As We Fall Through Time, by Claire North

Time travel in fiction is tricky, especially if we take into account continuity and paradoxes; however, Claire North decided to embrace paradoxes and changing timelines to create a romantic sci-fi story that is equally ambitious yet intimate, a novel with a lot of heart at its core, a proposal that slowly evolves and embrace bigger stakes as we fall through the multiple timelines.

When Cal meets Oliver, a soldier of the French Revolution, he knows his lover is destined to die. Being a time traveller, he can just make the necessary tweaks to history to keep Oliver alive; small paradoxes can be easily closed, and things can be fixed, a small price to pay for love. 
When Fadimatu stumbles upon her own mummified corpse in a museum, a paradox that sets her on a path that simultaneously exists and not; a sudden rupture through the fabric of story that is affecting what all the lives built by the travellers. A rip that will put all the travellers in different paths, desperate journeys in which one of them has their own agenda.

Interestingly, North starts the novel with a relative low stakes setting, focusing on Cal's attempts to keep Oliver alive, that tender romance which also helps to establish how time travel and its quirks work; however, after letting us feel comfortable, North pulls the floor under our feet, with growing stakes while the plot becomes much more complex, even confusing by moments. And you know what? It's brilliant how North plays with the multiple timelines, using the confusion from the paradoxes as a way to make the plot continue; you need to experience it, but seriously, trust the author to pull it all together.

As in Slow Gods, North also takes the opportunity to defy concepts so ingrained in our society like genre, taking a fluid approach that was another of the aspects I really enjoyed in this novel; and we can't forget how climate plays a pivotal role on the whole plot, which is nowadays more relevant than ever.
The pacing was in a sweet spot, starting slow with smaller stakes as we follow Cal-Oliver, but soon growing into bigger stakes as the pacing accelerates, embracing a chaotic approach that really suits this story well.

As We Fall Through Time is the kind of time travel novel that I absolutely love: ambitious and unafraid of embracing complexity; trust the author, and you will get an amazing experience. A really brilliant novel by Claire North.