Literary Fiction

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…

Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace is a historical novel built around a real unsolved question: did Grace Marks kill anyone? In 1843, Grace Marks, a sixteen-year-old Irish immigrant servant, was convicted along with a stablehand named James McDermott for the murders of their employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery in Upper Canada. McDermott was…

A review of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, a darkly comic novel told through 15 voices about a poor Mississippi family hauling their matriarch’s corpse across county lines to keep a promise.

A review of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, a labyrinthine, hypnotic novel that moves between parallel storylines and refuses to resolve them neatly. His most ambitious work.

A review of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, a haunting, ingenious novel about a man who lives alone in an infinite house of tides and statues, and slowly discovers who he was before.