222 Best Books Of All Time

To help us narrow this down to the absolute best books, we reached out to thirty-three acclaimed and best-selling authors. Everyone from Anne Tyler to George R.R. Martin to Karin Slaughter took the time to share their passionate recommendations. Then we called some of our favorite bookstores and asked for their suggestions. So you’ll find personal picks on the list by dozens of writers and staff members from indie booksellers all over the country. We even scoured sites like Goodreads to see what you love the most. Our guiding principle was to include as many types of books as possible, because a great picture book is just as worthy as Proust. And both deserve to be on our list.  We can name 100 great mysteries (in fact we have). We can name 100 great crime novels. (Yep, we’ve done that too.) So a list of the best books of all time from every genre is just a starting point. Tell us which ones you love. Tell us what’s missing. Tell us what shouldn’t be on here. And tell us what list you’d like to see next. (The 100 Best Sports Books? The 100 Best Memoirs/Biographies? The 100 Best Picture Books?) We’ll keep reading if you will. Here at Parade.com, we’re all about sharing products we love with our audience. When you make a purchase on an item seen on this page, we may earn a commission, however, all picks are independently chosen unless otherwise mentioned. 

222 Best Books of All Time

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Writer Anne Tyler said yes when asked to contribute to Parade’s list of some of the best books of all time. Yes, with one condition: the only book she wanted to talk about was The Remains of the Day. It’s that sort of book. The story of an English butler so devoted to service he misses his chance at love, it was hailed as an instant classic on publication in 1989. Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel isn’t path-breaking or stylistically shocking; it’s just very, very good and everyone knew it, right away. Tyler, author most recently of French Braid, cherishes the remarkable scene at its climax. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget the heart-stopping moment near the end,” says Tyler, “when the central character all at once understands that his entire life has been wrong.”

Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson

You know how parents can spend a lot of money on a gift for kids, only to watch them play with the box it came in more than the toy itself? That embrace of imagination is at the heart of this picture book. Harold decides to go for a walk late at night. Armed with only a purple crayon, he embarks on all sorts of adventures before winding up right back where he started. Bookseller Nina Barrett of Bookends & Beginnings in Evanston, Illinois loves handselling this one. It’s a classic, Barrett says, “for showing how, with just a few simple lines, a small child can follow his imagination anywhere it leads, and create his own destiny”

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Jane Austen went from an anonymous author (because nice women didn’t write) to being labeled a purveyor of mere romance novels (which are women’s stuff and so don’t really matter) to grudgingly called “beloved” (one way of admitting how wildly popular she is, without actually respecting her) to a full recognition that Austen’s novels are insightful, rich and intellectually complex. And what the heck is wrong with being entertaining, anyway? It took too long for Austen to gain her due. Still, we’ve always had the novels, at least four of which are practically perfect. Tomorrow we’ll pick Sense and Sensibility or Persuasion as our favorite. But today we’re choosing Pride and Prejudice with the willful and smart Elizabeth Bennett, the infuriating Mr. Darcy, that cad George Wickam and so many other memorable characters. Marriage is serious business—indeed, the most serious act a woman of a certain class makes in life—and Austen is as keen an observer of manners and mores as one could hope for.

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

A work of imagination so profound and unique, it stands alone…unless you count the modern fantasy genre that sprang up in its wake. Heck, even the idea of the trilogy that dominates sci-fi and fantasy is a cliche simply because this one, long novel was broken up into three parts by its publisher. Even the biggest names will take a moment to honor Tolkien. “It will surprise no one to learn that my favorite fantasy novel is The Lord of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien,” says writer George R.R. Martin, author most recently of Full House: Wild Cards 30, which he edited, and The Rise Of The Dragon, with Elio M. Garcia Jr. and Linda Antonsson. “Fantasy is the oldest branch of literature, with roots that go back as far as Gilgamesh and Homer, but Professor Tolkien redefined the genre, and every fantasist since has been writing in his shadow. He is as important to fantasy as Shakespeare is to the theatre… and like Shakespeare, his work will endure for centuries, being read, reread, and treasured.”

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson wowed everyone in 1980 with her debut novel, Housekeeping, the story of an eccentric aunt who burdened (or freed?) her nieces with an unconventional approach to life. It became a marvelous film in 1987 starring Christine Lahti. Twenty-four years later, Robinson finally published her follow-up. Gilead was worth the wait. It’s a novel of faith and family, bringing to life John Ames, a minister dying of heart disease who wants to leave behind a document for the young son who will never really know him. Robinson tackles the Underground Railroad, John Brown, the unfair caricaturing of Calvinists as dour scolds and above all life in a small town for a man of faith. Ames wrestles with his conscience but Robinson never seems to struggle at all. Her novel is illuminated from within, like stained glass lit up by the sun.

Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe

One work often becomes the gateway to an entire world of literature for outsiders. Latin America? Start with One Hundred Years Of Solitude. Spain? Don Quixote. Africa? For decades, African literature was represented by one book: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Happily, countless novels have come in its wake, not least Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. And Adichie is here to champion not just the many authors who walked through the door Achebe opened, but his entire African Trilogy. It begins with Things Fall Apart, continues with No Longer At Ease and climaxes with Arrow of God, the story of a tragic clash between the chief priest of a small village and the Christian missionary John Goodcountry. “You know about the big historical events for which words like ‘colonization’ and ‘imperialism’ are used,” says Adichie, author most recently of Notes On Grief. “And then you read a novel like Arrow of God and you are struck by the beautiful, fragile, complicated humanity of the people whose lives were forever changed by history.”

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

If you’re going to name one book the “Great American Novel,” surely it should be in that most American of genres, the Western. Mind you, even people who never fantasize about heading to Deadwood fall under the spell of Larry McMurtry’s epic oater. Just ask bookseller Deb Leonard. “The romantic notion of cowboys permeates American culture,” says Leonard of Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “Those stoic, laconic heroes risking life and limb to drive their cattle across deserts and raging rivers, battling blizzards, sandstorms, rattlesnakes, coyotes (pronounced ki-oats), and no-good rustlers loom large in our psyche. It is hard to believe those cattle-driving days lasted less than twenty years. This gorgeous novel chronicles one of those adventures: a couple of retired Texas Rangers on a drive from Mexico to Montana. Cattle-drives not your cup of tea? Then how about a soaring story full of vivid landscapes and absolutely unforgettable characters. It is a book that will make you laugh so hard that it hurts on one page, just to break your heart into pieces on the next. If you only read one Western in your life, make it this one.”

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Sometimes you just want the bejesus scared out of you and if that’s your wish, bookseller Lisa Morton recommends The Haunting Of Hill House. “Not only was this modern classic the first major novel to deal with a paranormal investigation, it also contains what may be the most disturbing opening in all of literature,” says Morton of The Iliad Bookshop in North Hollywood, California. “The entire paragraph is sublime, but the last five words—“whatever walked there, walked alone”—is the perfect evocative, chilling introduction to the story. Breathing walls, rattling door knobs, a damaged and fragile heroine…. Jackson may have produced equally fine novels (especially We Have Always Lived in the Castle) and one of literature’s great short stories (“The Lottery”), but she was never better or more frightening than here.”

Love and Rockets: Maggie the Mechanic and Love and Rockets: Heartbreak Soup by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez

For 40(!) years, Los Bros Hernandez have produced “alternative” comics that helped revolutionize the industry. Along the way, they’ve created two sprawling worlds peopled with vivid characters, crazy storylines and the quotidian challenges of everyday life. Gilbert is best known for the Palomar stories, set in a mythical Latin American country suffused with magic realism (natch) and featuring Heraclio and Carmen, a happy couple at the heart of early storylines. Jaime is best known for the Locas stories set in LA and centered by oft-time lovers Maggie and Hopey. It’s the serialized novel to end all novels, it’s Dickensian, it’s Borgesian and certainly Trollope would be proud. Start with these two collections from the early 1980s. Binge-watching has nothing on the binge-reading you’ll soon be doing.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Lee’s book is so wonderfully complex it boggles the mind. Lee covers 80 years of history from 1910 to 1989. And if you think the usual immigrant experience is complicated, imagine you’re a Korean moving to Japan, only to discover with a shock that your people are despised there and forced to live in a ghetto-ized area. Then the Japanese invade and occupy Korea. Conflicted much? Lee captures the inner turmoil these events create in her characters, along with everything from kimchi to pachinko parlors. A rich, rich novel that we believe will be considered a classic years from now. So why wait? (The TV series is good too.)

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

Judy Blume changed everything for young adult fiction, though Blume would be the first to highlight those who paved the way for her. But if Blume were just an Important Figure, she wouldn’t be so beloved. Kids still read her fiction, still get caught up in the drama and still find themselves in it. First among equals in her admirable body of work? It has to be Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. A girl on the cusp of puberty is worried when all her friends get their period before her. Will it ever come? Buying bras, worrying about breast size, spreading rumors about girls who seem a little faster when it comes to boys? This might be an episode of HBO’s Euphoria, though with less drugs and no actual sex. Margaret spends the book exploring different faiths, but kids quickly learned they could always have faith in a book with Judy Blume’s name on it. A classic.

Another Country by James Baldwin

One of our richest thinkers, James Baldwin shared the wealth with his autobiographical debut Go Tell It On The Mountain, the righteous essay collection The Fire Next Time, numerous short stories, his powerful work as a public intellectual and the groundbreaking Giovanni’s Room. Author Arundhati Roy is drawn, most of all, to his complex, troubling novel Another Country. It’s the story of jazz drummer Rufus Scott and his abusive relationship with Leona in 1950s Greenwich Village. “Rage. Poetry. Beauty,” says Roy, author most recently of Azadi. “A book in which writing meets music. In which literature shows the world its place in the universe—with precise coordinates.”

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

An Italian novel about female friendship amidst the backdrop of domestic violence shouldn’t be the stuff of bestsellers. When My Brilliant Friend turns out to be the first of four novels that tell one long story, when the whole thing is handled by the boutique label Europa Editions (rather than a big house with tons of marketing muscle) and when the author refuses to do most press and remains anonymous? Well, you’d be lucky to reach cult status. Instead, Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels became an absolute sensation, even getting adapted into a fine HBO series. Why? How did it happen? Just read it. Sometimes, great writing is enough.

The Stand by Stephen King

As we said when choosing just one Stephen King novel for our list of the best thrillers of all time, pick one of his books and readers will invariably say, “But what about…?” We know, we know. We said it ourselves. What about The Dark Tower series? What about his marvelous collection of four novellas Different Seasons? What about Misery or Mr. Mercedes or 11/22/63 or It, for pete’s sake? What about It? Sure, but if we chose any of those books, we bet a lot more people would say loudly and clearly, what about The Stand? It’s the book that is the most Stephen King of Stephen King books. It’s big and sprawling and he’s come back to it and added in more because it needed more and we wanted more and it’s about a pandemic and god knows we can’t pretend that’s some fantastical conceit any more, can we? The Stand has it all. While the hardcore fans see his entire body of work centering on The Dark Tower, we say maybe, sure, you could be right. But start with The Stand.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It seems like Americanah is Adichie’s masterpiece, but that’s probably because we haven’t read her next novel yet. Her debut, Purple Hibiscus, was a revelation. Then came her second novel, Half Of A Yellow Sun (another peak!). In 2013 she delivered Americanah, a remarkable, decades-spanning story of a young woman in Nigeria who falls in love but chooses to flee a military dictatorship and come to America. She is changed and also changes the U.S. in her way, by blogging on race and identity. Like so many people forced by circumstance to uproot, our heroine returns home when she can. Are the changes she has undergone going to mark her forever as not-Nigerian, as an “Americanah?” Must she change again? Or must Nigeria? And who decides? Praised by Beyoncé, who even sampled a speech by Adichie in a song, but that’s just the most glamorous of many accolades Adichie has received. So far.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Don’t panic! The Douglas Adams radio play turned franchise is an eco-friendly renewable resource, spinning off plays, movies, TV shows, comic books, computer games and a “trilogy” of novels that total six in all. If you enjoy the madcap new movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, then you’re ready for The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the first book in the series. It begins with Earth being demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, soon sees our hero tortured by aliens (they read him their poetry) and includes all sorts of nonsense mixed up with concepts from philosophy, science, religion et al in the silly/smart way perfected by Monty Python. Gloriously bonkers and sneakily serious—think Candide, but with more spaceships. Bonus points if you also listen to the marvelous Stephen Fry reading it for the audiobook version.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Which Brontë sister is your favorite? This question can spark a knock-down drag out fight. Some of us, like perhaps Kate Bush, choose Emily Brontë and her only novel, the romantic classic Wuthering Heights. Others pick Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, preferring the brooding Mr. Rochester to the passionate Heathcliff or maybe the self-made Jane to the doomed Catherine. And someone, somewhere must be arguing for poor Anne and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as the best of the bunch, though they’re quite alone in that. We’ll take the wild abandon and disastrous mistakes of Wuthering Heights. Just consider this a placeholder for all the Brontës and what might have been if they hadn’t each died so very young.

A Perfect Spy by John Le Carré

We put Le Carré’s novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on our list of the best mysteries of all time because it’s riveting to watch George Smiley ferret out a mole in Britain’s MI5 by sitting and thinking. It’s a true mystery, even though Le Carré is usually classified differently. Then we put his novel A Perfect Spy on our list of the greatest thrillers ever written. Either one could be on this list of the best books of all time. We chose A Perfect Spy in part because we could just as easily file it under “memoir.” Le Carré drew deeply upon the relationship he had (or lacked) with his own father. Dad was a con man that hobnobbed with violent London gangsters the Kray brothers, made and lost fortunes and charmed everyone within a mile of his magnetism. Jeffery Deaver, author most recently of Hunting Time, concurs. “No one writes about espionage like this author,” says Deaver. “But I’ve picked it because it is also one of the most engrossing—and harrowing—portraits of a father-son relationship I’ve ever read. It’s not for the faint of heart, and that warning is not because of car chases and shootouts.”

Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans

Picture books are evocative for adults and few offer as Proustian a trigger as the opening lines of Madeline: “In an old house in Paris/that was covered in vines/lived twelve little girls/in two straight lines.” Picture books are powerful, especially when read again and again and again, as Kathy Doyle Thomas, of Half Price Books in Dallas, can attest. “My daughter loved the Madeline books and I loved my daughter sitting on my lap and us reading the books together,” says Thomas. “Madeline was smart, cute, French and adventurous, a fun role model for my daughter. I have two sons, so my daughter loved the idea of a little girl surrounded by other little girls instead of her BROTHERS!”

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

One sign of a classic is the way it speaks in a fresh way to each new generation. Don Quixote’s tale of a woebegone knight errant and his blunt-spoken sidekick Sancho has been labeled comic, tragic, a defense of eternal values and a repudiation of the very idea of eternal values. Or it’s been seen as lacking only a song (and thus turned into the musical The Man Of La Mancha) or a little dance (and thus turned into a ballet by George Balanchine, among others). It certainly speaks to George Saunders, author most recently of A Swim In A Pond In the Rain. “What I love about Don Quixote is its energetic portraiture of someone who is, like all of us, sometimes very right and sometimes very wrong, but always sees himself as the former,” says Saunders. “The book is a vast canvas, gloriously full of ‘on the other hand’ thinking—no stolid, lazy truth is allowed to exist for long in its universe. So, to read it is to be reminded that our tendency to always know where we stand on things is a weakness—a very human weakness, the human weakness, really, part of what makes us both dangerous and dear.”

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, The Finca Vigia Edition by Ernest Hemingway

Not every great writer is influential. Not every influential writer is great. Hemingway is both. And he should be read by everyone. “I’d somehow managed to avoid reading Hemingway until my early thirties, when I was first beginning to write,” says Julie Otsuka, author most recently of The Swimmers. “I’d always thought he was ‘not for me’—I’m not white, I’m not a man, I’ve never stalked a lion, I haven’t been to war. And yet, as soon as I began to read him, I could not stop. It was the cadence of his sentences that first drew me in, the clarity and beauty of his language. Also, the humor and quiet melancholy. And his ‘iceberg theory’—in many of his stories, the war is only hinted at, obliquely, through small details, but so much is left unsaid—was helpful to me when I was trying to figure out how to write my first novel, which also deals with the trauma of war.”

Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding

When Samuel Pepys began his diary in 1660, he recorded what time he woke up, what he ate for lunch, the actresses he dallied with, the horrors of the Plague and even his new watch. (Pepys was very fond of his new watch.) Everyone calls it a masterpiece. But when Bridget Jones keeps a diary and records her battles with weight, the plague of her singleness, the challenges at work, the irritating Mr. Darcy and never once mentions her watch, male critics dismiss it as “chick lit.” It’s too funny, too romantic, too entertaining to be “real” literature. Bollocks, we say. If a novel is meant to capture an era and bring to life a vivid character we know better than we know ourselves, then Helen Fielding’s novel ranks right up there.

Dune by Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert’s Dune has many facets: it’s science-fiction, it’s fantasy, it’s a commentary on religion, it’s a dissection of colonialism and it’s an early example of cli-fi (that is, climate fiction). But it takes romance legend Beverly Jenkins to center the passionate and strong woman whose decision puts the entire story into motion. “Dune is one of my all time faves,” says Jenkins, author most recently of To Catch A Raven. “As a classic space opera, it appeals to the fantasy/sci-fi lover that I am. Dune is also the ultimate romance and that appeals to me as well. Lady Jessica was told by her Order to birth a girl child, but her love for her Duke overrode that directive. She gave Leto a son instead. Without that love, there’d be no Paul. And without Paul, there’d be no Dune.”

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

This charming debut has beguiled everyone from Walt Disney to J.K. Rowling. Writer Armistead Maupin is no exception. “When I was a teenager in North Carolina, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle taught me to love the very idea of England, a land where a deeply eccentric family could cheerfully endure poverty in a dilapidated castle while their father faces writer’s block in a nearby tower,” says Maupin, author most recently of Logical Family. “Smith’s novel was in the form of a teenage girl’s diary, and I’ve never forgotten how its first line lured me into the story. (‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.’) It makes sense that I would end up making a home in England and writing a novel about an eccentric American living in a crumbling Elizabethan manor house. It’s called Mona of the Manor and it will be published as soon as I climb down from my lockdown tower.”

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sherlock Holmes is everything, everywhere, all at once, it seems, with an endless stream of movies, TV shows, mangas, spin-offs and even a new stage play in the works. (The same is true in the multiverse, we assume.) But it begins with the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. While Holmes first appeared in the novel A Study in Scarlet, most everyone agrees with bookseller Ed Justus that the stories are the heart of the matter. “In my opinion, the short stories are far better than the novels,” says Justus of Talk Story Bookstore in Hanapepe, Hawaii. “Any of the short stories of Sherlock Holmes by A.C. Doyle are truly amazing. Even though these stories were written a century ago, the prose and conversational style immediately draws in the reader, effortlessly accepting the characters as if they were completely real. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes? I couldn’t get enough of this one.”

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

History is written by the victors. That may explain why Thomas Cromwell has been seen as such a villain for the past 500 years, despite his key role in the English Reformation. After all, when you’re beheaded by the King, you can hardly take part in writing history. So it took Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Cromwell to give his side of the story. She starts with Wolf Hall and continues with two further, only slightly less perfect books. We meet a man of modest origins who is always the smartest person in the room. Watching Cromwell move mountains so Henry VIII can defy a Pope and declare himself the Supreme Head Of The Church of England—all so he can get a divorce—is so thrilling you can barely breathe while reading it. It’s a pity Henry’s new wife Anne Boleyn wasn’t more grateful. One flaw of Cromwell’s? He knew he was always the smartest man in the room, but wasn’t always smart enough to keep everyone else from knowing it too.

The Sandman Book One by Neil Gaiman and Various Artists

Ok, so you’re kind of intrigued by comic books. A lot of people take them seriously and you want to see what all the fuss is about. You can—and should—check out one of the great Batman or Superman storylines because maybe you’ve seen the movies and know what they’re all about. It will be familiar territory. Or you can dive into the deep end. You can sample the pure, unadulterated, uncut stuff. You can read The Sandman by Neil Gaiman and a host of world class illustrators. In 75 issues from 1989 to 1996, Gaiman and his collaborators spun out the story of Morpheus and a desire to right the wrongs he committed earlier in life. It’s a mind-spinning combination of horror and fantasy and the superhero genres, all girded by a mordant sense of humor. People who never read comic books read The Sandman, especially college students and especially female college students. For an industry yearning for respectability and new fans, it was a dream come true.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt arrived with a thunderclap via the murder-on-campus success of The Secret History. But Chris Pavone, author most recently of Two Nights In Lisbon, speaks up for her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Goldfinch. The novel, triggered by a terrorist act and the almost accidental filching of a painting, “is a sprawling masterpiece of suspense that also happens to be a book about nearly everything: family and loss and grief and despair and growing up and art and betrayal and many types of love,” says Pavone. Since Tartt takes a good decade between releases, it’s lucky that, as Pavone says, the novel is “very long (at 784 pages) but for me, not nearly long enough. It’s a book I could read forever.”

