This Is How You Lose the Time War

"Yes. Both Amal and Max are extremely lauded and well-recognized authors in their own right. So it’s amazing to see the two of them come together and produce something that’s even grander than the sum of both parts: they’re both already fantastic authors, and combined together they become a super author. I suppose you could call it a time travel story. It takes place across all history, and features two protagonists, two women who are essentially spies—saboteurs for rival visions of the future, who are trying to twist the timeline to lead to their respective faction’s visions. But then they fall in love with each other, and it becomes a story about how love drives us to resist the oppressive, all-encompassing worldviews of all totalitarian visions. How do individuals carve out their own timeline in the face of impersonal authority? Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The story is incredibly beautiful and moving, and the language is so poetic. You get such a great sense of the two protagonists, their distinct personalities, their distinct ways of viewing the world, of seeing time. You traverse across all history; episodes that are often not well-known to your standard Western historical education are highlighted. So I think this is just an incredible book to pick up. It’s also short. The two of them packed so much into so little space. It is just a concentrated dose of beauty that explodes in your brain and overwhelms everything. That I do not know. I haven’t specifically spoken with the authors about their composition process. That seems like a very natural way of doing it, but I don’t believe that’s in fact what they did. Amal, at least, specifically has said repeatedly that the book is by the both of them, with the implication that every word in the book represents the effort of both. So I’m going to follow her lead and imagine it that way. My theory is that every good book has its ideal audience, and the entire apparatus of publishing, of publicity, of book tours, and book blogging, BookTubing, and the conversation that we’re having right now—all of these efforts are geared towards connecting the right book with the right reader. The discovery problem is actually surprisingly hard to solve. A lot of times, books that should do well don’t do well, just because it somehow failed to reach the ideal audience, its ideal readers just didn’t know that the book existed. So all of us have to try harder at boosting the books that we love, in the hopes of somehow bringing them to the attention of the right readers. There’s a large measure of luck and randomness in how this happens, but it’s not just luck. The only way we can make luck work better is to all work harder on recommending books. Having said all that, I do myself try to open myself up to as many channels of recommendations as possible. I listen to other readers whose taste I trust. I do a lot of outreach and participate in fandom. I talk to other authors and try to be of service to new authors. I pay attention to what other writers I admire are working on. I follow new book releases and industry news to see what’s popping up. I try to build buzz for books that I think are wonderful, and hope that in that effort, I can make everyone’s lives a little richer by connecting the right books to the right audiences."