A story within a story - a "conversation" between two readers who (gasp!) write in the margins of a book they are passing back and forth.
Any Human Heart
by William Boyd
Logan Mountstuart is a writer, lover, art dealer, and spy. He chronicles his adventures through the 20th century in nine absorbing (and footnoted!) journals.
Stumbling across the hidden diary of a boarder who had been a father figure to him half a century earlier, Walter discovers the man's life-risking undercover work as an anti-Nazi Moscow spy.
Flannery Culp is just a typical high school senior, trying to make it through SATs, college applications, and a crush on a boy. But then things ... get out of control. And now she's incarcerated and the subject of daytime talk shows.
The sad and somber diary of John Mitchell, an "immigration inspector", and later commissioner, for the Federal Immigration Service at Ellis Island for 45 years.
After brutal climate changes knock out the power grid completely, the Amish way of life may save humanity - if they can survive the chaotic and violent upheaval in the neighboring cities.
Georgetown socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer was the ex-wife of the CIA chief and sister-in-law to the Washington Post's Ben Bradlee. She was also sexually adventurous, experimented enthusiastically with LSD, and was the secret lover of JFK.
Emma Timpany is only 17 when she assists at the harrowing and miraculous birth of quintuplets in 1934 in rural Canada. She remains their nurse and companion through their frightening first days to their subsequent relocation as "wards of the King" to a sterile but very public new home.