The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

Amidst the mountain of material about the Civil War, Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels is a peak. This Pulitzer Prize winner uses the Battle at Gettysburg to encompass the entire arc of the war. The Confederacy’s Robert E. Lee—accustomed to winning—goes head to head with the Union’s John Buford and makes fatal mistakes. Historians love the accuracy, as well as Shaara’s reappraisal of the Confederacy’s James Longstreet and more. Military buffs love how Pickett’s Charge and the battle on Little Round Top come alive. And readers simply become enthralled with its sweep and power. Heck, The Killer Angels even prodded Ken Burns into making his landmark documentary, The Civil War, and that’s about as impressive as it gets.

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

That most Catholic of writers, Graham Greene, captures guilt and sin and the flickering possibility of redemption like few others. Published in 1951, The End Of The Affair completes his Catholic quartet, which also includes Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter. Author Patti Callahan Henry calls it his masterpiece. “Always visiting his favorite themes—God, love and jealousy—Graham Greene was inspired to write this novel from his own affair with a woman named Catherine Walston,” says Callahan Henry, author most recently of Once Upon A Wardrobe. “There is nothing like it and it reads better every single time I pick it up (or listen to Colin Firth read it). It’s a love story, and yet it’s so much more.”

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

With just three novels, writer Julie Otsuka has memorialized the brutal mistreatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II with precision and passion. Writer Madeline Miller knows the challenges of bringing history to life and admires Otsuka all the more. “The Buddha in the Attic tells the stories of the ‘picture brides’—women who immigrated from Japan to America in the early 20th century in hopes of a better future,” says Miller, the author most recently of Circe. “The women speak in the first person plural, and part of the wonder of this book is its stunning choral voice—piercing, elegiac, beautiful, brutal, unflinching. The stories they tell of their lives are unforgettable and the novel is a literary and historical masterpiece. It is the book I read when I need to remember what fiction can do at its very best.”

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

Beginning with The Golden Compass, author Philip Pullman retold and reimagined Milton’s Paradise Lost in a trilogy of almost shocking ambition. The pearl-clutchers who feared it might be sneaking in Ideas—and Dangerous Ideas at that—were right. Fellow writers immediately paid attention. “No books are more important to the history of modern fantasy after The Lord of the Rings than His Dark Materials,” says Terry Brooks, author most recently of Daughter Of Darkness. “Pullman’s trilogy transformed the genre. Here were books in which angels rebelled against a dysfunctional deity to see it cast out of Heaven. Here was a reimagined, compelling story of how a boy and a girl reformed a world in which magic was a transformative power and love provided a means for changing everything…This is high fantasy at its very best."

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Horrible people can become disturbingly sympathetic once you spend time with them, whether it’s Norman Bates in Psycho or Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter, the serial killer with good intentions (or at least bad victims). The brilliant Highsmith knew this well, and perhaps her greatest creation, Tom Ripley, toyed with our affections throughout five novels. “The Talented Mr. Ripley is certainly one of the best if not the best thrillers of all time,” says Karin Slaughter, author most recently of Girl, Forgotten. “Tom Ripley is not just a classic antihero, he is a precursor to so many flawed men we’re meant to root for—from Don Draper to Tony Soprano. Highsmith crafts him as a perpetual underdog, a striver that the reader finds more relatable than the monied snobs he so desperately wants to be a part of.” It’s a delicious irony at the heart of so many crime novels: you’re not supposed to root for the criminal or vicariously enjoy someone knocking off those people who really, really “deserve it.” And yet….

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

Many artists have tackled the bloody, righteous act of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, an act meant to stir up a slave revolt in the South. It was the dress rehearsal for the Civil War, which began about a year and a half later, and usually inspires sober, serious works like Russell Banks’ Cloudsplitter or Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic poem John Brown’s Body. But James McBride is the only one to see the violent attack called a dress rehearsal, think “aha!” and launch into a no-holds barred comic retelling of the tragedy. He creates Henry Shackleford, an enslaved man caught up in John Brown’s crusade and is soon bumping into other historical figures like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Oh, and John Brown thinks Henry is a girl and puts him in a dress, which the young man wears for most of the book. We did say “comic!” Compared favorably to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—that other rollicking, hilarious, pointed takedown of slavery—McBride’s novel won the National Book Award and what is apparently another badge of importance in today’s world. Yes, it was turned into a TV miniseries (and a very good one) starring Ethan Hawke.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

If revenge is a dish best served cold, author Kate Chopin should be well pleased. Her second and final novel was tut-tutted over by critics. Chopin dealt forthrightly with a woman’s sexual desires, intellectual needs, suicide, society’s constraints and the limited roles of wife and mother open to her gender. Toss in a caustic attitude towards religion and you had a book that was just as controversial as Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House and Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary. Even those forced to admit The Awakening was brilliantly written tended to hope—like fellow writer Willa Cather—that Chopin would use her talents for “a better cause.” Chopin died all but forgotten. But seventy years later, people finally awakened to her immense achievement—a novel deeply influential on other writers, the Southern literary tradition and a key work in feminism. Today it’s widely read, widely studied and widely enjoyed.

The Collected Stories: William Trevor by William Trevor

Short story writers are diamond cutters: meticulous and sharp, with only one chance to get it right. Few were as brilliant as the Irish writer William Trevor, whose work is invariably referred to as Chekhovian because what higher compliment can be paid to a short story writer? “My favorite book of all time is The Collected Stories by William Trevor,” says Elizabeth Strout, author most recently of Lucy By The Sea. “As a writer I found his influence huge ever since I first read his work years ago in The New Yorker. But he is not just a writer’s writer. He is so precise and so gentle and can flip over a sentence in a heartbeat. He writes about the lives of ordinary people, who are all—of course—extraordinary. One of my favorites is called ‘Mrs. Silly’ about a young boy sent to boarding school and his lovely mother who embarrasses herself on their visiting day. It’s a quiet, honest killer of a story.”

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s debut is one of the most banned books in America and also one of the best. Set in 1941, it tells the story of Pecola, a young African-American woman who is told so often she’s ugly that she finally begins to believe it. Child molestation and racism are just two of the omnipresent dangers the book details. For decades it has been a popular pick for college reading lists. That means bookseller Lynette Yates is far from alone in her experience with it. “The Bluest Eye is the first book I ever read by Toni Morrison,” says Yates of Half Price Books headquartered in Dallas. “And I was hooked. I could not put it down!” Morrison has other masterpieces like Beloved and Song Of Solomon but you might as well start at the beginning. Then, you’ll want to read them all.

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

The journey of Boris Pasternak’s masterwork—about a physician and poet during the two world wars—is as remarkable as the story itself. Impossible for it to be released in the Soviet Union, his novel was smuggled out, published in part by the C.I.A.(!), turned into a massively popular film and helped win its author the Nobel Prize, which Pasternak was then forced to turn down. But let’s not forget the novel itself. Writer Mark Helprin, himself a proponent of the “epic tradition” school of writing Doctor Zhivago epitomizes, loves it above all others. “Doctor Zhivago combines astoundingly beautiful writing with epic sweep, deep emotion, historically riveting action and impossible-to-ignore spirituality,” says Helprin, author most recently of Paris In The Present Tense. “And the courage to write in defiance of a crushing dictatorship illuminates every serious word and phrase. Unlike many books awarded the Nobel Prize, it fully deserved it, and will live on (even though it was made into a movie).”

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

A beloved children’s book, if a book about an accusation of rape underlined by racism can be said to be for children. Whether you read it as a child, decided to become a lawyer because of Atticus Finch, saw the movie or the new Broadway play, or were assigned it at school, To Kill a Mockingbird is inescapable. Our favorite part of its mythic status was the fact that Lee avoided any press and said almost nothing about it—or anything else. That was as cool as the little girl Scout refusing to wear frilly pink dresses if she didn’t want to. 

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

Ok, don’t rush him. Writer Junot Díaz takes his time, but patience pays off—both for him and us. Díaz exploded onto the scene in 1996 with the short story collection Drown, immediately establishing the Dominican-American author as a major talent. Over the next 26 years? One more short story collection (This Is How You Lose Her), one picture book (Islandborn) and one novel. The picture book is sweet, the two short story collections are both so strong we couldn’t choose between them and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is just amazing. The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao celebrates a chubby kid growing up in New Jersey who suffers under a curse that dogs his family for generations. Oscar is obsessed with comic books and fantasy/sci-fi, so Díaz amusingly peppers his story with everything from references to J.R.R. Tolkien to footnotes and touches of magic realism. Oh and mongooses. (Mongeese?) Now, wouldn’t it be wondrous if Díaz finally delivered a full-on sci-fi/fantasy novel of his own?

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

When Abraham Lincoln was President, his son Willie died. According to newspaper reports, on the day the child was laid to rest, Lincoln returned repeatedly to the crypt and cradled the body of Willie in his arms. George Saunders took that image and turned it into his first novel. After twenty years of increasing acclaim and success penning erudite, clever short stories, Saunders was daunted by the idea of a novel, not to mention a novel set in the past, not to mention a novel depicting one of the most famous people in history raw with emotion. Well, it worked—ghosts and all. Writer Michael Cunningham is just one of many to stand back in awe. “Quite possibly the most remarkable, original, beautiful book I’ve read yet, in the 21st century,” says Cunningham, author most recently of A Wild Swan and Other Tales. “If it doesn’t become a classic, my faith in the ongoing history of literature will suffer as a result.”

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is the most popular mystery writer of all time. And this is her most popular novel. Indeed, by some accounts, it’s the best-selling mystery novel and one of the best selling books ever, with 100 million copies sold and counting. Happily, the ugly racial slur that besmirched both its title and a key clue for decades (up to 1986, in UK editions) has been thoroughly erased. Now, fans can enjoy the novel for what it is: a brilliantly constructed tale of suspense. The set-up is so ingenious that others (not to mention Christie herself) use it time and again in movies, plays and novels. A group of strangers is brought together in an isolated location (in this case an island) under false pretenses. They slowly realize this…and quickly realize the members of their party are being knocked off, one by one. Who among them is the killer? And what have they each done to deserve this fate? The mounting tension, the suspicion, the backstabbing—it’s all delicious fun and Christie delivers one of her neatest solutions to tie it up very nicely indeed.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

If you want to understand how timid, mean-spirited and ugly some stand-ups are today—both in what they make fun of and how—just read The Sellout. This is how it’s done. In his Booker and National Book Award-winning novel, Paul Beatty starts at outrageous, then builds up steam and really gets going. A black man looking to reinstate slavery in an abandoned town called Dickens on the outskirts of LA? The last surviving member of The Little Rascals, a fellow called Hominy Jenkins? A Supreme Court showdown lacerating the likes of Clarence Thomas with glee? It’s all here and Beatty is always punching up—never down. He pricks pomposity, makes serious points with jaw-dropping hilarity and swiftly outpaces Jonathan Swift with one of the best satires in generations.

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore has written acclaimed novels, criticism, essays and a children’s book. But short stories are where Moore shines best, from her 1985 debut collection Self-Help to 2014’s Bark. Writer Sherman Alexie returns to one of her collections again and again. “Birds of America is hilarious and heart-wrenching in equal measure,” says Alexie, author most recently of the memoir You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me. “I’ve re-read this book at least twenty times and I think that’s always the best sign of greatness.”

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Bored with life, infatuated with the idea of romance, always searching for the next thrill, Emma Bovary is a frustrating, fascinating, fully alive character in a novel so influential it’s hard to believe this was Flaubert’s debut. Emma flits from affair to affair, piling up bills and disappointments with abandon, never putting a foot right. Flaubert, however, never puts a foot wrong and Anthony Doerr can’t praise it enough. “Attacked upon its publication for being ‘obscene,’ Madame Bovary has remained relevant ever since,” says Doerr, author most recently of Cloud Cuckoo Land. “It’s a 160+ year-old novel that still feels contemporary in its techniques and its critiques of the patriarchy. Flaubert’s portrayal of Emma Bovary is simultaneously beautiful and brutal, and lives at the headwaters of realistic psychological fiction.”

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

In an earlier era, it was Peyton Place that revealed the scandalous goings-on in suburbia. Stories like that were dismissed by some as little better than soap operas. Never mind that they dealt with the frustrations of women trapped in a certain role, the unspoken divide of class and so much more. It’s a domestic drama, mere women’s fiction and thus not important. We’ve learned better. Celeste Ng’s second novel is set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the hometown of Ward Cleaver of Leave It To Beaver, which is to say the suburbs of our dreams. And yet, this seemingly quiet domestic drama soon explodes with an act of arson, secret abortions, transracial adoptions, surrogate mothers, sex, love, jealousy, heartbreak and, yes, little fires everywhere. It’s complex, cathartic and no wonder Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington produced and starred in a miniseries adaptation.

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

William Goldman is the Oscar-winning screenwriter of movie classics like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All The President’s Men. He also wrote about two dozen books, including a nonfiction memoir about Hollywood that captures the entire industry in one sentence: “Nobody knows anything.” But nothing tops the pleasures of his fantasy novel The Princess Bride. It tells the story of Buttercup, a young woman who believes her true love died at the hands of the Dread Pirate Robert. She’s pressured to marry Prince Humperdinck, heir to the throne of Florin. Before the wedding takes place, Buttercup is kidnapped by a rather kindly trio of outlaws. Toss in a framing device that includes details from the author’s “real” life, silly footnotes and other nonsense about this book being an abridged version of an earlier book that really wasn’t as good as the author remembered and you’ve got a treat. Goldman’s novel was twice blessed. First, it was turned into an equally magical film in 1987 that beautifully captures the tone of the novel. Second, while Goldman was determined to write a sequel called Buttercup’s Baby, he never could recapture the magic and gave up. So readers will never be tempted to read a sequel that would inevitably fall short of the original. And there it sits: a perfect little gem, just waiting for you and your children to enjoy.

Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley

It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature. But that never stopped humans before, did it? Written on a bet about who among friends could tell the best ghost story, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a landmark work of horror and caution. If all you know is the (brilliant) 1931 film version starring Boris Karloff as the Monster, then you’re in for a shock. The novel is far more expansive and the Creature (as Shelley calls him) is far more articulate, deadly, purposeful and plaintive. Some call it the greatest horror story ever written and others the prototype for science fiction. But one thing is clear: it’s not Victor Frankenstein who is the modern Prometheus, but Shelley herself. In other words, she won the bet.

Ficciones/Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

Prepare to enter the labyrinth of Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges. Or, if you prefer, prepare to dive into the fiction of Labyrinths. The Argentine writer burst into worldwide prominence in 1962 with the publication of two short story collections translating his work into English. One was Ficciones, or in English Fictions. The other was Labyrinths. Borges is a beguiling Prospero, wielding his magic to enchant anyone brave enough to explore a world of saintly librarians, imaginary lands and fanciful reviews of the second editions of books that never existed in the first place. For a writer who relished wordplay, plots that circled back upon themselves and concepts that anticipated the multiverse, it must please Borges no end that these two collections overlap, with numerous stories appearing in both. Which one should people read first? In what order? This unintentional creation of confusion and uncertainty for readers new to him? Perfect.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Here are the facts. N.K. Jemisin is the first African American writer to win the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy novel. She’s the first writer ever to win the Hugo Award in three consecutive years. And she’s the first writer ever to win a Hugo Award for all three books in a trilogy. That should make you sit up. We could also mention her MacArthur genius grant, how fans believed in Jemisin enough to help crowd-fund her move to writing full-time way back when and much more. But those are just the facts. Read the Broken Earth trilogy of science fantasy that begins with The Fifth Season and you’ll be plunged into a vivid world devastated by a climate crisis every few centuries. You’ll discover a middle-aged woman necessarily hiding her extraordinary powers to influence the entire planet. You’ll fear for a small girl also blessed or cursed with those powers, a girl whose parents can’t bring themselves to kill her as society demands. And you’ll follow a young woman who discovers the truth about how their world is actually kept safe. It’s classic fantasy but also thoroughly modern. Jemisin blends the three storylines together with a flourish worthy of Proust, but that’s just one of its many pleasures. A landmark.

Indigo by Beverly Jenkins

An early peak for romance legend Beverly Jenkins, Indigo features all her trademarks. The story is an unexpected one, focusing on a young woman named Hester Wyatt bravely risking her life in the Underground Railroad (in Michigan!). She finds herself drawn to an arrogant conductor named Galen Vachon, a man who is badly injured and needs hiding. Galen is handsome and wealthy; she doesn’t know the latter fact but can’t help noticing the former. She’s pretty and willful; he can’t help noticing both of these qualities. In other words, it’s a classic romance with all the pleasures that entails. But Jenkins weaves in history and background detail with ease, grounding the story in a real world that’s far more complicated and interesting than most genre books ever attempt. And that makes her stories all the more gripping. She’s successful in many genres, but historical romances are where Jenkins flourishes—from stories about high-class hotels for people of color to the challenges facing professional doctors long ago to the many black cowboys of the Old West. Her novels are told with verve and accuracy, complete with bibliographies at the end for those who want to explore the history further. Whoever imagined romance novels with a bibliography? Beverly Jenkins.

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville

Forget the whale, for a moment. Most people haven’t read Moby-Dick, so for them it’s about some crazy guy on a boat obsessed with tracking down a white whale that made a snack of his leg. And yeah, sure, that’s a big part of it. But Herman Melville’s novel is a wilder ride than this implies. It’s the 1851 equivalent of surfing the web, with Melville telling his story about Ishmael, the newest member of the whaling ship Pequod. He veers from a fascinating breakdown of ship life and its culturally diverse crew members to describe the migratory patterns of whales and then back to the ship and the surprisingly cozy sleeping arrangements for the men and off again for a useful guide on harvesting whale blubber to a fiery sermon of poetry and song and back to the story at hand and then onto some other tangent. It’s remarkable how often the novel isn’t recounting the obsessive quest of Captain Ahab, though that mad venture is always just below the surface. Melville’s novel is obsessive itself, seeming determined to tell you everything that crosses its mind. It’s as mad as Ahab and just as fearsome and magnetic and impossible to forget.

Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates

Norma Jean Baker’s greatest performance was as the movie star Marilyn Monroe. In her last interview, she spoke about current issues of the day and pleaded with the writer, “Please don’t make me a joke.” No luck; it was too late. Or at least it seemed too late. Now, writer Joyce Carol Oates treats Norma Jean with the seriousness she deserves. This meaty, compulsively readable and epic novel tracks her entire life, from a tumultuous childhood with a mentally disturbed mother to life in an orphanage, followed by brutal early days in Hollywood with sleazy studio execs and then the reward of suffocating fame. Monroe is naturally savvy if also innocent, desperate to learn more and be more, but also aware her sex appeal is the best way to get there. Oates captures her mercurial but insightful approach to acting, her determination to break with the studio system and tackle the roles she knows she can and her desire for someone—anyone—who might treat her with the kindness and respect she’s never known. You know how it ends and yet the journey is captivating, unexpected, funny, painful and as great as Monroe—or rather, Norma Jean—could dare imagine. Oates has written literally dozens and dozens of novels and short story collections. This is her masterpiece.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

All eyes have been on writer Colson Whitehead since his oddball debut The Intuitionist. He satirized the publicity machine that feted him (John Henry Days), explored genres like horror (Zone One) and the bildungsroman (Sag Harbor) and even nodded towards forebears like E.B. White with his nonfiction work The Colossus of New York. Then, like Muhammad Ali predicting a knock-out, in 2016 Whitehead gave his next novel the totemic, throw-down-the-gauntlet, this-is-the-one title The Underground Railroad. And yes, it was the brilliant, captivating, mind-bending masterpiece everyone expected of him. In this case, the Underground Railroad is literally an underground railroad and the characters who escape by riding it enter into post-Civil War worlds where racism remains ever-changing, ever-new and ever-present. It’s upsetting, unexpected, propulsive and the most entertaining Important Book you’ve read in ages. With two more acclaimed novels since (The Nickel Boys and Harlem Shuffle), Whitehead is clearly just getting started.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Writer Madeline Miller spent a decade bringing the passionate romance at the heart of Homer’s Iliad to vivid life. The love between Achilles and Patroclus upends the entire Trojan War and it’s there for all to read in the epic poem dating from roughly 2700 years ago. And, still, it came as a shock to some in 2011 when Miller brought these two lovers so fully and beautifully to life in her debut novel. Miller did it again by turning an enchantress of The Odyssey from a minor villain to a complex, fascinating heroine in her 2018 book Circe. Surely Mary Renault and Robert Graves look on approvingly—two similar writers of historical fiction who captured the imagination of contemporary readers.

