Back Cover Blurb:
From award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone comes an enthralling, romantic novel (This Is How You Lose the Time War) spanning time and space about two time-traveling rivals who fall in love and must change the past to ensure their future.
Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.
Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war.
“There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never – and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.”
Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War
“She climbs upthread and down; she braids and unbraids history’s hair.”
Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War
This book is heavy on the prose and light on defined plot points, but I enjoyed the romance and whimsy. It let me occupy the head space of being newly in love when you read this kind of shit back and forth to each other, seeing the comedy and romance in every tragedy and the tragedy in every comedy and romance. If you yearn to feel gorgeous words tumble through your mind, body, and soul, this is the book for you: sardonic, sapphic, spy vs. spy sci/fi.