The best time-bending novels that turn reality inside-out

Slaughterhouse-Five is my favourite book of all time, and the book I would most like to have written myself (if only I had Vonnegut’s skill and didn’t have to live through the fire-bombing of Dresden).

Dealing with the atrocities of war while throwing in a mix of aliens and time travel, and regularly breaking the ‘fourth wall’, it’s a novel that shouldn’t work... but works superbly because of that.

Hilarious and tragically sad, mind-bending but soundly logical, the story of Billy Pilgrim and how he is kidnapped by Tralfamadorians to be mated in a zoo with a beautiful movie star on the other side of the universe, and how he survives World War II, is one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking stories ever.

I enjoy the occasional romance, but often want something more than a traditional linear structure with predictable character trajectories, and The Time Traveler’s Wife won me over completely.

Not only does it play with the concept of time, pitting two characters in a relationship with one another at various non-sequential points in their lives (Henry meets Clare when she’s six and he’s thirty-six, they get married when she’s twenty-two and he’s thirty!), but it does it oh-so-convincingly. What’s more, it tells a superb love story at the same time—one of the best.

I’ve always been a sucker for an unreliable narrator and Saul Adler turns out to be one of the most unreliable of all time.

He’s a character whose views about his relationships with other people we can’t help but grow to distrust, and who invites dislike. Hit by a car on London’s Abbey Road in 1988, while his girlfriend is preparing to take a photo, his life-story becomes like pieces of a broken mirror, except the shards ultimately reflect two contrasting trajectories.

I love the way Deborah Levy layers and intertwines these versions of his life, back and forward through time, from East Berlin and the reunification of Germany to contemporary London, and how as readers we’re able to gradually identify a (possibly) ‘truer’ reflection of what really happened.

This is the first novel I read by Haruki Murakami and it got me hooked on his writing.

Toru Okada is tasked with finding his lost cat but, as he searches, the past stories of other characters constantly intersect and become inescapable detours, which often foster ambiguity and a sense of becoming lost in a charmed world.

We’re left with an impression of a world slipping into the surreal, where reality becomes blurred like Okada’s memory of what his missing cat looks like, and where “Ten minutes is not ten minutes” because time can stretch and shrink. I was frequently surprised and sometimes confounded by this but, because of Murakami’s skill as a writer, felt pleasantly lulled with the same dreamlike acquiescence as his hero into following Okada’s convoluted journey.

The memory of a primary school-teacher reading this book to the class has remained with me for decades, and was partly responsible for me wanting to write stories of my own.

Living in a historic village myself, the idea of Peter, the young protagonist, finding a rusty, medieval gauntlet and, after slipping his hand into it, being transported back to a life in that era, appealed so much to me that I spent a lot of time digging the vegetable garden afterwards in the hope of unearthing something similar.

That Peter then buries a different object in 1326, which he digs up in the twentieth century to prove the truth of his experience, really fired my imagination and left me fascinated by time-bending stories ever since.