What are the best 'alternate history' books?

Meet Thursday Next, literary detective without equal, fear or boyfriend

Jasper Fforde's beloved New York Times bestselling novel introduces literary detective Thursday Next and her alternate reality of literature-obsessed England-from the author of T... Read more about The Eyre Affair

‘. . . There are two schools of thought about the resilience of time. The first is that time is highly volatile, with every small event altering the possible outcome of the earth’s future. The other v...

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'Deighton's best book ... an absorbingly exciting spy story that is also a fascinating exercise in might-have-been speculation' The New York Times Book Review

It is 1941 and Germany has won the war. Britain is occupied, Churchill executed and the Kin... Read more about SS-GB

The other man busied himself with the papers on his desk and made no comment. He thumped the rubber stamp into the pad and then on to the docket, ‘Scotland Yard. 14 Nov. 1941’. It was incredible that ...

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It is the cusp of World War I. The Austro-Hungarians and Germans have their Clankers, steam-driven iron machines loaded with guns and ammunition. The British Darwinists employ genetically fabricated animals as their weaponry. Their Leviathan is a wha... Read more about Leviathan

Alek turned back to his desk and began to move the cavalry forward, grinning as the battle neared its climax. The Austrian walkers had completed their bombardment, and it was time for the tin horses t...

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First published in 2006, Jo Walton's Farthing was hailed as a masterpiece, a darkly romantic thriller set in an alternate postwar England sliding into fascism.

Eight years after they overthrew Churchill and led Britain into a separate peace with Hitl... Read more about Farthing

It started when David came in from the lawn absolutely furious. We were down at Farthing for one of Mummy’s ghastly political squeezes. If we could have found any way out of it we would have been some...

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A hit HBO original series, Watchmen the groundbreaking series from award-winning author Alan Moore presents a world where the mere presence of American superheroes changed history, the U.S. won the Vietnam War, Nixon is still president, and the Cold ... Read more about Watchmen

In one of the most powerful and thought-provoking novels of his remarkable career, Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch interweaves a compelling portrait of Christopher Columbus with the story of a future scientist who believes she can alter human history fr... Read more about Pastwatch

"the replanting" or "the restoring" or even "the resurrection" of the Earth. All these names were accurate. Something had been done, and now it was being undone. Much had died or been broken or killed...

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In the mid-1870s, a violent spray of comets hits Earth, decimating cities, erasing shorelines, and changing the world's climate forever. And just as Earth's temperature dropped, so was civilization frozen in time. Instead of advancing technologically... Read more about The Peshawar Lancers

Captain Athelstane King rinsed out his mouth with a swig from the goatskin water bag slung at his saddlebow. Even in October this shadeless, low-lying part of the Northwest Frontier Province was hot; ...

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"One of the most ingenious parallel world stories ever written." - Richard A. Lupoff

What if Robert E. Lee won the Battle of Gettysburg and his army went on to capture Philadelphia? What if the United States government was forced to recognize Confed... Read more about Bring the Jubilee

I was born, as I say, in 1921, but it was not until the early 1930s, when I was about ten, that I began to understand what a peculiarly frustrated and disinherited world was about me. Perhaps my appro...

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"Utterly engaging…a page-turner that is certain to win the author legions of new readers and fans."-George R. R. Martin, author of A Game of Thrones

It's spring on Nantucket and everything is perfectly normal, until a sudden storm blankets the entire... Read more about Island in the Sea of Time

Ian Arnstein stepped off the ferry gangway and hefted his bags. Nantucket on a foggy March evening was chilly enough to make him thankful he'd worn the heavier overcoat; Southern Californian habits co...

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With new commentary by the authors

1855: The Industrial Revolution is in full swing, powered by steam-driven cybernetic Engines. Charles Babbage perfects his Analytical Engine, and the computer age arrives a century ahead of its time. Three extraordi... Read more about The Difference Engine

Below her, in a neglected formal garden, leafless vines lace wooden trellises on whitewashed, flaking walls. From the open windows of her sickroom, a warm draft stirs the loose white hair at her neck,...

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