I've spent the best part of a decade asking this question for a living. Every time travel novel I've written starts from the same itch: if someone handed you a return ticket to your own past, which stop would you choose? Ask it out loud at the barber's and watch what happens. People go quiet. They stare into the middle distance like a dog hearing a crisp packet opened two rooms away. Then they name an age with alarming speed, which tells you they worked it out years ago and have simply been … continue reading
Time Travel
If you could go back, would you? Keith A Pearson on time-travel fiction: the genre behind The '86 Fix and the Echo Lane novels.
Books Like 11.22.63: 13 Novels for Stephen King’s Time Travel Fans
Few time travel novels carry the unique weight of Stephen King's 11.22.63. Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in modern Maine, discovers a portal at the back of a diner that leads precisely to 11:58 AM on September 9th, 1958. The diner's owner has used the portal for years with a single mission: stay in the past long enough to prevent Lee Harvey Oswald assassinating President Kennedy. When the owner falls ill, the mission passes to Jake. What follows takes nearly nine hundred pages. … continue reading
Time Travel Novels: The Ultimate Readers Guide
You're about to read another best-of-time-travel list. Welcome. Before you scroll, here's something worth knowing: most of these lists land in your search results from writers who've never plotted a time-travel novel. I have. Six of them, with another in the works. Over the past decade I've sold roughly a million books built on this premise, and across those years I've read perhaps a hundred others in the genre. That experience colours what follows. I hold strong opinions about which novels … continue reading
1990 UK Property Market: Cheap Houses, Brutal Interest, Hard Maths
I'm currently writing the third book in my Echo Lane series, set in an estate agency in 1990. That's led to a lot of research into the UK property market back then, and the numbers, frankly, threw me. We hear constantly that buying a house in 2026 has become impossible. There's truth in that. The deposits alone are enough to make a millennial weep into their oat milk. But the assumption underneath, that buying used to be a doddle, deserves a closer look. Spoiler: nobody had it easy. What … continue reading
The Best 1990s Time-Travel Novels (For Readers Who Remember the Dial-Up Tone)
If your formative memories include the dial-up screech, the agony of taping the Top 40 off Radio 1 only for Mark Goodier to talk over the outro, and the strange social currency of owning a MiniDisc player nobody else had, this list is for you. This isn't a vague roundup of time travel novels. These are books that drop you into the 1990s, or close enough to taste the Sunny D and feel the static off a Findus Crispy Pancake. I've split the list into three sections: modern British nostalgia (the … continue reading
The Best 1980s Time-Travel Novels (For Readers Who Miss the Mixtape Era)
If your heart still lives somewhere between a tape deck and Teletext, this list is for you. This isn't a vague roundup of time travel novels — this is specifically about books that drop you into the 1980s, or close enough to smell the hairspray. Walkmans, Top of the Pops, pre-internet Britain, and the quiet ache of wondering what you'd do differently if life handed you a do-over. I've split the list into three sections: modern British nostalgia (the bittersweet do-over novels), international … continue reading
Books About Going Back in Time to Fix Mistakes
We've all done it. Lain awake at 2am replaying a conversation, a decision, a single stupid moment that set your life on a different course. What if you could go back? Not to witness history or fight aliens — just to fix the thing that went wrong. To say the words you didn't say. To walk through the door you walked past. To not buy that can of Coke from a newsagent in 1986. That last one's mine. I've spent the best part of a decade writing novels about exactly this premise — ordinary people … continue reading