The first thought I had after seeing Everything Everywhere All at Once was “This is easily my favorite movie of the year.” The second thought I had was, “What would I put on a list of books similar to Everything Everywhere All at Once?”
I didn’t wonder purely because making book lists is my job, but also because I thought it would be hard to think of novels that were as madcap and masterful as A24’s Oscar-winning film. Making this list felt like the best kind of challenge: Find the rare reads that encompass the magic of the multiverse, embrace diversity, and strike that perfect balance between silly and serious.
Here are the books to read if you like Everything Everywhere All at Once. My personal favorite is This is How You Lose the Time War, which won the Hugo Award (basically the Oscars of science fiction and fantasy books) for Best Novella, but all of these are delightful explorations of far-flung dimensions.
1. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
If you have a passion for quantum physics and the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, then we have the perfect meta, postmodern science fiction book for you. Every sci-fi trope receives a hilarious spin in this existential crisis of a novel in which a time travel technician has been looking for his long-lost father.
2. The Only Living Girl on Earth by Charles Yu
Go on another sci-fi adventure in this short story from Yu (author of the aforementioned How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe), which is a Scribd Original work. The National Book Award-winning writer welcomes you to Earth: The Gift Shop, where the history of Earth: A Bunch of Civilizations has been commodified into knickknacks sold by the last living soul on this planet, Jane.
This is a witty and absurd story about the destruction of Earth, the survival of capitalism, and the strength of the human spirit.
3. Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen
Kin Stewart travels from 2142 to 1996’s San Francisco to eliminate a target who’s threatening the balance of time and space. But Kin gets stuck in 1996 and becomes a time anomaly himself, which makes his own kin (we see what you did there, Chen) a target for elimination once he’s finally found and returned to 2142.
Kin’s devotion to his daughter across the many decades that separate them is heartwarming, and reminds us of Evelyn and Joy’s ultimately unbreakable mother-daughter bond in A24’s star-studded, award-winning movie.
4. This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
This Hugo Award-winning novella contains the chaos of all time and space within its beautifully short, never-ending love story.
Two women, named Red and Blue, fight for opposite factions in the ceaseless time war, flowing from the past to the future, from timeline to timeline. Through a series of letters sent via tea and lava and other delightful delivery systems, Red and Blue fall for each other, and combine for some of the best purple prose around.
5. How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse by K. Eason
If you loved watching Evelyn, Joy, and Waymond Wang adjust to different — at times contradictory — powers while they fought through their personal feelings and the multiverse’s politics in Everything Everywhere All at Once, then Eason’s novel is for you.
Sleeping Beauty meets Star Wars here, as Princess Rory Thorne uses the 12 gifts and one curse she receives from fairies to alter intergalactic relations.
6. How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Nagamatsu masterfully twists science fiction’s greatest tropes in a series of interconnected dystopian stories about the discovery of a deadly virus. This quietly devastating novel full of isolated, lonely people still beats with a heart that’s fully human, one whose beat tethers us across tragedy, time, and space.
7. Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Who doesn’t wish they could go back in time to right old wrongs, spend time with loved ones, or gain closure? In a small, retro cafe in a back alley in Tokyo, visitors have the opportunity to do just that. However, there are rules to traveling back in time: They must sit in a certain seat, they can’t leave the cafe, and they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold.
In this beautifully moving and heartwarming story, Kawaguchi explores not necessarily what can be changed from revisiting the past but, rather, what can be learned.
8. The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
The title story of this collection has won every single prestigious speculative fiction award — the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award — and many of the other stories won or were nominated for at least one of these awards as well.
Lui’s works are highly imaginative, provocative takes on technology, immigration, the nature of storytelling itself, and much more. Like with Everything Everywhere All At Once, there’s a lot to lovingly admire as you travel across time and space in The Paper Menagerie.
9. Bliss Montage: Stories by Ling Ma
Fantastical situations highlight hard-hitting themes in this collection of eight short stories by Ma (Severance). Immigration and belonging — particularly from women’s perspectives — play a huge role in Ma’s latest, including “G,” a story about two Chinese American women whose friendship falls apart upon drug-fueled reflection.
If you’re a movie buff looking for more recommendations, check out our lists of books that read like Wes Anderson films and books about Oppenheimer.
