Here are 86 books that Shattered Souls fans have personally recommended if you like
Shattered Souls.
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I was born and raised in Mississippi, where ink and river mud run through our veins in equal measure. My parents were readers, and thus, I followed in their footsteps. Before long, I was reading their library choices and mine and still running out of books before it was time to visit again. From the moment I laid eyes on Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody series, I was hooked on historical mysteries. It took me forty years of life to realize I had stories of my own to share. I now live in Oxford, England, with my husband, two daughters, three cats, and lots of shadowy corners for inspiration.
I am fairly convinced that Grace Burrowes is a time traveler, for I have never seen a modern author get period-specific language so right. Unlike all the other books on my list, the Lady Violet series does not include any murders.
Instead, Lady Violet’s penchant for solving “puzzles” made for a nice break from the more macabre. I got lost in the twisty details and adored the Agatha Christie-style reveal at the end of the book.
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
Like many others, and perhaps mostly the dreamers, I’ve had a lifelong fascination with time travel, along as many others, always wondering, what if? Plus, I have a passion for American history, mostly American Revolution history, always thinking, what if you could time travel back in time to witness history in the making, or travel to the future and witness the results of decisions made today. Plus, I have an obsession with a good mystery, mainly murder mysteries. I thoroughly enjoy a good murder mystery that has (I didn’t see that coming) twists, turns, and a few good red herrings. Which you can see by the books on my list.
This is one of the better time travel adventures that could make anyone a believer! Or at least make you wonder, at least it did for me. And I’m a real fan for a good time travel mystery.
If you’re a history buff, you’ll love the science of time travel mixing with the method of travel, as your sent back to the start of the American Revolution in Massachusetts. One spark to this intriguing story was the main characters are thrown off their initial course of testing their time-ship, hoping to travel just a couple years into the future only to find themselves over 200 years in the past. It’s a great adventure read.
A time-travel adventure that just might make you a believer. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells was fun, as was the enjoyable A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle and Jack Finney's delightful Time and Again. If you enjoyed these books, you’ll definitely want to read Mission in Time. However, after reading Mission in Time, this might be the first time you actually find yourself believing in time travel. Imagine being sent on a time-travel mission expecting to arrive in a certain period of time and finding yourself in a very different era—a major period in the history of…
I am an author of history books as well as children’s fiction. My books for Pen and Sword Publishing tell the stories of the places associated with Henry VIII, and with the Princes in the Tower, the boys who mysteriously disappeared from the Tower of London during the reign of King Richard III. So it was obvious that I should use my passion for late medieval and Tudor history when it came to deciding on a setting for my first children’s book; The Secret in the Tower is set during Henry Tudor’s invasion and his assumption of the English throne. I hope readers enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed researching and writing it!
Another book set amidst the colour and vibrancy of Elizabethan theatre – but I enjoyed this book particularly for its featuring of William Shakespeare himself as a character!
A young American actor comes to contemporary London to perform at the newly-built Globe theatre – and finds himself transported back in time to the first Globe theatre and the world of Shakespeare and his players. A plot against Queen Elizabeth I drives the action forward in this unusual time-slip adventure.
I lay very still, with all my senses telling me that I had gone mad. The plague? Nobody's had the plague for centuries . . .
Nathan Field, a talented young actor, arrives at the newly rebuilt Globe Theatre in London to play Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. As rehearsals begin, eerie echoes of the past begin to haunt Nat, and he falls sick with a mysterious sickness.
When he wakes, Nat finds himself in 1599, an actor at the original Globe - and his co-star is none other than the King of Shadows himself: William Shakespeare.
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
I've always been obsessed with time travel, which transcends science fiction and offers ways to experience and reinterpret history, explore philosophical ideas, comment on the past, and imagine the future. I love the possibilities for humor and character development and plot twists across every genre and audience. One feature of all of the books I’ve chosen for this list is that they’re about contemporary young people and grounded in real lives, and time travel happens in all sorts of ways: through magical, mysterious forces, an app, tap shoes, a diary, a rideshare vehicle. I’m less interested in imaginary worlds and more fascinated by the way time travel can shed light on our own times.
