17 Best Time Travel Historical Fiction Books

Every historical novel is a kind of time machine. Time travel novels simply make it literal: they take a modern person, drop them into the past and let us see it through their astonished eyes. The best of them are as carefully researched as any historical novel, and the shock of arrival makes the past feel more real, not less.

This list gathers the best time travel historical fiction in the order of the history it visits, from the Bronze Age to Dallas in 1963. It runs from Mark Twain’s comic classic to Hugo winners, romance, thrillers and a recent bestseller that sends the past to us instead.

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What Counts as Time Travel Historical Fiction?

For this list, a novel has to send its characters to a real historical period, or bring someone from the past into ours, and treat that history with care. Books that use time travel only for science fiction ideas, with no real interest in the past, are left out.

Time travel stories often change history, and some of these books do. If what you want is a whole world where history went differently, see our guide to Historical Fiction vs Alternate History and our list of the Best Alternate History Books.

Quick Picks

If you want	Read
The most famous time travel romance	Outlander
A powerful classic about slavery	Kindred
The Middle Ages, in a book that will break your heart	Doomsday Book
A comedy of manners on the Thames	To Say Nothing of the Dog
A thriller	Timeline
Old New York	Time and Again
A modern bestseller	The Ministry of Time
Saving JFK	11/22/63

The Ancient World

1. Island in the Sea of Time by S. M. Stirling (1998)

Setting: Nantucket and the Bronze Age world, around 1250 BC

In March 1998, a mysterious dome of light surrounds the island of Nantucket. When it fades, the island, its people and a Coast Guard training ship, the Eagle, have been thrown back to the Bronze Age, around the time of the Trojan War. Cut off from the modern world, the islanders have to work out how to survive.

Stirling’s novel is less about one traveller than about a whole community, and it is full of practical detail about farming, trade and the Bronze Age peoples the islanders meet. It is the first book of the Nantucket trilogy. For more novels set in this period, see our Ancient World hub.

Perfect for: Readers who like big casts and survival stories.

2. Household Gods by Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove (1999)

Setting: Carnuntum, a Roman frontier town on the Danube, second century AD

Nicole Gunther-Perrin is a Los Angeles lawyer and single mother, worn down by her job, her ex-husband and her colleagues. One night she makes a wistful wish to a plaque of the Roman gods Liber and Libera. She wakes in the body of a widowed tavern keeper in Carnuntum, in the reign of Marcus Aurelius.

Nicole had always imagined the Roman world as a more civilised place. Tarr and Turtledove show her, in vivid and often grim detail, what daily life on the frontier was really like. See our Harry Turtledove author page for his other books, and our Best Ancient Rome Historical Fiction list for more Roman novels.

Perfect for: Readers who want the Roman world without the romance.

Late Antiquity and King Arthur

3. Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp (1939)

Setting: Rome, 535 AD

In 1938, Martin Padway, an American archaeologist, is visiting the Pantheon in Rome when lightning strikes. He finds himself in 535 AD, in a Rome ruled by the Goths, on the eve of a long and ruinous war. All he has is his knowledge of history, and he sets out to survive and to stop the Dark Ages from coming.

De Camp’s novel first appeared in a magazine in 1939 and as a book in 1941. It is witty, clever and full of real history, and it inspired generations of later time travel stories, including several on this list.

Perfect for: Readers who enjoy a clever hero with nothing but his wits.

4. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain (1889)

Setting: Camelot, sixth century

Hank Morgan is a factory superintendent from Hartford, Connecticut. A blow to the head in a workplace fight knocks him out, and he wakes in King Arthur’s Britain, where Sir Kay captures him and takes him to Camelot. Hank sets out to remake the medieval world with nineteenth century know how.

Twain’s novel is funny, then sharp, then much darker than its reputation suggests. It is a satire of chivalry, of the Church and of Hank’s own faith in progress. In the UK it was first published as A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. Our Best Arthurian Historical Fiction list has more books set in Camelot.

Perfect for: Readers who want the classic that started it all.

The Middle Ages

5. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (1992)

Setting: Oxford in the mid twenty first century, and an English village in the fourteenth century

In the Oxford of the future, historians travel in time to study the past. Kivrin Engle, a young student, persuades the university to send her to the Middle Ages, despite the fears of her tutor, Mr Dunworthy. Just after she leaves, the technician who sent her collapses with a mysterious illness, and Oxford is put under quarantine. In the past, Kivrin falls ill as soon as she arrives.

