With A Wrinkle in Time taking the box office by storm, you should have already dusted off your old copy and re-read it in anticipation of seeing the Ava DuVernay film adaptation. If you've already re-visited Madeleine L'Engle's classic novel, or if you suspect you've outgrown it, I've got 15 adult books like A Wrinkle in Time.
A Wrinkle in Time is the first in a quintet of books centered on the Murry family, which consists of two scientifically minded parents, their four genius children, and their dog, Fortinbras. In the first novel, husband and father Alex Murry has disappeared while doing research related to interplanetary travel, and it's up to two of his children, Meg and Charles Wallace, to rescue him. Joined by Meg's friend Calvin, and aided by three mysterious women who can travel through time and space, the Murry kids set about performing the difficult task of finding their father and saving the world.
If you're one of the millions of kids who grew up reading A Wrinkle in Time, you should put the 15 books from this list on your TBR A.S.A.P. Check out my recommendations below, and share your favorite A Wrinkle in Time readalikes with me on Twitter!
'When You Reach Me' by Rebecca Stead
Miranda, the preteen protagonist of Rebecca Stead's 2009 novel When You Reach Me, looks to her favorite book — A Wrinkle in Time, natch — after her best friend unexpectedly cuts off contact with her, and a series of mysterious letters begin to arrive.
'The Parable of the Sower' by Octavia E. Butler
Hyperempathic heroine Lauren Olamina has lived a life of relative peace and prosperity in her gated community, separated from the chaotic outside world. But when disaster strikes, the teenager is forced out into a country descending into madness, a land she must try to save.
'All Systems Red' by Martha Wells
Set in a corporatocracy, All Systems Red centers on the self-styled Murderbot, an android assigned to protect researchers exploring a foreign planet. Unbeknownst to everyone else, however, Murderbot is no ordinary security droid. It has gone rogue, hacked into its own A.I., and freed itself from Company control, and now all it wants is a little peace and quiet.
'Lagoon' by Nnedi Okorafor
Tracing the disparate responses to an alien landing on Earth, Lagoon follows three beachgoers — a biologist, a rapper, and a veteran — as they try to bridge the gap between the extraterrestrial visitors and humanity.
'Noumenon' by Marina J. Lostetter
When a millennia-long mission to examine a newly discovered star receives approval, humanity clones the crew of a nine-ship fleet and sends them off into the abyss of space, but no one expects that the generations of clones who will complete the mission will deviate from their original DNA sources...
'The House of Discarded Dreams' by Ekaterina Sedia
Desperate to escape her close-knit, but overbearing, family, Vimbai seizes the opportunity to become one of three roommates sharing the titular House of Discarded Dreams. Things quickly get weird, what with one roommate having a pocket universe instead of hair, and Vimbai's dead grandmother showing up to cook in the kitchen, as the heroine begins to live through the myths and legends that color her Zimbabwean heritage.
'Doomsday Book' by Connie Willis
In the mid-21st century, and Oxford historian named Kivrin asks to be sent back in time to the 14th century, so that she can observe life in the Middle Ages. After she is sent through time, however, a flu epidemic breaks out in 2054, and her entire mission becomes hopelessly complicated.
'The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August' by Claire North
Harry August isn't like other men, a fact he learns in 1989, when he dies of old age and is reborn on his birthday in 1919, retaining everything he knew at the time of his death. Being reborn upon death makes Harry an Ouroboran, and the retention of his memories makes him special among his kind. After meeting another man like him, Harry begins work on a machine that could save the world, but soon learns that not all Ouroborans are benevolent.
'Redemption in Indigo' by Karen Lord
After leaving her good-for-nothing husband, Paama receives a gift from the immortal djombi: the Chaos Stick. The artifact gives Paama the power to control the forces of chaos, but the undying spirits don't tell her that the stick's human-hating owner, a djombi called the Indigo Lord, plans to repossess it.
'Station Eleven' by Emily St. John Mandel
Years after a swine flu pandemic eradicates North American society, a troupe of Shakespearean actors traveling the Great Lakes on a two-year circuit return to the town where they last saw two of their friends, only to find that it has been taken over by a personality cult centered on a Prophet with a penchant for violence.
'Midnight Robber' by Nalo Hopkinson
Tan-Tan's parents are both having affairs, but when her father learns that his wife has not been faithful, he kills her lover and drags his seven-year-old daughter to New Half-Way Tree, an alternate version of their home planet that is populated with criminals and shadowy beings.
'Every Heart a Doorway' by Seanan McGuire
Like all the kids at Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, Nancy has spent time in a world that she was not born into, and has just been forced to return to her homeworld. Desperate to get back to her beloved, the Lord of the Dead, Nancy must first help solve a series of murders targeting her fellow Wayward Children.
'The Icarus Girl' by Helen Oyeyemi
Bright and temperamental, eight-year-old British citizen Jess never makes any friends until she and her family take a summer trip to her mother's home country of Nigeria, where she meets TillyTilly, who already knows all about her. It's only when the other girl follows Jess home to England that the young protagonist realizes she is the only person who can see TillyTilly.
'Salt Fish Girl' by Larissa Lai
Based on Chinese myths, Salt Fish Girl intertwines the stories of its shapeshifting narrator Nu Wa and Miranda, a Pacific Northwesterner living in a walled city in the mid-21st century, who finds herself unwittingly drawn into the interwoven worlds of corporation and government through her relationship with Evie, a human-carp clone.
'The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making' by Catherynne M. Valente
When circumstances beyond their control render her parents largely absent from her life, September is recruited by a man dressed all in green to save Fairyland from its chaotic Marquess, who has demanded the retrieval of a particular talisman from a magical forest.