It may be obvious by now that I’m drawn to stories about complex characters, stories that aren’t afraid to be both humorous and gut wrenching.
Fourteen-year-old Nephele is another protagonist whose voice is immediately endearing, refreshing, and compelling. She’s an outsider, a brilliant math and science nerd who struggles to adjust socially to high school.
She invents a time travel app in order to relive her freshman year and do it right—but instead she becomes stuck in a time loop for ten years, encountering characters and surprises that help her to overcome her loneliness and find herself.
I love it that this book celebrates a smart, quirky character as she learns to look more deeply into her life and navigate her world.
When Nephele has a terrible freshman year, she does the only logical thing for a math prodigy like herself: she invents a time travel app so she can go back and do it again (and again, and again) in this funny love story, Groundhog Day for the iPhone generation.
Fourteen-year-old Nephele used to have friends. Well, she had a friend. That friend made the adjustment to high school easily, leaving Nephele behind in the process. And as Nephele looks ahead, all she can see is three very lonely years.
Nephele is also a whip-smart lover of math and science, so…
I have read SF, starting with the classic Jules Verne, since I was a young teenager. Soon I discovered Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke, Ellison, Zelazny, Dick, all of whom lit up my mind with wondrous and sometimes dangerous visions of possible futures. During the COVID shutdown period, when our university went to online instruction, my wife convinced me to try my hand at writing in my favorite genre. Previously I had written a textbook, How Films Tell Stories (listed here at Shepherd), but never any fiction, so I wrote Temporal Gambit, a time-travel adventure combined with themes of first contact, artificial intelligence, and alternate history. I then followed it with a sequel. I hope you enjoy.
Bradbury remains my favorite author of all time, and this collection of short stories contains some of his best work, including my favorite time travel tale, “A Sound of Thunder.”
Imagine an avid hunter given the opportunity to stalk the king of prehistoric beasts, the monstrous T-Rex. Then imagine that things don’t go exactly as planned. The world will never be the same.
I’ve always looked at the world with a sense of wonder. As a child, I was drawn to the magical and the fantastical, but a budding fascination with the scientific method eventually led me to discover the beauty and wonder of the natural world. I assumed science fiction would scratch that itch, but too many genre novels left me feeling empty, like they were missing something essential—what it feels like to be human. Novels that combine a wonder of the world with an intimate concern for character hit just the right spot for me. Maybe they will for you as well.
This book is a literary novel set in part on the Moon. That’s not a sentence you’ll read often, which is a big part of why I love this novel—it’s not what I expected, even though there’s a big hint in the title.
Like many readers, my introduction to Emily St. John Mandel was her post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven. In that story, the most interesting characters aren’t concerned with simple survival…if they are going to fight to live, they want a culture worth fighting for. When I picked this book up, I deliberately chose not to read the story summary and was completely caught off guard by how the novel unfolded. Typically, stories questioning time and our perception of reality do so by sending the protagonist on a dangerous quest looking for answers.
Like all my favorite novels, the scope is intimate and vast in this one. The story…
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.
One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads
“One of [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
Growing up, I devoured books from two authors, the grande dame of mystery, Agatha Christie, and the science fiction great, Isaac Asimov. Luckily for me, both were prolific. That combination explains what I write, best described as the sleuth story meets speculative fiction. As a reader, when it comes to mysteries I’m always on the lookout for the out of this world. Which doesn't necessarily mean murder on a spaceship, though it can! What breaks the mold could be an unlikely detective, an inventive premise, an unusual setting, a narrative that surprises… Here are five such tales.
Rob Hart’sThe Paradox Hotel is bursting at the seams with interesting characters. The hotel of the title serves the needs of wealthy time tourists on their way to and from the nearby Einstein port. Working security is one January Cole. Her only friend an AI drone, January is grieving a lost love and fast succumbing to a time-travel illness that has her becoming unmoored from the present. Things go from bad to worse when she stumbles on a dead body that only she can see—turns out, it’s quite tricky to solve a murder that hasn’t happened yet. Surprisingly poignant, with moments that made me laugh out loud, and some inventive time travel shenanigans.
