How did the two authors divide the writing of the book?

Max Gladstone wrote all of the chapters from the perspective of Red, while Amal El-Mohtar wrote all of the chapters from the perspective of Blue.

Is there a film or television adaptation of this book?

While no screen adaptation has been released, the rights have been optioned for television with the authors attached to write the scripts.

This Is How You Lose the Time War

Jay V · 2026-08-24T14:32:12.000000Z

Quite cool seeing love blossom through letters. But wow, it was confusing. The poetic prose was cool at first and there’s some really beautiful quotes in this but it was so amped up that half the time I felt like my brain was lagging behind. I genuinely started to think I was dumb because I didn’t fully understand what was going on for most of it. It’s super fast paced and there is barely any world building, and yes I get that it’s more about the relationship than the mechanics of the world, but I feel like I would’ve enjoyed it more if some bits were fleshed out and we got more detail on how these god damn letters were made. That said, the small glimpses we do get of the world are actually really cool.

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.

Prose complexity: 7/10

Romantic Reflective

Epistolary Enemies to Lovers Forbidden Love Rivals Slow Burn Time Loop

Authors

A

Amal El-Mohtar

Amal El-Mohtar is a Canadian poet and writer of speculative fiction.

M

Max Gladstone

Max Gladstone is an American fantasy and science fiction author, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and raised in Sewanee, Tennessee. He studied Chinese at Yale and lived in China from 2006 to 2008 as a Yale-China Fellow. His debut, Three Parts Dead (2012), began the Craft Sequence, urban fantasy in which lawyers, gods and souls-as-currency drive the plot; the Craft Wars series continues it. With Amal El-Mohtar he co-wrote the epistolary novella This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019), which won...

Red (This Is How You Lose the Time War)Protagonist

An elite agent of the technological Agency, who begins a secret correspondence with her opposite number across the strands of the time war.

Blue (This Is How You Lose the Time War)Protagonist

An agent of the organic Garden and Red's rival, whose taunting replies turn into a forbidden love.

All characters in This Is How You Lose the Time War

Frequently asked questions

How did the two authors divide the writing of the book?
Max Gladstone wrote all of the chapters from the perspective of Red, while Amal El-Mohtar wrote all of the chapters from the perspective of Blue.
Is there a film or television adaptation of this book?
While no screen adaptation has been released, the rights have been optioned for television with the authors attached to write the scripts.