Summary Norwegian Wood is the novel Haruki Murakami wrote to prove he could do something different. His earlier work had leaned into fantasy and surrealism. This one is set entirely in the real world, in Tokyo in the late 1960s, and it is about grief so direct it is almost uncomfortable to look at. Toru…
Summary A Gentleman in Moscow is a novel about constraint and how an extraordinary person inhabits it. Published in 2016, Amor Towles’s second novel follows Count Alexander Rostov, a Russian aristocrat sentenced in 1922 by a Bolshevik tribunal to house arrest in the Metropol Hotel, across the street from the Kremlin. He is told that…
Gail Honeyman published Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine in 2017, her debut novel, and it became one of the decade’s most widely read and discussed books. It spent years on bestseller lists across the English-speaking world and sparked the kind of conversation that fiction about mental health and trauma rarely generates at scale. The novel…
Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance is one of the great novels about catastrophe – personal, political, and the way these two things are never truly separate. Set in India during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency of 1975 to 1977, a period when civil liberties were suspended and forced sterilizations were carried out as population policy, the novel…
Barbara Kingsolver spent years researching the Congo before writing The Poisonwood Bible, and every page reflects that rigor. Published in 1998, this novel follows an American missionary family into the heart of Africa in 1959 and watches their certainties dissolve one by one. It is a book about the damage that self-righteous conviction inflicts on…
Delia Owens published Where the Crawdads Sing in 2018, her debut novel at age seventy, and it became one of the bestselling novels of the decade. The book spent years at the top of the lists, was adapted into a successful film, and introduced millions of readers to a kind of novel they had perhaps…
Summary Cormac McCarthy published Blood Meridian in 1985, and it found almost no audience for years before critics began recognizing it as something exceptional. It is now regarded as one of the greatest American novels ever written, and it remains among the most challenging: violent to a degree that still shocks, philosophically dark in ways…
Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient won the Booker Prize in 1992, and the award generated some controversy at the time: this was a lyrical, fragmented, elliptical novel that moved through time and place in ways that rewarded patience but resisted summary. It has since established itself as one of the defining literary novels of the…
Sylvia Plath published The Bell Jar in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, one month before her death. It was reissued under her own name in 1966 and has been in print ever since. The novel is one of the most widely read accounts of depression and mental illness in American literature, and one…
Ann Patchett published The Dutch House in 2019, her eighth novel, and it consolidated her reputation as one of the most dependable literary novelists in America – a writer who builds worlds that feel inevitable, populated by characters who behave with the complexity of real people, and whose prose is as clear and precise as…