The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

James Crumley was a “writer’s writer,” which means his books never sold that much, but boy were they good. Heck, when the legendary author Ray Bradbury wrote three mystery novels, he named the detective “Crumley” in honor of the man! “[The Last Good Kiss] is the best private eye novel I’ve ever read,” says author Dennis Lehane, author most recently of Since We Fell. “Best first sentence, most satisfying ending, most beautifully written from beginning to end.” In the novel, investigator C.W. Sughrue is lured away from his job at a topless bar to find a wayward writer but ends up hunting down a woman missing for more than a decade. Crumley died in 2008, but not before enjoying a late-career appreciation from many quarters. “One of the great pleasures of my life,” says Lehane, “was getting to meet Crumley and tell him that his masterpiece forever changed my perception of what a crime novel could be.”

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

Oh, the joy of finally seeing yourself in an acclaimed, best-selling novel! In her debut, Amy Tan told of Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters. Friends in San Francisco gather together each week to play mahjong, eat and talk, but mostly talk. They complain about their daughters while their daughters complain about the mothers. Stories are told, of the hardships the women faced when risking it all to move from China to America and of the very different lives their daughters are having thanks to that gamble and why can’t those daughters respect them and do as they’re told and not marry this boy or go to this school but marry that boy and study for that degree at the school chosen for them? Unless you’re a Chinese-American, it’s hard to appreciate the thrill, the deep satisfaction of seeing your stories embraced and celebrated. Like the best art, it’s universal for being so very specific. And oh, the joy of having something other than Charlie Chan and The Good Earth represent all of Chinese culture to America. Now, strands of that culture can be found in “everything, everywhere, all at once.” But The Joy Luck Club will always be a beloved and important breakthrough.

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

Whatever the truth, the romantic tale of how Sherwood Anderson became a writer is too good to pass up. He was a very successful businessman, overseeing a company selling paint, buying up smaller paint companies and expanding into other ventures. Anderson was 36 years old, married and had three children. But on November 28, 1912, he went to work and then rebelliously decided to chuck it all and devote himself full-time to writing. Anderson feigned mental illness of some sort so no one would get angry at him, walked out the door and never came back. Or, more likely, he had his second nervous breakdown (following an earlier one in 1907) and that left him unfit, unable or unwilling to work in paint any more. After two not so good novels, he hit paydirt with Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of short stories that combine to tell the life of one man and the frustrated, lonely dreams of everyone around him in a small town. It does in fiction what Edgar Lee Masters did in poetry with 1915’s Spoon River Anthology, another book that puts the lie to small-town life always being idyllic and sweet.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

We might have made the obvious choice and picked Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a depressingly timely novel that didn’t predict a thing, since every cruelty in its male-dominated dystopia had already been done to women. But for sheer bravado, her Booker Prize winner The Blind Assassin is hard to beat, offering the sweep of Canadian history in the 20th century. The narrator is an old woman looking back on her life, mostly to the 1930s and 1940s. It captures the pulpy feel of that era’s paperbacks without sacrificing complexity. And for an author who rejects the label of science-fiction writer, it offers a novel-within-a-novel that’s pure sci-fi and throws in enough betrayals and revelations to fuel a Buck Rogers serial. Very satisfying.

Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin

By 1983, writer Mark Helprin had published two collections of short stories diamond-like in their clarity, not to mention a wonderfully sprawling debut novel (Refiner’s Fire) of the sort one expects from a writer who values tradition and the great novels of the 19th century. So no one was quite prepared for Winter’s Tale. Out of the blue, Helprin delivered a Dickensian fantasy celebrating the New York City of our dreams. It tells the story of Peter Lake, a burglar who lives in the ceiling of Grand Central Station (when not sneaking into the mansions of the wealthy to relieve them of their possessions). A white horse that swoops down from the stars, a beautiful young woman tragically dying of consumption, gangs of burglars, marshmen who live on the fringes of society, a raging fire, truth and joy and beauty and light and all of it wrapped up in language of boldness and verve. Magic? Just a touch. Magical? From start to finish.

Winnie the Pooh/The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne

Yes, but have you read it as an adult? Have you read it lately? A.A. Milne captures children to perfection, the way they interrupt your storytelling, their pleasure at seeing themselves included in it and their desire to learn more without quite admitting they don’t understand everything just yet. Any adult who’s made up a story for a small child will purr with pleasure when reading the opening chapters of Winnie The Pooh. It has charm to spare, thanks to timeless tales about friends and pranks and accepting people for who they are, like the dour Eeyore or the over-excitable Tigger. Not accepting them despite their quirks, but because of them. And oh, The House At Pooh Corner. The sad encroachment of school and Growing Up and time away from play and the need to Learn Things. Long before the Toy Story trilogy tore your heart out, Milne did it here to perfection.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Like most overnight successes, Emily St. John Mandel put in years of hard work to make it happen, switching from a career in dance to full-time writing. Three hard-boiled noirs led to her fourth novel, the sort of breakthrough that booksellers like Emily Bruce at Half Price Books in Dallas love to champion. “Mandel tells the story of a young actress in King Lear witnessing the lead have a heart attack on stage the same night a devastating flu pandemic begins and ultimately ends life across the world as we know it,” says Bruce. “Flashing forward to the survivors twenty years later, the actress is in a traveling symphony and encounters a violent prophet. Although a book about a pandemic is certainly an unsettling topic these days, the story of survival is moving, powerful and well worth the read.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Ok, maybe you were forced to read Dickens in school and it didn’t take. Heck, if school forced you to eat chocolate ice cream every day you’d probably get sick of that too and vow “never again.” But as someone once said about London, anyone who is tired of Dickens is tired of life. His novels were first serialized in magazines so the cliffhanger endings of each chapter make them as binge-worthy as any TV show streaming online. You could start with the nigh-on-perfect Great Expectations or the righteous Hard Times or the novella you already know called A Christmas Carol. We suggest David Copperfield, the story of a young man making his way in the world. It’s bursting with the eccentric, colorful, immediately recognizable characters Dickens is known for. It boasts a clutch of passionate social issues Dickens illuminates like the brutal school system, child labor, prostitution and more. And because it’s based in part on his own challenging childhood, David Copperfield is as close to a memoir and the author’s own beating heart as anything else he wrote.

Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson

A genius (hey, the MacArthur people know what they’re talking about), writer Jacqueline Woodson is a talent whose work transcends labels like “young adult” or “kids” books. They’re for everyone. And you can start anywhere, from an exuberant picture book like The Year We Learned To Fly to young adult novels like Miracle’s Boys or her classic debut Last Summer With Maizon. You’ll find vivid characters, real life and the power of friendship. But you might as well start with her “adult” novel Another Brooklyn, a 2016 peak in which a woman coming to bury her father remembers the culture shock of moving from Tennessee to Brooklyn and adjusting to life in NYC. Woodson has been capturing young people and their fears and joys for more than 30 years. And she keeps getting better.

Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey

The Western of Westerns, Riders Of The Purple Sage from 1912 is the model for every Western that followed. It’s the story of a willful young Mormon woman in Utah who resists becoming the third wife of an Elder and then befriends some Gentiles. Some consider it anti-Mormon. But if the villain is a Mormon, so is our heroine! And her objection to polygamy and approval of comity with other faiths is exactly where the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints is officially at today. So not only is this one of the great Westerns, it was arguably ahead of its time spiritually too.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Writer Zora Neale Hurston is now rightly recognized for her pioneering scholarly work in documenting the folktales of African-Americans and the Caribbean peoples. She did serious ethnographic work, documented the life of one of the last people to have survived the Middle Passage and wrote about voodoo rituals in Haiti and Jamaica. All of this now receives a brighter spotlight, along with her plays, short stories, poetry and the like. We can thank writer Alice Walker, who renewed attention for Hurston and the masterpiece that is Their Eyes Were Watching God. If this novel was the only accomplishment of her life, she would still loom large. Just as in Jane Austen, the heroine of this story is abused for wanting a marriage based on love. Janie Crawford triumphs over her enslaved beginnings to become a woman of property who can choose the man she wants from many suitors. That doesn’t mean she’ll choose well, mind you. Published in 1937, its centerpiece is the devastating Okeechobee hurricane of 1928, an event that wipes the slate clean for Janie and lets her start her life over yet again. Gripping, moving and bold for this time—not to mention 1937—the only surprise is that it took 40 years for people to recognize how great this novel truly is.

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos

What might have been? That’s the bittersweet question at the heart of this elegiac novel that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990. The dying musician Cesar Castillo sits alone in a hotel room, listening to old records by his band the Mambo Kings and thinking back on his life. Exiled from Cuba after Castro overthrew the U.S.-backed dictator Batista, Cesar and his brother move to New York City. Fittingly for musicians, their timing is perfect. A mambo craze sweeps the country and they enjoy a burst of fame after appearing on the sitcom I Love Lucy. Of course, the craze ends, the Mambo Kings fade from the scene and Cesar now remembers the many highs and lows of his life both personal and professional. What might have been? With the life-changing success of his second novel, Oscar Hijuelos assured he would never have to ask himself that question.

Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

All but forgotten, British writer Hope Mirrlees is enjoying a resurgence. Her 600-line work Paris: A Poem is now considered a modernist classic and a major influence on T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, who originally published the piece with her husband. Mirrlees’s “friendship” with the famous classicist Jane Ellen Harrison is now seen in a new light. (Harrison was 37 years her senior but they lived together for 15 years until Harrison died. So perhaps “good pals” doesn’t quite cover it.) And her lone fantasy novel has passionate fans like writer Neil Gaiman. “My favourite book of all time is probably Lud-in-the-Mist,” says Gaiman, author most recently of Neil Gaiman’s Chivalry and Death: The Deluxe Edition. “It’s a story about a stolid land, and the fairy fruit that comes over the border, bringing dreams and poetry and madness; it’s a ghost story and a detective story and it’s also about existential angst and the pain of living in reality. I read it as a boy, and return to it every decade, finding new things in it—sometimes in the plot, sometimes in the way Mirrlees put words together.”

Where I’m Calling From: Selected Stories by Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver was married twice and for a while considered himself a full-time drinker and merely a part-time writer. After being lauded as a major talent, he famously broke away from the influence of an editor that made his reputation and turned minimalism into the style du jour of the 1970s and 1980s. You can ignore the public profile, the stuff of magazine features and literary debates and just read his stories. You won’t find any major twists in the tales. No meta conceits to flatter your brain. No highbrow allusions. Just stories capturing life in such a straightforward manner that you catch your breath. “Cathedral.” “Boxes.” “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” And best of all, with this final collection done before Carver died of lung cancer, we get his own stamp of approval on 37 stories, some presented as they were first published (with his editor’s strong hand), some as Carver originally wrote them and some brand new. Brilliant.

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Sarah Hollenbeck of the Women & Children First bookstore in Chicago says simply that The Round House is “a transformative and mesmerizing novel by national treasure Louise Erdrich.” Indeed. One of our best writers, Erdrich is also one of our best chroniclers of crime, violence, poverty and its impact on individuals and communities. An enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, Erdrich finds rich material amidst life on the reservation in North Dakota. Fiction, poetry, children’s books, nonfiction—the Pulitzer-Prize winner has done it all. But the Justice Trilogy is a keystone of her career, encompassing Plague of Doves, LaRose and smack dab in the middle is 2012’s The Round House. It shows a 13-year-old boy frustrated that the police aren’t looking more seriously into a horrific attack on his mother. Disastrously, the kid takes matters into his own hands, with the help of friends and a stolen rifle. Justice is far, far away but a riveting story and art is right at hand.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

This massive blockbuster reverberates in the mind as a novel about a scheming spouse…or perhaps a novel about how the media loves a scheming spouse…or perhaps how we secretly love it when the media piles on a scheming spouse. Let’s face it, Gone Girl is a roller coaster as the happy marriage of Nick and Amy Dunne falls apart in the white-hot glare of a missing wife case. Infidelity! Betrayal! Hidden diaries! Faked diaries! Clues! False clues! You can’t trust anyone or anything in this masterful tale filled with unreliable narrators. Unreliable except for Flynn, that is, who knows exactly what she’s doing.

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov shocked the world with Lolita, while his work Speak, Memory is one of the great memoirs. But writer Scott Spencer isn’t mincing words about the book of Nabokov’s he admires the most. “You’re always on thin ice when you say a book is the greatest of all time—or even the greatest of the year in which it was first published,” says Spencer, author most recently of An Ocean Without A Shore. “But I feel terra firma beneath my feet when I say Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov is the most astonishing work of fiction I have ever read. After a harrumphing, hilarious foreword, the novel presents us with a 999-line poem written by a poet named John Shade. Shade’s next door neighbor is a colleague at the local college named Charles Kinbote, a madman who believes himself to be Charles the Great, the exiled king of Zembla. The rest of the novel is Kimbote’s commentary/explication of Shade’s poem, in which Kimbote’s personality and preoccupations all but devour the poem itself. It is a narrative strategy of mind-bending weirdness and complexity, and the grateful reader can’t help but wonder how anyone—even the supremely gifted Nabokov—could create something so intricate, so dazzling, yet so filled with humanity. Pale Fire is a gorgeous, radiant work of high spirits and deep sorrow, an other-worldly novel with no predecessors and no descendants."

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Chrissie Hynde called time “the avenger.” Bob Dylan said “time is a jet plane—it moves too fast.” Jennifer Egan simply calls time “the goon squad,” the thug that beats you up no matter how you try to avoid it. Time ravages all the characters in her not-quite short story collection but not-quite novel that won the Pulitzer Prize. Set in and around the business of rock ‘n’ roll, Egan’s work jumps around in time, turns one passage into a PowerPoint presentation and does pretty much everything you’d expect from a cool contemporary book. It’s also everything you’d expect from a classic penned one hundred years ago: beautifully written, filled with great characters and hard to shake. Time will be kind to it.

Watership Down by Richard Adams

This novel is about rabbits and was inspired by stories that author Richard Adams told to his daughters on long road trips. So that explains why Watership Down is often slotted in the children’s section. But it might just as easily be put in the fantasy or fiction or nature or “books you didn’t think you’d care about but the second you start reading them you can’t stop” section. That’s a category, right? In this beguiling adventure, a group of rabbits listen to the prophet-like Fiver, who has a vision their warren is about to be destroyed. They break away from the only world they’ve ever known and head off into the unknown. The group struggles to overcome dangers like cars, dogs, snares, mutiny and much more, with only the vague idea of a destination – a  hilltop where they might live in peace. These aren’t rabbits with pocket watches and they don’t live in some fantasy world. This is our world and the rabbits behave very much like rabbits do. And yet, they’re us too. Gripping, frightening, inspiring.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Every well-written story is universal. And Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel after her acclaimed short story collection Interpreter of Maladies is yet another example. A Bengali couple from Calcutta India moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their son born in America is named Gogol, after the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. It’s the familiar and fresh story of immigrants, of people making a new home and wondering how and if they should fit in, what to leave behind and what to cling to. What kind of a name is “Gogol,” wonders the son, who wants to legally change his name, rebelling against his parents by becoming so American they think they might be losing him. Nuanced and moving, Lahiri’s book shows that the immigrant story—that most American of stories—is always being told anew.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Everyone from Sigmund Freud to Albert Einstein loved this novel—the final and greatest achievement of one of Russia’s greatest writers. You’ve heard about The Grand Inquisitor, even if you’ve never read the poem in the novel where he first appears. And pretty much anyone who makes a list of this sort includes it. Indeed, author W. Somerset Maugham includes it in his admirably brief list of the ten greatest novels of all time. We can’t bring ourselves to be as succinct as he, but at least we’ve included seven of the books he admired best. Just as Dostoevsky wrestles with the idea of God and free will, you simply have to wrestle with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Don’t worry; even if they best you, you’ll never forget the struggle to truly understand these Russian bears.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

The body of work created by Octavia E. Butler is rich. But 1993’s Parable of the Sower looms larger and larger, if only because it grapples with the climate crisis, inequality, corporate greed and the eternal hope that life will be better somewhere else. Lauren Oya Olamina is an African American teenager living in the deteriorating society of 2024. She escapes the violent collapse of her preacher father’s isolated community and travels north for work. Hiding her gender, fearing rape, risking an interracial romance, Lauren creates a new religion she calls Earthseed, where humanity’s only chance to get it right is to start again on another planet. Like the best parables, Butler’s book is first and foremost a story you’ll remember. But it also has much to teach.

Waiting by Jin Ha

Just…wait. That’s all Dr. Lin Kong is asking his girlfriend, Nurse Manna Wu, to do. Wait. Lin wants to marry Manna but he’s already married to Shuyu, an old-fashioned village woman Lin never loved but dutifully wed. Now he needs to ask for a divorce. Every year he heads home to his village determined to do so…and every year he comes back to the city and asks Manna to wait just one more year. Jin Ha’s National Book Award-winning novel revealed life in Communist China in new detail for many readers, showing its constraints on personal freedom. More broadly, Waiting shows the divide between city and country, between tradition and modernism, between passion and responsibility, divides that are familiar the world over. Which explains its popularity the world over…except in China, where the book was denounced and has yet to be officially published.

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

Joan Didion is rightly acclaimed for her nonfiction work laying bare the soul of America. She also won a legion of new fans with the memoir The Year Of Magical Thinking, the story of Didion’s life in the year after the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne. But boy did she know show biz. In her second novel, Didion presents one of its fringe players. Maria is in a psychiatric hospital in LA, thinking back on how she got there. Born in a small town, Maria dreams of being an actress, falls in with abusive men and only moves to Hollywood after she’s given acting up. That may be the sanest move of her life. Everything is a struggle for Maria, who fights to protect her ailing child, fights addiction, fights for a divorce and is now fighting to get better and get out of the hospital. Life soon imitated art: the novel came out to acclaim in 1970 and Didion along with her husband spent the next decade working in Hollywood, albeit with much more success than Maria.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

If you’re not ambitious, start with Tolstoy’s devastating novella The Death Of Ivan Ilyich. If you’re overly ambitious, go for War And Peace, a novel as big and sprawling and all-encompassing as its title. But if you want to start at the top and prefer a little doomed romance with your Russian epics, try Anna Karenina. It features enough vivid characters and plotlines to power two soap operas. Like War and Peace, it’s not shy about boldly tackling everything from religion to Imperial Russia in all its glorious complications and so on. But it revolves around a juicy love affair between the married Anna and the cavalry officer Count Vronsky, who simply must be described as “dashing.” You’ll be caught up in a way you’re simply not by the equally marvelous but less focused musings of War And Peace. Just don’t read it on a station platform while waiting for a train.

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury is famous for his dystopian novel about book-burning titled Fahrenheit 451. He’s acclaimed for his eerie tales of space colonization called The Martian Chronicles. But those who love him best gravitate to the nostalgic tales of childhood in Dandelion Wine. Tinged with magical realism, these evocations of small town life dipped in honey are irresistible because they capture a perfect past that never really existed…except for every boy and girl with a little imagination and a lot of heart. Bookseller Jim Reed of Jim Reed Books in Birmingham, Alabama, always has a few copies on hand to press on lucky browsers. “Christopher Isherwood and R.L. Stine and I, among others, believe this is the great American novel,” says Reed. “Dandelion Wine is a magical lightning bolt. When I first read this wonderful book in the 1950s, I was a teenager without compass, a quiet kid with no prospects. Dandelion Wine awakened me to the idea that I could be a dreamer, an actor, a writer…and that that was ok. Apparently I wasn’t the only kid on the planet who was amazed by life.”

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. At the time, that wasn’t a big deal, as such—four of the first seven winners were women. Men slowly began to dominate the award, with women now making up only a third of all winners. Men also dominate in The Age Of Innocence. The protagonist Newland Archer is accustomed to getting whatever he wants: Newland is old money, upper class and proud of it. He should marry the innocent seeming May Welland but he’s drawn to the unsuitable yet more interesting Ellen Olenska. Newland pursues her, but his peers won’t have it and quietly disapprove. The bonds of society, the sharply defined lines between old money and new, between the “better” classes and the lower ones are all on display in Wharton’s dissection of a world she knew so well. Pregnancy as a plot twist and a weapon? You might say only a woman would have thought of that. But you’d be more correct to say only a great writer would have deployed it so well.

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie’s second novel is so influential in India that critics refer to the “post-Rushdie” era. Among countless accolades, it scored the highest honor in the Commonwealth: the Booker Prize. Then on the Booker’s 25th anniversary, it was named the best book to win the Booker. And on its 40th anniversary, Midnight’s Children did it again, being chosen as the Booker of Bookers. Rushdie’s third novel The Satanic Verses is the one that unfortunately made him a household name around the world, as well as a fugitive from a fatwa. But Midnight’s Children remains a landmark in world literature, as signal an event in its way as the independence of India from the U.K. and the wrenching partition of that country into India and Pakistan. The babies born between midnight and 1 a.m. on that fateful day have special powers. Our hero Saleem is born very close to midnight, so he proves very powerful indeed. Saleem’s story is very much the story of modern India in all its tragedy, missed opportunity and promise. Few novels are as ambitious and even fewer succeed so splendidly.

