This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is a lyrical little epistolary novel that virtually defies description. Two women, Red and Blue, are on opposite sides of a battle to shape the strands of time in one direction or another. At the end of one momentous battle one leaves a letter for the other. As they continue to wage their fight up and down the different strands of time they continue their correspondence, developing a relationship that grows more and more meaningful to each of them.
The book is slim and does the neat trick of hinting at the framework of events and leaving the reader to flesh in the, sometimes gruesome, details. The writing is sparse, almost poetical. I would recommend this book even to someone who doesn’t normally read science fiction.
