This Is How You Lose the Time War Review — Is It Worth Reading?

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Verdict: A 200-page epistolary love story between rival time agents that swept every novella award of its year, undercut by prose so dense that a large minority of readers cannot find the story inside it.

Best for: Readers who want language as the main event, enemies-to-lovers built entirely at a distance, and a book they can finish in an afternoon and argue about for a year.

Heat level: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5 — romance.io’s “glimpses and kisses”; the leads barely meet)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.7/5 — a 3.82 Goodreads average across 365,401 ratings, the most polarised book on our list)

Tropes: Enemies to lovers, epistolary romance, time travel, forbidden love, secret correspondence, rival agents, insta-love, dual POV, star-crossed, hopeful ending.

This Is How You Lose the Time War is a novella by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, a standalone published by Saga Press on 16 July 2019, set across every braided strand of history in a war between two mutually exclusive futures, and built on the collision between Red, an agent of the technological Agency, and Blue, an agent of the organic Garden — who begin leaving each other taunting letters in the wreckage of the timelines they have just destroyed.

It holds a 3.82 average across 365,401 Goodreads ratings and a 3.98 across 152,924 StoryGraph reviews, and it won the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus, the BSFA and the Ignyte in the novella categories — effectively a clean sweep. It also has 12% of its ratings at one or two stars, roughly triple the rate of anything else on our sapphic fiction list. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is This Is How You Lose the Time War About?

This is a novella and it is structurally a correspondence, not a novel with letters in it, and knowing that in advance changes everything. Roughly two hundred pages alternate between short third-person sections and the letters themselves, and the letters are the point: the plot happens between them, mostly off the page, and the war that supplies the title is never explained in any operational sense. The book is not withholding the war to be clever — it simply is not interested in it. What it is interested in is what two people become through the act of writing to each other.

Red is introduced through victory: she is the Agency’s best, post-human, efficient, standing on a battlefield she has just won. Blue is introduced through provocation — a letter left in the ash that says, essentially, that Red is not as good as she thinks. Neither woman has a surname, a face or a stable body; both are written by a different author, with Gladstone writing Red and El-Mohtar writing Blue, drafting in reply to each other. That is the origin of the book’s texture and, as it happens, of its most common criticism.

What Makes This Sapphic Time-Travel Novella Work

• The letter-delivery conceit: The most-cited invention in the book — messages encoded in tree rings, in lava, in the sting of bees, in a seed. Readers remember these years later when they remember nothing else about the plot.
• The prose: Starred by both Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and the single most-praised feature in reader reviews. It is also the single most-complained-about feature, which is the whole story of this book.
• Intimacy without proximity: An enemies-to-lovers arc in which the two never spend meaningful time in the same place. 77% of StoryGraph readers experience it as character-driven, against 2% who call it plot-driven.
• Brevity: Around two hundred pages doing what most authors would take six hundred to attempt, which is also why it spreads so easily by word of mouth.
• Rereadability: Publishers Weekly‘s starred review said outright that it warrants multiple readings, and the letters do genuinely reconfigure once you know where they are going.

Book Synopsis

Two futures are at war, and neither can survive the other. The Agency has made itself out of technology and hive-minded efficiency; the Garden has made itself out of roots and pollen and long slow growth. Both send agents up and down the strands of history to nudge events — a battle lost here, a letter delivered there — so that their own version of tomorrow becomes the one that happens.

Red is the Agency’s finest. Blue is the Garden’s. They have been ruining each other’s work for a very long time. Then Red finds a letter in the ruins of a battlefield she has just won, addressed to her, mocking her, signed by her opposite number. She writes back. The correspondence continues — through eras, through disguises, through the impossible logistics of leaving a message where only one person in all of history could find it.

What starts as a taunt becomes a game, then a confession, then something that would get both of them executed. The question the book spends its second half on is not whether they will be caught. It is what two agents built entirely out of loyalty to their own futures are prepared to do when they discover they want a different one.

My Review

The conceit is the achievement, and it is genuinely unlike anything else. Red and Blue cannot meet, cannot be seen corresponding, and cannot leave anything that a surveillance apparatus spanning all of time would notice — so they write in tree rings, in the chemistry of a volcano, in the pattern of a bee sting, in the taste of a cup of tea. Every letter is a puzzle of delivery before it is a message, and the escalation of those puzzles is the escalation of the relationship. That is a formal solution to a romance problem, and I cannot think of another book that has found one this elegant.

