As I may have mentioned before I'm planning to read several monumental novels that I so far have avoided. This includes Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) and Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities), but I started out with Uwe Johnson's 4-volume novel Jahrestage (Anniversaries). I just finished volume 2.
You'll find an English description of this massive novel here.
As far as I know there has been only a partial translation published in English titled Anniversaries.
The novel's main storyline depicts an exact year of Gesine Cresspahl's life with her daughter in New York City in 1968 going day by day like in a diary. However, the novel goes back to tell the story of Gesine's childhood and youth in wartime Germany and in the Sovjet zone of Germany after the war. The second volume ends with the end of WWII in the flashbacks.
Although massive the novel is actually an easy read since the daily chapters are fairly short. Johnson goes in quite minute detail retelling the German history, while the 'present day' story very much relies on everyday observations of New York and the reports of each day in the New York Times. In this way you get an kaleidoscope image of 20th century history, somehow exemplified on the fates of a few protagonists, but never losing touch with the actual historic context.
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