Who hasn’t thought at one time or another about how exciting it would be to travel through time? And who, following that thought, hasn’t come face to face with the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in time travel? Like, if your father dies sometime in his childhood, does that mean you won’t be born? Or would you just not be you? Or if one thing in the past is changed—one simple thing, as in Ray Bradbury’s remarkable short story “A Sound of Thunder”—is the present altered irrevocably?

• Read any of these books on this page? Share a comment or review.

• Recommend another book about time travel!

Writers have explored these questions ever since H. G. Wells published his classic time-travel novel The Time Machine and Mark Twain took his Connecticut Yankee and put him in King Arthur’s court, but here are some others you might enjoy as well:

Philip E. Baruth’s The X President

Darryl Brock’s If I Never Get Back

Octavia Butler’s Kindred

Charles Dickinson’s A Shortcut in Time

Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand

Jack Finney’s Time and Again (I’ve never met anyone who didn’t love this novel)

Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander

Ken Grimwood’s Replay

Robert A. Heinlein’s Time for the Stars and The Door into Summer (have you ever wondered how Leonardo da Vinci dreamed up ideas that it wouldn’t be practical to implement until hundreds of years after his death? Think about a misplaced time traveler named Leonard Vincent. . . )

Richard Matheson’s Somewhere in Time

Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife

Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time

John Varley’s Millennium

Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog

Robert Charles Wilson’s The Chronoliths