Exploring alternate realities through time travel is a familiar subject across fiction. Traditionally, the mechanism for making such a feat possible is the invention of a new technology: a time machine, a spaceship that can go faster than the speed of light, etc. Yet books built around these high-tech means often come with a mind-bending interpretation of physics that makes your head hurt. While H.G. Wells' The Time Machine is a classic tale, sometimes you're just in the mood for something different.

Luckily, heavy sci-fi works aren't the only stories that deal with the theme of traveling through and potentially changing the course of time. Scott Alexander Howard's The Other Valley brings time travel into the realm of physical boundaries and geopolitics by having its characters walk to different valleys representing different points in time. Plenty of other books offer non-tech-related mechanisms for time travel that play across various fictional genres, including murder mystery, ...