“Time travel, murder, corruption, restless baby dinosaurs, and a snarky robot named Ruby collide in this excellent, noir-inflected, humor-infused, science-fiction thriller.”—The Boston Globe
An impossible crime. A detective on the edge of madness. The future of time travel at stake. From the author of The Warehouse . . .
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, Kirkus Reviews
January Cole’s job just got a whole lot harder.
Not that running security at the Paradox was ever really easy. Nothing’s simple at a hotel where the ultra-wealthy tourists arrive costumed for a dozen different time periods, all eagerly waiting…
I have read SF, starting with the classic Jules Verne, since I was a young teenager. Soon I discovered Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke, Ellison, Zelazny, Dick, all of whom lit up my mind with wondrous and sometimes dangerous visions of possible futures. During the COVID shutdown period, when our university went to online instruction, my wife convinced me to try my hand at writing in my favorite genre. Previously I had written a textbook, How Films Tell Stories (listed here at Shepherd), but never any fiction, so I wrote Temporal Gambit, a time-travel adventure combined with themes of first contact, artificial intelligence, and alternate history. I then followed it with a sequel. I hope you enjoy.
One of the best SF novels I’ve read in the last 25 years.
The story takes you on a journey through multiple, shifting realities as different time travelers compete to change history to their advantage without wiping out everything and everyone they know and love.
Unlike so many books these days, this one never drags or bores with unnecessary background details but keeps moving from one catastrophic change to another. Highly recommended.
When Nigel Walden is fourteen, the UNHAPPENINGS begin. His first girlfriend disappears the day after their first kiss with no indication she ever existed. This retroactive change is the first of many only he seems to notice.
Several years later, when Nigel is visited by two people from his future, he hopes they can explain why the past keeps rewriting itself around him. But the enigmatic young guide shares very little, and the haggard, incoherent, elderly version of himself is even less reliable. His search for answers takes him fifty-two years forward in time, where he finds himself stranded and…
I began my own writing journey in 2007. I skipped many HS classes just to stay home and read. I want to know the ending of a story. I want happy ending. Life is hard, but when I have the ability to write the stories I write with the ending that so many are deprived of, at least I know I can find it in a book of my own choosing. That is my love of romance.
Back to romance! This is a time travel story about a woman who is keeping something vital from her family.
She’s the middle child and suffers from that insecurity of not quite having found her place. She is seriously depressed. But the moon, an eclipse, timing, the house she’s in… all play a part in this excellent tale that brings the medieval times front and center.
The author really delivers a knock-out punch to the gut and hope really is lost until this hero comes to his senses. But when he does… well, suffice it to say, you won’t be disappointed.
On New Year’s Eve, she tumbles 700 years back in time--and into the bed of a darkly dangerous knight.
Sir Gaston de Varennes wanted a docile bride who would fit into his plans for vengeance and justice, but a trick of time finds him married to a thoroughly modern American lady who turns his castle, his life, and his heart upside down. Will her desperate secret tear them apart after only a few bittersweet weeks of stolen passion—or will they conquer mistrust, treachery, and time itself to discover a love that spans the centuries?
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
I have read SF, starting with the classic Jules Verne, since I was a young teenager. Soon I discovered Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke, Ellison, Zelazny, Dick, all of whom lit up my mind with wondrous and sometimes dangerous visions of possible futures. During the COVID shutdown period, when our university went to online instruction, my wife convinced me to try my hand at writing in my favorite genre. Previously I had written a textbook, How Films Tell Stories (listed here at Shepherd), but never any fiction, so I wrote Temporal Gambit, a time-travel adventure combined with themes of first contact, artificial intelligence, and alternate history. I then followed it with a sequel. I hope you enjoy.
This clever novel takes the old premise, “What would happen if you went into the past and met yourself?” and magnifies it by multiple degrees.
Returning to the time of the great Chicago fire, the hero ends up meeting several past and/or future versions of himself, each time making his situation more complicated. A quick, enjoyable read.
