I feel like this is a good one for this group of readers for a handful of reasons. This is a short novel told in vignettes and letters and small conversations. It’s about two different soldiers or time travelers (though it’s more appropriate to say they are inter-dimensional travelers) of warring or competing factions. So they travel to different times and universes or threads of the same universe. They sometimes meet up and sometimes are able to communicate with each other. And they’re in love and a complete and utter danger to one another.
Tone wise, it’s somber and lovely and poetic and heartbreaking. But it’s otherwise a lot like a combination of Connie Willis’s Oxford Time Travel series (in terms of world building), Mr and Mrs Smith in terms of how they’re competing in aims and goals as both enemies and lovers, and Heloise and Abelard in terms of form and emotional depth.
I think it’s a lovely novel that is beautifully crafted. Like our travelers, we are never firmly established in any particular context and the novel gives us just enough to understand the emotional connections and beats of the story without trying to turn this into any kind of full-fledged epic novel with clear structure and plot. I don’t think it would work that way and everything that works in the novel would be overexposed and less good as a consequence. The story and the telling are both necessarily fractured, and we’re all better off as a consequence. The other reason it works better this way, in short form, is that there’s a lot of reference happening in this novel and the smaller the better.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/This-How-You-Lose-Time/dp/1534431004/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2X1O2LT8SVRPV&keywords=this+is+how+you+lose+the+time+war&qid=1577286464&sprefix=this+is+ho%2Caps%2C146&sr=8-1)