Doomsday Book won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award, and it is one of the most moving novels on this list. Willis brings the medieval village and its people vividly to life, and the parallel stories in the two centuries build to an ending few readers forget. See our Medieval Europe hub for more.

Perfect for: Readers who want to be moved to tears.

6. The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier (1969)

Setting: Cornwall, the present day and the early fourteenth century

Dick Young borrows an old Cornish house, Kilmarth, from his friend Magnus, a scientist. He agrees to test an experimental drug that sends his mind back to the same landscape in the fourteenth century. He can watch the people there but cannot touch them, and he grows more and more absorbed in their lives.

Du Maurier uses the real history of the area around Tywardreath, and the drug soon becomes a dangerous habit. The novel is both a medieval drama and a sharp study of a man escaping his own life. See our Daphne du Maurier author page for her other historical novels.

Perfect for: Readers who like gothic suspense.

7. Timeline by Michael Crichton (1999)

Setting: The Dordogne, France, 1357

A team of historians is excavating a medieval site in France. They find that the tech company funding them knows more about their dig than it should. When their professor disappears and a message from him turns up in the six hundred year old ruins, his students learn the company has found a way to reach fourteenth century France, and they go back to bring him home.

Timeline is a fast paced thriller, set during the Hundred Years’ War, with knights, sieges and castles described in loving detail. It was made into a film in 2003.

Perfect for: Readers who want a page turner.

The Tudors and the Jacobites

8. A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley (1939)

Setting: A Derbyshire farmhouse, early 1580s

Penelope Taberner Cameron, a girl from Chelsea, is sent to recover her health at her relatives’ old farmhouse, Thackers, in Derbyshire. There she begins slipping back into the sixteenth century. She is drawn into the lives of the Babington family, and into a plan by Anthony Babington to free Mary, Queen of Scots, imprisoned nearby.

Uttley, best known for her Little Grey Rabbit stories, wrote this for young readers, but it is loved by adults too. It is gentle, wistful and full of the sights and smells of Elizabethan country life. The BBC adapted it in 1978. For more from this period, see our Best Tudor Historical Fiction list.

Perfect for: Younger readers and anyone who loves a quiet, beautiful book.

9. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (1991)

Setting: Inverness and the Highlands, 1743

Just after the Second World War, former army nurse Claire Randall is on a second honeymoon in the Highlands with her husband Frank. She touches a stone in the ancient circle at Craigh na Dun and wakes in 1743, caught between English Redcoats and the Highland clans.

Outlander is the most popular time travel novel ever written, a mix of romance, adventure and real history that has sold millions of copies. It won the RITA Award for best romance, and the Starz TV series began in 2014. In the UK it was first published as Cross Stitch. Our Outlander reading order lists the whole series, and our Best Scottish Historical Fiction list has more set in Scotland.

Perfect for: Readers who want romance and adventure in equal measure.

The Nineteenth Century

10. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (1979)

Setting: Los Angeles, 1976, and a Maryland plantation, early nineteenth century

On her twenty sixth birthday, Dana Franklin, a young Black writer, is unpacking in her new home in California when she is suddenly pulled back in time to a riverbank in Maryland. She saves a drowning white boy, Rufus, the son of a slaveholder. Then she is pulled back again, and again.

Kindred is one of the most powerful novels ever written about American slavery. Butler uses time travel to show a modern woman, with modern ideas of freedom, facing the full horror of the plantation. It was adapted as a graphic novel in 2017 and as a TV series in 2022.

Perfect for: Readers who want a short, unforgettable classic.

11. Time and Again by Jack Finney (1970)

Setting: New York City, January 1882

Si Morley, a New York advertising artist, is recruited into a secret government project. It is testing whether a person can reach the past through self hypnosis, by living in a carefully recreated period setting. Si agrees to try, and steps out into the Manhattan of 1882.

Finney fills the novel with old photographs and drawings, and his New York of horse drawn sleighs and gaslight is a delight. Many readers rank it among the best time travel novels ever written.

Perfect for: Readers who love old cities.

12. To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis (1997)

Setting: Oxford in the future, Coventry in 1940 and the Thames in 1888

Time travelling historian Ned Henry is worn out from searching the bombed ruins of Coventry Cathedral for a hideous Victorian vase, the “bishop’s bird stump”, for the formidable Lady Schrapnell’s rebuilding project. Suffering from time lag, he is sent to 1888 to rest. He has one small errand: return an object that should never have left its own time.

Set in the same world as Doomsday Book but completely different in tone, this is a comic novel in the spirit of Victorian humour, full of boating trips, seances and romantic mix ups. It won the Hugo Award. See our Victorian Era hub for more.