Devil’s Cub by Georgette Heyer

J.R.R. Tolkien established the modern fantasy, a genre almost entirely indebted to him for its existence. Few can make a similar claim about pioneering a new category of fiction. But Georgette Heyer can. She wrote many thrillers, often one a year, and they deserve your attention. But she’s widely recognized as creating the modern historical romance and more specifically, the Regency romance. Jane Austen wrote Regency romances as a matter of course—for her, they were contemporary novels because that’s when she lived. One hundred years later, Heyer would bring a scholar’s passion for accuracy to the Regency romance. By the end of her life, Heyer owned a reference library exceeding 1000 titles about the era, along with any info she could find on the history of snuff boxes, the cost of candles in a particular year and so on. What’s truly exciting is that her novels like Devil’s Cub are so much fun. The characters are offbeat for the day (Marrying for love? What an idea!) and Heyer has a blast upending convention, even as she establishes that convention so well. Everyone in the romance field stands in her debt. Devil’s Cub is great but really you can’t go wrong with anything she wrote.

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

A picture book classic can’t just appeal to kids—it also must appeal to adults because they’re the ones who read it. Author Matthew Paul Turner estimates he’s read Where The Wild Things Are hundreds of times to his own children and to classrooms of kids. “To me, Sendak’s 1963 offering is a perfect children’s book because it’s one of the most delightful books to read aloud, offering moments to read quietly, in almost a hush, and also lines to read loudly with growls and snorts,” says Turner, author most recently of I Am God’s Dream with illustrator Estrella Bascuñan. “With every turn of the page, Sendak adds mystery and nuance to Max’s adventure using the fewest words possible. One minute we’re observing Max in his bedroom yelling ‘I’ll eat you up!’ at his mother and a few pages later, we’ve joined Max on an island of monsters, romping and stomping with the young hero. Wild Things is real and it’s fantasy, it’s childlike and yet it leaves space between the words to imagine a deeper and more profound story. Its illustrations are simple and timeless and have inspired the imaginations of generations of readers. I love that I was able to introduce my kids to a story that I loved deeply when I was their age.”

Waiting To Exhale by Terry McMillan

It’s hard to overstate the impact of Waiting To Exhale when it came out in 1992. It’s a thoroughly entertaining novel about female friendship, the pressures of career and how very disappointing men can sometimes (ok, often) be. Funny, sexy and smart, Terry McMillan’s book is a winner. While it has many precursors (many mothers, you might say), the success of it and her follow-up How Stella Got Her Groove Back proved a landmark. This was a book embraced by a wide audience. But it wasn’t written to reach a wide audience and didn’t worry about a wide (that is, white) audience. It was by and for people of color and especially black people and especially black women. So when it became a best-seller and reached both the women it celebrated and everyone else as well, the change was fundamental. One year later, the TV show Living Single debuted, so change was in the air, a change marked by so many movies and TV shows and books and music by the likes of Jill Scott. A change sparked by Waiting To Exhale.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

One of William Faulkner’s masterpieces, The Sound and the Fury, signified something, though critics were mostly dismissive when this story of a fading Southern family came out in 1929. Its stream of consciousness style, jumps in time and multiple narrators led off by the mentally challenged Benjy Compson was just too much for many. Respected critic Clifton Fadiman wasn’t alone when he recognized Faulkner’s artistry but for the life of him couldn’t understand why it was used to tell this confusing story. Within two years, the book would start to gain momentum commercially and in 20 years, Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Today, so many books and tv shows and movies like Pulp Fiction have used similar time-jumping structures to tell a story that The Sound And The Fury feels almost familiar. It’s still bold and disorienting, but at least readers can rest assured they’ll figure out what the heck is going on and that it’s all worth the ride.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

This autobiographical novel about a young girl who loves reading and dreams of something…more speaks to immigrants and adolescents everywhere. Writers like Kristy Woodson Harvey hold it especially dear. “I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for the first time in the fourth grade,” says Harvey, author most recently of The Wedding Veil, “and have read it almost every year since. Every time, every page, I find something new to love, some different piece of wisdom to grasp onto, something truer and more real about humanity than I did before. The brilliance of Betty Smith was her ability to transform the ordinary moments of our lives into something bright and shining, to find that morsel of goodness that connects us across circumstance and time. And, of course, ‘The world was hers for the reading,’ is a quote that still, all these years later, can’t help but make my book-loving heart race.”

Donald Barthelme: Collected Stories by Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme is America’s Beckett, which is to say America’s class clown or more exactly America’s court jester—the one who gets away with speaking the brutal truth because it’s cloaked in absurdist humor the unwary dismiss as surreal, fragmented nonsense. His short stories (and the infrequent novel) are invariably playful, hilarious and grim. In his work Barthelme drew inspiration from visual artists as much as he did fellow writers as diverse as Kafka and S.J. Perelman, always deferential if not reverential to Beckett. So, at times, his stories would be interrupted by a found piece of illustration from the 19th century, just to keep you on your toes. Monty Python probably paid attention. Collected Stories from the Library of America gathers together essentially every short story he ever published, which is appropriate since every short story of his is essential. To say he was held in high esteem by other writers is an understatement. “This book will take you from the early let’s say cubism to the later let’s say domesticity in the Barthelme progression,” says Padgett Powell, author most recently of Indigo. “A major book: what Hemingway was to the first, Barthelme was to the second half of 20th century American fiction.”

Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard

Toss a dart at the books of Elmore Leonard and you’ll hit a classic. Thunk and you’ve picked his wonderfully unconventional Western Valdez Is Coming. Or thunk the period gangster story The Hot Kid. Or thunk and you’ve landed on Get Shorty, in which Leonard combines hilarious dialogue and vivid characters with genuine danger to skewer Hollywood along with the usual loan sharks and criminal lowlifes. God knows why Leonard would bite the hand that feeds him—Hollywood made one terrific movie after another based on his novels and the 1995 film Get Shorty with John Travolta was no exception.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

For people living with depression, for certain women, for certain artists, few books matter as much as The Bell Jar. The poet Sylvia Plath shows her (autobiographical) character Esther Greenwood fighting depression with a humor and clarity that astonishes even today. We know so much more about bipolar disorder, depression and the like now. But Plath knew it instinctively in 1963 and she captured what it is to live with depression, rather than damning or praising this treatment or that clinic or yet another off-target diagnosis. What a person really wants first—really needs first—is to be believed and listened to and understood. When you’re trapped under a bell jar, it’s hard to be heard. Not for Plath, who’s still speaking out some 60 years later.

Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor

“It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown out there on the edge of the prairie….” For decades, those words promised a return to an idyllic innocence that never really existed and a gentle teasing of human foibles that always will. The radio show A Prairie Home Companion was a marvelous combination of good music, bad jokes, community and a generosity of spirit. The highlight back in the day was the monologue with news from Lake Wobegon, delivered extemporaneously by host Garrison Keillor. He reshaped some of the best monologues into the collection Lake Wobegon Days and it catapulted him and the show into even greater worldwide fame. Yes, it won a Grammy as an audiobook and yes, some fans prefer to hear him, rather than read him. But Keillor is a careful writer and knows the difference between what works on the air and what works on the page. So don’t discount the craft put into this gem of gentle humor. If you can’t help hearing Keillor’s voice while reading it, well that’s okay too.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Without warning, every once in a while, it seems like everyone you know—everyone—has read, is reading or is about to read the same book. In 2015, that book was The Nightingale, a World War II novel about two estranged sisters resisting the Nazi invasion of France. One secretly shelters Jews, including a neighbor’s child she hides in plain sight. The other sister joins the French Resistance and devises a plan to spirit away stranded Allied pilots to neutral territory. Like the most enduring thrillers, you’re sucked in not just by plot twists or the high drama of war but by the characters who become so real to you that their fate is akin to your own.

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford’s novel came out in 1915. You have to remember that when reading this story of poisoned marriages, infidelity and madness. Its narrator is so slippery and its attitude so cynical that the effect is almost shocking. Two couples meet at a spa in Germany where a respective spouse can be treated for their ailing heart. One couple is British, with Captain Edward Ashburnham resting his heart after overuse: the man is chronically unfaithful to his wife Leonora. The other couple is American, with the wife Florence pretending to have a weak heart so she can keep her husband John from “bothering” her in bed while she maintains an affair on the side. This isn’t Noel Coward territory: suicide and mental breakdowns are on tap, not to mention intimations of abuse and even the possibility that we’re being sold a bill of goods by the narrator. Truly no one is good here except, of course, for Ford.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

She’s the voice of a generation! She’s Ireland’s most popular export since U2! Or we could calm down and say that, three novels in, Sally Rooney is the real deal. Normal People became a hugely popular miniseries and turned Paul Mescal into a star, so thank you for that, Sally. But what a novel! It’s so engaging you almost don’t realize how ambitious it proves, tackling class and gender with insight and complexity. Connell is the star of his high school, almost embarrassed to be dating the shy Marianne. But she blossoms at university while Connell struggles to adapt to a wider world where he’s not automatically B.M.O.C. She’s rich, he’s working class and they are both smart enough to realize this tangled, confusing, ever-shifting relationship (friendship? love?) has to mean something. Doesn’t it?

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Some novels reveal their pleasures immediately. Others need careful attention, re-reading and perhaps a little life under the reader’s belt before they can be fully appreciated. Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece is different. Its pleasures are immediate and abundantly clear—the fantastical tale is hilarious, satirical, intellectually playful, clearly has a lot on its mind and is above all fun. Even a child knows this. Yet the more you read it and the more you think about it and what it says and means, the curiouser and curiouser it becomes. Novelist Joyce Carol Oates, for one, often cites it as a profound influence. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is hilarious and satirical and all that, but far more than you realized. If it’s been a while since you went down the rabbit hole, all we can say is don’t hesitate to DRINK ME and EAT ME and indeed READ ME.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

In real life, we want nothing to do with ornery, cranky, difficult people. Who needs the bother? But in movies and TV shows and books we positively delight in them. It’s fun to spend time with the rude, downright obnoxious character who says what everyone is secretly thinking. Writer Elizabeth Strout hit pay dirt with the prickly personality of Olive Kitteridge. Embodied to perfection by Frances McDormand in an HBO miniseries, Olive observes everyone around her with a gimlet eye…and then tells them precisely what she sees. Her saving grace is that Olive is just as hard on herself. You finish the book and immediately start to miss her. Strout must have felt the same way—she wrote an equally acclaimed sequel called Olive, Again about a decade later.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

In the year 2000, author Michael Chabon discovered his superpower. Prior to that, he seemed a mild-mannered writer. Chabon’s acclaimed debut novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was seen as semi-autobiographical, like many first novels. He struggled with the follow-up and then dropped it completely to do that most writerly of things—write a novel about a writer trying to write a novel (a college professor, no less!). Wonder Boys was a huge success and spawned a good movie, but still. One worried. Then Chabon was bitten by a radioactive bug or discovered a hidden passage in his library or was told about his true origins on another planet or something! Because out of nowhere he delivered The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a fictionalized reimagining of two nice Jewish boys who create a superhero comic book, a la Superman. It’s a rich period story punctuated by vivid retellings of the comic book plot, World War II, a gay romance, assimilation and so on. Even more amazing, Chabon hasn’t looked back. Since this landmark, he’s written children’s books, a sci-fi mystery set in an alternate timeline, a novella capturing Sherlock Holmes in his old age, a serialized novel about swashbuckling Jews around the turn of the last millennium and even a comic book bringing to life the comic book hero of Kavalier & Clay! Genre is his superpower and Chabon won’t ever forget it.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Writer Tayari Jones lays claim to Atlanta as her literary stomping ground, thanks to a string of acclaimed novels and her role as editor of the mystery/thriller collection Atlanta Noir. Bookseller Sarah Hollenbeck touts An American Marriage, the story of a newly married couple whose lives are torn apart when the husband is wrongfully convicted and sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. “It’s an intimate look deep into the hearts of people who are victims of our current mass incarceration crisis but must somehow face the future,” says Hollenbeck of Women & Children First bookstore in Chicago. “A profound and stirring book!” She’s not alone in loving it. Oprah made it a pick for her book club, President Barack Obama touted the title and it won the prestigious Women’s Prize For Fiction.

The Chosen by Chaim Potok

A father expects his son to enter the family business, but the son has other plans. You’ve heard this one before. But when that tension between expectation and desire is set in the world of Jewish boys growing up in Brooklyn during World War II, it becomes fresh and surprising. Reuven and Danny are friends, even though Reuven is part of the more worldly Modern Orthodox community while Danny is the son of a rabbi leading an ultra-orthodox Hasidic yeshiva. They’re all-American boys who bond over baseball. And both want to defy their parents. Reuven yearns to be a rabbi, but his father expects the boy to pursue higher education. Danny’s father assumes the boy will become a rabbi, but Danny wants to study psychology. Who gets to choose the life you lead? Your father? Yourself? And if the Jews are the Chosen, how could the Holocaust ever take place? A novel that grapples with faith and family, The Chosen will remain a perennial favorite as long as kids and parents clash.

A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin

How can we celebrate a fantasy series that’s not even done yet? Easy. All fantasy writers stand on the shoulders of J.R.R. Tolkien, as Martin himself readily acknowledges. But few do it with such flair and passion as he. Martin’s novels are brutal, cynical, and thrilling in their scope. In them, the smallest and kindest among us don’t pop up to save the day. More likely, they’re trampled underfoot. Major characters who die won’t be brought back to life. They’re just dead. Betrayal and honor carry a heavy price and it’s not clear which is higher. Watching leaders battle for control of Westeros while ignoring a looming (ecological?) disaster isn’t “timely.” It’s timeless. Fighting for power while sidestepping the issues that really matter is par for the course with the ruling class. Someday we’ll be able to read A Song Of Ice and Fire from start to finish. Those frustrating gaps where characters aren’t heard from for a thousand pages won’t matter. The gaps between books being published won’t matter either. All that will matter is the song. So take your time, Mr. Martin.

Selected Stories by Alice Munro

This is the name of the greatest hits set from 1996, gathering the best stories from Alice Munro’s first eight volumes. It’s been published under various titles, but don’t worry. You can grab any collection, like Vintage Munro (which is a  redundant title) or My Best Stories. Or you can buy her first book of stories Dance Of The Happy Shades or her most recent Dear Life. Really, just look for the name Alice Munro and read it. She’s the first Canadian and only the thirteenth woman in history to win the Nobel Prize. You’ll soon understand why.

Roots by Alex Haley

If you or someone in your family has taken a swab test to trace your roots, you can thank writer Alex Haley. A passion for genealogy and a desire to see if the oral history he’d heard over the years was based on truth sent Haley on a quest. It took him all the way to Africa and what is now known as The Gambia. Then it led him to a typewriter, where Haley took the facts as he best knew them and crafted a novel. That book told the story of Kunta Kinte, a 17 year old man cruelly kidnapped from his home and sold into slavery…and then it told the story of the next seven generations of Kinte’s family, moving from tragedy to triumph. They started filming the miniseries even before the novel was published; both were massive, unprecedented successes. Genealogy and our understanding of American history have never been the same.

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

A plucky young orphan girl with spunk? Check! Ornery old people who turn out to be endearing? Check! Some “disasters” and setbacks that loom large for our heroine but prove surmountable? Check! A boy who is infuriating but proves to be rather handsome and kind once you get to know him? Check! Yes, this 1908 classic was not the first of its kind (hello, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm) and certainly inspired countless successors. But the red-haired Anne with an “e” is special. It inspired five sequels of increasing depth and sophistication, though writer Margaret Atwood insists this first novel is the best. And who are we to argue with Margaret Atwood? By the end of the series, Anne looks on as her children sleep, while the shadows of World War I loom large. You realize how much Anne and her world mean to you…and start to read them all over again.

Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid On Earth by Chris Ware

When people who don’t love comics single out a comic (or graphic novel or what-have-you) worth reading, they often light on something that is the least comic book-y thing they can find. Hence the universal—and yet deserved—praise for Chris Ware’s atypical, beautiful comic Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid On Earth. Outlets that rarely get comic books can “get” this mournful story of a middle-aged man who has a troubled relationship with his dad. The stories are quiet, piercing and broken up by flashbacks to Jimmy Corrigan’s grandfather as a boy, when he had a troubled relationship with his dad. First, you’ll be enraptured by the sheer pleasure of looking at this work of art. Then, you’ll sink into the story and its quiet moments and before you know it, you’re under his spell.

Speedboat by Renata Adler

Renata Adler became infamous for reviewing a collection of movie criticism by Pauline Kael. Both were writers at the New Yorker but that didn’t stop Adler from decimating her colleague Kael’s work, tearing it down line by line, piece by piece. In her autobiographical-ish debut novel Speedboat, Adler did much the same for modern life in the 1970s. Moments flit by, fragmented scene follows fragmented scene and yet somehow it all coheres into the story of a journalist making her way through the world of New York City and politics and parties. “Reading it is like being in a snowstorm,” said one rave review in The New Yorker (not written by Kael, needless to say). Everyone from Elizabeth Hardwick to David Foster Wallace has championed it and Speedboat went from an out-of-print cult favorite to a modern classic.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

This is an angry book. It’s a nice, safe classic now, enshrined on lists like this, turned into a great movie starring Henry Fonda, a great stage play and even an opera. But when it came out, The Grapes Of Wrath was a thunderbolt. It was banned all over the place and burned…even by librarians! People argued about it. Debates were held on the radio. John Steinbeck was called a socialist, a communist and he would have been called worse but there was nothing worse to be called than a communist. Yet it sold and sold and sold. The debate hasn’t stopped. It was banned in Ireland in the 1950s. It was banned in Turkey in the 1970s. Today, people still raise objections to it being required reading in high schools or even optional reading or even just sitting on the shelf in libraries where some impressionable child might find it. The story of the Joad family, fleeing the ravages of the Dust Bowl and the Depression, desperate for jobs, hounded everywhere they go when all they want is a decent wage for a decent day’s work? That’s as timeless as it gets. Steinbeck might prefer a better future where the book was long forgotten or just a relic of ancient history. But he certainly wouldn’t be surprised that it’s still blazingly relevant. And he’d still be angry.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

No matter how unique, how unexpected, how new a novel seems, even its author can readily name the many novels that inspired it, paving the way for their “unprecedented” and original work. Still, the debut novel of Susanna Clarke certainly felt wonderfully fresh and new. Clarke might have mentioned Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees as one of many predecessors in tone and style. But we simply weren’t expecting a pitch-perfect evocation of the 19th-century novel a la Dickens and Austen, a comedy of manners and high drama which combines an alternate history, the Napoleonic Wars, the re-emergence of magic and most deliciously of all the knives-out ferocity that is academia into one bewitching tale. No one is more territorial than a scholar defending their minor backwater of knowledge and Clarke punctures such pomposity with footnotes to her novel that are howlingly funny in their pedanticism. This might have turned into a cult classic, one especially treasured by tenured professors. Instead, it became a rip-roaring bestseller to the delight of all.

A Death in the Family by James Agee

A brilliant film critic, James Agee also penned two classic screenplays: The African Queen (along with director John Huston and two others) and The Night Of The Hunter (with an uncredited Charles Laughton also playing a role). A good collaborator, Agee worked with photographer Walker Evans on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a ground-breaking combination of words and images documenting the lives of impoverished tenant farmers. But his posthumous novel A Death In The Family is the riveting, anguished pinnacle of Agee’s life. People can’t leave it alone. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize after an editor pulled it together from an unfinished manuscript. Others turned it into a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, a film, a TV movie and an opera. Then a scholar took issue with the editing and oversaw a new edition of the novel closer to the form it was in when Agee died. In every form, the story of a little boy in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1915—the year his father dies in a car accident—is piercing, heartwarming, nostalgic and so very moving.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy wrote easier books. The Road is his most popular work—a dystopian novel where the brutal struggle to survive is given purpose by showing a father determined to protect his young son. All The Pretty Horses is more lyrical and open-hearted, with a doomed romance at its core. Then there’s Blood Meridian, the anti-Western, a novel few praised when it first came out in 1985. In it, a semi-lawless band of men is sent off to scalp any violent Indians that cross their path along the U.S.-Mexican border. Soon they’re attacking peaceful Indians, sleepy Mexican villages, the Mexican army and pretty much anyone else unlucky enough to come in range. The violence is unremitting and you’ll decide it puts the lie to the romantic Westerns of your youth or you’ll decide this is how it really was back then so deal with it or you’ll decide violence is just the way of humanity, as one of the novel’s epigraphs suggests. Hard to shake, and maybe you shouldn’t try.

