On the Book Lady's Blog, she has come up with an annotated list of a several novels and short stories that play with time in compelling ways and in most cases also happen to be amazing.
From the piece...
The Beggar Maid, Alice Munro.
This set of linked stories, which charts the nodal events in the life of a single protagonist, Rose, has the effect of a novel, because we see Rose’s life journey, from having grown up in a small town in rural Ontario (covered in the first 3 stories), to having made her way out in the wider world (the next 5 stories), where she reinvents herself over and over (as wife of a pampered rich boy, lover to various men, mother, TV talk show host, actress), and her eventual return to the town where she grew up (the last 2 stories). Taken together the stories have the feeling of the wanderings of Odysseus, though with a far less dramatic homecoming (though it is, of course, heartbreaking). Part of the wonder of this book is that while the stories themselves are arranged in chronological order with regard to Rose’s life (so that we are able to connect the dots and put together a complex larger portrait of her, complete with well-developed themes about self-image and social class) there is a great deal of time-bending within the stories. The first story, “Royal Beatings,” for instance, which recounts events in Rose’s childhood, takes a jump at the end to a many-decades-later point in time that lies beyond the time frame of the book’s final story, “Who Do You Think You Are?” Meanwhile, this final story travels back to a point in Rose’s childhood that predates any of the events in “Royal Beatings.” It’s also worth noting that the linked story or novel-in-stories format is particularly suited to this kind of jumping around in time, because each story itself becomes a kind of “block” in the overall architecture.
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