I am late to the party… however, not SO late, because this just won the British Fantasy Award! Which it absolutely deserves.

I’m sure there are some readers who would avoid this because “they don’t read romance” (hi, I used to be one of those). The reality though is that you do; there’s almost no story – written or visual – that doesn’t include romance somewhere in its plot. What I have learned about myself is that I rarely enjoy what I think of as “straight romance” – that is, stories where the romance is the be-all of the plot; they just don’t work for me, as a rule. What I love, though, is when the romance is absolutely integral to the story and there’s a really fascinating plot around it. Every single one of these stories does that.

As the name suggests, this is set of stories involving romance and some sort of time travel. It’s a rich vein to mine, and every single one of these stories is completely different. Sometimes the time travelling is deliberate, sometimes not; sometimes the ending is happy, other times not; some are straight, some are queer; some pay little real heed to potentially disrupting the historical status quo; some have easy time travel while others do so accidentally; sometimes the time travel happens to save the world, and sometimes it’s about saving a single person. Sarah Gailey, Rowan Coleman, Margo Lanagan, Carrie Vaughn and Ellen Klages (a reprint) wrote my favourite stories.

And then there’s Catherynne M Valente’s piece. I did love every single story in this anthology; Valente’s story is breathtakingly different in its approach to both structure – eschewing linearity – and theme: the romance is between a human woman and the embodied space/time continuum. Hence the lack of linearity. It’s a poignant romance and sometimes painful romance; it also confronts the bitterness of dreams lost, the confusion of family relationships, the beauty of everyday life, and the ways in which even ordinary people don’t really live life in a straight line, given the ways our memories work (Proust, madeleines, etc). This is a story that will stay with me for a long, long time.