History AnachronicOrder / Literature

* The protagonist in Creator/ChuckPalahniuk's ''Literature/Survivor1999'' is speaking the entire story into the flight recorder of the plane he has hijacked. His narration unfolds two time lines. One is his time after being one of the few survivors of a suicide cult while the other time line covers his indoctrination. The disjointed narrative is highlighted be the page and chapter count of the book running backwards running down to the point when the plane will run out of fuel.

* Robert Masello uses this in many of his novels; ''Blood and Ice'', ''The Medusa Mask'', and ''The Romanov Cross'' all feature a storyline set in the present while also looking at events in the past, such as the ''Blood and Ice'' flashbacks looking at the events that led to Sinclair and Eleanor becoming vampires in the Crimean War or ''Medusa Amulet'' exploring the history of the titular amulet.

* Abused to no end by P. Howard, especially in his more lighthearted novels. more often than not, the first thing we find out about the protagonist's actions, is the impact they had on the whole plot, or the impressions they left on the witnesses. And I don't mean they are told through flashbacks. Several chapters will end with secondary or tertiary characters discovering that their current most pressing issue was mysteriously solved, under very unusual circumstances, followed by several chapters retelling everything from the hero's point of view. Then the next plot twist comes in, and events seem to be told in chronological order again, until the situations is resolved again, in a seemingly anticlimactic fashion.

* The protagonist in Creator/ChuckPalahniuk's ''Literature/{{Survivor}}'' is speaking the entire story into the flight recorder of the plane he has hijacked. His narration unfolds two time lines. One is his time after being one of the few survivors of a suicide cult while the other time line covers his indoctrination. The disjointed narrative is highlighted be the page and chapter count of the book running backwards running down to the point when the plane will run out of fuel.

* Katherine Kerr's ''Literature/{{Deverry}}'' series. The date of each section in order, is, 1045, 1052, 643, 1058, 698, 1062, 773, 1063, 790-797, 1063, 833-845, 1063, 1096, 718-915, 918, 980, 1096, 843, 1098, 1112, 1116, 1063, 1116 -- and that's just the first half of the series. The oldest part of the story and the newest both take place in the last book; Kerr often said the pattern was supposed to bring to mind Celtic knotwork in embroidery.

* ''Literature/TheWheelOfTime'' series does this out of necessity in order to cover the journeys of its [[LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters many characters]], most of whom are in different places at any given time. While a given event is never shown twice, it is not uncommon to have a character do something in one book, to have another character react to that event several books later. And occasionally you'll see people reacting to something secondhand, to have a chapter come along later from the point of view of someone who was there, describing the event as it happened. Book Ten, ''Crossroads of Twilight'', takes place almost entirely over the span of time covered by Book Nine, ''Winter's Heart''.

* Nikki Flynn & Edwin Dantes model their writing of ''Literature/AnthologiesOfUllord'' after this trope. Their various stories spoil events from other stories since there are a lot of crossover stories and characters making cameo appearances. These cameo appearances are used as a {{Continuity Nod}} and in a {{Connected All Along}} way. You can pick up reading any series or umbrella of their works (so long as you take book 1 in the series first) and experience this trope.

* The ''Literature/{{Fallocaust}}'' series is split into the main series and companion novels. While each book in the main series occurs in order, so far beginning within moments of each other, the companion novels each explore a specific character's past.

* ''Literature/AMillionRandomDigitsWithOneHundredThousandNormalDeviates'' doesn't follow any type of set structure, it just randomly switches focus from character to character almost randomly thousands of times. Did we mention the book has more than ten different characters to switch between?

* ''Literature/TheEnglishPatient'' is more or less set at the end of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, but devotes many chapters and extended flashbacks to the characters' backstories.

* Creator/ConnieWillis's two-part World War II novel ''{{Literature/Blackout}} / All Clear'' makes extensive use of this trope, to an extreme level even for a time travel story. The three main protagonists, plus a few other characters, have each traveled to the same general time period and region from separate points in both chronological time and their personal timelines. Successive chapters in the first half are not necessarily in order either by absolute chronology or any particular character's personal timeline, and even once the main plotline settles into a more-or-less linear order in terms of the characters' personal timelines, there continue to be out-of-chronology chapters interspersed here and there. If the chapters didn't all begin with a datestamp, the reader would be hard pressed to tell where they figure into the chronology. There are several chapters for which the reader doesn't even know who the viewpoint character is until much later in the story, and many of these take place later in real time than most of the story; these are eventually revealed to be [[spoiler:one of Polly's earlier trips to a later point in the war]] and [[spoiler:Michael's activities between the point when he leaves the main story and when Polly sees him die]]. One sequence actually takes place '''during''' Willis's first time-travel story "Fire Watch", but from the point of view of one of this novel's main characters. Fortunately, it really does all make sense by the end.

* ''Ceremony'' by Leslie Marmon Silko jumps between the main character before WWII, the main character as a child, the main character's mother, and current time.