Tipping The Velvet by Sarah Waters

Don’t get the impression that Sarah Waters peaked with her marvelous debut Tipping The Velvet. You’ll find her crime novel Fingersmith on our list of the 110 Best Thriller, Crime, Suspense Novels Of All Time. But since she began with Tipping The Velvet, you should too. Waters was writing her PhD on historical fiction, figured she’d have a go at it herself and wrote this gripping novel. Forget everything you imagine you know about the Victorian era because it’s probably wrong. Here you’ll discover Nan, a young woman working in the unromantic business of oysters. Her world is upended by Kitty, a “masher,” a woman who dresses as a man onstage. Crime, betrayal, life on the stage, sex work of unimagined variety and more take place in the late 1800s against the backdrop of the suffragette movement, socialism and the constant fear of being arrested for whom they love. It’s a proper melodrama and in a novel this well-written and historically grounded, that’s a compliment.

Howards End by E.M. Forster

A Room With A View is Forster’s wittiest and most romantic novel. Maurice, and its doomed gay love, is his most personal. (It was only published after the author died in 1970.) A Passage To India, and its take on Empire, is his most popular. But Forster is at his most focused and refined with Howards End. He diagnoses the ills of English society while gently satirizing those who saw “the poor” as their own personal pet project. It’s all-encompassing, shrewd and generous of spirit, with the titular home proving both a symbol and a burden, until it’s finally placed into the right hands.

Underworld by Don DeLillo

Like Babe Ruth pointing to where he’d hit a home run before a pitch is thrown, writer Don DeLillo’s career clearly pointed to this: a sprawling yet focused, all-encompassing masterpiece. And just like the Babe, he delivered. The 98-page opening section is devoted to The Shot Heard ‘Round The World, a home run by Bobby Thomson that won the New York Giants the pennant and sent them to the World Series. That ball is caught by a young black fan while J. Edgar Hoover watches from the stands, being informed during the game that the Soviets have successfully tested a hydrogen bomb. It’s all there—America, the Cold War, race, class, sports, sexuality, politics, joy, despair—and it’s done so perfectly that this chunk of the book would later be titled Pafko At The Wall and sold separately as a novella. The rest of the novel charts the life of a man obsessed with finding out what happened to that home run ball and acquiring it for himself. Oh, and charting the 20th century as well. So far, it’s DeLillo’s best novel, but he still has innings left to play.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The cruelty of caste. The dismissal of women. The pain of heartbreak. Family. Religion. All play a role in the meticulous, absorbing debut novel by Arundhati Roy that took the literary world by storm 25 years ago. Set in Kerala, India, and beginning in the 1960s, Roy’s story centers on women betrayed by love, bolstered by love and bent on love. To this day, so-called “Love Laws,” in both the cultural and legal sense, limit who can love who and how much in India, with gender, caste and faith all obstacles to be surmounted. What’s love got to do with it? Everything—and Roy demonstrates why in a novel as formally complex as it is generous of spirit.

Ubik by Philip K. Dick

Sci-fi author Philip K. Dick is compared to Franz Kafka and Thomas Pynchon as much as to other science fiction writers. But where to begin with his confounding body of work? The books that inspired the film Blade Runner or the TV series The Man in The High Castle? Well, a body of voters in France and the very American magazine Time both agree his masterpiece is, in fact, Ubik—a nightmare of the future where everything is monetized. Bookseller Lisa Morton agrees. “Ubik starts with a hero named Joe Chip who is unable to leave his automated apartment because he doesn’t have money to pay his door,” says Morton of Iliad Bookshop in North Hollywood, California. “From there, it takes off on a mind-bending story of time and evolution moving backwards, with all roads seeming to lead to death and dissolution. That mad genius Philip K. Dick was once shocked when told that French critics had chosen Ubik as one of the five best novels ever written. He thought surely the list must be the five best science fiction novels, but no—it was simply the five best novels in all of literature. After reading this funny, horrific, tragic and surprising book, you might agree with the French.”

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

Were you wowed by Cloud Atlas, the David Mitchell novel that toyed with structure so cleverly it turned his genre-hopping book into a literary Matryoshka, a Russian nesting doll? Did the way Ian McEwan ended Atonement—changing everything that came before—blow your mind? Well, open The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing’s masterpiece is often hailed for its clever-clever narrative, which goes back and forth between the four notebooks that document the life of writer Anna Wulf. Others emphasize its importance as a feminist classic. Lessing herself put the focus on the titanic issues the novel engaged with, from Stalinism to colonialism to the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation movement. The fact that she dazzled while doing so, thought Lessing, was not the point. She’s right, but dazzle it does.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

Artist Bob Marley looms large over popular music and the history of Jamaica. His greatest hits set, Legend, is one of the best-selling albums of all time. His influence is incalculable. And writer Marlon James captures both Marley—referred to only as The Singer—and decades of Jamaican history in his third novel. It leaps from an attempted assassination of Marley in 1976 to the ravages of crack in the U.S. and back to Jamaica in the 1990s. James is so masterful as he captures a remarkable range of characters and time periods that he became the first Jamaican writer to win the prestigious Booker Prize for best novel. After capturing such a broad sweep of history, the only way for James to top himself was to create an entire world. He is doing just that with a fantasy trilogy based on African myths and history. It began with Black Leopard, Red Wolf, continued with the just-out Moon Witch, Spider King and will be complete with White Wing, Dark Star.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Oh for a chance to try again! Who hasn’t said, “If I knew then what I know now!” and meant it? It’s a tempting desire and that’s why movies like Groundhog Day are so powerful. Writer Kate Atkinson tackles this premise with relish in Life After Life. Our heroine Ursula (or should that be “heroines?”) is conceived…and then dies in the womb, strangled by an umbilical cord. Fade to black. She is conceived again, avoids the danger and is born…only to die another way. Fade to black! Again and again, Ursula is born and makes her way through life. She dies repeatedly during the Spanish Flu and tries again, dimly aware as her lives repeat that she’s done this before and learning just enough to improve her chances. Facing down a rapist, surviving the Blitz during World War II, choosing to fall in love and spending WWII in Berlin with her German husband, again and again Ursula lives out her lives with an ever-expanding sense of the possibilities we all have at our command. It’s playful, serious, mind-blowing and oh, for a chance to try again. At least, we can read it again.

The Adventures of Captain Underpants by Dav Pilkey

When a parent is desperate to see their kids embrace reading, any book they will actually read, indeed demand to read as soon as the latest one comes out, is immediately one of the greatest books of all time. And that’s why the silly, punny, juvenile humor of the Captain Underpants series is here. Two boys turn their school principal into a superhero? Professor Poopypants? Bionic Boogie Boy? Relax! As long as they’re giggling and reading, it’s good. Bookseller Kathy Doyle Thomas of Half Price Books (headquartered in Dallas, Texas), knows that well. “My dyslexic son was obsessed with Captain Underpants and his crazy adventures,” says Doyle Thomas. “He was not a strong reader, but could easily read and comprehend the books and relate to the character. Most importantly, he felt good about himself!”

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

If you want to become an indelible part of American culture, it’s always smart to write a short, easy-to-read novel that can be taught in high school English classes. For generations past, those novels included A Separate Peace by John Knowles, To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. They’re part of a shared memory for older generations, the way the Harry Potter books and Star Wars films are for people today. Each followed a different path to success. A Separate Peace began as a short story appearing in Cosmopolitan and was a solid success when published as a novel. To Kill A Mockingbird proved a runaway bestseller and scored the Pulitzer Prize. The Great Gatsby languished with modest sales in 1925; Fitzgerald died fifteen years later believing it was a flop. But when World War II came along, G.I.s were given a paperback copy and its popularity soared. Today, few books embody and question the American Dream quite like this novel about Nick Carraway caught up in the frenzied world of new money living it up in Long Island. Not only do some lives have a second act, so do some books. Especially the great ones.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

Sure, it’s just a modern updating of Tom Brown’s School Days with a dollop of fantasy. But the magic isn’t just in the spells and potions. It’s found in J.K. Rowling’s remarkable gift for naming (Dumbledore, Hagrid, Ravenclaw), plotting and humor. From the butterbeer on tap to Harry the Boy Who Lived (but did so in a cramped space underneath the stairs of his mean aunt and uncle), the invention never flags. Rowling’s expansive vision grew and grew along with the books in this seven-volume series. An entire generation simply had to read them. People lined up at midnight all over the world when a new one came out. The movies and games and plays and merchandise still stand in their shadow. And it all began with this debut, which is nigh on perfect and magical in every way that matters.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

What do you do as a critic when a major writer like Gabriel García Márquez delivers a novel so brilliant it can’t be denied? Normally, you just shout about it from the rooftops. But when that novel combines the fantastical with the ordinary, when it draws upon the magical in a way that is uncomfortably akin to the despised genre of fantasy, you’re in trouble, since fantasy can’t be taken seriously by literary critics. The answer is simple. You cast a spell and instead of calling it “fantasy,” you call it “magical realism” and everyone is happy. The novel can be praised, a new fancy phrase has been invented (and will be applied to almost any writer from Latin America, whether it fits or not) and a sprawling, sexy, bewildering tale that spans generations and is set in part in a fictional town called Macondo and includes people tied to trees for years on end and more incest than you would expect becomes one of the most acclaimed and best-selling books of all time. And realistically, that’s pretty magical.

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

It’s not fair, but we’re still happily waiting for writer Zadie Smith to fulfill the promise of her debut novel White Teeth. This sprawling story covers 25 years and the lives of everyone from a devout Jehovah’s Witness from Jamaica to a white Englishman dumped by his Italian wife to a Bengali Muslim from Bangladesh who is endlessly distracted from his faith by a fondness for beer, masturbation and his children’s music teacher. As Edward R. Murrow famously intoned during his war reporting: this…is London. Critics and readers agreed wholeheartedly as White Teeth won awards, hit the bestseller list and became a miniseries and a play. Smith hasn’t stopped: she overcame the sophomore slump with her excellent third novel On Beauty and continues steadily on with five novels in all, two short story collections, a play, teaching and the occasional foray into the role of public intellectual. That’s exactly how you fulfill the promise of a brilliant debut. You do the long, steady work of writing and publishing and then writing again. As Smith keeps this up, in another 30 years with another clutch of great books to her credit, we’ll gladly say her promise is fulfilled. Until then, we greedily demand more.

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

Some novels are so big, so important, so monumental, they can’t be ignored. Such is Les Misérables, just one of the great novels by Victor Hugo, an author so popular in France that when he died more than two million people—two million!—took part in the funeral procession. The story is familiar to you, the story of a man who stole a loaf of bread to feed a child and paid a terrible price. No, it’s not enough to see the musical or watch a film or TV adaptation. It’s time to read the book, all of it. When you’re done, you’ll want to make the world a better place.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Sometimes you just want a good story. Oh yes, Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize winner is beautifully written and grapples with all sorts of themes—how could any book set in part during World War II that’s worth its salt fail to do so? But let the scholars parse its greatness. You’ll simply be caught up in the tale of Marie-Laure, a little blind girl who grows up in Paris and then flees the war to reside in Saint-Malo. Her father builds his daughter a model city of their new town so she can learn her way around. Then he disappears. Marie-Laure’s story is interwoven with the story of a little German boy named Werner who is handy with electronics. If you expect their paths to cross during the war, well, you won’t be disappointed. But first, you’ll learn about the cursed diamond known as the Sea Of Flames, an old man still haunted by World War I, a maid who takes part in the Resistance and so much more. A treat.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

What’s not to love? You’ve got a missing father and a trio of kids determined to find him, led by 13-year-old Meg Murry. You’ve got mysterious neighbors known as Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which. They task Meg, her super-smart little brother Charles and their friend Calvin to save her father…and the world! You’ve got the ability to travel through time and space, centaurs, strange new planets and creatures, new friends and dangerous enemies and a race against time as Earth is slowly engulfed by an evil known as The Black Thing. Kids and adults have loved this novel (and its sequels) ever since, celebrating a story where a girl is the hero of a sci-fi/fantasy and Love is more powerful than Hate.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

If you’re Latin or simply read a lot of Latin American literature, you might roll your eyes at The Savage Detectives being on this list. There are other authors, other books from Latin America since Gabriel García Márquez, you would say. Yes, yes, but if the died-too-young Bolaño’s novel (or his equally acclaimed 2666) is always the book, the author people tout to show they’re aware of the vast body of fiction found in Latin America, well, that’s not so bad. The Savage Detectives is bohemian, rebellious and bold in structure. It covers decades of history and the romantic—if tiresome—travels of poets proudly dubbing themselves the Visceral Realists. Think On The Road, for starters. Plus, Bolaño name-checks so many other authors and works that any reader enamored of it will surely start tracking down some of those other books. Sure, many of them are imaginary, but it’s a start.

Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

A novel can mean everything to a reader. But sometimes we forget that a novel can mean everything to its author as well. Writer Dorothy Allison put everything into her semi-autobiographical debut. It’s about a child repeatedly beaten and assaulted by a stepfather, while the mother tries and fails again and again to leave him behind. Allison poured in the details of her own childhood, the family she was estranged from for years, the poetry and short stories she was publishing, the sense of empowerment she felt from the feminist movement, her own awakening sexuality and more. The awards, the best-seller lists, the movie, the chance to keep writing and make a living as an author was all great, of course. But the mere fact of its existence, of being published in the first place and achieving what she set out to do, that surely meant everything to Allison. And readers responded.

The Horatio Hornblower Series by C.S. Forester

Everyone should read the Aubrey-Maturin nautical novels of Patrick O’Brian. But before you read them, you’re well advised to dive into the Horatio Hornblower books by C.S. Forester. O’Brian just assumes you know as much about the Napoleonic era and seafaring as he did. Forester takes the reader by the hand, letting them learn the difference between a mainsail and a halyard right alongside our hero. By the end, you’ll feel immersed in the era and ready to take command of your own ship. Bookseller Ed Justus of Talk Story Bookstore in Hanapepe, Hawaii, agrees. “Reading these as an adult, any of the Hornblower books are completely engaging,” says Justus. “Forester’s writing style flows seamlessly, making action and interpersonal character development equally as interesting. I could smell the salt air, feel the movement of the ship, and the adrenaline at the sight of an approaching vessel. Really timeless stuff burned into my memory.”

Charming Billy by Alice McDermott

You’ll never catch Alice McDermott “writing.” Like her quiet, unassuming characters (people so “typical” that one extraordinary novel about an ordinary life is simply titled Someone), McDermott’s prose never calls attention to itself. Whether charting the course of young love (That Night); much of the 20th Century (The Ninth Hour); or simply the burial of a funny, loyal, complex and incurable drunk (Charming Billy); McDermott defty and invisibly brings to life a person, a community (Irish-American) and a world. She’s about due for another novel soon and we guarantee it will quietly, modestly capture your heart. Now that’s writing.

All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot

This really is a novel, though fans of the books (and the TV shows based upon them) do insist on assuming they’re memoirs. What higher compliment could you pay an author than to insist it’s all true? In fact, James Alfred Wight aka James Herriot did base his stories on real-life experiences as a vet in Yorkshire. And he really did have two memorable brothers for partners—one of them terribly eccentric and the other a charming ladies’ man. (You can guess which one enjoyed the books more.) But the town of Darrowby where the stories are set is made up. Many of the characters are made up. And perhaps only the animals and their ailments are based on fact. But the stories are so vivid and funny and charming that it’s better than true. Funnily enough, it took an American publisher to take the books seriously, which sold very modestly at first in the UK. The American repackaged them with grown-up art (not some silly cartoonish images that dogged the UK version), renamed them and turned the books into bestsellers. To date, they’ve sold at least 60 million copies worldwide, turned some young people into veterinarians and made many, many folk glad they’re never called out for a calving on a cold winter’s night.

The Tale Of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur is the definitive tale of Camelot and probably the first novel written in English. But 400 years earlier(!) in Japan, a lady-in-waiting at the court of the Emperor beat him to it with The Tale Of Genji. (Yes, an even earlier novel might be Kādambari which was published 400 years before that, but our Sanskrit is weak so we can’t speak to it.) Not to worry. Like Don Quixote (the first novel written in Spanish) and Le Morte d’Arthur, Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji isn’t just a historical curiosity or the answer to a trivia question. It’s an enthralling tale of the impossibly handsome Genji, the bastard son of the Emperor who is forever falling in and out of love when not dealing with court intrigue, domestic life and more affairs than any one man should have time for. Hey, if you’re driven to write the first novel, you must have a corker to tell and Murasaki sure did.

The Code Of The Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse

The Brits have a gift for comic novels. Maybe primping and preening as it oversees an Empire On Which The Sun Never Set makes a nation ripe for mockery? Whatever the reason, the British love and appreciate humor, turning out witty authors by the lorry-load. For sheer silliness, none match P.G. Wodehouse. His tales of the unflappable valet Jeeves and the dim-witted but genial blueblood Wooster are especially silly. Give Wodehouse a stately home, an awkward engagement, a fulminating Lord or Earl or some such titled fool, interfering friends, a fancy dress party, incompetent or indifferent servants and by gosh he’s off to the races. (Probably Ascot.) The Code Of The Woosters is a prime example, with Wodehouse mocking British fascists and the local constabulary for good measure. Reading Wodehouse makes life worth living.

The Children Of Men by P.D. James

Baroness P.D. James is rightly remembered for her marvelously intelligent and thoughtful mysteries starring Adam Dalgleish, a police commander and poet. Any fan of mysteries should dive in. But the fourteen books she wrote about him have a cumulative power. If you’re only ready to read one book by her, we recommend the atypical dystopian novel The Children Of Men from 1991. Set in the near future, it takes place after a mass infertility event and begins with a killer opening line stating that the last person ever born has just died in a pub brawl. Things get much more complicated. James grapples with existential questions about the meaning of life and how people might react when the future becomes meaningless. But she does it with a sci-fi thriller about conspiracies and lies and the need to make some sense of the struggle to survive, rather than just doing it. And when you don’t have the knee-jerk excuse of doing it for the kids, for the next generation, well what do you have?

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

The cool people claim to prefer J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories or Franny and Zooey, but they’re just being phonies. Salinger’s classic novel about a rebellious teenager may be the obvious choice, but it’s also the right choice. Just ask any kid who’s read it for the first time. “There have been a couple fiction books which made a strong impact on my life,” says bookseller Ed Justus of Talk Story Bookstore in Hanapepe, Hawaii. “As a teen, it was The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. The writing style told through the eyes of the main character broke through all the established ‘rules’ of traditional storytelling we had been taught in school. It caused me to realize just how flexible fiction and writing could be.”

The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor

Has it been 40 years already? It seems like this marvelous book came out yesterday, with its stories that tell the lives of seven women dealing with the struggles and setbacks (and men) that dominate their existence in an inner city sanctuary known as Brewster Place. At the same time, it seems like this book has always been there, with its vivid characters popping in and out of each other’s lives, each one with a story to tell. It’s a modern Canterbury Tales, except no one is going anywhere—just staying in place is triumph enough.

We Others: New & Selected Stories by Steven Millhauser

It’s tempting to recommend Steven Millhauser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Martin Dressler. That’s a marvelous skewering and celebration of the American Dream, told through the fantastical story of a turn of the century businessman who concocts department stores of such elaborate design they become wonderlands of impossible complexity, all described in riveting prose. Think Ray Bradbury crossed with Jorge Luis Borges. But his 2011 collection of new and selected stories is dazzling and perhaps easier for beginners than the rabbit hole that is Martin Dressler. Many of Millhauser’s stories slip into the fantastical, the way Little Nemo of comic strip fame tumbles out of bed into a bewildering dreamscape: you feel yourself slipping, almost imperceptibly, and then—boom!—you’re on the floor in a daze, waking up from a reverie that seemed so very, very real. In the stories of Millhauser, the mundane becomes magical and the magical becomes, not mundane, but possible, just possible, somewhere just around the corner perhaps or down the street, especially late at night if you go for a stroll and don’t quite pay attention to where you’re headed.

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

Writers are tackling the climate crisis in countless ways. Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson dives into violent, earth-shaking possibilities with The Ministry For The Future. Richard Powers puts trees at the heart of The Overstory. Author Barbara Kingsolver focuses on a poor woman in Appalachia about to start an affair when she stumbles upon an amazing, upsetting discovery. Bookseller Sharon Anderson Wright of Half Price Books in Dallas, Texas, loves Flight Behavior. “It’s about the migration of a million monarch butterflies diverted from their flight path,” says Anderson Wright, “as well as deforestation, global climate change, and the rebirth of a woman trapped in an unsatisfying life. I found the story of how they are able to adapt and find new ways to survive fascinating.”

A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White

Many gay novels came before this one, like Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar and William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf. Long before them, Homer’s The Iliad was about how unwise it is to taunt a warrior like Achilles by killing his very good “friend” Patroclus. Nonetheless, in 1982 it was still bold and a little shocking to deliver an autobiographical novel like A Boy’s Own Story. White manages to be both romantic and dispassionate in describing his thinly veiled coming of age and coming out. It forms the first part of a trilogy, though White continues to mine his life to this day in novels and memoirs. His biography of Jean Genet may be White’s masterpiece, but for influence and beauty, few can match this one.

