Campaign for the American Reader: Five top books about time

Samantha Harvey is the author of four novels, The Wilderness, All Is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind, and of a memoir, The Shapeless Unease. She lives in Bath, UK, and is a Reader in creative writing at Bath Spa University.

At the Guardian, Harvey shared her favorite "books that play with present, past and future," including:

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. I read it around the same time I read Kant, and it seemed to me a lucid, bright playing out of that subjectivity of time he describes – the way it sticks here and slips there, the way the present is saturated in past and future, the way it contracts and expands. The two protagonists’ experience of a single day is an experience of moments that seem to occupy centuries, and decades that collapse with a single thought. All the while, Big Ben strikes the hour, a metronome that holds all this flux in balance.