We present multiversion timestamp locking (MVTL), a new genre of multiversion concurrency control algorithms for serializable transactions. The key idea behind MVTL is simple and novel: lock individual time points instead of locking objects or versions. After showing what a generic MVTL algorithm looks like, we demonstrate MVTL’s expressiveness: we present several simple MVTL algorithms that address limitations of current multiversion schemes, by committing trans- actions that previous schemes would abort, by avoiding the problem of serial aborts and ghost aborts, and by offering a way to prioritize transactions that should not be aborted.