 This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
This is my favorite kind of science fiction: wonderfully weird and imaginative, more concerned with fun than plausibility. It's far in the future (or sometimes the past), and Red and Blue work for competing time-traveling entities. Red works for the technocratic Agency, Blue for a collective called the Garden. They flit back and forth in time, trying to manipulate events in the past so that their faction wins. They're not exactly human; they're whatever humans have evolved to be in their timeline. They start leaving each other letters. At first the notes are taunts, but their curiosity about each other gradually turns into respect and finally love. Each has to grapple with the possibility that she's being catfished. The letters themselves show up under increasingly improbable circumstances: carved into the rings of trees growing over a period of centuries, or in oil on the lava as Atlantis sinks into the ocean. It's hard to create suspense in a story where time travel exists, always leaving open the possibility of going back to correct any mistake. But the real danger isn't about losing the time war, but rather losing a heart that still has something human in it. 52 Book Club Challenge: Spotted in a movie or TV series (Heartstopper). Booklist Queen Challenge: Time in the title.
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