The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done by Sandra Newman 387pp, Chatto & Windus, £10.99 Halfway through this looping, fragmented tale of lost parents, adopted brothers and enigmatic sisters, poetic parallels and staggering coincidences, you feel the urge to stop reading and sketch out some kind of dysfunctional family tree on the flyleaf, for clarification.
Having earned acclaim, trust, and a bit of studio-funded coin after the success of Easy Rider, Hopper followed it up by directing The Last Movie, an expensive, fragmented colonial tale about a stunt coordinator (played by Hopper) battling reality on a Peruvian Western film set.
O'Brien's fragmented narrative skips between this lot, their author, the top-level author (a stout-swilling undergraduate) and other tales that slip in: Irish epics, westerns.
Phillips uses fragmented narrative polemically.
Highlights include Ramez Naam's dizzying near-future world immersed in augmented reality, Sofia Samatar's fragmented and lyrical tale that could be read as metaphor for outsiders' love, and Ian McDonald's stirring homage to HG Wells's Mars.
As our world gets increasingly more technological, fragmented and confusing, his strange tales of dystopian futures and multiple realities seem ever more pertinent.
Or the narrative is fragmented and chaotic.
Others, like The Creators Project's own Energy Flow, take a more dare I say it postmodern approach, letting tales unspool in nonlinear and fragmented pieces. .
And then the reveal: the whole tale was Christine's life flashing, fragmented, before her as she died in a car accident.
It is the reunion of these children, on a Ghanaian beach, towards which the tale unfolds in its opaque and fragmented fashion.
Doctors and hospital executives, who have expressed their frustration in meetings with White House and Medicare officials, said the issue offered a cautionary tale of what could happen when good intentions meet the reality of America's fragmented health care system.
