Grimwood’s Replay is the classic to read next, followed by Jason Ayres’s Time Bubble books and Adrian Cousins’s Jason Apsley series. If you’d like a British take on the same idea, my Start Here page will point you to the right one of mine to begin with.
Are Keith A Pearson’s books available in the US?
Yes. All of my novels are available in the United States on Amazon, including Kindle Unlimited, with ebook, paperback, and audiobook editions. Wherever you found Shawn Inmon, you can find me too.