Impossible Times Books in Order
Part ofMark Lawrence Books in OrderExplore the Impossible Times trilogy by Mark Lawrence in order, with summaries, series background, and guidance on how its time travel story connects to his other work.
Last updated: December 24, 2025
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Publication Order
3 books
One Word Kill
by Mark Lawrence
2019
In 1986 London, fifteen year old maths prodigy Nick Hayes is diagnosed with cancer and then approached by a stranger who claims to be his future self. As Nick and his Dungeons & Dragons group try to protect their friend Mia from a violent threat, they are drawn into an impossible time loop.
Limited Wish
by Mark Lawrence
2019
Now a student at Cambridge, cancer survivor Nick Hayes wants a normal life but keeps finding creases in time that threaten catastrophe. Pulled between versions of himself and haunted by what he knows is coming, he must fix the timeline without losing Mia or breaking the world.
Dispel Illusion
by Mark Lawrence
2019
Years after first meeting his future self, Nick Hayes is a researcher racing toward the moment when everything began. Mia’s fateful accident and the closed loop of his own life are fast approaching, and a new discovery suggests he may have been lying to himself all along.
Series background & context
Impossible Times is Mark Lawrence’s tight, three book foray into time travel and near future science fiction. Instead of castles and convents, the story starts in 1980s London, but it keeps his usual focus on friendship, trauma and hard choices.
The trilogy centres on Nick Hayes, a teenage maths prodigy who is diagnosed with leukaemia in One Word Kill. He spends his weeks bouncing between chemotherapy sessions and Dungeons & Dragons games with his small circle of friends. Then a strange man who looks uncomfortably familiar starts following him, claiming to be Nick from the future and warning that their new friend Mia is in terrible danger.
From there the books spiral through branching timelines, paradoxes and the question of how much of your life is fixed once you have seen part of what is coming. Limited Wish follows Nick to Cambridge University, where he works with a brilliant but difficult professor and discovers that experiments in manipulating time may already have started. The creases in reality threaten to tear far beyond his own small circle.
In Dispel Illusion, Nick is an adult researcher approaching the age of the man he once met as a teenager. He knows the date of Mia’s accident and the outcomes he has been told must happen. The problem is that he can also see ways to try to dodge that fate, even if every change risks making things worse.
Throughout the trilogy, Lawrence uses the group’s ongoing D&D campaign as a mirror and commentary on what is happening in the “real” world, just as he uses fantasy structures to frame questions about illness, consent and the ethics of meddling with time. The books are shorter and more compact than his epic fantasy series, but they hit many of the same emotional beats.
This page gives you the reading order, short summaries and a sense of how Impossible Times connects to the rest of his work. It is a good choice if you want Lawrence’s voice and interest in broken people trying to do the right thing, but in a setting of lab coats, cassette tapes and paradoxes instead of swords and sorcery.
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