Jason Ayres Books in Order
Explore Jason Ayres books in order, with quick summaries, series guides, and where to start across The Time Bubble, A Year in the Life, and more.
Last updated: July 7, 2026
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Publication Order
27 books
Austerity Dad
by Jason Ayres
2013
In this follow-up diary, Ayres tackles parenting on a budget with jokes, grumbles and dubious money-saving tips. Holidays, nappies, fussy eaters and junk food all make the cut in a lively account of everyday family life.
Fortysomething Father
by Jason Ayres
2013
Ayres looks back on a year as a stay-at-home dad, juggling young children, marriage, food obsessions and middle-aged panic. It is a warm, self-mocking diary about family life and the chaos in small daily battles.
Global Cooling
by Jason Ayres
2014
Ten years after the first bubble, a new one is found in Cornwall just as an asteroid strike plunges Britain into brutal cold. In a small town fighting hunger and fear, survival becomes as dangerous as time travel.
The Sausage Man
by Jason Ayres
2014
Jason Ayres turns his stint as Britain's official sausage taster into a funny diary of food, travel and odd public fame. It is part memoir, part behind-the-scenes look at a very British title.
The Time Bubble
by Jason Ayres
2014
Teenagers Charlie and Josh discover a strange portal in a railway tunnel that sends them into the future. What starts as a joke becomes dangerous when the jumps grow longer and a girl's disappearance puts Charlie under suspicion.
Man Out of Time
by Jason Ayres
2015
Daniel Fisher lands 22 years in the future to find himself legally dead and locked out of his old life. Branded unstable and trapped in an unfamiliar world, he becomes obsessed with getting back and finding who did this to him.
Splinters In Time
by Jason Ayres
2015
Josh Gardner sets out to prove parallel worlds are real after his ex starts dreaming of one. A trip to 2025 goes badly wrong, leaving him lost across dangerous alternate timelines and desperate for a way back.
Class of '92
by Jason Ayres
2016
Stranded in 1992 Oxford, Josh Gardner must navigate a pre-internet world while searching for a way home. Then missing people from different decades begin turning up unchanged, and the mystery pulls him deeper into time.
Midlife Crisis
by Jason Ayres
2016
Richard Kent is jobless, miserable and stuck thinking about better days. When a stranger grants him six trips into his past, he grabs the chance to fix old mistakes, settle scores and rediscover who he was.
Vanishing Point
by Jason Ayres
2016
Josh and Alice reach Canberra and join scientists Henry and Vanessa Jones in a mind-transference experiment. When the timeline starts erasing people and someone begins killing the only witnesses, they have to stop a deadly rewrite of history.
Rock Bottom
by Jason Ayres
2017
At 43, Kay's life has collapsed into drink, regret and a flat above a chip shop. Given a chance to revisit the past, she chases second chances, investigates her husband, and risks uncovering a killer.
Happy New Year
by Jason Ayres
2018
Amy is trapped reliving every New Year's Eve of her life, moving backwards one year at a time. As she grows younger, she tries to fix old wounds, family tragedies and bad choices before time runs out on her.
My Tomorrow, Your Yesterday
by Jason Ayres
2018
Thomas Scott wakes in hospital with no memory and discovers his life is moving backwards, one day at a time. As he travels from middle age toward childhood, he tries to protect his family by changing the past.
Return to Tomorrow
by Jason Ayres
2021
Thomas Scott wants to preserve the future that will lead him to the right life and the right woman. But when another traveller starts using foreknowledge for his own gain, their clash ripples from Oxford in 1988 to Ibiza in the 1990s.
Cause of Death
by Jason Ayres
2022
Henry Jones wakes on Fuerteventura with no memory and finds himself dying in different ways inside a shifting time loop. With Alice's help, he must recover the truth before the island traps them forever.
Lauren's Odyssey
by Jason Ayres
2022
Lauren has always preferred staying in the present, but a crisis forces her into the multiverse. Crossing five very different realities, she must keep moving, think fast and stop a threat that reaches far beyond one world.
Gone to the Rapture
by Jason Ayres
2023
Unexplained disappearances spread from a motorway pileup to the wider world, and panic starts to unravel society. Josh suspects time travel is behind it, but finding answers grows harder as the population vanishes around him.
The Crooked Line
by Jason Ayres
2023
In 1972, fading TV star Ronnie and rising comic Bernard head to a will reading and end up in a strange country house. An inheritance game soon turns into a comic mystery involving apparitions, an ancient stone circle and time-bending secrets.
The Haunted Theatre
by Jason Ayres
2023
After their soap is cancelled, Ronnie and Bernard take a pantomime job in the seaside resort of Skegmouth. Rumours swirl around the Grand Theatre, and before long the pair are trapped in time with no easy way out.
1980: A Year in the Life of Keith Diamond
by Jason Ayres
2024
Shock jock Keith Diamond loses his job and gets hurled back to 1980, when he was a young Fleet Street reporter. Surrounded by music, headlines and old mistakes, he tries to change both his future and other lives.
