Summary Three years after winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead won it again for The Nickel Boys – a feat unprecedented in the history of the award. The two novels could not be more different in scale and method. Where The Underground Railroad was expansive and mythic, The Nickel Boys is…
Summary Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad begins with a simple premise that immediately ruptures the reader’s sense of the familiar: what if the underground railroad were a real railroad, with actual tracks and tunnels running beneath the soil of the antebellum South? From that single speculative pivot, Whitehead constructs a novel that is simultaneously a…
Summary Published in 1989, The Remains of the Day won Kazuo Ishiguro the Booker Prize and established him as one of the most important British novelists of his generation. It is a short novel with enormous emotional reach. The story is simple: Stevens, an aging English butler who has spent decades in service at Darlington…
Summary Things Fall Apart, published in 1958 by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, arrived at a particular moment in literary history. African fiction in English barely existed as a recognized category. Western readers who knew anything about Nigeria knew it through the lens of colonial administration and missionary memoir, accounts written by outsiders who treated…
Gunter Grass published The Tin Drum in 1959, and the novel arrived like a percussion blast into the genteel silence of postwar German literature. Germany had been rebuilding itself – economically, politically, psychologically – and had produced relatively little honest reckoning with what had just happened. Grass, who had himself served in the Waffen-SS as…
Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven was published in 2014, years before COVID-19 made pandemic fiction feel prophetic rather than speculative. The novel describes a flu that kills most of humanity within weeks and then, in its more expansive sections, follows a traveling Shakespearean theater company through the Great Lakes region twenty years after the…
Juan Rulfo published Pedro Paramo in 1955, and it changed what the Latin American novel could do. The book is short – barely 120 pages in most editions – and its effects are proportionally large. Gabriel Garcia Marquez said he could recite it from memory. Jorge Luis Borges called it one of the great works…
Ian McEwan’s Saturday follows a single day in the life of a London neurosurgeon. Published in 2005, it unfolds on February 15, 2003 – the day of the global anti-Iraq War demonstrations, the largest coordinated protest in human history up to that point. Henry Perowne wakes before dawn, watches a burning plane cross the sky…
Amor Towles published The Lincoln Highway in 2021, eight years after Rules of Civility and five years after A Gentleman in Moscow. His third novel arrived with high expectations and met most of them: a genuine page-turner with literary ambitions, a novel that uses its period setting – America in June 1954 – to examine…
Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Age of Innocence in 1921, becoming the first woman to receive the award. The prize recognized a novel about 1870s New York society that operated as a kind of double portrait: a loving reconstruction of a world Wharton had been born into and a precise…