The second strength is that the co-authorship is doing structural work rather than being a curiosity. Gladstone wrote Red’s letters, El-Mohtar wrote Blue’s, and they drafted in reply to each other from an outline loose enough that they were genuinely surprised. You can feel that in the correspondence: the letters answer each other rather than performing an answer, and the escalation has the slightly unbalanced quality of a real exchange. Very few epistolary novels manage that, because usually one person is writing both sides.

It is also the book most often produced as evidence in a long-running argument about whether men should be writing sapphic romance at all — we went through the research on that question in Can Men Write Lesbian Romance?

Where it struggles is legibility, and this is the dominant complaint rather than my own resistance — it is also, unusually, almost entirely absent from the professional reception, which was close to unanimous praise. The mechanism readers describe is precise: the prose stacks metaphor on metaphor with very few concrete referents, so you can parse any individual sentence and still be unable to extract what happened. The recurring coinages are metaphor hell and word salad. Stacked on that are three related problems. The first is that there is no discernible plot — the epistolary frame plus non-linear time-jumping removes cause and effect, and the war is never explained, so between letters there is nothing to hold. The second is that Red and Blue are not distinguishable, which is a real irony given the co-authorship: both write in the same elevated register, and readers report checking the header to know whose letter they are in, which undercuts the enemies premise because the two sides do not feel different. The third is that the romance is asserted rather than dramatised — the leap from rivals to world-abandoning love happens between letters, and readers who do not supply that connective tissue themselves find the declarations unearned.

There is a fifth complaint worth naming separately, because it explains the shape of the ratings better than any of the others: readers report feeling stupid. Not bored — excluded, as though they had walked in on a private joke between two writers. That is an unusual thing to see at scale in reviews, and it is the honest reason a book with five major awards sits at 3.82.

The expectation worth resetting is what the viral recommendation implies. The tweet that made this a bestseller in 2023 told people to read it blind because it is only two hundred pages, and a great many did, without knowing they were picking up an award-winning literary novella built out of dense figurative language. If you want plot, calibrate now. If you were told it is a lesbian time-travel romance, that is true, and it is nothing like what those words usually mean.

My honest note: A formally brilliant novella that is also a genuine gamble, and the gamble is whether its language reads to you as music or as fog. Read the first ten pages before you commit — unusually for a book, that sample will tell you the whole answer.

Element	In This Is How You Lose the Time War
Central relationship	Red & Blue — rival agents of two mutually exclusive futures, in love entirely by correspondence
Core tropes	Enemies to lovers, epistolary romance, time travel, forbidden love, secret correspondence, star-crossed
Setting	Every strand of history, contested between the technological Agency and the organic Garden
Heat level	1/5 — romance.io’s “glimpses and kisses”; the leads are physically separated almost throughout
Series	Standalone novella, roughly 200 pages — no sequel written or announced
Content notes	War, mass death and erased timelines, graphic violence and gore, assassination, torture, body horror, stalking, poisoning and self-destruction, imprisonment and threatened execution, animal death

How Spicy Is This Is How You Lose the Time War?

A 1/5, and it is structural rather than coy. romance.io files it as “glimpses and kisses”, and the two protagonists are physically separated across time for nearly the whole book and barely meet — so the intimacy is textual by construction. The erotic charge is in the writing and the reading of the letters, and most famously in Blue consuming Red’s words. StoryGraph’s community warnings do not list sexual content in any tier at all. The sapphic content is the entire subject of the book and none of it is a sex scene.

The element worth flagging in advance is violence rather than heat. Both leads are professional killers, whole timelines are erased with everyone in them, and StoryGraph puts war, death and violence in the graphic tier with torture and body horror at moderate. There is also a poisoning sequence that a number of readers find harder than they expected. No reviewer flags anything beyond that. For the same restrained band on this site, Gideon the Ninth and The Jasmine Throne both sit at 1/5.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you read for sentences before story, you like a formal experiment that pays off emotionally, you want enemies-to-lovers built without the leads ever sharing a room, and two hundred pages of concentration sounds like a pleasure rather than a task.

