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10 Books Driven By Time

I don’t always manage to do a Top Ten Tuesday post but this week’s prompt was a good excuse to go digging into my archives.

The topic is books with titles that include units of time. That could be seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, eternity. Our lives are so governed by time that maybe it’s not surprising how often a term relating to duration is used in book titles. Even so I was startled to find how many books I’ve read that fitted the prompt.

The first book that came to mind was 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World by Elif Shafak, which if you haven’t read it yet, I urge you to remedy that pronto. It’s a wonderfully evocative and spellbinding tale of the last moments in the life of Tequila Leila, an Istanbul prostitute. The novel’s title and first half describe the last moments of Leila’s consciousness as she crosses from life into death.

Here are my other choices of books I’ve read with units of time in the title. All the hyperlinks take you to my reviews.

The Hours by Michel Cunningham 

Three Hours by Rosamund Lipton 

One Moonlit Night by Caradog Prichard

Twelve Nights by Urs Fans

Three Days and a Life by Pierre Le Maitre 

Five Days At Memorial by Sheri Fink 

The Cruellest Month by Louise Penny 

Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules and the list of topics visit the Top Ten Tuesday page on her blog.

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