Ian McEwan’s Atonement, published in 2001 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is his most ambitious and most fully realized novel-a work about the relationship between storytelling and moral responsibility that is itself, at every point, aware of its own moral stakes. It is a novel about a lie and what it costs, but it…
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, is perhaps the most terrifying novel of the early twenty-first century, and it is terrifying in a way that distinguishes it from thriller or horror: the terror here is metaphysical. McCarthy imagines a post-catastrophe America-cause of the catastrophe unspecified, which is part of the…
George Eliot published Middlemarch in eight installments between 1871 and 1872, and Virginia Woolf would later call it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” That characterization has stuck, and it is accurate: Middlemarch is a novel for readers who have lived enough to understand that most human tragedy is quiet, undramatic,…
Tolstoy began publishing Anna Karenina in serial form in 1875 and completed it in 1878, reportedly describing it as his first “true novel.” The distinction matters: what he was distancing himself from was the panoramic historical ambition of War and Peace. Anna Karenina is a narrower work, entirely concerned with the private lives of its…
When The Grapes of Wrath appeared in 1939, it was received as a political document as much as a novel, inspiring fury from California’s agricultural interests and bringing its author before a Congressional investigation. It is indeed a political novel-passionately, unapologetically so-but Steinbeck’s art transforms polemic into something that outlives its immediate occasion and achieves…
John Steinbeck called East of Eden his “big book” and “the book I have always wanted and was afraid to write.” Published in 1952, it is indeed his most ambitious work: a multigenerational family saga set in California’s Salinas Valley from the Civil War through the First World War, consciously modeled on the Genesis story…
J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye appeared in 1951 and immediately divided critics and readers in ways it has never entirely stopped doing. Holden Caulfield, its sixteen-year-old narrator, has become one of the most recognized voices in American fiction-and one of the most contested. His disdain for “phoniness,” his sensitivity, his grief, and his…
Gabriel García Márquez begins One Hundred Years of Solitude at the moment of its ending and ends at the moment of its beginning, and in that circular structure contains the entire cosmology of a fictional world so fully realized it has permanently enlarged the possibilities of the novel as a form. Published in Spanish in…
Published in 1927, To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf’s most formally audacious novel and arguably her most personal. The book is organized around a single postponed journey-the Ramsay family’s plan to visit the lighthouse on the Isle of Skye-and uses that deferrment to excavate the nature of time, loss, and the impossibility of perfect understanding…
Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel, published in 1925, takes place in a single London day-June 1923, sometime after the Armistice-and in that day contains what feels like a lifetime, or several lifetimes, or the texture of consciousness itself trying to hold a lifetime together. Mrs. Dalloway is the book in which Woolf fully developed what she…