
Our score
Excellent
Listen free with a trial
Start a free Audible trialNew to Audible? Start a free trial to listen: stream or download titles in the Audible app and cancel anytime.
As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support the site at no extra cost to you.
This Is How You Lose the Time War Audiobook— narrated by Cynthia Farrell and Emily Woo Zeller
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's This Is How You Lose the Time War is a slim, fierce epistolary romance between two enemy agents trading letters across the wreckage of warring timelines. It's science fiction built on language and longing more than mechanics, and it rewards readers who love prose that performs.
Why the audiobook wins
This is a book about two voices falling for each other through letters, so it needed two narrators, and splitting Red and Blue between Cynthia Farrell and Emily Woo Zeller is what makes the gambit work. Each reader owns her half completely, so when the letters start echoing each other's phrasing, you hear two distinct minds converging rather than one performer doing a voice.
The novel is dense and lyrical, easy to reread mid-sentence on the page; read aloud, the letters move at the pace of actual correspondence, one voice answering another, and the shifting timelines become easier to track by ear than by eye. At a lean four hours plus change, it rewards one uninterrupted sitting more than a scattered commute.
Few books this short leave this much of an afterimage. Farrell and Zeller turn a strange, elliptical premise, enemies who fall in love leaving letters in tree rings and lava flows, into something you feel rather than decode. One credit, one sitting, and you'll want to start it again.
Already a member? Go straight to This Is How You Lose the Time War on Audible
Prefer to read it?
Audiobook questions
- Who narrates the This Is How You Lose the Time War audiobook?
- Cynthia Farrell and Emily Woo Zeller narrate the audiobook edition of This Is How You Lose the Time War.
- How long is the This Is How You Lose the Time War audiobook?
- The audiobook runs 4 hr 16 min.
- Is the This Is How You Lose the Time War audiobook worth listening to?
- We scored This Is How You Lose the Time War 4.2 out of 5. This is a book about two voices falling for each other through letters, so it needed two narrators, and splitting Red and Blue between Cynthia Farrell and Emily Woo Zeller is what makes the gambit work. Each reader owns her half completely, so when the letters start echoing each…
- Can I listen to This Is How You Lose the Time War free with an Audible trial?
- Eligible new Audible members can use a free-trial credit to listen in the Audible app. Eligibility and current offer terms are set by Audible.