Perfect for: Readers who want to laugh.

13. Somewhere in Time by Richard Matheson (1975)

Setting: Hotel del Coronado, California, 1896

Richard Collier, a thirty six year old screenwriter, is spending what he expects to be his last days at the Hotel del Coronado. There he falls for a photograph of Elise McKenna, a stage actress who performed at the hotel in the 1890s. He resolves to will himself back in time to meet her.

Matheson’s novel was first published as Bid Time Return and won the World Fantasy Award. It was retitled after the 1980 film with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, which became a cult classic.

Perfect for: Readers who want a romantic, bittersweet story.

14. The Map of Time by Félix J. Palma (2008)

Setting: London, 1896

In Victorian London, Andrew Harrington is about to take his own life out of grief for Mary Kelly, a victim of Jack the Ripper. Then his cousin suggests a visit to a man who claims he can travel in time. Two more linked stories follow, drawing in a restless young woman and the novelist H. G. Wells himself.

Palma is a Spanish writer, and The Map of Time won Spain’s Ateneo de Sevilla Prize. It is a playful, clever novel that keeps asking whether the time travel is real. It is the first of his Victorian trilogy.

Perfect for: Readers who like stories within stories.

The Twentieth Century

15. Blackout by Connie Willis (2010)

Setting: Oxford in 2060, and Britain in 1940

In 2060, three Oxford historians, Polly, Michael and Merope, travel back to study the Second World War. One is to watch the evacuation of Dunkirk, one the Blitz, and one evacuated children in the countryside. Once they are in 1940, they find their way home is not working.

Blackout and its second half were published the same year and won the Hugo and Nebula Awards together as a single novel, so plan to read both. Willis captures the courage and humour of ordinary people in wartime Britain beautifully. See our WW2 hub for more.

Perfect for: Readers who love novels about the home front.

16. 11/22/63 by Stephen King (2011)

Setting: Maine and Texas, 1958 to 1963

Jake Epping is a high school English teacher in Maine. His dying friend Al shows him a secret: in the storeroom of Al’s diner is a portal to 1958. Al asks Jake to take on his mission, to live in the past for five years and stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

King’s novel is a thriller, a love story and a loving portrait of America in the late 1950s. It won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for mystery and thriller, and Hulu adapted it as a miniseries in 2016.

Perfect for: Readers who like big, absorbing books.

The Past Comes to Us

17. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (2024)

Setting: Present day London, with visitors from the past

A British civil servant takes a well paid job with a secret new government ministry that has found a way to travel in time. Her role is to act as a “bridge” for Commander Graham Gore, a Victorian naval officer rescued from Franklin’s doomed Arctic expedition, and help him adjust to modern life. The two share a house, and the experiment soon gets complicated.

The Ministry of Time turns the usual story round, bringing the past into our world. It was a finalist for the Hugo Award and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2025. Gore was a real officer on the expedition, and Bradley’s affection for him shines through.

Perfect for: Readers who want something witty, romantic and new.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best time travel historical fiction book?

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon is the most popular, and the best start for readers who like romance and adventure. For a literary classic, read Kindred by Octavia E. Butler. For science fiction with real historical depth, Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book is hard to beat.

Is Outlander a time travel book?

Yes. Claire Randall travels from just after the Second World War to the Scottish Highlands of 1743 by touching a standing stone. Time travel is the starting point, but most of the series is historical fiction, set in Scotland, France and colonial America.

What was the first time travel novel set in history?

Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, published in 1889, is one of the earliest and most famous. It came out six years before H. G. Wells’s famous time machine story, which sends its traveller into the future rather than the past.

What are the best Connie Willis books to start with?

Doomsday Book is the best start. It is moving and self contained. To Say Nothing of the Dog is set in the same world but is a comedy, and Blackout, with its second half, covers Britain in the Second World War. The books can be read in any order.

Are there time travel novels set in the Middle Ages?

Several. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis is set in an English village in the fourteenth century, Timeline by Michael Crichton in France during the Hundred Years’ War, and The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier in medieval Cornwall.

Is time travel fiction the same as alternate history?

Not quite. Time travel fiction sends a character into the past, and the history may or may not change. Alternate history imagines a world where history went differently, with or without time travel. Some books, such as Lest Darkness Fall, are both.

What should I read after this list?

For more about the periods these books visit, see our Medieval Europe, Victorian Era and WW2 hubs. Readers who enjoy the history changing should try our Best Alternate History Books list, and Outlander fans will find more on our Best Scottish Historical Fiction list.