Sometimes, a whole life can pass by in the blink of an eye – or in the time it takes to read a book, where the journey from birth to death can unfold in just a few hundred pages. Over the course of a novel, we can witness the many iterations of a person’s identity, their highest highs and most heartbreaking lows, and the multiple dramatic ways their surroundings evolve with each passing year.

From sweeping multi-generational epics to intimate chronicles of a single lifetime, the following Booker Prize and International Booker Prize-nominated novels span decades and centuries and reveal a world in a constant state of flux. Depicting tragic losses, great love affairs, societal upheaval and the complexities of everyday existence, these 11 compelling works explore the transformative nature of time, revealing humanity’s deepest triumphs and tragedies.

Flesh by David Szalay

Flesh charts the complicated life of protagonist István, beginning when he is just 15 years old and living on a housing estate in Hungary. From his time in juvenile detention to military service and his gradual rise up the ranks of London’s high society, the socially awkward István gradually builds an enviable life, worlds away from his upbringing. 

Winner of the Booker Prize in 2025, Flesh is a propulsive novel that takes place across multiple decades of István’s life, with – crucially – many of the key moments taking place off-stage, between chapters, and without providing a novel’s usual insights into the hero’s interior world. 

The Booker Prize judges said: ‘Using only the sparest of prose, this hypnotically tense and compelling book becomes an astonishingly moving portrait of a man’s life.’

Any Human Heart by William Boyd

Longlisted for the 2002 Booker Prize, Any Human Heart chronicles the life of Logan Mountstuart, from his early childhood years in the 1920s to his death in 1991. Presented through a series of journal entries, the book traces Mountstuart’s journey from his early school days to his stint as a writer in London and time serving as a naval intelligence officer – and much more. The book traverses continents and countries, detailing Mountstuart’s adventurous and colourful, almost Forrest Gump-esque experiences, including his participation in a number of real-life 20th-century events, such as the Spanish Civil War, two World Wars, the Great Depression and the 1950s art scene, and his encounters with such real-life luminaries as Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf, and members of the British Royal family. Throughout, Boyd presents Mountstuart as ‘a composite of multiple selves’ and captures the complexities of one man’s life: his strengths, his weaknesses, and his lack of satisfaction with the cards that life has dealt him.

Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong, translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae

Mater 2-10 is a multi-decade epic centred on three generations of rail workers in a divided Korea and their experiences of occupation and partition, beginning with Yi Jino, a laid-off worker and union leader who stages a sit-in atop a large industrial chimney. Blending elements of magical realism (including a talking pig) and folk tales, the novel begins in the Japanese colonial era and continues through Korea’s liberation, right up to the modern era. 

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024, the book took Hwang Sok-yong 30 years to complete, and is inspired by his encounter with an elderly former train driver during a visit to North Korea in 1989. The book serves as a powerful tribute to ordinary industrial workers in Korea: individuals who, Hwang says, ‘are among the most neglected figures, largely left out of post-colonial Korean literature’.

In a review for the Irish Times, Rónán Hession called Mater 2-10 a ‘novel of epic ambition and convincing delivery,’ praising Hwang for his ‘panoramic range on societal issues,’ while maintaining a compassionate touch.

Held by Anne Michaels

A contemplative and deeply poetic work of understated power, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024, Held presents a series of fragmented yet interconnected stories; a collage of miniature portraits viewed beneath a looming shadow of trauma and war. Beginning in 1917 on a battlefield in northern France, injured soldier John struggles to focus his thoughts. Returning to North Yorkshire, shellshocked, he marries artist Helena and is determined to keep living, despite his haunting memories of the past. 

Spanning four generations, from the First World War to the present day, and leaping forwards and backwards in time, Held explores the love, loss and death that shape its characters’ lives. Writing in The Conversation, Georgia Phillips said: ‘Like Michaels’ poetry, this tender but fiercely truncated novel combines its sense of loss, silence, history and identity with a desire to grasp the unquantifiable. The balance of tenderness with technical mastery is enthralling.’ 

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

Shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize, The Stone Diaries is a fictionalised autobiography, tracing the life of Daisy Goodwill Flett, an ordinary Canadian everywoman, born in 1905. The novel spans the 20th century, following Daisy through a tragic childhood, marriage, motherhood, and eventually old age. Each chapter captures a separate decade in Daisy’s troubled existence, recounting an often lonely and isolated journey, encompassing grief, adoption, widowhood and depression. 

‘Carol Shields has explored the mysteries of life with abandon, taking unusual risks along the way’, wrote Jay Parini in The New York Times. ‘The Stone Diaries reminds us again why literature matters.’

The book earned Shields a Pulitzer Prize and cemented her reputation. Her speciality, according to Barbara Ellen in the Observer, ‘has been the subtle ying and yang, the eternal ding-dong, if you will, of the human condition: young and old; happy and sad; confused and determined; male and female. The “nothing much” that usually happens all conveyed in such microscopic detail that humankind seems to be revealed in all its mundane, wonderful glory.’

