How can you make ordinary life feel resonant enough to function as literature? One of the ways is to structure it well. Time jumps—whether they be quick sneak-peeks into the future, as Muriel Spark does, or dramatic jumps of several years, as in Henry James’ work—can give resonance to a work of seemingly straightforward literary fiction. For this list, I’m not talking about books that include time travel, but rather novels that are interested in using “sleights of time” to make ordinary stories feel both dramatic and satisfying.
In my debut novel, Mistranslation, I employ several large time jumps in the narrative. By including a childhood section, a teenage section, and an adult section, I hope to infuse energy into the narrative at each jump and also to place certain moments in the lives of my characters in closer proximity to each other. In childhood, my main character Sabina meets Khalil—the boy who’s moved in across the street—and notices that he has popsicle juice staining his mouth. Their meeting is confrontational. In adolescence, during another pivotal moment, a drink has stained his mouth and it reminds her of something, although she can’t say what. By placing these two ordinary moments close together, I hope to create something that feels meaningful—in other words, that feels like plot.
Below, I’ll recommend five character-driven novels that use time jumps in innovative ways.
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Spoilers ahead: It’s my opinion that the time jump after Isabel Archer’s marriage is the single greatest moment in literature. For several hundred pages, the reader has watched the young, passionate and recently wealthy Isabel fall for the cold charm of Gilbert Osmond, who is worldly, widowed, and a dilettante of the dullest variety. Could Osmond love Isabel, or is he just after her money? I first read this 19th-century classic at the age of sixteen and can still remember staying up all night to find out what would happen to Isabel. The time jump that takes place after her marriage is genuinely devastating.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
This slim novel about an eccentric teacher’s hold on her students is excellent for so many reasons—for example, did it inspire The Secret History?—but one of its charms is the way Spark makes deft little leaps in time to reveal her characters’ futures in the space of a single sentence. Early in the novel, we’re informed that one of Miss Jean Brodie’s students will ultimately betray her, which also serves to turn the rest of the story into a sly whodunnit of sorts. Funny and harrowing, this midcentury novel should be read once for enjoyment and again as a study in craft.
The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen
Twenty-five years before Spark, Bowen wrote this dense and almost gothic novel that uses a leap into the past to breathe life into the narrative. Here, we follow two children arriving at a house in Paris. For the first third of the novel, the action—perhaps an ironic word, as there’s a deliberately stagnant feeling to everything that’s happening—takes place over the course of one day, but the middle section of the book jumps ten years into the past to imagine the lives of one of the children’s parents, before we return to the present of the novel. Both this tripartite structure and the almost metafictional aspect of the imagined past are ambitious and original; Bowen doesn’t give us neat answers but instead invites the reader to draw their own conclusions.
I’ll be honest: I wasn’t too impressed with this 2025 Booker-winning novel until I hit the second or even third time jump. The writing is spare, which is intentional but which doesn’t usually make for my favorite kind of novel. Yet Szalay always jumps forward to the right moment in his main character István’s life, often doing so in ways that brutally juxtapose one set of events with another. There’s a time jump in the first half of the book that redraws the relationship dynamics completely, and it’s this that won me over definitively to this haunting novel about ambition and loneliness.
The Meaning of Daughter by Alexia Nader
The Meaning of Daughter is also being published by the University of Iowa, which is how I became aware of it, and I read an ARC in order to interview Alexia. In a funny coincidence, my and Alexia’s novels—publishing only a week apart—both contain three distinct sections, each separated by a time jump. But while my novel follows the same characters across different periods of their lives, Alexia’s follows three generations of women from the same family, as each woman confronts the idea and/or the realities of motherhood. What I love about her approach is how each generation’s story illuminates something about the generation before it. This is a subtle novel in which the reader has to be attuned to what’s been left out in order to get the full story.