If the bartender’s recruitment of the Unmarried Mother and the revelation that Jane is both parent and child thrilled you, you’ll feast on the dizzying self-causing loops in The Man Who Folded Himself. Gerrold pushes the same paradox you loved—meeting, romancing, and challenging versions of oneself—into an intimate chronicle that feels like the personal diary of a temporal agent gone rogue.

You followed Jane’s life as it hopscotched through the bartender’s frame story, discovering the truth only after the time-jumps aligned. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim likewise slips nonlinearly through his life, and you get that same uncanny click of recognition when scattered moments—like the bar confession in All You Zombies—suddenly map into a single, inescapable pattern.

If the climactic unmasking—that the barkeep, the recruiter, and the Unmarried Mother are one—gave you chills, Use of Weapons delivers that same gut-punch. Banks braids two timelines toward a final revelation that recontextualizes everything you thought you understood, much like how Jane’s parentage and recruitment snap into focus at the bar.

Jane’s transition and the way her identity is dismantled and rebuilt—until she literally becomes her own origin—mirror the identity puzzles in Ancillary Justice. As Breq navigates a society without gendered pronouns and reckons with being a fragment of a once-multiple self, you’ll find the same fascination with who we are when our bodies, names, and roles no longer match.

If the barroom confession framing Jane’s life hooked you, Wolfe’s triptych will scratch that itch. The Fifth Head of Cerberus layers narratives that echo and expose one another—diaries, testimonies, and retellings—until identity becomes a hall of mirrors, much like how the bartender’s tale reframes every earlier scene in All You Zombies.