There is a very particular reader who finishes Oona Out of Order at some ungodly hour, sits in the dark for a bit, and then immediately wants the same feeling delivered by a different book. If that is you, hello. I write time-slip novels for a living, so I take a professional interest in the trick Margarita Montimore pulls off, and I keep a shelf of suggestions for the withdrawal.
Quick refresher, in case you came here off the back of a recommendation rather than the book itself. On the stroke of midnight on her nineteenth birthday in 1982, Oona blacks out and surfaces in 2015 as a fifty-one-year-old, occupying a life she has no memory of assembling. Thereafter, every new year flings her to some random point on her own timeline, hitting each year exactly once, always young on the inside while the outside does as it pleases. She falls for people before she has properly met them. She grieves them before they leave.
Why Oona needs its own shelf
Here is the distinction that matters when you go hunting for more. Oona is not a do-over. She never rewinds to fix a bad decision, and she never dies and starts again with the cheat codes. She lives one single life with the pages torn out and shuffled by a postman whose filing system is held together entirely by spite. That is a different ache from the loop novels and the go-back-and-mend-it novels, and it deserves different recommendations.
So the four below lean the way Oona leans: one life, knocked out of sequence, usually a woman at the centre of it, warmth and a proper gut-punch rather than a lecture about wormholes. I have already rounded up the grand romance-across-the-decades shelf in my list of books like The Time Traveler’s Wife, and the die-and-relive-it loop in books like The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. Oona sits between the two and slightly to the left, so I have deliberately kept clear of repeating those.
Four novels that scratch the Oona itch
In Five Years by Rebecca Serle
Dannie Kohan has her entire life mapped to the quarter-hour. Then one evening she falls asleep and wakes five years into her own future for a single hour, in an apartment she does not recognise, beside a man she has never met, wearing a ring she did not choose. An hour later she snaps back to the present with the whole thing still humming in her bones. Serle then spends the rest of the novel quietly refusing to be the romance you assumed you were holding. The real subject turns out to be Dannie’s friendship with her best mate Bella, and that is where the book empties your tissue box. It takes Oona’s out-of-sequence heart and compresses it into one unbearable hour.
This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub
Alice wakes on the morning after her fortieth birthday and finds herself back in 1996, sixteen years old, in her childhood bedroom, with her father pottering about downstairs. Not the frail version she left in a hospital bed in the present, but the charming, healthy, forty-something dad of her teens. Straub hands Oona’s dislocation a reason to exist: not to repair a life but to sit at a kitchen table with a parent while he is still entirely himself. Underneath the time-travel coat, it is a love story between a father and a daughter, and it is glorious. Approach with a full box of Kleenex and your cynicism left at the door.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Nora Seed, at the lowest point of a life she has decided she is finished with, lands in a library that sits outside time, every book on its shelves a version of her existence had she chosen differently. She tries a few on for size: the one where she stuck with the band, the one where she chased Olympic swimming, and a good many others she let slip. Where Oona ricochets through the years she genuinely lived, Nora tours the ones she never did. It is the same enormous question approached from the opposite direction: what shape was this life ever going to take, and would any other version have hurt less?
The ’86 Fix by Keith A Pearson
My turn, so apply the appropriate discount to a bloke recommending his own book. Craig Pelling is fortyish, managing an electrical shop and a marriage neither party enjoys, when a school reunion and a can of Coke bought in 1986 hand him one weekend back in his teenage bedroom with his adult memory fully intact. Oona is nineteen on the inside and decades older on the outside. Craig is the precise inverse: a middle-aged man rattling around his fifteen-year-old self, appalled by the wallpaper. Same disorientation, viewed down the other end of the telescope, with considerably more Space Invaders and a Texan bar or two.
Pick your particular flavour
If the thing that hooked you in Oona was the sweeping love-across-the-decades ache, my longer round-up of books like The Time Traveler’s Wife runs to ten titles, Oona among them, and leans romantic. If it was the machinery, the sense of a person living a whole span again and reconsidering it at leisure, my books like The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August list handles the loop novels properly. This page is for the third thing Oona does that neither of those quite manages: a single ordinary life, delivered in the wrong order, with no forwarding address.
The order was never the point
Strip the calendar tricks away and every one of these books presses on the same soft spot. None of us receive our life in a tidy sequence either, whatever we tell ourselves. We simply experience the shuffle at the ordinary speed and call it memory: the argument that only made sense fifteen years later, the friend we understood far too late, the version of a parent we would give anything to sit with again for one more hour. Oona just has the decency to make the muddle literal. What these novels offer, at their best, is the small consolation that a life lived out of order is still a life, and quite possibly a fuller one than the neat, chronological version we thought we were promised.
If you fancy staying in this exact emotional weather, I have spent twenty-odd books loitering in it. The ’86 Fix sends a fortysomething back to a single 1986 weekend to unpick where it all went sideways. And In Lieu of You hands a man on the edge of an ugly divorce a trip to 1996 and the day he first met his wife, with the option of never meeting her at all, though the life he swaps into might not turn out to be the upgrade he pictured. Both live in the same tender, slightly daft corner as Oona, only with more drizzle and fewer New Year’s Eve parties in New York.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Oona Out of Order about?
It follows Oona Lockhart, who blacks out at midnight on her nineteenth birthday and wakes as a fifty-one-year-old, then spends the rest of her existence being flung to a random year of her own life every New Year, living the whole thing wildly out of sequence while staying young on the inside. Margarita Montimore published the novel in 2020, and it became a Good Morning America Book Club pick.
What should I read if I loved Oona Out of Order?
Strong choices include In Five Years by Rebecca Serle, This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub, and The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. Each one takes a single life and dislocates it in time, and each cares far more about love, family, and friendship than about the mechanics of how the time-slip works.
Is This Time Tomorrow similar to Oona Out of Order?
Very. Emma Straub’s 2022 novel drops a fortysomething woman back into her sixteen-year-old life and reunites her with her younger, healthier father. Like Oona, it uses a person landing in the wrong stretch of her own timeline to write about family and the weight of time, and it leans warm and emotional rather than science-fiction heavy.
Are there British authors who write books like Oona Out of Order?
Yes. Matt Haig is British, and at the comic end of the shelf I write time-slip novels about ordinary people landing in the wrong part of their own lives, such as The ’86 Fix and In Lieu of You. British fiction has a particular fondness for the funny, wistful version of this idea, with the sci-fi turned right down.
Do you have to read Oona Out of Order as part of a series?
No. It is a complete standalone novel with its own beginning and ending, so you can pick it up without any prior reading. Margarita Montimore has written other novels, including Acts of Violet, if you want more of her work afterwards.