This Is How You Lose the Time War
by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
I found this book recommended somewhere, possibly reddit.com, and reserved it at my local library, but the reservation came through while I'm in the middle of slogging through a long non-fiction book about pirates. But it was due back soon, so I decided I better get my A into G and read it. Can I say how glad I am that I did so? It was a great palate cleanser from the dry (yet not unentertaining) historical work, and I smashed through it in a couple of days.
The format lends itself to a quick read, and it's not an overly-long work. Two time-travelling warriors from opposing sides of a sprawling temporal war draw the attention of each other and begin to spar through deed and plot over centuries, trading missives encoded in reality that begin as mental sparring but soon progress to something else. It's a war story, it's a love story, it's a tangled tale of time travel that turns out to be not so complex as to overshadow the complex interplay between the pair known only as Red and Blue.
The writing is poetic and multi-layered and filled with subtlety, humour and wonder. Concepts that could provide an adequate spine for a whole novel are presented in mere sentences, but you don't mind because the complexity of the ideas washes over you in delicate prose, and a new concept has already been delivered, and it's just as thought-provoking as the first! It's LGBT-affirming, it's surprising and heartfelt and inspiring, and I'll be looking out for works from both of the authors as the year progresses!