You may want to skip it if: you need a plot you can summarise, dense metaphor without concrete referents frustrates you, you want two rivals who actually sound like opposites, or a romance that escalates off the page will feel unearned.

In short: the most divisive book on this list, and the shortest — which makes it the cheapest bet you can place.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

No book on our list has a stranger reception history than this one, and it is worth telling properly because it explains the ratings. Published in July 2019, it won the Nebula and BSFA for 2019 and the Hugo, Locus and Ignyte for 2020, all in novella categories — a clean sweep. Then, on 7 May 2023, an anime fan account on Twitter called Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood posted an unadorned instruction to read it blind because it is only about two hundred pages, with no link and nothing to sell. Within days the four-year-old novella climbed to number three among all books on Amazon and number one in science fiction. That single tweet put an enormous, entirely non-self-selecting audience in front of a difficult literary novella, and the bottom of the ratings distribution is where that shows: 12% of its ratings sit at one or two stars, roughly triple the rate of anything else on this list. As a coda, the tweets themselves drew enough nominating votes to qualify for the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Related Work, and the nomination was declined.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The prose comes first and comes up most — described as an intricate dance, as searingly beautiful, as poetry — and the people who love it love it precisely for the ornateness that the detractors reject. Second is the letter-delivery conceit, near-universally named as the most memorable invention in the book. Third is emotional intensity, with one formulation recurring often enough to be worth quoting the shape of: that it captures the humiliation built into wanting someone. Fourth is originality — readers report genuine surprise at the form, which is rare. Fifth is the freshness of the enemies-to-lovers execution, built at a distance and without the leads meeting. Sixth is brevity, which is both a virtue and the engine of the viral recommendation. Seventh is rereadability, echoing the starred Publishers Weekly line about multiple readings. The minority view worth flagging cuts against the plot complaint: a substantial group argues the war is deliberately incomprehensible because it does not matter, that the book is about two people and not two empires, and that trying to follow the conflict is reading the wrong novel.

What readers argue about and complain about: The prose, above everything, and the mechanism is specific rather than a matter of taste — stacked metaphor with few concrete referents means readers can parse a sentence and still not know what happened, producing a sense of being deliberately shut out. The recurring coinages are metaphor hell and word salad. Second is the absence of plot: the epistolary frame plus non-linear jumping removes cause and effect, the war is never explained, and there is nothing between letters to hold onto. Third, and genuinely ironic given that two authors wrote the two halves, is that Red and Blue sound identical — readers check the header to know whose letter they are in, which flattens the whole enemies premise. Fourth is that the romance is asserted rather than earned, with the jump from taunting to devotion happening in the white space between letters. Fifth, and the one that best explains the ratings shape, is alienation: readers describe feeling stupid, excluded, or as if they had interrupted a private joke, which is an unusual complaint to see at this scale. The genuine split here is not between people who understood it and people who did not — it is between readers for whom figurative density is the pleasure and readers for whom it is an obstacle, and nothing reconciles those two positions.

The standalone question worth asking first: It is a complete standalone novella with no sequel written or announced, and it resolves — hopefully, with the two of them together and free of their empires, though the exact texture of the future is left open. A television adaptation was optioned back in March 2019, before publication, with both authors attached to co-adapt and executive produce; there has been no network, cast or production news in the seven years since, so treat it as an unrealised option rather than something forthcoming. If you liked it and want more of the same, the honest answer is that there is not more of the same — El-Mohtar’s solo The River Has Roots (2025) is the closest thing in register, and Gladstone’s Craft Sequence is a completely different kind of book.

The audiobook is a dual production, with Cynthia Farrell reading Red and Emily Woo Zeller reading Blue, running a little over four hours from Simon & Schuster Audio — and it directly addresses the loudest complaint, because two voices make the two correspondents distinguishable in a way the page does not.

Prefer audio? Listen to This Is How You Lose the Time War on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does This Is How You Lose the Time War have a happy ending?

Yes, or close enough. Blue breaks Red out of execution and the two turn on both their empires together, ending free and with each other. The precise shape of what comes next is deliberately left open.

How explicit is it?

