This Is How You Lose the Time War
Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange letters—and fall in love in this thrilling and romantic book from award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. In the ashes of a dying world, Red finds a letter marked “Burn before reading. Signed, Blue.” So begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents in a war that stretches through the vast reaches of time and space. Red belongs to the Agency, a post-singularity technotopia. Blue belongs to Garden, a single vast consciousness embedded in all organic matter. Their pasts are bloody and their futures mutually exclusive. They have nothing in common—save that they’re the best, and they’re alone. Now what began as a battlefield boast grows into a dangerous game, one both Red and Blue are determined to win. Because winning’s what you do in war. Isn’t it? A tour de force collaboration from two powerhouse writers that spans the whole of time and space.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about This Is How You Lose the Time War
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Red of the techno-utopian Agency and Blue of the verdant Garden are rival agents fighting up and down the strands of time, each rewriting history for her own future.
Yes. This Is How You Lose the Time War won the Hugo, Nebula, and BSFA Awards in 2020. The novella's TikTok virality in 2022 brought it a second wave of readers years after publication.
Yes. This Is How You Lose the Time War is a sapphic time-traveling-rivals love story told through letters between two agents on opposing sides of a temporal war. The romance is central to the novella.
This Is How You Lose the Time War was written by Amal El-Mohtar, published in 2019 by Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers.
This Is How You Lose the Time War is 208 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, This Is How You Lose the Time War takes most readers 3 to 5 hours to finish.
This Is How You Lose the Time War is a standalone novel by Amal El-Mohtar, not part of a series.
This Is How You Lose the Time War is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.