Kairos

"Kairos" is Madeleine L'Engle's own term — Greek for time outside ordinary measurement — for the eight novels that follow the Murry and O'Keefe families through the cosmos: the Time Quintet (A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, An Acceptable Time) and the Polly O'Keefe Quartet (The Arm of the Starfish, Dragons in the Waters, A House Like a Lotus, and An Acceptable Time, which closes both). L'Engle set these apart from her Austin family novels, which unfold in ordinary "chronos" time. The Library of America collected all eight together as The Kairos Novels.