Items20The creator’s order
  1. 1Moon tiger (1987)Moon tiger (1987) 8.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 1987Claudia Hampton intends to put her own life inside a history of the world. Other people's memories make that ambitious account harder to control. Lively's movement between times and viewpoints turns a wartime love story into a question of who gets to define a life. This compact novel is a useful…0
  2. 2Night Watch (2006)Night Watch (2006) 6.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2006Knowing where these Londoners have ended up makes their earlier encounters more poignant. Waters moves backwards through the 1940s, letting causes arrive after consequences as wartime relationships take shape. The reverse sequence is clear enough to follow without a complicated chart. Read for how…0
  3. 3Life After Life (2013)Life After Life (2013) 8.5/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2013Ursula Todd's life repeatedly returns to an earlier possibility rather than proceeding once from birth to death. Atkinson makes the variations matter through family attachments, accidents and twentieth-century catastrophe. Notice what changes and what persists, without treating every passage as a…0
  4. 4How to Be Both (2014)How to Be Both (2014) 10.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2014A contemporary teenager and a Renaissance artist make a pair of stories whose order changes the associations a reader brings to the second. Smith uses art, grief and acts of looking to connect times without flattening their differences. Copies were published with the sections in either order;…0
  5. 5The Gathering (2007)The Gathering (2007) 8.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2007Veronica's preparations for her brother's funeral keep returning her to scenes she cannot confidently put in order or explain. Enright makes that instability part of grief and responsibility, rather than a puzzle the reader can solve from outside. Follow what Veronica needs to understand. Suicide…0
  6. 6Time's Arrow (1991)Time's Arrow (1991) 8.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 1991One man's life runs backwards, making ordinary actions look strange and moral cause and effect increasingly appalling. The reverse movement asks the reader to keep translating what is seen into what happened. Amis uses the device to confront a Nazi war criminal's past. It is short but deeply…0
  7. 7Use of Weapons (1990)Use of Weapons (1990) 7.9/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 1990A mercenary's work for the Culture is set against a past reached through a demanding arrangement of chapters. Banks makes the order in which we learn about a person alter the moral weight of his apparent usefulness. Keep track of the chapter labels and resist looking up a plot summary. This is the…0
  8. 8A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) 6.9/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2010The minor figure you have just passed may become the centre of the next episode, years away. Egan uses that change of distance to show music-industry lives acquiring consequences nobody could see at the time. The linked narrative also changes form, including a slide presentation. Hold on to people…0
  9. 9The Blind Assassin (2000)The Blind Assassin (2000) 7.3/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2000Iris looks back across a family history whose public account is far more orderly than the experience beneath it. Atwood lets memories and other texts change the meaning of events the reader thought they understood. Give this long novel time to establish its different layers. The reward is a…0
  10. 10The English Patient (1992)The English Patient (1992) 7.1/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 1992Four people in a damaged Italian villa carry histories the present cannot keep at a safe distance. Ondaatje allows a remembered place or sensation to open into another time, gradually changing the significance of an attachment. Read the transitions as emotional connections before trying to put…0