1981: A Year in the Life of Nick Taylor
by Jason Ayres
2024
Nick gets the chance to relive the worst year of his childhood, the year his mother died and his family fell apart. Back in 1981 as a ten-year-old, he knows what must change, but nobody listens to children.
1982: A Year in the Life of Wendy Wood
by Jason Ayres
2024
Wendy once seemed destined for pop stardom before bad luck and betrayals wrecked everything. Given a way back to 1982, she throws herself into the Oxford music scene and tries to reclaim the future she lost.
Closing Time
by Jason Ayres
2024
Decades after discovering the first portal, Josh and the surviving team are older, tired and facing loss. Then a new anomaly begins swallowing parts of Earth, and the final fight becomes a race against time itself.
1983: A Year in the Life of Jenna Rae
by Jason Ayres
2025
Jenna returns to 1983 determined to protect her Cornish village from greed, tragedy and change. She takes on local power players while trying to save both her family's future and the place she loves.
1984: A Year in the Life of Nobby Clarke
by Jason Ayres
2025
Lifelong gambler Nobby Clarke gets a shot at 1984, but he cannot use it to get rich. Instead he tries to clear his father's name, save the family business and repair the mess he made of love and life.
1985: A Year in the Life of Robbie James
by Jason Ayres
2025
After creating an AI that costs him his job, Robbie is sent back to 1985 and the boss who always beat him. He sees a chance to reclaim a stolen idea, rescue a lost romance and rewrite his future.
1986: A Year in the Life of Lucy Hart
by Jason Ayres
2026
Widowed Lucy learns her marriage was built on lies, then gets a chance to return to 1986. Back in suburban Surrey with two small children, she starts building her own business and her own life.
Where should I start?
If you want the main time travel saga: The Time Bubble → Global Cooling → Man Out of Time
If you like emotional second-chance stories: My Tomorrow, Your Yesterday → Midlife Crisis → Rock Bottom
If you want nostalgic 1980s fiction: 1980: A Year in the Life of Keith Diamond → 1981: A Year in the Life of Nick Taylor → 1982: A Year in the Life of Wendy Wood
If you prefer broad British comedy: The Crooked Line → The Haunted Theatre
If you want memoir and parenting humour: Fortysomething Father → Austerity Dad → The Sausage Man
Author bio
Jason Ayres was born in Oxford and grew up in Oxfordshire, and he now lives in Evesham, Worcestershire. He writes the kind of time travel novels that start with ordinary lives and then tip them into something strange, funny, emotional or quietly unsettling. Across his books, you will find parallel worlds, second chances, family drama and a lot of British nostalgia.
He came to fiction by the long route.
Before writing novels full time, Ayres spent years working in market research. The shift toward writing became real in 2013, when he joined the Oxford Mail as a weekly columnist. That gave him a regular outlet and, just as important, a reason to keep showing up at the page.
Family life shaped a lot of what came next. In his own account, he left full-time employment while caring for his children, ran discos and karaoke nights at weekends, and started blogging about the chaos and comedy of being a parent. Those early pieces grew into his first books, the humorous diaries Fortysomething Father and Austerity Dad. He followed them with The Sausage Man, drawn from the strange period when he became Britain's official sausage taster.
Then the time travel took over.
His first novel, The Time Bubble, arrived in 2014. It began with a simple hook, a mysterious portal in a railway tunnel, and grew into a long-running series that eventually stretched across fifteen books. What readers tend to like in these novels is not just the puzzle of time travel, but the way Ayres folds big ideas into recognisable lives. Characters lose jobs, fall in love, make bad choices, carry regrets, and then get dropped into situations that let them revisit the past, face the future, or watch reality bend around them.
That approach shows up in books such as My Tomorrow, Your Yesterday, where a man lives his life backwards, Midlife Crisis, where a frustrated father gets a limited chance to redo key moments, and Class of '92, which mixes temporal mystery with strong 1990s nostalgia. Even when the premises are wild, the emotions stay close to home. His stories return again and again to missed chances, family ties, changing timelines and the nagging question of what people would fix if they really had the chance.
In more recent work, Ayres has widened the map without losing the voice. The Ronnie and Bernard Adventures lean into broad 1970s comedy, mystery and light supernatural fun. A Year in the Life takes a different approach, using standalone novels set in different years of the 1980s to explore memory, regret and reinvention. Each book has a new lead and a new corner of Britain, but the same curiosity runs underneath.
He has also built a loyal readership. By 2026 he had published twenty-four books and sold more than 250,000 copies. That is a solid result for a writer who came to this career after other jobs, family commitments and a lot of persistence.
Away from the page, food is clearly part of the story too. In 2013 he tasted around 300 sausages on his way to being named Britain's official sausage taster, and later helped judge British Sausage Week. It sounds like a joke, but it also fits the larger picture, Ayres's books and public persona both have room for the odd, the funny and the very everyday.
These days he writes from Evesham and talks about balancing work with a busy family life raising two teenage boys. That feels like a useful key to the books. However strange the setup gets, Ayres usually writes about regular people trying to cope, improvise and maybe do a little better the second time around.
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