This Is How You Lose the Time War

Two agents, Red and Blue, serve opposing sides of a sprawling war fought up and down the threads of time — Red for the sleek, technological Agency, Blue for the organic, tangled Garden. Each is the best in the field at reshaping history to favor her side's future, and each begins to notice the other's handiwork left, tauntingly, at the scene.

What starts as a rival's taunt becomes a secret correspondence, smuggled across centuries and universes in messages hidden inside lava, tree rings, and the bones of extinct animals. As Red and Blue write to each other across strands of time they were each sent to unravel, admiration curdles into obsession and then into a love that could unmake them both — a betrayal of everything their sides have trained them to be.

Told in lush, intertwining letters between its two rival narrators, this epistolary novella by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is a genre-blending work of time-war science fiction and doomed romance, prized for its dense, poetic prose and the tenderness it finds inside an impossible, planet-spanning conflict.