A little over one year ago, we brought you the first word of This Is How You Lose the Time War, a jointly written novella of temporal warfare and timeline-cross’d romance co-written by award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Today, we’re pleased to close that loop (a small time travel joke, y’all) with another post telling you a little bit more about the hotly anticipated mashup—arriving on shelves next summer from Saga Press—and showing off the cover art, which takes illustrating the concept of love amid a brutal war across time in an unexpected direction…

Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange letters—and fall in love in this thrilling and romantic book from award-winning authors Amal-El Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future. Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war. That’s how war works. Right? Co-written by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space.

As you can tell from the blurb—and as you might expect if you’ve read the authors’ prior bodies of work—this is a book that blurs the lines between pure genre and quote-unquote literature, and the cover—designed by Greg Stadnyk— reflects that with clever subtlety. As Saga Press editor Navah Wolfe puts it: “How to capture a book that feels epic, romantic, literary, and spans all of time and space in one cover? I barely knew where to start—but Greg knocked this one out of the park.”

Amal is a big fan. “I absolutely adore this cover! It really gets to Red and Blue as the heart of the book: their distance from human, their equal-and-opposite-ness, the way they reflect and distort each other across time and space,” she said. “Everything else is details I can’t wait for readers to discover.”

Adds Max: “Red and Blue make war through broken time—they are enemies and reflections and more, they’re inhuman and all too human. I love how this cover captures that shape, that rhythm. Maybe the birds are broken, and the type. Or maybe it’s the world that’s broken against them.”

This Is How You Lose the Time War will be released July 16, 2019, but you can preorder now, which is kind of like time traveling, if you think about it.