One night, in May of 2023, I came across this tweet (pictured above). As you can probably guess, I was intrigued! So, I ran straight to my Kindle and downloaded a sample… I was hooked by page nine. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is a sapphic novel primarily written in letters between two agents on opposite sides of a war through time. Don’t be fooled though, this is not your typical enemies-to-lovers story, not at all; it is so much more than that.
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There are two sides to the time war: the Agency and Garden, of which Red and Blue are each faction’s best agents. They travel up and down-thread (in the book, time is a braid, so each timeline is referred to as a thread; up-thread would be the past, and down-thread, the future), jumping through different timelines and worlds, carrying out missions according to what will benefit their side’s future. As they’re both the best, they’ve spent their lives chasing each other through time, constantly undoing the others’ progress.
Red encounters Blue’s first letter amidst the ashes of a dying planet; she has just successfully finished her current mission when she comes across a sheet of paper which reads just one line: Burn before reading. Thus begins their dangerous correspondence, a game between rivals that ultimately results in an all-consuming relationship. Red and Blue spend lifetimes crafting letters for each other, each more creative and unconventional than the last.
Blue spends years growing a tree, so that when it’s cut down, its rings will spell out a letter for Red, who, in turn, writes a letter on a piece of fish that Blue finds undigested in the stomach of a seal. Their style of communication is unusual, to say the least, but there’s something in the effort that each letter takes that speaks to their commitment to each other, despite the danger. As they keep in contact, the letters evolve and soon become more personal, which eventually leads to their love.
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I won’t spoil the ending, but I assure you it is worth reading. This book is magnificent, and much like Tenet (if you know, you know), the story is already over by the time it begins. This Is How You Lose the Time War is the kind of story you have to fall into and trust that it will eventually lead you where you’re supposed to end up. This book will take you across a myriad of moments in time (past, present, and future), worlds that seem impossible, and it will confuse you—you just have to let it. Because at its core, this is a story about two women who have nothing in common, except that they’re the best, they’re alone, and they love each other. Their love is inevitable right from the start, and if you give this book a chance—which, dear reader, I hope you do—you will understand what I mean when I say it was always going to happen the way it did, because, from the very beginning, it already had.