Summary Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, published in 2014 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2015, is a World War Two novel told through two alternating perspectives: Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind French girl who flees Paris with her father as the Germans advance, and Werner Pfennig, a German orphan whose…
Summary Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, published in 2020, is a novel about regret, depression, and the unlived lives we carry inside us. Nora Seed is thirty-five years old and has, by her own account, failed at everything she cared about: she gave up competitive swimming, abandoned music, called off an engagement, and estranged herself…
Summary Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, published in 2020, is a novel about grief, love, and the plague, set in Stratford-upon-Avon in the late sixteenth century. It tells the story of Agnes (as William Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway was known locally) and the death of her son Hamnet at age eleven in 1596, the year before Shakespeare…
Summary R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface, published in 2023, is a satirical novel about race, cultural appropriation, and the publishing industry, written with a sharpness and speed that makes it genuinely uncomfortable to read. The narrator is Juniper “June” Hayward, a white American author who has published one novel to modest sales and has spent years watching…
Summary Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, published in 2021, returns to the territory of her first two books but with a difference in register: the characters are older now, the romantic complications more self-conscious, and the philosophical undertow more explicit. The novel follows Alice, a successful novelist reeling from a breakdown,…
Summary Hernan Diaz’s Trust is a novel about who gets to tell the story of American wealth. Structured as four interlocking narratives that circle the same set of events from radically different vantage points, it begins with a slim, elegant novella-within-a-novel called “Bonds,” which follows Benjamin and Helen Rask, a reserved financier and his ailing…
Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, published in 1887, is his most disciplined and analytically precise major work. Where Thus Spoke Zarathustra is prophetic and poetic, the Genealogy is argumentative and historical. It consists of three interconnected essays, each pursuing a specific question about the origins and psychological basis of moral values. The central…
G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, published in 1807, is the most ambitious philosophical work ever written. Hegel proposes nothing less than to trace the development of consciousness from its most naive, immediate form – simple sense-perception – through all the stations of its alienation and self-recognition, to the standpoint of absolute knowledge in which the…
Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, published in 1927, is the most influential philosophical work of the twentieth century and one of the most difficult books ever written. Heidegger’s aim is as fundamental as philosophy gets: he wants to reopen the question of the meaning of Being itself – a question he believes Western philosophy has…
Friedrich Nietzsche called Thus Spoke Zarathustra his greatest gift to humanity. Written in four parts between 1883 and 1885, it is unlike anything else in the philosophical canon – a philosophical poem, a prose epic, a parody of biblical narrative, and a sustained provocation that has been misread more comprehensively than any philosophical work of…