#TopTenTuesday A Whole Life in a Book #TuesdayBookBlog

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

The rules are simple:

• Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want.
• Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post.
• Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists.
• Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

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This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is Books That Include A Favorite Theme or Plot Device. Examples are unreliable narrators, flashbacks, time travel and metafiction. I’ve picked whole life stories, i.e books where we follow a character from cradle to grave (or just about). Links from each title will take you to my review or the book description on Goodreads.

1. The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Paterson Joseph – ‘I had little right to live, born on a slave ship where my parents both died. But I survived, and indeed, you might say I did more…’
2. The Romantic by William Boyd – Born in 1799, Cashel Greville Ross experiences myriad lives: joyous and devastating, years of luck and unexpected loss
3. The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne – a story of friendship and unrequited love, missed opportunities and wrong turnings, and the cruelty of random events in the life of Cyril Avery
4. A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler – An exquisite novel about a simple life, looking at the moments, big and small, that make us what we are.
5. Any Human Heart by William Boyd – Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary, but Logan Mountstuart’s – lived from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century – contains more than its fair share of both
6. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara –  ‘It wraps us so thoroughly in a character’s life that his trauma, his struggles, his griefs come to seem as familiar and inescapable as our own’ – Huffington Post
7. Stoner by John Williams – A story about hopes unfulfilled, opportunities missed or relinquished, guilt about things not done, and the conflict between self-fulfilment and duty
8. The Magician by Colm Toibin – recreates as biographical fiction the life, thoughts and achievements of Thomas Mann
9. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson – On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual
10. The Autobiography of Henry VIII: WIth Notes By His Fool, Will Somers by Margaret George – Henry VIII’s story as he himself might have told it, in memoirs interspersed with irreverent comments from his jester and confident, Will Somers

What other ‘whole life’ books have you enjoyed?