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon

If we were going to play it safe, we’d choose Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying Of Lot 49 or Gravity’s Rainbow to be on this list. They’re the twin pillars on which his reputation rests. We could get wacky and choose the crime novel Inherent Vice (indeed, we did choose it for our list of the Best Thrillers of All Time). But the historical novel Mason & Dixon has an unrestrained joy about it we can’t resist. It’s 1786 and the Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke is a shaky man of the cloth but an excellent storyteller. He keeps a clutch of little kids enthralled with nightly tales about the surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. If surveying doesn’t sound like the stuff of bedtime stories, be sure the Rev. will toss in fart jokes and unlikely escapades whenever attention flags. A yarn, and how Pynchon loves to unravel it.

The Overstory by Richard Powers

When trees are a central character in a novel, either you’re in or you’re out. For many readers of this Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of eco-fiction, they are in. Powers is no stranger to unexpected topics. His novels tackle genetics, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, astrobiology and avant-garde music, among other topics. But it’s awe for the majesty of nature and trees in particular that powers The Overstory. Nine characters each discover an appreciation for trees so profound they come together to protect forests, not as a natural resource but as a good worth saving. Trees tolerate us. Trees outlive us. And trees might well outlive humanity, if we’re not careful. Powers speaks for the trees and if writing a book means cutting some down to print it, well, that’s just one more problem to be solved while we still can.

The Left Hand Of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

We’re still catching up with the vision of writer Ursula K. Le Guin. At least we can pat ourselves on the back in recent years for realizing how much catching up we had to do. By the time of her death in 2018, Le Guin had been showered with accolades and affection and enough reappraisals to last ten lifetimes. Her Earthsea fantasies center a person of color as their hero. Her Orsinia novels are historical fiction about an imaginary country, giving Guy Gavriel Kay, among others, an entire career. Poetry, essays and so much more challenge and provoke. And her key series of the Hainish—novels and stories set on the planet of Hain—do all that and more. Then there’s The Left Hand Of Darkness from 1969. It tackles gender, androgyny and other issues few were even considering at the time and does it in a novel so compelling it was an immediate sensation. Darkness is the most mind-expanding First Contact novel of them all, thanks to ambisexual aliens who raise their children communally and are simply “beyond” gender. To call it feminist science fiction would immediately limit its scope. But it was and is and will always be feminist, science fiction and immediate.

My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk

Take Umberto Eco’s The Name Of The Rose and add a dash of Jorge Luis Borges. Tell about the murder of an artist living during the Ottoman Empire. Immediately upend expectations by having the author interrupt the proceedings and make clear these are all just characters in a story. Then make it gripping, playful, fascinating and fun and you’ll start to appreciate the triumph that is My Name Is Red. Orhan Pamuk is the first Turkish writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize and it’s easy to understand why. He’s not just brave in literary matters. The author faces down lawsuits and death threats for defending freedom of speech and condemning Turkey’s genocide of Armenians. In My Name Is Red, the artists are miniaturists, specialists in tiny, precise artworks. Not Pamuk—he works on a large canvas.

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

For such a beloved kids book, Harriet the Spy has a lot of sharp elbows. It tells the story of a very observant child who pays attention to everyone around her and writes down what she thinks about them in her notebook. Then she loses the notebook. Then her friends find the notebook, read it and get very, very annoyed. Our heroine falls into a depression and becomes isolated from all her pals just for yearning to be a writer! But the moral is not that Harriet was wrong to write such thoughts; it was wrong of everyone else to read them. Duh! If you read someone else’s diary, you’re bound to be hurt. Generations of mystery lovers, novelists and even real-life C.I.A. agents credit Harriet the Spy as their gateway drug.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

You don’t talk about fight club, but you do talk about Fight Club. Like many great books, it’s open to multiple interpretations. Is this story about a lonely man who bonds with other men via a “fight club” and is ultimately driven to reject cookie-cutter consumerism? Is it making fun of toxic masculinity? Is the movie starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton faithful to the novel? Or was the infamous, re-edited version imposed on it in China actually, weirdly more faithful to the book? Do you have to read the comic book sequels to “get it?” Rarely has a man wrestling with his own demons been dealt with so literally. Hallucinatory, incendiary and you’ll probably lose sleep over it simply because you’ll want to finish Fight Club in one go. Just…accept the insomnia, alright?

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

War changes everything. Mann’s comic novel about people with tuberculosis seeking a cure at a spa in Davos, Switzerland was a work in progress when World War I butted in. Suddenly, Mann wasn’t in the mood to joke around, or at least not without purpose. He reimagined The Magic Mountain, kept writing and the book deepened and grew into a sly takedown of modern society, all of it shadowed by war. It’s daunting, hard to pin down, sad and funny, and if you’re not quite sure what to make of it, you can always follow Mann’s advice: read it twice. It’s so good, you won’t mind.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

It’s been a novel and then a movie and then a stage musical and then a radio play and soon a movie musical. But really it’s just a series of letters to God. For a book filled with so much pain and violence, Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winner is universally beloved. Just ask bookseller Lynette Yates of Half Price Books in Dallas. “The Color Purple grabs you from the first page and takes you on a rollercoaster ride covering so many issues and evoking so many emotions,” says Yates. “A real page-turner!” We believe it’s the forgiveness the novel embraces and embodies despite the pain and violence that keeps it so popular.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

The greatest tennis novel of all time! OK, that’s a modest claim, though there are other notable novels that encompass the sport of tennis. (Try Trophy Son by Douglas Brunt or one of Agatha Christie’s personal favorites of her mysteries, Towards Zero.) Mind you, this 1000+ page behemoth is much more than a tennis novel. It’s hilariously post-modern (even its footnotes have footnotes), sprawling (obviously), sad, controversial, erudite, show-offy (which is another word for “erudite”) and a mountain worth climbing.

The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

Teachers change lives. How often have we heard stories about the right teacher at the right time having a profound impact on a student? The novel How Green Was My Valley. The movie Dead Poets Society. The play The Corn Is Green. Then there’s Muriel Spark’s masterpiece The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie. All the elements are in place: an inspiring teacher in 1930s Edinburgh, a group of girls singled out for promise and the reward of academic success. But what’s this? On the wall, the teacher puts up admiring images of the fascist Mussolini. And what’s that? Miss Brodie dallying with not one but two male teachers? And Miss Brodie manipulating one of the girls to perhaps dally herself with the more handsome but married of the two men? That’s a lesson in life Mr. Chips never considered. In devastating fashion, Sparks shows the danger of idolizing anyone and that the best thing a student should learn is to think for themself.

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Oh, fatal misunderstanding! How much art would go differently if only people would speak clearly or explain themselves or just not jump to conclusions? Wuthering Heights. Bridget Jones’s Diary. Romeo & Juliet. Misunderstanding the situation can be the death of love, literally. So it is in Atonement, where a young girl fatally misunderstands a scene she witnesses and feels compelled to make an awful accusation, ruining the lives of those around her. Can she make it up to them, even if only in her imagination? Ian McEwan’s novels are filled with such misunderstandings. But perhaps none is so dramatic as the one in Atonement. It powers this story through the start of World War II, Dunkirk and then a final bittersweet revelation that should feel a cheat, but somehow doesn’t. Sometimes a sad ending is the right ending, no matter how much we long for things to turn out better.

Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

Are you going to sit there with your dusty books and read about life? Or are you going to live your life? Eat, drink, dance, make love, live! That’s the philosophy of Zorba the Greek, the character who brushes aside those silly books to wake up a young intellectual who experiences the world only through the words of others. Not after Zorba is done with him! That’s the action in this exuberant 1946 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, a huge bestseller made even more famous by the classic film version that gave star Anthony Quinn one of his best roles. It promises a zest for life. But, of course, you’re reading about this zest for life. You’re being inspired by a book that encourages a zest for life, which it insists can’t be found in books. Ironic? Hmm. Maybe reading books isn’t so bad after all.

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Writer Jesmyn Ward is the only woman to win the National Book Award twice. She’s also the only African American to win the National Book Award twice. Her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing has been compared to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and George Saunders’ Lincoln In The Bardo. All three of those writers are on this list too, though Faulkner is here with The Sound and the Fury. Everyone from the New York Times to the BBC to former President Barack Obama named it one of the best books of the year. The all-things-bookish website Literary Hub named this 2011 novel one of the best books of the decade. And now it’s on our list of one of the best books of all time. It tells the story of a road trip. Thirteen-year-old Jojo struggles with the demands of being a young man while caring for his little sister Kayla, wary of his mother Leonie and uncertain of the father who’s just been released from prison. If that isn’t enough, he must also help the ghost of Richie, a 12-year-old boy who can’t quite accept the fact that he’s died. It’s tough and true and—as you might expect—the prose sings.

True Grit by Charles Portis

This stone-cold classic could stand in for all the great Westerns. They just aren’t usually narrated by a 14-year-old girl so distinctive in nature that you’ll never forget her. It’s so popular they made two films based on the novel, but neither can hold a candle to it. Writer Jasper Fforde insists it belongs on any list of great novels. “Mattie does not seek blood redress, she seeks justice—to see Chaney ‘hanged at Judge Parker’s convenience’ back home at Little Rock,” says Fforde, author most recently of The Constant Rabbit. “A revenge story, a manhunt, a thriller, a story of trust, love, bravery, duty and tenacity—True Grit has it all.”

The World According To Garp by John Irving

We stand in awe of John Irving’s fourth novel and breakthrough, The World According To Garp. In 1978, it seemed willfully odd and “out there.” An NFL quarterback who has a sex change and now goes by Roberta? A woman who wants a child but not a husband? A son who struggles to write fiction…and then watches as his strong-willed mother simply sits down, writes an autobiography she calls A Sexual Suspect, and immediately becomes a world-famous feminist icon? Radicals who cut out their tongues to protest brutal male violence? What is this madness? Well, it’s beautiful and scary and strange and above all human, somehow. In 1982, it was turned into a wonderful, perfectly edited film that captured the idiosyncratic appeal of John Irving’s worldview and proved Robin Williams was more than a funny man. Irving soon proved he was more than an offbeat eccentric with The Cider House Rules and A Prayer For Owen Meany, but his career proper began right here.

The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

It’s never too late. Flannery O’Connor’s second short story collection came out just five months after she died. And she won the National Book Award for The Complete Stories eight years later. As a devout Catholic, O’Connor surely would have appreciated this posthumous success: for her, death was only the beginning. Her father died of lupus when O’Connor was just 15 years old. The same illness would plague her for the last twelve years of her life. It was also the period when she wrote some of the most famous short stories of her day, stories that ensured her fame. “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead.” Critics saw them as bleak, gothic and grotesque. O’Connor saw them as honest and true by tackling race, faith and the daily struggle to get by in a violent, unfair world. Write about what you know? That she did.

The Ministry For the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s entire career led to his most recent, most remarkable novel. In book after book, Robinson tackles the challenge of the climate crisis and how humanity might survive it. The Three Californias trilogy shows its impact on that state. Red Mars kicks off the Mars trilogy, a look at the practical challenges of terraforming the Red Planet and how we are likely to bring our problems with us. The Science In The Capitol books show a ravaged D.C, New York 2140 a Venice-like Big Apple and on and on. Race may be the defining issue for America. But the climate crisis is the defining issue for the planet and Robinson tackles it admirably. With The Ministry For the Future, he swings for the fences. Robinson offers a near-future look at what is going to happen next and what might happen after that. It’s scary and shocking and so believable, it gets scarier still. But as bad as it gets, there’s hope. Oh it won’t be easy, Robinson says, but maybe just maybe we can get through this. He offers this ray of light in a novel so expansive and wide-ranging that only Moby-Dick comes to mind for sheer, all-encompassing vision. Maybe it’s a warning. Maybe it’s a how-to book. But it’s definitely great.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

You can’t go wrong with Virginia Woolf, one of the giants of literature. We figure movie buffs already know about her novel Orlando: A Biography thanks to the brilliant film version starring Tilda Swinton. And this list includes Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, which was inspired by Mrs. Dalloway and should send readers scurrying to that masterpiece as well. So we’ll include To the Lighthouse. Woolf is a “modernist,” and her stream-of-consciousness style was strange and new to readers of the 1920s. But we’re used to it now, so the impressionistic chatter of Mrs. Dalloway and the gender fluidity of Orlando and the flitting from character to character in To the Lighthouse shouldn’t put you off. In this novel, the Ramsay family is vacationing on the Isle of Skye and plans to visit a lighthouse on a nearby island the next day. Or will they? Ten years later, they try and finally make that jaunt to the lighthouse actually happen. Amidst this simple action, the complex give and take of a married couple, the lines of tension in a family, the tangled friendships and neighbors that muddy it all up (not to mention life, war, the passage of time and so on) are captured in a rush of emotions and memories and brief moments. It’s all illuminated by Woolf the way—wait for it—the shining beam of a lighthouse pierces the fog and lights the way home. Someone in the novel insists women can’t be serious painters or writers. Woolf must have had a good laugh over that.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

A cat is missing. That’s the event kicking off writer Haruki Murakami’s mid-career masterpiece. When a writer dips into science fiction, crime novels and magical realism, not to mention nonfiction works about being a marathon runner and talking with survivors of a terrorist attack, you expect a missing cat to be just the beginning. And it is. The novel soon contains psychics, a missing wife, horror stories from World War II and much more. Murakami cranks up the story and then lets it fly, with reality always a teasingly subjective matter. His spin on 1984 titled IQ84 might be an easier way in for some. But whether you tackle his novels or short stories or nonfiction, this perennial favorite for the Nobel Prize will happily confound you.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Singers discover new facets of their voice as they mature. Age or a new vocal coach or simply nerve open up all sorts of possibilities. Sopranos become mezzo-sopranos. Baritones evolve into tenors. The Bee Gees discover falsetto. You get the idea. Writers do the same thing. Author Ann Patchett pushed herself and found a new voice with her fourth novel Bel Canto. Inspired by a real-life terrorist act, she imagined the story of a Japanese business executive being wooed by a South American country. He’s the guest of honor at a party, an American opera singer is brought in for entertainment and it’s crashed by a terrorist group hoping to kidnap the head of the country. The result is a stand-off, with tense negotiations breaking up long dull periods of waiting, not to mention love. A translator falls for a terrorist. The businessman falls in love with the singer, though neither speaks the other’s language. And Patchett takes her writing to a whole new level of sophistication and control, winning critical acclaim and a wider audience than ever. Brava!

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Moby-Dick. Jane Eyre. Great Expectations. Everything ever by Shakespeare. The list of classic works of art that inspire other classic works of art is so long and respectful that no one should blink an eye when an author says they’re writing a prequel or sequel or spin-off to a masterpiece. And yet, it took a serious amount of chutzpah for writer Michael Cunningham to not only write a novel inspired by the classic Mrs. Dalloway, but to include Virginia Woolf herself as one of the main characters. His nerve paid off. The Hours depicts one day in the life of three women separated by decades: Woolf herself, working on Mrs. Dalloway in 1923 while fighting off the black dog of depression; Mrs. Brown, planning a birthday party for her World War II veteran husband in 1949; and Clarissa, the former lover of a male poet dying of AIDS who is throwing a party with her female partner in 1999 to celebrate him. Cunningham captures Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness style. He also brings to life three people of their time who deal with society’s oppressive attitudes towards their sexual orientation and status as women. And The Hours subtly makes one now commonplace but important point for women and LGBT people: it gets better.

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

If he wasn’t so darn entertaining, maybe people would realize how radical writer Armistead Maupin has been. His valentine to San Francisco began as a serialized novel featured in the San Francisco Chronicle. Wide-eyed newcomer Mary Ann Singleton visits the city and realizes this is the place for her! She finds a room to rent at 28 Barbary Lane, she finds a friend in Michael aka “Mouse” and she gains an inspiring mentor in her landlady Anna Madrigal. From a story about a wide-eyed girl, Maupin’s addictive drama quickly took readers to every corner of the city. Even a hip liberal newspaper in San Francisco was wary of the bathhouses and bisexuals and so much more in the serial. But everyone wanted to know what happened next, so what could they do? Nine novels, radio plays, a musical and four groundbreaking miniseries followed. Like Dickens or Balzac or Trollope, Maupin captured an entire fleeting era just as it happened. Start here but be warned: you can’t read just one.

Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

E.L. Doctorow changed the historical novel once and for all. Others came before, they always do. But Doctorow’s rigorous research mixed a playful combination of historical figures and imaginary characters in a manner that brought the past to light and commented on it at the same time. It’s as neat a stunt as any Harry Houdini ever pulled off. In the panoramic Ragtime, Doctorow starts with the lives of a wealthy family that sells fireworks, crosses their path with the musician Coalhouse Walker and then weaves in pretty much everything going on during the early 1900s, from agitator Emma Goldman to Robert Peary’s polar expeditions to tycoon J. P. Morgan and a depressed Houdini, to name just a few. It’s dazzling, fresh, alive, funny, tragic and the movie and musical it inspired have their fans, but can’t outshine the original.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler has written 24 novels and enough short stories to fill two collections. So it’s no surprise to find people arguing about which is her best. Tyler herself would say don’t read her first four novels, but that’s modesty for you. She could mention the National Book Award for The Accidental Tourist, turned into a delightful Oscar-winning film. Or the Pulitzer Prize won by Breathing Lessons, one of her most effervescent works. Or the Booker nomination for A Spool of Blue Thread. But diehards and Tyler point to Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant as the prototypical Tyler novel and a great place to start. It tells the story of three siblings, riven by the abandonment of their father yet entangled with old arguments, resentment, history and forgiveness, soon followed by new arguments. You know, siblings. Tyler said it comes closest to what she imagined at the start, which is to say it’s warm-hearted, clear-eyed, amusing and moving. Enjoy.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

It’s just one of those books, a work so original and fresh that everyone instantly agrees, “Oh yes, that’s a good one.” Mitchell’s third novel is daringly constructed. It begins with the journal of a man on board a ship in the 1800s, written in the style of the era. Just as you become thoroughly involved in the story, it stops mid-action. The next section is an epistolary novel set in 1930s Belgium and written by a bisexual musician to his lover. The first story was so absorbing that you’re thoroughly annoyed Mitchell jumped to something new. What is going on here? But soon enough this new story becomes equally absorbing and just as you become enthralled by this tale and forget the first story even existed, it too stops. The novel jumps forward to the 1970s, with yet another new story written in the style of a mystery. Again and again it happens. Every time Mitchell drops a tale and begins something new, you’re annoyed; the story was so good, why on earth won’t he finish it? And then he wins you over again. Then at the halfway point, the final reveal takes place and you see the entire, brilliant structure of the novel and what Mitchell has been up to all this time. You understand how ambitious and clever it is and almost sigh with pleasure. Cloud Atlas is a tour de force. The film version, which you probably didn’t see, couldn’t ever hope to recreate the pleasure of reading this book.

My Ántonia by Willa Cather

Sometimes it seems like all the best stories about America are stories about travel. Immigrants reach America in Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, Jack Kerouac goes On the Road, Huck Finn journeys down the Mississippi and Ántonia heads out West with her Bohemian family. Willa Cather made her name for good with this finale to the Prairie Trilogy. It celebrates regular, plain-speaking people like the orphaned boy Jim and his friend Ántonia, both struggling to survive at their new homes in Nebraska. F. Scott Fitzgerald lamented that his novel The Great Gatsby was a failure compared to hers, though eventually, they’d both do just fine in the eyes of critics and readers.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Some novels strike a chord. How else to explain why a story about a boy in Afghanistan would take the world by storm in 2003? Khaled Hosseini’s novel charts the country’s tragic history from the fall of the monarchy to the Soviet invasion and the rise of the Taliban by focusing on fathers and sons. It’s since been adapted into a graphic novel, a movie and a Broadway play. None of them match the novel’s emotional impact, but when something is this popular, you can’t blame them for trying.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol I and II by M.T. Anderson

Some of the boldest, bravest works in recent decades are published for kids, perhaps to smuggle work into the culture without awakening the censors. Philip Pullman radically reimagines Paradise Lost with His Dark Materials. Charles M. Schulz showed little folks dealing with depression, unrequited love and the seeming futility of existence in the comic strip Peanuts. And in a young adult novel, M.T. Anderson reorients our understanding of the American Revolution, the central horror of slavery in U.S. history and how scientific studies are often influenced by the people funding them, all long before 1619. But The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing is also gripping and enthralling as we watch an enslaved boy raised by men of science who at first are determined to give him every advantage. They want to prove the African race is not inferior to Europeans, with Octavian as a test case. Later, as circumstances dictate, they’re determined to stack the deck against Octavian so somehow this bright young man fluent in several languages and an excellent violinist to boot will somehow leave white Europeans safe in the belief of their superiority. Toss in the curveball of the American Revolution and you have a work of historical fiction that stands alongside the best of them, just like Octavian Nothing.