On Canaan’s Side by Sebastian Barry

Another life-spanning novel, On Canaan’s Side explores the past of Lilly Bere, an octogenarian Irish woman, who is mourning the loss of her grandson Bill. Across 17 chapters – each representing the 17 days after the death of her grandson – Lilly reflects on the traumas of her past, including her forced immigration to America with her fiancé. Longlisted in 2011 for the Booker Prize, On Canaan’s Side is a poignant exploration of personal loss, and the enduring scars of sorrow. 

Reviewing the book in the Guardian, Alex Clark wrote: ‘By anybody’s reckoning, Lilly’s life is a traumatic one, encompassing multiple bereavements and separations, material hardship, numerous upheavals and unrelieved exile from an oppressed and divided homeland. Her indomitability – she is, she tells us, “thankful for my life, infinitely” – derives in part from the very invisibility and stoicism that she has had to cultivate and for the joy in small reliefs and pleasures to which that has led.’ 

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Jude, Willem, JB and Malcolm are four close friends living in New York. Jude, a talented litigator with a deeply painful past, endures life feeling ashamed and broken, unable to open up to his friends about the events that have led him to his current agonies. As he navigates life, haunting flashbacks gradually reveal the harrowing experiences that have left him physically and emotionally scarred. 

Steph Cha from The Los Angeles Times praised Yanagihara for how she incorporated time into the novel, ’one of the many things Yanagihara handles well is the narrative passage of time,’ while singer Dua Lipa, a passionate fan of the book, has described it as one of those books that ‘stays with you forever’. A heartbreaker of a novel – and one that some readers find to be almost unbearably bleak – A Little Life was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2015 and has since become a cult classic, selling millions of copies worldwide. 

The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin

This epic Georgian family drama, originally written in German, tells the story of several generations of the Jashi family. Told by Niza to her 12-year-old niece Brilka, each of the book’s seven chapters focuses on a different member of the family, starting with Niza’s great-grandmother, the strong-willed daughter of a chocolatier. 

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020 and weighing in at over 900 pages, The Eighth Life spares no details as Haratischvili takes readers on a journey across an eventful and brutal century, highlighting the impact of historical events on the family as they live through the Great Purge, the Second World War, the Georgian civil war and more. It is a story told, as Maya Jaggi observed in the Guardian, ‘from the rare vantage point of a subjugated republic on the fringes of the Russian and Soviet empires, the “balcony of Europe”.’ Jaggi argued that the book has ‘the heft and sweep’ to overturn the West’s misconceptions about Georgia, ‘while introducing the uninitiated to a beguiling culture’.

A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler, translated by Charlotte Collins

Just as the title suggests, A Whole Life depicts the entire life of one man, Andreas Egger, an orphan who is taken in by a farming family from an alpine village in Austria. From the early 1900s to the 1970s, Egger’s journey takes him through roles as a cable car worker, mountain guide, and soldier in the Second World War, during which he spends several years as a prisoner of war. As he eventually finds his way back to his village, he discovers that time hasn’t stood still, and modern advancements have transformed the place he called home. 

Despite enduring hardship and tragedy, Eggers remains fulfilled and grateful, living a simple life marked by solitude and stoicism. Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2016, A Whole Life is a reflection on a life well lived.

Writing in the Irish Times, Eileen Battersby said: ‘Seethaler never reduces Andreas to a mere victim. Instead, he is a survivor whose personality evolves throughout the narrative as experiences consolidate his response to existence. It is his story, yet A Whole Life is also a study of change and the impact of progress upon a traditional way of life.’ 

The Years by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L Strayer

Widely regarded as Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux’s magnum opus, The Years spans modern French history, from 1941 to 2006. Written in the third person, the memoir-like narrative (‘This is an autobiography unlike any you have ever read,’ wrote Edmund White in the New York Times) explores Ernaux’s life through the prism of a collective generation. Blending memories and observations, it delves into feminism, technology, politics, and historical moments, guiding readers through pivotal cultural events of the 20th century. The novel, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019, captures the rhythms of societal change while anchoring them in deeply personal reflections. 

Ernaux ‘captures the ineffable passage of time,’ wrote Lauren Elkin in the Guardian, showing ‘it is possible to write both personally and collectively, situating her own story within the story of her generation, without ever confusing the two’.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

Winner of the Booker Prize in 2014, The Narrow Road to the Deep North unfolds over half a century. Shifting between decades, Richard Flanagan recounts the life of war veteran and lauded Australian doctor Dorrigo Evans, from his childhood to his harrowing experiences as a prisoner of war on the Thailand-Burma Railway – also known as the ‘Death Railway’ – and into his later years. Haunted by memories of the war – and his heroic efforts to keep his fellow soldiers alive – and the guilt of a love affair with his uncle’s wife, Dorrigo searches for meaning and acceptance. 

The Booker Prize judges described the novel as ‘written in prose of extraordinary elegance and force,’ adding The Narrow Road ‘bridges East and West, past and present, with a story of guilt and heroism’.

This article was updated in December 2025 to include Flesh by David Szalay.