Literary Fiction

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, published in 2004, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award-and then prompted a small but fierce debate about whether literary prizes had finally got something exactly right. Written as a letter from an elderly Congregationalist minister in Iowa to the young son he will not live to see…

George Saunders spent twenty years thinking about one image: Abraham Lincoln, alone at night in a Georgetown cemetery, cradling the body of his eleven-year-old son Willie, who had died of typhoid fever in February 1862. That single image became the seed for Saunders’s first novel, published in 2017 by Random House. Lincoln in the Bardo…

Sally Rooney’s second novel, Normal People, published in 2018 by Faber & Faber and released in the US by Hogarth in 2019, follows two young Irish people from their final year of secondary school in County Sligo through their years at Trinity College Dublin. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan orbit each other across a decade…

Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, published in 2019, is one of those rare works that announces a literary voice so fully formed and so distinctively itself that it seems to arrive without precedent. Written as a letter from a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother-a letter she will never read-it is simultaneously a bildungsroman, a…

Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, published by Doubleday in 2015, opens with a familiar setup: four college friends move to New York City to chase their ambitions. There’s Willem, a kind and handsome aspiring actor; JB, a brash and talented painter; Malcolm, a thoughtful architect still living with his parents; and Jude, a brilliant lawyer…

Ian McEwan’s Atonement, first published in 2001, is a novel that operates on two frequencies at once: it is a sweeping story about love, war, and class in mid-twentieth-century England, and it is a ruthless interrogation of storytelling itself. The book opens on a blisteringly hot day in 1935 at the Tallis family’s Surrey estate,…

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…