What are some books that think outside the linear first- or third-person storyline? Some examples I can think of include:
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Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi The book starts out with two sisters separated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. One stays in Africa, the other is taken to America. The rest of the book bounces back and forth between across the ocean, each covering a direct descendant of these two women for about 300 years. The author had to create a character, world, and story for each individual chapter of the book, basically making the reader connect with this newly-introduced person in the span of just a few pages.
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Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold The narrator is telling her story after having been murdered.
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Inland by Téa Obreht One half of the book told the story of a woman struggling in the American southwest in the 1800s. It took me a good while to figure out who was narrating the other half of the book: >!A dead body riding around on camelback.!<
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Always Never by Jordi Lefabre This one’s a graphic novel told backwards. Chapter 1 is actually the end of the story, and each chapter works its way back in time until you arrive at the last chapter, which is the beginning of the story.
EDIT: Adding Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday. Two different narrators break the book up into three parts: Alice’s story part 1, Amar’s story, then Alice’s story part 2. I had to read the reviews after finishing this story to figure out what the author has done, but it was brilliant.
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In the dream house - it’s a memoir but the narration is unique
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokvo
This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is an epistolary novel written in second person, if I recall correctly. It has truly lush vocabulary in a time spy vs. time spy enemies-to-lovers queer novella.
this was my favorite book i read this year. so good, only ~200 pages, i recommend it to everyone !
The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe - it’s wild seeing the world from inside Francie’s head.
Jesus yeah, some book, its fair darkly funny at times as well
The Neverending Story with the font colors.
Ulysses, by James Joyce, is kind of a catalog of narrative styles
Always Coming Home by Ursula K LeGuin - a fictional ethnography (so written in past tense, and like it’s nonfiction, but it’s all made up) of a future society that doesn’t exist yet. Also multimodal (poems, narrative, songs, etc) and an interesting use of collective perspectives & points of view
Also the Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (each book is a day in the narrator’s real time where his life has gone to shit, and he spends the book telling part of his life story from before - but the series is unfinished rn) and the Locked Tomb series by Tasmyn Muir (plays around a lot with timelines and second/third person switches)
Dracula by Bram Stoker. The epistolary, nonlinear style with the different characters’ perspectives is really interesting.
House of Leaves.
Font colors, two equally unreliabable narrators, footnotes to footnotes of digressions within end notes, and a whole section near the end where you have to turn the book 90 degrees every page to read it.
Special Topics in Calamity Physics. I read it a long time ago when I was in high school but it’s written as an academic paper, which is kind of interesting.
House of Leaves.
In a Bamboo Grove, a short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. It’s first person, with a twist.
The novel 253 by Geoff Ryman is about a train with 253 people on it with a section on each consisting of 253 words. Initially published online, hyperlinked, later published in print; the author remarked that the two formats give the novel different meaning, one emphasising the connectedness, one emphasising the differences.
i am red by orhan pamuk. the author not only uses the voices of our main characters but of different things and objects (ie a dog, a picture, death, the country, a colour among other things) to create a cohesive picture. i remember being entranced the first time i read it.
same goes for midnight’s children by salman rushdie. he leaps back and forth, foreshadowing and having all things happen at once sometime so it seems like one is conscious of several layers of time existing. it’s surreal and dreamlike.
celestial bodies by jokha alharti follows the same format, but it’s slightly more confusing in the sense that some parts seem surreal and others not so. but honestly i found it to be refreshing and unusual as well in that sense.
life after life by kate atkinson gave us an interesting concept of looping back and forth to live one’s life with the vague sense that one can help to avert things but yet shows us that nothing is ever set in stone.
The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
Narrated by Death during WWII. The formatting is very unique. Bolded words and italics. Moves between haunting and poetic to chatty and personable.