“What are the best British time travel books to read?” It is a question readers of my sort of fiction ask a lot, and I understand the pull completely. There is something very British about the whole genre. We rarely need a gleaming aluminium car or a laboratory full of blinking dials. Our lot tend to wake up in the wrong decade with a sense of disbelief and a haircut they’ve spent a lifetime trying to forget.
As a card-carrying member of the British time travel trade, I have opinions on this, so here is my honest, personal shortlist: the classics, a run of clever modern novels, and the scrappy indie wing the newspapers ignore and readers adore. One confession before we start. A few of these do not strictly travel through time at all; they relive it, or live straight through it without ageing. I have let them in because the best of the genre has always bent that rule, and because no one would appreciate me excluding Kate Atkinson.
Where the whole thing began
You cannot answer this question and leave out H. G. Wells. The Time Machine arrived in 1895 and more or less invented the vehicle, along with most of the vocabulary we still reach for. Wells sends his unnamed Time Traveller off to the year 802,701, where a soft, childlike people called the Eloi live in the shadow of the cannibalistic Morlocks below ground, and he smuggles a hard lump of Victorian class politics inside what looks like a boys’ adventure. It runs to barely a hundred pages, it’s genuinely eerie, and has outlived every critic who ever sniffed at it. Every writer further down this page owes H.G. a pint he can no longer collect.
The great British what-if
Give a British writer a time machine and the first instinct won’t involve a trip to see dinosaurs. They’d more likely nip back and fix history, then stand aghast as that tinkering slowly destroys the world. Stephen Fry’s Making History (1996) hands a Cambridge PhD student and an elderly Holocaust survivor the means to stop Adolf Hitler ever being born, which they duly manage, only for the twentieth century to conjure someone colder and cleverer to take the vacancy. It is funny, clever, and quietly appalled at its own premise, which is Fry all over.
Ben Elton pulls a related trick in Time and Time Again (2014). His hero, Hugh Stanton, a former soldier with nothing left to lose after a road accident takes his wife and children, travels back to 1914 to stop the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and unpick the First World War before it starts. Elton is better known for the sitcoms, yet the man can plot, and the slow, sickening realisation that meddling never delivers… no spoilers, but the ending splits opinions. Masively.
The same life, lived until it comes out right
Two of the finest British novels of the last fifteen years share a spine. Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (2013) opens on a snowy night in 1910 as Ursula Todd is born, dies before her first breath, and then, on the very same page, is born once more to begin a life she will lose and restart again and again while the century lurches towards its second world war. It sounds like a gimmick and reads like a miracle.
Claire North, the pen name of the British writer Catherine Webb, does something adjacent in The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014). Harry dies and wakes as a baby in 1919, every single time, holding on to all his memories, one of a hidden brotherhood forever looping through the same stretch of history. In his eleventh life a dying child brings word that the end of the world is creeping nearer with each generation. If that premise alone does not sell it to you, I cannot help you.
An honourable oddity: the man who forgot to age
Matt Haig’s How to Stop Time (2017) belongs here with an asterisk, because Tom Hazard does not travel through time so much as refuse to leave it. Born in 1581, he ages roughly a year for every thirteen or fourteen the rest of us clock up, so he has watched Shakespeare at work and shaken hands with Captain Cook, and he now teaches history to bored London teenagers who have no clue their new form tutor remembers the first performance at the Globe. The rule that governs his kind is plain and cruel: never fall in love. Haig, as ever, is really writing about grief, and about how long a life can feel when you spend it hiding.
History as a full-contact sport
Jodi Taylor’s Chronicles of St Mary’s kick off with Just One Damned Thing After Another (2013), which she self-published at the age of sixty before the series found a home and a fiercely loyal following. Her historians investigate the past in what they loftily call “contemporary time,” and would sooner arm-wrestle you than concede it amounts to time travel. They set off to observe great events armed with clipboards and good intentions, and come home scorched, hunted, or one team member lighter. This is British comedy with real teeth, and the death of a favourite will wind you the moment you drop your guard.
The indie wave the papers miss and the readers hoard
Here is the part the broadsheet lists always skip. A whole shelf of British time travel now comes from authors who publish themselves, shift books by the crateload, and never once trouble a literary editor. Adrian Cousins drops a grumpy modern divorcee into the summer of 1976 in Jason Apsley’s Second Chance, forty years of hindsight rattling round his skull with nowhere sensible to put it. Jason Ayres has built a whole fifteen-book universe, The Time Bubble, plus a run of standalone novels planted firmly in the 1980s, every one of them turning on how a single small nudge reshapes an entire life.
I write in that same corner, so I had better declare my interest now rather than pretend I wandered in by accident.
Why we keep going back
Notice what nearly every British entry has in common. On paper the stakes are colossal: saving the world, unpicking a war, cheating death itself. The beating heart of each one, though, is small and painfully familiar: a marriage gone quietly cold, a word left unsaid for the better part of thirty years. That, I have come to think, is the real reason we keep writing the stuff. We are not that fussed about the machine. We simply want one more go at the bits we fumbled.
Which is where, with as little shame as I can manage, I steer you towards my own shelf. The ’86 Fix hands Craig Pelling a single weekend back in 1986 to repair the life he quietly let slide. In Lieu of You sends a husband back to the day he first met his wife, with instructions to make sure the meeting never happens, then asks whether he truly wants what he wished for. And Tuned Out drops a frazzled young millennial into 1969 to find out whether his parents’ generation really had it easier. If you would like me to choose the right one for you, my Start Here page does precisely that. All three sit on Amazon UK and US, free in Kindle Unlimited, and read aloud on audio for good measure.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the best British time travel books to read?
A good British shortlist runs from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) through modern novels like Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Ben Elton’s Time and Time Again, and Stephen Fry’s Making History, to popular indie authors such as Adrian Cousins, Jason Ayres, and Keith A Pearson. Between them they cover classic science fiction, comedy, alternate history, and reliving-your-life drama.
What is generally considered the first time travel novel?
H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, published in 1895, is the novel usually credited with popularising the machine for travelling through time and much of the genre’s language. Earlier stories had toyed with time, but Wells set the template most later authors have followed.
Do British time travel books count if the character relives their life instead of travelling?
Many of the most loved ones work exactly that way. Life After Life and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August feature characters who die and restart rather than board a machine, and How to Stop Time follows a man who simply ages very slowly. Purists may object, but reliving and long-living stories sit comfortably beside classic time travel on most readers’ shelves.
Which British time travel books are funny?
For comedy, try Jodi Taylor’s Chronicles of St Mary’s, Stephen Fry’s Making History, and the indie novels of Adrian Cousins, Jason Ayres, and Keith A Pearson, which blend laughs with genuine emotion. British time travel has a long habit of mixing jokes with a lump in the throat.
Where should I start with Keith A Pearson’s time travel novels?
The ’86 Fix is the usual starting point: it sends an ordinary fortysomething back to 1986 for one weekend to fix his life. From there, In Lieu of You and Tuned Out show the range. The Start Here page on keithapearson.co.uk will suggest the best first book for your taste, and all are on Amazon UK and US, Kindle Unlimited, and audio.