Pile by the Bed reviews Lost on Time by AG Riddle a fast paced time travel thriller with dinosaurs.

Pile by the Bed reviews Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister a crime novel with a time travel twist as a mother drifts back in time, reliving key moments in her life to try and discover why her son might have committed a crime.

Pile by the Bed reviews The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley – in which she brings her steampunk sensibility with a little time travel mixed in to an alternate history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Pile by the Bed reviews The Future is Yours by Dan Frey – a time travel driven page-turning takedown of the tech industry

Pile by the Bed reviews The Future of Another Timeline by Analee Newitz – a mind bending time travel tale with a social conscience

British author Ian McDonald is best known for his futuristic novels set in India (River of Gods) or South America (Brasyl) or Turkey (Dervish House) or his more recent kick-arse Game of Thrones on the Moon series Luna. In Time Was he shifts a gear. This novella is an intimate time travel tale. Emmett, an antiquarian bookseller in London, comes across a letter tucked into an old book of poetry. The letter, written in World War II, sends Emmett on a quest to find out more about its author. Emmett’s research takes him to a woman named Thorn who lives in an old house in the Fen country where he learns the name of the author of the letter (Tom Shadwell) and its recipient (Ben Seligman). But when he takes a photo of the two that Thorn has given him to a contact at the British War Museum and it exactly matches a picture of two young men from the early years of World War I, things start to get weird. Emmett becomes obsessive about solving the mystery of the two men and following their path as it seems to take them in and out of different parts of the…

It is probably an indicator of the publisher’s lack of faith that Robert Dickinson’s The Tourist sells itself as a thriller rather than a time-travel tale. Because how thrilling can things be when the future is already written? Spens is a rep for a tour company that takes people from the 24th century back in time on quaint early 21st century expeditions to English shopping malls and pubs. The enterprise is not a secret – the 21st century community know that the future tourists are among them and have adapted to serve the market. Meanwhile, back in the future, a prisoner is asked to be guide for an operative who has been sent forward from the recent past to track down some high value people lost in the Badlands. For no apparent reason, the two narrative streams are differentiated by being told in first and second person. The two plots intersect when one of Spens’ tourists goes missing and all hell starts to break loose in 21st century UK. Time travel makes it difficult to generate any tension. People in the book keep talking about not wanting to know the future so as to have some form of agency. And…