Finn’s Rating    

This is How You Lose the Time War is a masterful interweaving of two authors' voices, bringing together a narrative that spans thousands of years and multiple realities and centering it around a single relationship. This thin little novel contains multitudes, as well as my highest recommendation.

"[An] exquisitely crafted tale...Part epistolary romance, part mind-blowing science fiction adventure, this dazzling story unfolds bit by bit, revealing layers of meaning as it plays with cause and effect, wildly imaginative technologies, and increasingly intricate wordplay...This short novel warrants multiple readings to fully unlock its complexities." --Publishers Weekly (starred review).

From award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone comes an enthralling, romantic novel spanning time and space about two time-traveling rivals who fall in love and must change the past to ensure their future.

Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandment finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading.

Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, becomes something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

Except the discovery of their bond would mean the death of each of them. There's still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win. That's how war works, right?

Cowritten by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space.

Amal El-Mohtar is a Nebula Award nominee and a two-time winner of the Rhysling Award for Best Short Poem, as well as the author of The Honey Month, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey. Her fiction and poems have appeared in multiple venues online and in print, including Strange Horizons, Apex, The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, Welcome to Bordertown, Stone Telling and Mythic Delerium.