The complete list of 145 time travel books, from H.G. Wells to Stephen King, with the movie and TV adaptations based on them.
Time travel is one of fiction's most durable ideas: give a character a way to step out of the present and every genre opens up, from hard science fiction and alternate history to romance, comedy, and children's adventure. This list gathers 145 time travel novels, novellas, and short stories, arranged alphabetically, spanning everything from Samuel Madden's 1733 curiosity Memoirs of the Twentieth Century to modern classics like Kindred, Doomsday Book, and 11/22/63.
Where a book has been adapted for the screen, we've paired it with its movie or TV version, including the director and release year, so you can decide whether to read the book first or see how filmmakers handled the paradoxes. Use it as a reading checklist, a movie-night guide, or both.
The most acclaimed picks on this list include H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, which defined the genre, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Octavia Butler's Kindred, and Connie Willis's Hugo-winning Doomsday Book. For more recent favorites, readers consistently recommend Stephen King's 11/22/63, Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, and Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series.
Yes — it is widely considered one of Stephen King's best novels and a standout of modern time travel fiction. It follows a teacher who finds a portal to 1958 and sets out to stop the Kennedy assassination, blending historical detail, romance, and suspense. At around 850 pages it is a commitment, but most readers find it moves quickly; it was also adapted as the 2016 miniseries 11.22.63.
More than twenty books on this list have screen adaptations, including The Time Machine (2002), Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), Timeline (2003), A Sound of Thunder (2005), and The Time Traveler's Wife (2009). Richard Matheson's Bid Time Return became the cult romance Somewhere in Time (1980), and Karl Alexander's Time After Time was filmed by Nicholas Meyer in 1979. Diana Gabaldon's Outlander and Stephen King's 11/22/63 were both adapted as TV series.
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