* In publication order, Creator/DavidGemmell's ''Literature/{{Drenai}}'' saga jumps back and forth over several centuries of the history of the Drenai Empire; the first novel written and published, ''Legend'', ended up being about halfway through in chronological order. There is, however, a single novel which comes last and concludes the series in either order: ''The Swords of Night and Day'', published not long before Gemmell's death.
* Creator/SamuelRDelany's short novel ''Literature/EmpireStar'' (1966) uses/abuses this trope to an amazing degree. The story involves several different time travelers, and, while it follows one character, at the end, you realize that there is no "proper" order for the whole story. Any ordering would have been arbitrary, and you have to put the events together for yourself.
* Speaking of Delany... his novel ''Literature/{{Dhalgren}}'' just might be a Moebius strip. The first and last words in the novel form a grammatically correct sentence if you assume the proofreader got the pages out of order.

%% * All the Literature/JerryCornelius stories (except the first, ''The Final Programme'') are anachronic.

* ''Literature/AMillionRandomDigitsWithOneHundredThousandNormalDeviates'' doesn't follow any type of set structure, it just randomly switches focus from character to character almost randomly thousands of times. Did we mention the book has more than ten different characters to switch between?
* Common in the later entries of the Literature/{{Mithgar}} series -- the first chapter will feature the heroes in the middle of a quest, then a lot of chapters jumping back and forth between what they're doing "now", how they met, what they were like as children, and relevant world events throughout the whole era, before finally settling in a time period and continuing forward towards the climax. Each chapter comes with a time-and-place heading to help you keep track of how it all fits together.

* ''Literature/TheEnglishPatient'' is more or less set at the end of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, but devotes many chapters and extended flashbacks to the characters' backstories.
* The various threads of Creator/MichaelMoorcock's ''Eternal Champion'' series appear to take place in separate time streams. For instance, the ''Literature/TheElricSaga'' and ''Literature/{{Corum}}'' series have two {{Intercontinuity Crossover}}s where Elric and Corum meet each other, but time is apparently moving in opposite directions from their point of view, meaning that in each instance one is familiar with the other while the other is not.
** Erekose is the most obvious example of this trope, as not only do his stories jump around between different time streams; but he himself has lived anachronically since leaving his John Daker incarnation.
** Elric is particularly prone to anachronic crossovers with other Eternal Champion incarnations; and they other incarnations are more likely to recall him, than he is to recall them. It's strongly implied that Elric is, if not the first incarnation of the Champion (that appears to be Erekose) at least the earliest in "real-world" chronology.
** All the Literature/JerryCornelius stories (except the first, ''The Final Programme'') are anachronic.

* ''Lanark'' by Alastair Gray starts with Book Three, then One, Two, and Four. The book numbers are in chronological order (i.e. Book One takes places first chronologically), but the sequence is not.

* The various threads of Creator/MichaelMoorcock's ''Eternal Champion'' series appear to take place in separate time streams. For instance, the ''Literature/{{Elric}}'' and ''Literature/{{Corum}}'' series have two {{Intercontinuity Crossover}}s where Elric and Corum meet each other, but time is apparently moving in opposite directions from their point of view, meaning that in each instance one is familiar with the other while the other is not.

* Katherine Kerr's ''Literature/{{Deverry}}'' series. The date of each section in order, is, 1045, 1052, 643, 1058, 698, 1062, 773, 1063, 790-797, 1063, 833-845, 1063, 1096, 718-915, 918, 980, 1096, 843, 1098, 1112, 1116, 1063, 1116 -- and that's just the first half of the series.

* One of the key reasons that John Dowell is such an UnreliableNarrator in Ford Madox Ford's ''The Good Soldier.'' Dowell narrates events out of order, drops in TheReveal as an afterthought, and supplies key backstories long after the actions they would explain.

** Taken as a whole, all Warhammer novels are this, as there have been authors writing about the Horus Heresy (M30s), the War of the Beast (M32), the Sabbat Worlds Crusade (400s.M42) and various wars of the "modern" era (900s.M42-M43), among others, at the same time, as the Imperium's extremely long history means that people can add a story in anywhere in the timeline they like without having much impact on the big picture.

* ''Literature/TheChroniclesOfNarnia'' are each linear stories, but are written in non-chronological order (books 1-4 are followed by an interquel set during the events of book 1, during the time the four Pevensies ruled Narnia, and a prequel, set before Narnia ever existed, before book 7 jumps back to the normal order) and many fans of the book insist that they can only be appreciated that way because of the setup and payoffs; for instance, there are frequently allusions to past and future events that happened from earlier to later books, and ''Literature/TheMagiciansNephew'', the second-to-last, is a {{prequel}}. Huge gaps of NarniaTime transpire between each and every book.

** Taken as a whole, all Warhammer novels are this, as there have been authors writing about the Horus Heresy (M30s), the War of the Beast (M32), the Sabbat Worlds Crusade (400s.M42) and various wars of the "modern" era (900s.M42-M43) at the same time, as the Imperium's extremely long history means that people can add a story in anywhere in the timeline they like without having much impact on the big picture.

* ''Literature/TheChroniclesOfNarnia'' are each linear stories, but are written in non-chronological order, and many fans of the book insist that they can only be appreciated that way because of the setup and payoffs; for instance, there are frequently allusions to past and future events that happened from earlier to later books, and ''Literature/TheMagiciansNephew'', the second-to-last, is a {{prequel}}. Huge gaps of NarniaTime transpire between each and every book.