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

A historian and novelist, Wallace Stegner wrote a novel about a historian. That character writes a biography about his grandmother. To give it authenticity, Stegner drew heavily upon the letters of a real person, the notable writer Mary Hallock Foote. In a move that was controversial then and more so now, Stegner quotes extensively from the letters of Foote while only obliquely giving credit to her in his acknowledgments. And yet he wrote a novel where there never was a novel. Universally acclaimed and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize 50 years ago, Angle of Repose is a wonderfully layered combination of the brave journey of pioneers colored by the disappointments and regrets of the historian recounting them. Stegner, at least, surely had no regrets about his masterpiece.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

You can feast on just the titles of novels by exiled Czech writer Milan Kundera. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The Festival of Insignificance. Life Is Elsewhere. And of course, his most famous work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Playful, philosophical, political and personal, it shows Kundera at his most thoughtful and profound. The story of a womanizing surgeon is interrupted by sharp insights into life under a totalitarian regime. (In one passage, Kundera dissects a photograph of government officials watching a parade, detailing how those who fell out of favor had to be erased from the image, one by one.) Arguments about the nature of existence (Kundera is not a fan of Nietzsche) take place alongside the promise of the Prague Spring and its collapse with the invasion of Soviet troops and others in 1968. There is some lightness, too; a dog is a major character, for example. Kundera is an original.

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

Homer’s The Odyssey looms so large it would be fair to say that almost everything that followed it has been influenced by the epic. Countless works of art are directly inspired by it, from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and the comic film O Brother, Where Art Thou? starring George Clooney. Still, for debut novelist Charles Frazier to combine the story of his great-granduncle with the rough outline of The Odyssey and set it all during the Civil War was an act of bravery. Readers responded, for few modern novels have been this ambitious and yet taken so to heart by such a broad audience. Maybe it’s as simple as this: everyone can identify with the powerful desire to journey home.

Endless Love by Scott Spencer

When young people fall in love, they feel like an explorer discovering a new continent. Surely no one else has ever felt like this before? Surely no love has ever been this all-consuming, this beautiful, this perfect? It happens again in Endless Love. Two young people—kids, really—fall in love and imagine Romeo and Juliet have nothing on them. What’s remarkable is that writer Scott Spencer convinces us that the love of Jade and David really is that earth-shattering. Everyone around them agrees. Their parents, their friends, literally everyone acknowledges the love those two feel really is as special as they imagine. Then Jade’s father banishes David from this earthly paradise, David hatches a cockamamie plan to win back the family’s trust, it goes horribly wrong and love becomes obsession. A huge bestseller, Endless Love has been adapted into not one but two epically bad films, movies so awful you fear they’ve kept people away from the novel ever since. Don’t make that mistake.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Some books are so well-intentioned they forget to be good. Think Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. It’s as important a novel as there ever was, but you wouldn’t want to read that potboiler today. Mark Twain’s masterpiece is another thing altogether. His classic “boy’s own” book The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer is a delight of youthful innocence. A rascalish character in that novel takes center stage in this one. Twain lost the “The” for some reason and called it Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn. But he gained immortality with a righteous condemnation of enslavement wrapped in a story so funny and gripping and raw that few can resist it. The central dilemma? Huck knows he will be literally damned to hell for helping the escaped black man Jim avoid being put back in chains. He does it anyway. And if Huck treats Jim a little poorly after that mighty choice, well, whoever expected an abandoned, beaten, dismissed kid to always behave sensibly? Huck is just a child and Twain never forgets that. It’s the adults he damns so well.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

One of the worst periods in Indian history inspired one of its best novels. In 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ignored the Constitution and essentially declared martial law, jailing opposition leaders and clamping down on the media. Her dictatorial reign lasted almost two years and featured all sorts of atrocities, like the forced sterilization of millions. It’s called The Emergency. Writer Rohinton Mistry tells the story of this period through the lives of four people: two tailors from a caste considered “untouchable,” a wealthy Parsi widow and a young man from the Kashmir Valley who resents being sent to college by his parents. Their paths cross and crisscross during this life-changing period, a time of upheaval akin to the Partition of India in 1947 or perhaps the American Civil War. All three of his novels are worth your time. Still, it’s been 20 years since he published Family Matters and we are politely impatient for a fourth.

The Ice at the Bottom of the World by Mark Richard

“Read the story collection The Ice at the Bottom of the World at your own risk,” says Chuck Palahniuk, author most recently of The Invention Of Sound. “Mark Richard’s short stories will leave you unhappy with almost all other fiction for the rest of your life. In stories like ‘Strays’ and ‘This is Us, Excellent,’ he gives us characters in miserable circumstances, but who refuse to suffer. Thus the reader is forced to shoulder the emotional and psychological burden. Richard’s incredible sentences will stick in your head, and his plots rise to such unlikely beauty that you’ll find tears running down your cheeks.”

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis

In this biting, cynical novel, a man dies of pneumonia. Now dead, he’s free to say what he likes, so Brás Cubas dedicates his book to the worm that first feasted on his dead body and then tells his life story. He was a brat as a spoiled rich kid, loved often and poorly, made a mess of everything he did, wasted most of his family’s fortune, tried and failed at politics and finally dreamt up some quack medicine that could cure all diseases…but not, apparently, cure himself of pneumonia. A Brazilian classic, it’s been translated many times and is sometimes called Epitaph Of A Small Winner, which is about as much as Cubas can claim. It’s fragmented, entertaining, very modern and when you discover it was written in 1881 (not 2021 or even 1961), your astonishment and admiration is complete.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

What’s cyberpunk? Just picture the future as depicted in the film Blade Runner and you’re halfway there. When corporations or computers take over the world, you end up with something like the comic book Judge Dredd or William Gibson’s Neuromancer or even John M. Ford’s proto-cyberpunk novel Web Of Angels. Or you can read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a novel with his usual heady mix of technology, philosophy, religion, anarcho-capitalism, linguistics and other ideas we can barely follow. It’s all wrapped around our protagonist Hiro. You know he’s the protagonist because this pizza delivery dude’s full name is Hiro Protagonist. He joins up with Y.T. (a female skateboarder known as Yours Truly) and they’re soon caught up in one of those massive conspiracies involving technology, shadowy opponents and the fate of the (miserable) world. Snow Crash came out just thirty years ago and it’s amazing how quickly the world has caught up. Stephenson helped popularize ideas like an avatar and the Metaverse, which he definitely should have copyrighted. Bad science fiction tries to predict the future. Good science fiction like this holds up a mirror to the present and wonders where we’re headed. Take a look.

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

Some people are crazy about Jane Smiley’s academic skewering in the novel Moo. We’re partial to her trilogy of books (Some Luck, Early Warning and Golden Age) that told the story of a family over one hundred years, with one year per chapter. They were bestsellers and nicely reviewed but deserve more hoopla. But everyone admires, loves and reads her retelling of King Lear. Sometimes the consensus is right; with Smiley, this is where to start. The novel A Thousand Acres is resolute, smart and devastating. When a father decides to split control of the family farm among his three daughters, the youngest objects. Just as in Lear, she’s frozen out of the kingdom, the two older daughters turn on their father and then secrets Shakespeare never imagined come to light. You reap what you sow.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Writer Ralph Ellison sped right past the “protest” novel or the “problem” novel. He ignored the conventions of social conscience or the “right” way to win over white readers and said, “Hey, what if I just write a modernist masterpiece?” That he did, in a novel about a young black man in flight from racism. “I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either,” begins Ellison who does just that but in a far more poetic, lasting and effective manner than any protest novel ever would. Ellison’s influences were broad, ranging from Kafka to Faulkner, T.S. Eliot to Dostoevsky, yet all of them were used in service to a voice enriched by oral traditions and a vivid, urban spirit. Other characters refused to see the narrator, but the book itself was simply too good to ignore. Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953, making Ellison the first person of color to do so. It would be 30 years before another person of color—Alice Walker, for The Color Purple in 1983—won it again.

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

Empire Falls, Maine is a crumbling town on its last legs in Richard Russo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Miles Roby is a lot like the town. He’s running the Empire Grill and reduced to serving the new boyfriend of his ex-wife each and every day. His stoner brother is the short-order cook, his owner is the richest woman in town, his daughter in high school is a budding artist and they all know everything there is to know about each other. HBO made an excellent miniseries from this. While doing so, the production turned a pizza parlor in a small town in upstate New York into the greasy spoon Miles worked at. A few years later, the pizza parlor shut down because of course the real town was crumbling, just like Empire Falls. If that sort of irony causes a rueful laugh, Russo is the writer for you. He’s sharp, sympathetic and sadly amused by the pain of it all. You could start with The Risk Pool or Nobody’s Fool or you could just start right here.

Edisto by Padgett Powell

If you want to make a name for yourself among the literati, there are rules to follow. Start out strong with an acclaimed debut. Choose one style and stick to it—everyone will know what to expect from you and can easily skip a book or two of yours without feeling they’re missing something. (Did anyone worry if they missed a John Updike novel? They did not.) Oh and don’t be funny. No one will take you seriously if you’re funny. Well, Padgett Powell got the first part right. His debut novel Edisto is a coming-of-age tale about a 12-year-old boy named Simons Manigault and yes it’s devilishly funny. But it’s also masterful enough in style to have Saul Bellow praise Powell and Southern literary éminence grise Walker Percy declare the book better than The Catcher in the Rye. Then Powell went and blew it. He started writing short stories, each one more outrageous than the next. They were wild, wooly, unmannered. The pitch-perfect Edisto Revisited was so good it deserves comparisons to The Godfather Part II, another sequel that deepened your appreciation of the original. But it was too late. Before you knew it, Powell was performing high wire acts, like a novel composed entirely of a conversation between two men sitting on a porch chewing the fat, more vaudeville than High Art. Another one called The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? contained nothing but a series of questions. (Did he pull it off? Do you have to ask?) Is this the old-fashioned, dependable writer the gatekeepers signed up for almost forty years ago? No, it is not. Does he care? No, he does not. Read Edisto but be prepared to dive into the deep end once you become a fan.

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

Ken Follett broke onto the bestseller list with 1978’s Eye of the Needle, a blockbuster so good we named it one of the best thrillers of all time. Six more thrillers followed, two of them nonfiction. Then Follett surprised everyone with the novel that will be his legacy: The Pillars of the Earth. It’s a historical novel about the building of a cathedral in the fictional town of Knightsbridge, England during the 12th century. The action takes place over 50 years and the house of worship is the culmination of generations of work. What could be less thrilling than the building of a church? Ask, rather, what could be more thrilling? Follett poured everything into this, spending years on research to get it right. His passion was infectious and his story so immersive readers got lost in it, finishing in a daze. The book has sold at least 26 million copies so far. Then Follett spent the next 30 years delivering three more books in the Knightsbridge series. Unlike some of the artisans in the novel, Follett has lived to see his masterwork be complete. Sure, the series has been turned into two different miniseries and even a video game. But it’s the first novel that remains the peak of his career, as impressive and awe-inspiring as the cathedral itself.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor

No, not that Elizabeth Taylor. This Elizabeth Taylor is an English novelist who wrote polite dissections of middle and upper-class Brits, works so discreet and effortless that for a long time no one but other writers realized what a genius she was. Taylor’s short stories were a mainstay of the New Yorker magazine for about 20 years and she wrote twelve novels in all. Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont was the last published in her lifetime and that’s fitting since it deals with the end of life. Mrs. Palfrey is comfortable enough financially to move into the Claremont hotel alongside other aged residents. But she’s embarrassed her grandson never calls and frets over a marriage proposal and it’s all so amusingly depicted you almost don’t notice how sad and piercing Taylor can be. It’s the sort of book that is never in fashion but always read with pleasure.

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

In twenty-one short stories, writer and Vietnam War veteran Tim O’Brien tells the story of soldiers fighting in that war and probably the stories of soldiers fighting in every war that’s ever been and all the ones to come. We want our war stories told by veterans because then those stories are real, authentic and to be trusted. Except O’Brien toys with that expectation. He dedicates this book to the men of the imaginary Alpha Company. He calls his main character O’Brien and that character tells his daughter that no, he never killed anyone in the war. Then he immediately tells us about the man he did kill, only to tell us in another story that this was complete fiction. O’Brien (or maybe “O’Brien”) says he made up that incident because he wanted to help us understand the truth of what the Vietnam War was like. Moving, funny and haunting, The Things They Carried is as real as it gets, made-up stories and all.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a work of startling originality. In contrast, Bram Stoker’s Dracula takes bits and pieces from every vampire story that came before, along with folklore, myth and legend, and seasons it with fears about newly independent women, immigrants and disease. Then he cribs from the hugely popular author Wilkie Collins and especially the page-turner The Woman in White. Finally, Stoker tosses in his own personal peccadilloes—or at least, only as much of them as this acquaintance of Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde dared—to create a potent brew of erotic, Gothic horror. The result was a sensation, a vampire novel so bold and shocking and successful that it became the vampire novel and every vampire story that followed would steal from him. Like the vampire women feasting on poor Jonathan Harker, countless artists have fed on Dracula to inspire their own books, movies, plays, TV shows, games, comics, plays and more. Nothing, not even a stake through the heart, can erase this monster. Dracula survives and thrives in our imagination and probably always will.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Physically frail but morally strong, Carson McCullers empathized with outsiders and dreamers. Her writing was labeled Southern Gothic, because she was from the South and depicted outré characters such as mutes, closeted gay men and black people. A young white woman writing about black people! Her success was immediate, with the 1940 debut The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter seen as anti-Fascist, pro-democracy, exotic (how could there be so many mute people in one small town, wondered some?) and ultimately, just human and touching and true. If a mute man seems the safest person for a string of people to share their dreams and fears with, is that really so strange? McCullers enjoyed further success with The Member Of The Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. But McCullers remained a lonely hunter in her personal life, dying alone at age 50 after a lifetime of severe illness and unrequited love for the numerous women she pursued.

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

The Western may be the most American of genres. Yet long before it joined the United States, Hawaii boasted of cowboys with enough roping skills to put the Yankees to shame at their own rodeos. And Australia’s Outback would give the Badlands a run for its money in terms of punishing danger. Besides, surely every country can boast of criminals that capture the popular imagination? So here is Aussie Peter Carey with this vulgar, violent, rollicking Western about the outlaw Ned Kelly and his gang, as told to Kelly’s fictional daughter. You know you shouldn’t be loving Kelly’s outrageous justification for his actions, but a good story overwhelms moral qualms any day. And borders! Kelly’s dad was an Irishman transported to Van Diemen’s Land aka Tasmania; the author is Australian, where most of the novel takes place; and it won the prestigious UK prize the Booker. But did that stop its US publisher from calling this a “Great American Novel”? Nope. Besides, they’re right.

The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi

Why do we love these lists? Because we can spot books we love, point out books that should be on the list, yet aren’t, and be reminded of books we know we should read but haven’t. Yet. And—if we’re adventurous—we read these lists to discover books we haven’t even heard of but will soon become favorites. So here’s writer Chinelo Okparanta to champion a writer from Nigeria, the country where Okparanta was born. “Akwaeke Emezi is one of the most exciting voices of our time, even earning themself a cover feature in Time Magazine as one of the magazine’s 2021 Next Generation Leaders,” says Okparanta, author most recently of Harry Sylvester Bird. “The Death of Vivek Oji, set in an international community of families composed of foreign-born women married to Nigerian men, is the heart-wrenching story of Vivek, a gentle soul who, as his current stint at life would have it, has embarked on a tortured journey into a new self. It is about the family we are born into and [the] ones we choose for ourselves. The verdict on each family is not a tidy one, for the novel is also about the ways in which both kinds of families render earnest support, and how, despite their best intentions, they also disappoint. Vivek dies, but there is hope—a promise of a return after death. As an avid believer in reincarnation, I enjoyed the novel’s timeless contention that a body, though destined to die, will live again.”

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Is he a rebel dancing to his own beat or an unwitting toxic male fleeing from responsibility? Jack Kerouac may not have anticipated the many ways his characters would be seen over the years. But his classic novel of escape is rich enough to bear the re-examination. And no one can deny the rhythmic, tumbling, finger-snapping prose that hurtles the story along at breakneck speed. The legend of its birth is as totemic as the novel itself—in 1951, Kerouac pounded out the tale on one long roll of paper in a three-week fever dream of inspiration. Writers have been jealous and inspired by him ever since.

The Old Forest and Other Stories by Peter Taylor

Peter Taylor is an old-fashioned Southern storyteller, unremarkable in every respect except for how truly good he is. He wrote three slim, marvelous novels, but it’s his short stories that astonish—they capture a world, a character, a moment with such care that every word matters and every insight hits with an intensity no novel could sustain. Late in life, Taylor had his moment. In 1985, The Old Forest and Other Stories received an unusual amount of attention for him, along with rave reviews. Chekhov was mentioned, and often. One year later, his novel A Summons to Memphis won the Pulitzer Prize. Now? Now he sits quietly in a corner, waiting to be rediscovered as surely he will. His heyday (if one can use such a vulgar term) was so long ago that none of Taylor’s work is even available as an e-book. He might be relieved to know it.

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

W.G. Sebald is unique. He is like no one else and no one is his heir because how could they be? His “novel,” The Rings of Saturn, is typical of him—it’s sort of fiction, sort of a travel book, sort of history and sort of a memoir and more, all jumbled up together. In it, the narrator (presumably Sebald) takes a walking tour in Suffolk, England. He tells you what he’s seeing and the people he meets, along with an inexhaustible stream of scientific knowledge, history, literary allusions and so on. You assume he’s (sort of) telling the truth and if you look it up you’ll discover various facts are absolutely or fairly or somewhat accurate or perhaps you can’t discover anything about a certain fact at all, though this doesn’t prove it’s not true, does it? Before you know it everything is true and fantastical and connected and it’s all so moving, so real, so unlike anything you’ve ever read before that you’ll finish it and wonder what the heck it was and how he did it. You’ll want to urge people to read The Rings of Saturn while praying no one asks you to describe it…and then you’ll eagerly track down something, anything else by Sebald.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Who doesn’t want to live in a fancy hotel? From Eloise at the Plaza to Count Rostov at the Hotel Metropol, the idea of endless room service and a parade of interesting house guests you can easily ignore—if so inclined—seems like heaven. In the case of Count Rostov, the protagonist of A Gentleman in Moscow, it’s supposed to be more like hell, or purgatory at least. As a nobleman who returns to Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, Rostov is tried and sentenced to house arrest at the Hotel Metropol. Clearly, the last vestiges of the aristocracy hadn’t quite been swept away, though at least the Count is ordered to leave his lavish suite and take a servant’s quarters. Decades pass, all of it in charming detail and with an inventiveness that never flags. It’s no wonder Towles went from an acclaimed, best-selling debut novelist with Rules Of Civility to an absolute phenomenon thanks to this word-of-mouth sensation. It’s so entertaining, some might feel suspicious of its greatness. But we’re not. Just be prepared to fork out the bucks for a bottle of Châeauneuf-du-Pape. It’s impossible to read this without longing for a taste of that wine.

The Far Pavilions by M.M. Kaye

Born and raised in India, then sent to boarding school in Great Britain, writer M.M. Kaye was destined to write a novel about the British Empire. First, she spent decades writing and/or illustrating children’s books and penning a series of thrillers and stand-alone novels—none of them creating much of a stir. They weren’t nearly as dramatic as Kaye’s real life. She fell in love during World War II with a British Indian Army officer who was married and four years younger than her. Kaye had one child and was pregnant with a second before they actually got married. It was the war, she shrugged. Then, Kaye’s literary agent, Paul Scott, urged her to write about India. (He himself shot to fame with the Raj Quartet novels.) Over the next twenty years, Kaye wrote three books of historical fiction. The first was gutted by bad editing, the second did better, and in 1978, Kaye published her doorstopper of a masterpiece: The Far Pavilions. It received major acclaim as a new spin on Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, enjoyed huge sales and became HBO’s first miniseries. Kaye lived another 26 years but, except for a trilogy of memoirs, she never wrote again.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

This novel’s narrator starts talking and you just can’t stop listening. His story is the confession of a political prisoner in Vietnam and it’s a doozy. Our unnamed protagonist is filled with contradictions. He’s the mixed-race son of a Vietnamese mother and a French Catholic priest father. He’s a North Vietnamese double agent living in South Vietnam. He escapes to America and continues living a double life amidst the local Vietnamese community. Then, he’s an adviser on an American war film akin to Apocalypse Now. Finally, he returns to Vietnam to fight in a guerrilla campaign against the Communist government. He’s the ultimate sympathizer—seeing all sides at once and losing track of which side he’s on. Compared to everything and everyone from Ralph Ellison to Joseph Conrad to Philip Roth and Walt Whitman, Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is one of the most acclaimed debuts in ages. And its sequel, The Committed, continues the tale with similar success.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A Short Novel and Three Stories by Truman Capote

Truman Capote practically invented the true crime genre with his nonfiction book In Cold Blood. He also wrote remarkable magazine features, turned gossip into high art and even perfected the character of “Truman Capote” in interviews throughout his life. Yet Capote’s favorite creation was Holly Golightly, the American “geisha” at the heart of his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She’s a free spirit who lives in New York City thanks to the generosity of older, wealthier men. Holly is not a prostitute but she does enjoy nice things, and how kind of men to give them to her. You can draw a straight line from Lorelei Lee of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to Sally Bowles of Goodbye To Berlin (and later Cabaret fame) to Miss Golightly. It’s substantially different from the film version starring Audrey Hepburn. (Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe.) But the spirit of the novel is onscreen. Here, the novella is paired with three marvelous short stories, including “House Of Flowers” (turned into a fine Broadway musical), “A Diamond Guitar” and “A Christmas Memory,” itself turned into movies, plays and more. Capote could be waspish, but here he’s on his best behavior.