A 1/5. The two leads are physically separated across time for almost the entire book and barely meet, so there is no on-page sex at all. The eroticism is in the letters. StoryGraph lists no sexual content in any tier.

Is it a novel or a novella?

A novella, at roughly two hundred pages. It won in the novella categories at the Hugos, Nebulas, Locus Awards, BSFA Awards and Ignytes, so the classification is not a technicality.

Why do so many people find it confusing?

Because the prose is dense with metaphor and light on concrete referents, and because the time war itself is never explained in operational terms. Readers who treat the war as the plot tend to bounce; readers who treat the correspondence as the plot tend not to.

Is there a sequel or an adaptation?

No sequel, written or announced. A television adaptation was optioned in March 2019 with both authors attached, and there has been no development news since, so nothing is in production.

Is there an audiobook?

Yes, and it is a dual narration — Cynthia Farrell as Red and Emily Woo Zeller as Blue, just over four hours. It solves the complaint that the two voices read alike on the page.

If You Loved This Is How You Lose the Time War, Read These Next

Try The Space Between Worlds for another lean speculative novel where the sapphic relationship carries the structural weight; Our Wives Under the Sea for prose-forward literary science fiction with the same willingness to let language outrun plot; and Gideon the Ninth for the same antagonism-into-devotion engine at ten times the length. More across our Book Reviews and on our sapphic fiction list.

Why It Made Our Lists

This Is How You Lose the Time War is featured on our Best Lesbian Romance Books guide.

The Bottom Line

This Is How You Lose the Time War set out to build a love affair entirely out of letters that could not safely exist, and three things carry it: a delivery conceit nobody who reads it forgets, a co-authored correspondence where the two halves genuinely answer each other, and prose that two trade reviewers starred and thousands of readers call the best they have read. Three things hold it back: figurative density that leaves a large minority unable to extract events from sentences, an absence of plot scaffolding between letters, and two rivals who do not sound like opposites. At two hundred pages it is the cheapest bet on this list — read ten pages and you will know. Check This Is How You Lose the Time War on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

We rank This Is How You Lose the Time War at 3.7/5 — an award-sweeping formal experiment that a fifth of its readers cannot get inside, and that the rest never stop recommending.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 3.7/5

• ✓ 3.82 average across 365,401 Goodreads ratings
• ✓ Won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, BSFA and Ignyte for novella
• ✓ Starred by Publishers Weekly and Booklist
• ✓ 12% of ratings at one or two stars, triple the list average

Romance ★★★★☆ 4/5

• ✓ The romance is the entire book, not a subplot
• ✓ Enemies to lovers built without the leads sharing a room
• ✓ Ends with both women free and together
• ✓ The turn from rivals to devotion happens off the page

Characters ★★★★☆ 3.5/5

• ✓ 77% of StoryGraph readers experience it as character-driven
• ✓ Red and Blue were written by different authors in reply
• ✓ Both are competent, dangerous and specific in their letters
• ✓ Readers report the two voices are not distinguishable

Writing ★★★★☆ 4/5

• ✓ Two starred trade reviews and near-unanimous professional praise
• ✓ The letter-delivery conceit is genuinely without precedent
• ✓ Roughly 200 pages doing a much longer book’s work
• ✓ Also the single most-complained-about feature

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 4.2/5

• ✓ 69% of StoryGraph readers mark it emotional
• ✓ Readers cite the accuracy of humiliation inside desire
• ✓ The poisoned-letter sequence lands hard
• ✓ A large minority report feeling excluded rather than moved

Heat Level ★☆☆☆☆ 1/5

• ✓ romance.io files it as glimpses and kisses
• ✓ The leads are separated across time and barely meet
• ✓ Eroticism is entirely in the writing and reading
• ✓ StoryGraph lists no sexual content in any tier

Ending ★★★★☆ 4.2/5

• ✓ Both women survive, escape and end together
• ✓ The rescue pays off the correspondence structurally
• ✓ Widely described by readers as exquisite and fitting
• ✓ A minority find it ambiguous rather than resolved

Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 4.2/5

• ✓ Publishers Weekly’s starred review calls for multiple readings
• ✓ Letters reconfigure once you know where they lead
• ✓ Short enough to reread in a single sitting
• ✓ If the prose defeated you once, it will defeat you again

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