Welcome back to Book Break! In this video I'm going to recommend you some amazing dual timeline
stories: books that are told jumping back and forth between multiple timelines - at least two,
but for several of the books on this list it's way more than two. I've got nine books to recommend
you so let's jump straight in. Starting with a queen of this particular storytelling format,
Jenny Quintana. Jenny Quintana's whole back catalogue is basically
an example of excellence when it comes to dual timeline storytelling. This is her latest book
The Hiding Place. This book is told between the 60s and the 90s. In the 60s we follow Connie,
a teenager who has just found herself pregnant and abandoned by the baby's father. And then in the
90s we follow Marina as she tries to track down her birth parents. She was abandoned as a baby.
And so Marina ends up renting a flat in the building where she was found, the same building
where Connie lived three decades earlier. But in the 90s story, we also meet Eva, Marina's new and
very emotionally unstable neighbour who has got trauma and secrets of her own. Can You See Me
Now by Trisha Sakhlecha is told partly in present day, when Alia is working as a government minister
and Sabah is a documentary filmmaker looking for her next story, and 15 years earlier when Alia and
Sabah were part of the same friendship group at their very exclusive girls boarding school
in Delhi. These girls were caught up in a whole world of wealth and privilege that turned dark,
and it only took one night all those years ago for Alia's whole world to come shattering down around
her. Then there's a very intriguing spooky mystery in The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex, which is told
in between the 70s and the 90s. So in the 70s in Cornwall three men went missing from a lighthouse.
They vanished without a trace. The table was set for dinner, all of the clocks stopped the exact
same time, and the lighthouse was bolted from the inside. Very mysterious. In the 90s we follow an
author who is trying to write a story about this mystery, and he interviews the three women that
these men left behind. So as the book goes on we jump back and forth between these two timelines,
trying to piece together all of the different theories, sometimes supernatural, about what
really happened. Each chapter in Catch the Rabbit by Lana Bastasic is split into two halves. The
first half of each chapter is set in the present day when old friends Sara and Lejla have reunited
for the first time in years to take a road trip across Bosnia, searching for Lejla's missing
brother. And then the second half of each chapter recalls an event from their shared past, and shows
how they don't always remember the same events the same way. We've got three timelines in Ponti by
Sharlene Teo. This is set between 2020, 2003, and the 1970s in Singapore. So in 2003 we meet Szu,
this very lonely teenager who lives in the shadow of her beautiful reclusive actress mother Amisa,
who was once the star of this horror film franchise called Ponti. Szu's only friend is a
sometimes cruel girl called Circe who nonetheless takes Szu out of the loneliness of her life.
And then from that timeline we jump backwards and forwards. We go back to the 70s and we hear
Amisa's story of her time working on this film franchise, and we also jump forward to 2020,
when Circe is working on the marketing campaign for a remake of Ponti, which forces her to look
back on her time spent with the family. The Confession by Jessie Burton is set between
present day and the 80s. So in the 80s we follow the love story between two women, Connie and Elise
who meet one afternoon on Hampstead Heath, and very quickly fall into this intense relationship,
with Elise following Connie to LA, to oversee the film adaptation of Connie's latest novel.
And we see this trip becoming increasingly overwhelming for Elise leading her to make
an impulsive decision that will change everything. And then in the present day we meet a young woman
called Rose who has never met her mother who went missing, vanished without a trace, shortly after
her birth. The only thing she knows is that the famous but reclusive novelist Connie Holden is
the last person to have seen her mother before she vanished. And so Rose goes and gets a job
working in Connie's house without admitting who she is in order to dig up the secrets. OK The
Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel. We've got lots of timelines in this one. I absolutely loved
this book. It's a really intoxicating dreamy read, but it is quite hard to explain. So we are jumping
back and forth through time, through the lives of this brother and sister, who once both worked at
a luxury glass hotel. The brother goes in and out of rehab throughout the years, struggling
with a drug addiction, the sister ends up with a very rich businessman whose entire investment
fund turns out to be a Ponzi scheme. We also know that 10 years into the future the sister will go
missing from the deck of a ship. So the way that all of these different timelines come together
really has to be read to be understood. There There by Tommy Orange is another one
that plays with timelines in very interesting ways. It's not told in a linear way at all,
and the way that all of these different timelines come together only really starts to be pieced
together later as the book goes on. So we follow the lives of 12 different characters from Native
American communities who are all connected to each other in ways they may not yet realise. And
it's quite a brutal and violent book, it's about the lives of urban Native Americans, a community
that is not very often represented in literature. And then I started with one dual timeline queen,
Jenny Quintana, I couldn't resist finishing with another Kate Morton. And The Clockmaker's Daughter
is probably Kate Morton's most chronically ambitious novel. There are multiple timelines
all being pieced together in this book. We flash in and out of different generations,
different characters, living in this one beautiful manor house. And we actually did a video all about
this book and interviewed Kate Morton, so I'll link to that video below. It was really fun. I
got to go and visit the house that inspired the book and it really really felt like going back
in time. But in this book - there are too many timelines for me to tell you about, so I will
just tell you that in 1862, a group of artists came to spend a summer at this gorgeous manor
house. But by the end of the summer, one woman had been shot dead and another woman had gone
missing. And we then see the reverberations of this all through the next 150 years of this house,
until we get to present day, when another young woman finds some mysterious items in the leather
satchel, which prompt her to go back and explore the house's secrets for herself. But before I go,
I said I was going to recommend nine books, but I'm actually giving you a bonus number 10,
because I've got to let you know to look out for this book coming in July. The Ophelia Girls by
Jane Healey. This book is set between the 70s, when teenager Ruth and her four best friends are
obsessed with pre-Raphaelite art, and even more obsessed with each other,
and the 90s, when Ruth is all grown up. She has a teenage daughter of her own who is recovering
from a serious illness that nearly killed her, and one of Ruth's childhood friends shows back
up on the scene. I can't get enough of books told between multiple timelines like that,
I think it's a format that lends itself so well to mysteries, but also to epic love stories. I
love seeing all of the pieces of a puzzle come together through the different timelines. So I
would love to hear your recommendations for any more books like this. I will also link here to
a playlist of all of our videos recommending historical fiction books, so if that's what
you're in the mood for, click through and have a browse, and I'll see you next time.