My pick would have to be the A Whole Nother Story trilogy, in which (spoiler warning) you can only travel back in time. But because time is in a loop of sorts, if you go before the beginning of time, you will be at the end of time. From there you can go back to any time you want to. And time paradoxes cannot be produced. Plus, your memories from the previous timeline exist as well as the memories from the new one.
I’d love if anyone could remind me the name of a book I enjoyed as a kid, and had been thinking of lately.
It is similar to your example except the main character (a young woman I believe) ends up on a space ship that travels at such speed she reaches the end of the universe, it starts again, and she returns to meet herself
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffeneger. The protagonist time travels uncontrollably and to random periods of time triggered by something like a neurological fit. The story revolves around him meeting up with his non-time traveling soul mate out of order.
The time travel you describe in your example appears contradictory. If time is a periodic line without paradoxes, how can there be different timelines and preserved memories?
The Chronicles of St Mary’s by Jodie Taylor, the first book is “One Damned Thing After Another” - historian’s using time travel to do proper first person research. It’s a time travel action adventure comedy with great characterisation and a spin off series.
The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. 100% one of the most interesting books to read during the pandemic although it was published in 1992. In some near future, a historian from Oxford university time travels back to the black death in the medieval period but gets stranded because a pandemic begins in Oxford and all the people who are qualified to work the time machine are either deathly ill or prevented from entering the city due to quarantine. It’s a fantastic study in human nature, how two societies dealt with terrifying and untreatable infectious plagues and hands down the most absorbing and credible story of living in a medieval family/village/society. One of my favourite books ever and really prescient about how we dealt with pandemic life, even down to the panic over toilet rolls! Maybe the author herself had a time machine??
The first 15 lives of Harry August
Jodi Taylor’s St. Mary’s series & the off-shoot with the time Time Police. It’s my comfort reading.
Some of the descriptions of what the protagonist sees near the end of The Time Machine by HG Wells are beautiful. Not sure his take on time travel is particularly unique, but I thought it was a great little book
The Dechronization of Sam Magruder.
All you zombies by Heinlein. Totally blew my mind.
Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer.
Lighting by dean koontz has an interesting take on time travel. Lady starts to notice the same man show up to save her everytime she is in trouble
I love many of the time travel books mentioned already so I won’t rename them, but haven’t seen anyone recommend The Dream Daughter by Diane Chamberlain yet. This is one of my favorites!
“The year of the quiet sun”, by Wilson Tucker. It has maybe five people in it, and it hits very different from all the time travel novels that I have read. And believe me, I have read LOTS.
The psychology of time travel by Kate Mascarenhas. Smart, a murder mystery and just really well put together on all counts. Life after life by Kate Atkinson - a kind of timeloop, but still timetravelly. Kindred by Octavia Butler. Not for the faint hearted 😬 about a black woman that gets hurled back through time to the southern states during slavery. Amazing, but not exactly feel good… 11/22/63 by Stephen King. Absolutely lovely! The gone world by Tom Sweterlitsch sci fi, complex but worth the slight headache 😅 Sea of tranquility by Emily St. Mandel is haunting and beautiful, I would recommend reading The glass hotel first though, but it can stand alone too.
FYI you can format to hide spoilers by framing the spoiler with an arrow and exclamation mark on both sides. The arrow must point towards the spoiler and the exclamation mark is always closest to the sentence you want to cover. If I see the word spoiler and then want to stop I can’t because my eyes are already on the next sentence 😅 like running into a wall after seeing a stop sign 😂
Slaughterhouse V by Vonnegut and Kindred by Butler are probably my two favorites. Probably because they sort of intertwine the time travel with implicit social commentary on trauma/PTSD and the legacy of plantation slavery. Most writers don’t really deal with such topics when discussing time travel, as if there’s absolutely no social overlap.