Ulysses by James Joyce

The timid among us might name the short story collection Dubliners as the masterpiece of James Joyce. But cartoonist and graphic novelist Chris Ware will have none of it. He plunks for the daunting, challenging, modernist classic Ulysses. “Though apparently the Great American Novel still has yet to be published, the Great Irish Novel already was, exactly a century ago,” says Ware, author most recently of Monograph. “James Joyce’s inverted plot of the Odyssey—a husband exiling himself from his house to allow his wife her ongoing adulterous tryst—is mashed up into, amongst other things, the inside-out consciousnesses of his main characters, all of human history, and the ebb and flow of one day of life in 1904 Dublin, all written with an ever-recombined Erector set of dreamlike English that somehow, incredibly, implants sense-memories directly in the reader’s mind. And that final, 1922-outraging chapter, which so directly articulates female desire, remains Joyce’s private gift to one-half of humanity, a topic which until that point had rarely been treated as a topic worthy of consideration.”

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

Many great novels about young people came before. (Think The Catcher in the Rye or Anne of Green Gables or Little Women or Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, to name a few.) Judy Blume was just on the horizon, with her debut novel about to come out in 1969. But in 1967, The Outsiders was a young adult novel written by a young adult and for a young adult audience and it was so successful that it changed everything. Hinton was 15 years old when she started it, 16 when she really knuckled down and got serious about it and 18 when it came out. The novel depicts gang violence, underage drinking, smoking, absentee parents, and an awareness of class divides between the Greasers and the Socs (the Socials). People are still afraid of teens actually reading it, so The Outsiders remains one of the most challenged and banned books in the country. Hinton wrote other novels, but this debut manages to “stay gold” almost 60 years later. Kids hungry to see their lives in the stories they read still latch onto it. And writers hungry to capture authenticity still study it.

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler’s nightmare of a novel was inspired by the 1938 purges in the Soviet Union. In it, a man is broken down after multiple interrogations and makes a false confession about betraying the state. You are trapped with this man, you understand everything he’s feeling, you accept his decision to end the torture by saying whatever they want him to say and you walk with him as he’s led away to his death, the other unseen inmates drumming on the walls of their cells in support, just as he did for others before him and they will do again when the next one falls. It’s a shivering, unshakeable work.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

In the biker movie The Wild One, they ask Marlon Brando, “What are you rebelling against, Johnny?” He shoots back, “Whaddaya got?” Maybe rebellion is always in the air, but the counterculture movement sparked by the Beats and leading to the hippies of the 1970s found one of its key texts in Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s narrated by a half-Native American patient of a mental ward who lumps all oppression into what he calls The Combine. “Chief” Bromden details the battle for power between a not-so-crazy inmate named Randle McMurphy and the controlling Nurse Ratched. Kirk Douglas loved it so much that he bought the rights, turned it into a play and triumphed on Broadway. But he couldn’t get anyone to back a film version. It took his son Michael to make that dream happen, succeeding beyond anyone’s dreams with the Oscar-winning classic starring Jack Nicholson. Kesey went on to found the Merry Pranksters, inspire the Grateful Dead and write the novel Sometimes A Great Notion, his own favorite. But it’s the short, sharp shock of Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest that is still banned in some schools and still inspires people to fight back against the system, the Man, or as Bromden calls it, The Combine.

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

William Maxwell was the fiction editor at The New Yorker for 40 years during its glory days of 1936 to 1975. That’s enough to make his name legendary among other writers. But he also wrote novels, short stories, letters and essays. In 1980, Maxwell published one final book, almost 20 years after his previous novel came out. That new work was, naturally, published first in The New Yorker in two parts. They weren’t being kind to a venerable figure. They were lucky to have it and the publication was a sensation. So Long, See You Tomorrow is one of those perfect books; it’s simple, direct and unforgettable. The story begins with a gunshot and features an old man like Maxwell, looking back with regret on a tragedy of violence that tore through the town of his childhood. That gunshot, that murder, also abruptly ends a friendship just when that person needed their friend the most. Maxwell lived another 20 years, but this was his last novel. He was a good enough editor to know it doesn’t get any better than this, so why try?

The Greatest Short Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov

We’re sure you’ve been paying attention. And so again and again, you’ve seen the highest praise we give a writer—especially a writer of short stories—is “Chekhovian.” Anton Chekhov is also one of the greatest dramatists of all time and for the same reason. No one captures real life quite like Chekhov. Grab any short story collection you can. Any translation: Constance Garnett, Peavear and Volokhonsky, Miles, Dunnigan, Popkin, you name it. Everyone takes a shot at translating Chekhov into English because Chekhov is the greatest. Find out why.

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

The perennial bridesmaid of the Nobel Prize, Philip Roth reportedly spent the days when the annual announcement approached nervously in touch with his publisher. Have they called yet? They never called but you can’t blame the award-loving Roth for expecting it. Few writers turned out acclaimed work for 50 years like Roth. Choosing just one is absurd. How about one per decade? Goodbye, Columbus (1950s). Portnoy’s Complaint (1960s). The Ghost Writer (1970s). The Counterlife (1980s). Sabbath’s Theater (1990s). The Plot Against America (2000s). And overall, American Pastoral because it’s a sprawling epic covering underground movements like the Weathermen to political corruption like Watergate. Yet it remains human-scaled and moving thanks to the travails of Seymour Levov, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jew who realizes you never really know anyone, even your closest friends and family. Looks can be deceiving, which he should have known all along.

The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Some writers are shockingly prolific. Some take their time. Edward P. Jones takes his time. In his 72 years, Jones has published three books. Two are collections of short stories about African Americans working in Washington D.C. His only novel, so far, is The Known World, a work that makes the complicated horrors of slavery in the U.S. fresh again. How? By telling the story of both black and white people who enslaved others in antebellum Virginia. This historical fact—that some black people also owned other human beings prior to the Civil War—changes everything and nothing for readers ignorant of this truth. And it’s just a starting point for a rich narrative that contains stories within stories, along with the varied perspective of the owners and the owned, the rebellious and those who feel betrayed, women and men, poor whites and rich blacks and more. If Jones never publishes again, his name is assured. But we can hope.

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

Who needs critics? Most of them will politely admit that Swedish author Fredrik Backman’s debut novel has a certain charm. And yes, they laughed quite a bit, it’s true. But charm and humor and gentle wisdom are not the stuff of great reviews. Those qualities will, however, strike a chord when readers discover a book and tell a friend “you have to read this” and press a copy into their hands. That’s how this little book about a cranky old man with a sad past became a runaway bestseller. It’s charming, you’ll laugh a lot and the gentle wisdom is well worth hearing again. You can read it now or you can read it after seeing the Tom Hanks film version coming out in December. But you will buy it, love it and then tell a friend they have to read it while pressing a copy into their hands.

Devotions by Mary Oliver

This list of the best works of fiction wasn’t meant to include poetry, but some people just can’t help themselves. Writer Garrison Keillor writes poetry, edits anthologies of poetry and celebrates poetry with a daily podcast and newsletter. In short, Keillor, author most recently of Boom Town, is crazy about poetry. And one American poet of recent years is so alive in the minds of poetry lovers that it’s hard to remember she died in 2019: Mary Oliver. Keillor immediately asked to celebrate Mary Oliver’s collection titled Devotions. Keillor calls Oliver “the poet of long walks who is cheered up by the natural world and puts it all in elegant verse that sticks with you—‘No matter who you are or how lonely, the world calls to you over and over, harsh and exciting, announcing your place in the family of things.’”

The Thin Red Line by James Jones

Everyone lauds From Here to Eternity, the blockbuster novel by war veteran James Jones that climaxes with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It’s a great book and became a great movie. But since Jones is best when dealing with war and The Thin Red Line is the novel that’s actually steeped in combat, we’ll choose this one. Plus, it became an even greater movie than From Here to Eternity when Terence Malick released his movie version of the novel in 1998. (An earlier version came out in 1964.) Fellow veterans frequently laud Jones for telling it like it is and that makes his novels all the more surprising to modern readers. Loneliness, fear and brutality are all on display, along with unexpected touches like same-sex dalliances among soldiers trapped in foxholes and fearing for their lives. You won’t find any drum-beating or patriotic flag-waving either. This isn’t a rousing, go-get-’em war story by any stretch, though it’s not damning either. It’s just…true.

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez

An immigrant story? Sure, if your immigrant story involves being in a family of means in the Dominican Republic but then fleeing to the US after your dad joins a plot to overthrow that country’s dictatorship and finds out he’s a better doctor than a revolutionary. Julia Alvarez’s debut novel enjoyed instant acclaim and has remained both popular and critically celebrated ever since. It opens up the world of the DR that too few know anything about, as well as shows New York City in a fresh light, as only newcomers can.

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

After dozens of adaptations turning The Three Musketeers into movies, TV shows, comic books, video games, stage plays, radio dramas and the like, you might be forgiven if you forgot it began as a novel by Dumas. But you won’t forgive yourself if you don’t take the time to read it (or read it again, if you were the sort of kid who saw a big thick book about swashbucklers in France and dove right in). Like Charles Dickens, Dumas weaves a lot of topical issues into his grand adventures. This one is about a young man named d’Artagnan, who heads to Paris with the dream of joining the dashing Musketeers of the Guard and succeeds beyond his wildest imaginings. Grand fun. And if you’re wondering, when it comes to movies, we recommend the 1973 version starring Michael York, and when it comes to translations, we recommend the 2006 version by Richard Pevear—maybe if we all ask nicely, he’ll translate the sequels, starting with Twenty Years After and ending with The Man in the Iron Mask.

Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger

The epistolary novel—a story told entirely through letters or, nowadays, perhaps texts or email and the like—is a very particular treat. They range from the heart-warming innocence of 84, Charing Cross Road to the cruel darts of Les Liaison Dangereuses. Author Julia Quinn is a fan of the format in general and especially of Steve Kluger’s story about a Jewish kid in New York City in the 1930s. The boy badgers the third baseman for the New York Giants into becoming his pen pal. “I love epistolary novels, and Last Days of Summer is pure perfection” says Quinn, author most recently of Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron. “It is, at turns, side-splittingly funny and deeply sad, with characters who develop and grow with every letter, report card or Bar Mitzvah program.”

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín

Irish writer Colm Tóibín has something for everyone. Travel books that dive into history and faith. Plays. Novels. Short stories. Essays. Journalism. Two hugely acclaimed and ambitious books bring to life two giants of literature: The Master illuminates Henry James and The Magician captures the complexity of Thomas Mann. Then there’s Brooklyn. His most popular work and the source for a lovely movie, Brooklyn tackles the Irish immigrant experience in prose so empathetic and fresh that you’d swear no one ever told the story before. Eilis Lacey can’t find work in 1950s Ireland, so she makes an impossible leap to New York City. A young and sensible woman, she then chances it all on a handsome Italian plumber because she loves him and he loves her. Tóibín lets us feel how risky and brave and scary that is and we love her—and him—for it.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Any war novel worth its salt is an anti-war novel. How can you survive the hellish cruelty and uncertainty of war with dumb luck (the only thing that saves you, in the end) and not think, “Never again, no thank you!” That’s certainly true of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. The author served in World War II and survived (including the firebombing of Dresden) and it’s all poured into the story of Billy Pilgrim. Billy’s a soldier and prisoner of war who makes it home alive but finds himself slipping through time, because isn’t time unmoored when war tears a hole in your life? Then there are aliens, humans on exhibition, philosophical musings, comedy and tragedy and it’s all a glorious mess and can you believe they tried to make a movie out of it? Vonnegut’s body of work is rich and strange and singular. 

Middlemarch by George Eliot

We aren’t ranking the books on this list, but let us tell you a secret. If we did, Middlemarch would be at the top. Not because it is the greatest novel of all time. (No such thing exists.) But because it is inarguably one of the greatest novels of all time, for a thousand reasons. It’s the same reason Rolling Stone recently crowned Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On as the greatest album of all time and movie lists usually name Citizen Kane as the greatest film. Sure, your personal choice may be different, but you can’t say any of those choices are wrong. This masterpiece by George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans) is so solidly written, so engrossing, so heartbreaking and such an accomplishment it can’t be denied. It’s both a historical novel and a novel grappling with the issues of its day—like the role of women in a world where a genius like Evans had to choose a male pen name to avoid scandal and be taken seriously, for starters. Bookseller Nina Barrett of Bookends & Beginnings in Evanston, Illinois adds her approval, praising it “for the Godlike omniscience and the incredible wisdom about human love and frailty that she packs into every page.”

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

This semi-autobiographical novel shoulders many burdens. It’s “the” book that represents the Native American experience for many, even though it’s just about one kid on the Spokane Indian Reservation. So what about all the other tribes? And what about the girls? And what about kids who don’t live with a disability like Arnold Spirit Jr. or aren’t really smart or don’t choose to go to a practically all-white public school off the rez, like he does? And maybe don’t even like comics, while Arnold wants to be a cartoonist? Like all great books, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian becomes universal by being so specific about Arnold and his world of grinding poverty and friendship and family and moments of joy. Plus, it’s funny and moving and engagingly written. And who can’t identify with that?

The Duke and I: A Bridgerton Novel by Julia Quinn

The Bridgerton series devotes one book to each of the eight children in a family. You know it from the Netflix series, unless you’re a huge fan of Regency romances and read this when it made a stir in 2000. In The Duke And I, the story revolves around Daphne and Simon. She’s a Bridgerton and far too sensible and smart to appeal to the men of her time who prefer their women more mysterious and less outspoken. She doesn’t care, not really. Simon hates his father and vows never to marry or have children. But society can be so tiresome when matrons are pushing their eligible daughters at you. So they make a pact and pretend to be in love to get everyone off their backs. And of course, sparks fly and they fall for each other, though not without complications and confusion and a promise things will go no further. And then they go further. Sometimes a great novel is just great fun.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

In this 1942 novel, a French settler in Algiers kills an Arab man and is sentenced to death. That brief description raises a host of complicated issues even before the Nobel Prize-winning author Camus raises the story above the “colonial novel” to a profound grappling with the meaning of existence. Along with Camus’s The Plague, it’s a rite of passage for thinkers and writers, including Tim O’Brien. “I’ve read it at least a half dozen times, probably more, both in English and in French,” says O’Brien, author most recently of Dad’s Maybe Book. “And I’m always moved, in a guilty and mysterious way, by how unmoved the book’s protagonist is in the midst of typically shattering circumstances. (Yet, by and large, don’t we all “recover” and somehow move on from lost loves and dead mothers and our own misdeeds.) The Stranger is among the four or five novels that, as a young man, made me dream about writing one of my own.”

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

The flipside to Bridget Jones’s Diary, this laddish novel by Nick Hornby proves a tantalizing peek inside the mind of a middle-aged man-child. Rob is a 35-year-old record store owner obsessed with music but facing a mid-life crisis when his more successful lawyer girlfriend leaves him. Rob spends most of his days making up Desert Island Lists about music and pop culture. When he comes up with a Top 5 Break-ups list from his romantic travails, Rob rethinks his earlier relationships and talks to the women about where he went wrong. Rob learns to grow up without having to give up his passion for rock n roll, thank God. High Fidelity is so very, very specific to this particular man in England and that’s what makes it universal. Making a movie version and setting it in the U.S. was an absurd idea. Then it made perfect sense, but only in retrospect and only when overseen and starring John Cusack.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Write what you know? If everyone did that, we would never have novels like Middlesex. Jeffrey Eugenides read a memoir by an intersex person, but felt it stopped short of revealing the emotions and reality of this rare experience. What was it like to be one of the people who have less common sex characteristics and simply don’t fit onto a male/female binary? To make it real to himself, Eugenides drew upon specific details from his own life and that of his Greek-American family to tell a sprawling, multigenerational tale of incest, love, confusion, bankruptcy and the journey of Cal/Calliope. Cal transforms from a child raised as female to a teen diagnosed as intersex and pushed towards gender reassignment surgery to make them conform to male characteristics and finally to an adult who embraces their intersex identity. The Pulitzer Prize and Oprah’s endorsement turned this into a perennial bestseller.

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

Yes, of course, the movie. But the novel! It’s the second of four books centering on the magnetic, chilling serial killer, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. The first, Red Dragon, became an exceptionally good film called Manhunter. This one became a movie for the ages, the first horror-tinged movie to win the Best Picture Oscar. But the writing! Everyone from children’s author Roald Dahl to meta-magician David Foster Wallace have praised it to high heaven. Just don’t expect to sleep until you finish it. And then don’t expect to sleep easily.

Why Did I Ever? by Mary Robison

Anyone who ran away from home to try and track down Jack Kerouac in Florida is a person worth knowing. Other writers, like Daniel Handler of Lemony Snicket fame, have known and appreciated Mary Robison’s work for years. The fractured, fraying story of a Hollywood script doctor whose life is not following a three-act story arc, Why Did I Ever? may be her masterpiece. “It’s a manic, comic novel told in 536 little sections, some scarcely longer than a few words, from the point of view of a woman who is similarly scattered, troubled and jokey,” says Handler, author most recently of Poison For Breakfast. “If you’ve ever heard the lyrics (as the heroine does) as ‘It’s a grand old flag, dunt dunt high-flying flag. Dunt dunt duh, dunt dunt duh, dunt dunt duhhh,’ this book is for you.”

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

What can you learn about post-apartheid South Africa from a novel about a disgraced college professor who loses his job over repeated inappropriate behavior and far worse when it comes to a student he pressures into having sex? Nothing and everything. The Nobel Prize-winning Coetzee takes a white man of some standing in South Africa who sees his place in the world slipping away, both personally and in the country at large. Coetzee really puts him through the wringer and then somehow allows you to feel for him and hope for him, just when all hope seems lost. It’s a work of empathy and grace set in a country that lacked those qualities for so many for so long. And bestowing it on a character who really doesn’t “deserve” it proves again how everyone deserves it, always.

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

“Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” Those words at the end of Treasure Island echo in the mind of anyone who reads it long after they’ve closed the book. Has anyone spoiled the fun of Robert Louis Stevenson’s gem by discerning some commentary on colonialism or revealed Long John Silver as an example of unfettered capitalism? Let’s hope not. Because no book is more fun than Treasure Island. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is a bore. R.M. Ballantyne’s now thankfully forgotten The Coral Island is a scold. But 140 years on, Treasure Island is a tale to fire the imagination. Pirates! Mutiny! Treasure maps! Gold! A brave lad caught up in it all and he lives to tell the tale! Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum, indeed.

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

Of course you’re intimidated. It’s multiple volumes long and contains more than 4000 pages! And if you want to keep track of who is cheating on whom and who said what at which party, you really have to read it all at once. But the Harry Potter books run to seven volumes and so will George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire. Not only are people not daunted by them, they’re angrily demanding Martin hop to it and write more. Here’s the thing—Proust’s masterwork is gossipy, scandalous, sexy, funny and deeply moving. If you’ve ever enjoyed the company of someone who tells stories about their friends (“Oh, and did you hear what happened to Y.K. last week at the cafe?”) you will enjoy Proust. Reach the end of the final volume and you’ll be rewarded with an emotion unlike anything else in literature. Yes, it’s Mount Everest: formidable, challenging and dangerous. And people line up to climb Everest every single day. You can do it.

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown; Pictures by Clement Hurd

Books don’t have to be read again and again to be loved. But it sure helps. Like a favorite poem or song, a classic picture book distills a story to the essential words, casting a spell through a precise combination of text and pictures. It lulls a child to sleep and enchants the person reading it. Your parents read it to you. You read it to your child. And your child will read it to their child—or maybe already is!—and down and down through the ages. And if that doesn’t move you, nothing will. So let Margaret Wise Brown have the last, quiet word: “Goodnight stars. Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.”  Next up, How to Read All of Kristin Hannah’s Books in Order—Including the ‘Firefly Lane’ Series!