Book Recommendations: Love, Loops, and Second Chances: Two Stories About Rewriting Time and Fate

What if you could rewind the moment everything fell apart? What if you knew the world was ending, but love gave you a reason to try again anyway? That question beats at the heart of two very different but beautifully connected stories: A Time Traveler’s History of Tomorrow by Kendall Kulper and The Book of Autumn by Molly O’Sullivan. Check them both out – and add them to your fall TBR!

The Book of Autumn

by Molly O'Sullivan
Published by: Kensington
on October 28, 2025
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For readers of Adrienne Young, Olivie Blake, Hazel Beck, and Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, a spellbinding debut about ambition, privilege, second chance romance, and ancient magic set at an enchanted school tucked among the red mesas of the New Mexico desert, where a formidable pair of magicians are summoned to pursue an alleged killer.
Try as she might, anthropologist Marcella Gibbons can't escape the fact that she's a dimidium, one half of a formidable pair of Magicians, forever tied together to enable the other's powers. After a tumultuous final year at Seinford and Brown College of Agriculture (and Magic) in rural New Mexico, Cella felt more than a little uneasy about returning to the sun-drenched desert campus ever again. She'd cut ties with her other half—the charming and rugged rancher Max Middlemore—and sworn off Magic, academia, and heartache for good.
Until Max turns up at her door, grinning under his cowboy hat for one last favor. Something is shifting at her alma mater, something bigger than anyone understands. One student is dead. Another is floating midair in the infirmary, growling guttural nonsense and terrifying the staff. Their best, perhaps only, chance to intervene requires Cella and Max to work together. But the origins of the disturbances lie centuries ago. To unravel them, Cella will have to confront the truth about her past—and Max. Because she might be challenging a power she could never rival alone . . .

Love, Loops, and Second Chances

Both books start with impossible choices and unravel from there. In A Time Traveler’s History of Tomorrow, Cally accidentally destroys the universe. In The Book of Autumn, the seasons are alive and bound to an endless cycle of creation and decay. Both Cally and Autumn are trapped by forces bigger than themselves, caught between time, fate, and stories that insist things can only end one way.

As Cally teams up with Dmitri, a time manipulator who’s her total opposite, the two stumble through paradoxes, second chances, and slow-building trust. Their banter is sharp and funny, but underneath it sits the fear of never being able to fix what’s broken. Autumn faces something quieter but just as heavy. She’s supposed to bring endings, not beginnings, yet meeting a mortal she’s destined to destroy makes her question the role she’s been written into.

Both characters are trying to rewrite rules that were never meant to bend. Cally uses science, Autumn uses magic. Cally’s world hums with chaos and energy, while Autumn’s glows in candlelight and falling leaves. But the stories share a heartbeat, the feeling of realizing that love might not save the world, but it might be enough to make the fight worth it.

Kendall’s writing captures the rush of possibility that comes with time travel, the humor, the fear, the thrill of seeing someone across universes and realizing they matter. Molly’s prose slows that energy down, giving readers space to breathe inside a mythic love story that feels as old as the seasons. One is kinetic, the other meditative, but both end up in the same place: standing in the ruins, deciding to build something new anyway.

What makes these books work together is how they balance wonder and hope. They remind us that love stories aren’t about perfection; they’re about persistence. About the people who look at a broken world and decide to keep going.

If you’re craving a fall read that mixes heart with high concept, start here. Whether you prefer collapsing timelines or changing seasons, both stories prove the same thing: sometimes the universe gives you a second chance, and sometimes you have to make it yourself.