Philip Hensher's top 10 parallel narratives

From Mrs Gaskell to David Mitchell, the novelist picks the best of a surprisingly long tradition that pairs unconnected but related stories

The novel of unconnected narratives is older than you might think. Writers have always been acutely aware that similar experiences might be brought into comparison without the mechanism of a traditional plot. Why not put the life somebody lived in 1941 next to an unconnected life in the 1990s, and call it a novel? More of a whole than a volume of short stories, more expressive of separation and the whole breadth of society and history than a traditional novel can be, these forms lack only a convenient name.

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