Is there an audiobook of This Is How You Lose the Time War?

Yes. This Is How You Lose the Time War has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Cynthia Farrell and Emily Woo Zeller.

How long is the This Is How You Lose the Time War audiobook?

The This Is How You Lose the Time War audiobook runs 4 hr 16 min.

Is This Is How You Lose the Time War on Kindle Unlimited?

Yes. This Is How You Lose the Time War was included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on July 30, 2026.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar book cover for the Book of the Day science fiction book review

Our score

4.2/ 5

Excellent

Listen to This Is How You Lose the Time War free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

Included with Kindle Unlimited Buy on Amazon

Goodreads

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.

EDITION PUBLISHEDJuly 2019

PublisherJo Fletcher Books

Genres

Fiction Science Fiction Romance

Themes

Love across enemy linesFree will versus the weight of historyLetters and language as intimacy

This Is How You Lose the Time War

Name: This Is How You Lose the Time War
Price: 13.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Amal El-Mohtar

Amal El-Mohtar

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's This Is How You Lose the Time War is a slim, fierce epistolary romance between two enemy agents trading letters across the wreckage of warring timelines. It's science fiction built on language and longing more than mechanics, and it rewards readers who love prose that performs.

The Review

Our take

Two operatives, Red and Blue, fight on opposite sides of a war waged up and down the branching threads of time. They reshape battles, civilizations, whole futures, nudging history toward their faction's victory. And in the middle of all that strategic carnage they start writing to each other. Taunts at first, then something that curdles into curiosity, then something neither of them can afford. The whole book lives in those letters, hidden in tree rings, brewed into tea, encoded in the death of a bee. The premise is gorgeous, but what carries it is the way the correspondence itself becomes the plot.

What struck me most is how El-Mohtar and Gladstone use the epistolary form as more than a gimmick. Each chapter pairs a short third-person scene with a letter, and you can feel the two authors trading the voices back and forth. The prose is lush, almost dangerously so, packed with wordplay and recurring images that get folded back in later with a different meaning. A phrase that reads as a flirtation early on returns as a vow. The book trusts you to remember its own metaphors, and it pays off that trust. For a story about time travel, it spends almost no energy explaining how the time travel works, which is the right call.

That choice is also where the caveats live. If you come to a time war wanting a coherent map of factions, mechanics, and cause-and-effect, this book will frustrate you. The two sides, Garden and Agency, stay deliberately impressionistic; the worldbuilding is mood and texture rather than rules. The internal logic holds emotionally far more than it holds technically. Readers who love rigorous speculative architecture, the kind where you can diagram exactly how a change in 1850 alters 3000 AD, may find the hand-waving slippery. This is science fiction in service of a love story, not the reverse.

The romance, on the other hand, is the real engine, and it's a slow, hungry burn built entirely on voice. Red and Blue fall for each other's minds before anything else, and because we only ever meet them through their performances for one another, the intimacy feels both intense and a little unknowable, like reading someone else's private mail. Some readers find that thrilling; others find the density of metaphor exhausting and wish the characters would simply say a plain thing. It's a fair complaint. The book is short, but it asks to be read slowly, and a second pass genuinely unlocks lines you skated past the first time.

Why you should read

Readers who love prose-forward, lyrical science fiction
Fans of enemies-to-lovers romance built on voice and longing
Anyone who enjoys epistolary structure and rereadable wordplay
Short, intense reads you can finish in one sitting

What to expect

Readers who want hard, rule-based time-travel mechanics and clearly mapped factions may find the worldbuilding too impressionistic
The dense, metaphor-heavy style is divisive; if you prefer plain, propulsive prose it can feel overwrought

The final stretch turns the correspondence into actual stakes, and the structure tightens into something close to a thriller without ever abandoning its lyricism. I won't say where it lands, only that the ending earns its sentiment because the whole book has been quietly building the architecture for it. At under two hundred pages it's a concentrated dose, the kind of thing you can finish in an afternoon and then carry around for a week.

Reviewed by Rowan · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.2/ 5

Excellent

Listen to This Is How You Lose the Time War free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

Included with Kindle Unlimited Buy on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.

Where to read or listen

Is there an audiobook of This Is How You Lose the Time War?: Yes. This Is How You Lose the Time War has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Cynthia Farrell and Emily Woo Zeller.
Listen to This Is How You Lose the Time War free with an Audible trial
We earn from qualifying Amazon purchases.
How long is the This Is How You Lose the Time War audiobook?: The This Is How You Lose the Time War audiobook runs 4 hr 16 min.
Is This Is How You Lose the Time War on Kindle Unlimited?: Yes. This Is How You Lose the Time War was included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on July 30, 2026.
How much does This Is How You Lose the Time War cost?: On Amazon: Kindle $13.99, Paperback $9.39, Hardcover $16.26. Prices as of August 27, 2026 at 3:45 AM EDT and may change.

Filed underScience Fiction Romance Browse the archive →

CollectionsShort Reads Browse collections →

Common questions

What is This Is How You Lose the Time War about?: Two operatives, Red and Blue, fight on opposite sides of a war waged up and down the branching threads of time. They reshape battles, civilizations, whole futures, nudging history toward their faction's victory. And in the middle of all that strategic carnage they start writing to each other…
Is This Is How You Lose the Time War worth reading?: We scored This Is How You Lose the Time War 4.2 out of 5. Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's This Is How You Lose the Time War is a slim, fierce epistolary romance between two enemy agents trading letters across the wreckage of warring timelines. It's science fiction built on language and longing more than mechanics, and it rewards…