The shelf for novels read for how they are written as much as for what happens: families coming apart, cities changing, memory doing unreliable work and ordinary life examined closely. 575 books so far, across 31 series, plus 539 titles with no series listed. This is page 10 of the shelf.
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Wanda Petronski wears the same faded blue dress to school every day, and one day she tells the girls who tease her that she has a hundred dresses at home. The teasing becomes a game, and then Wanda stops coming to school. The girls who teased her have to think about what they did.
Olivia is Chinese-American, and her older half-sister Kwan was born in China and sent to live with the family when their father died. Olivia is embarrassed by Kwan, who does not speak English well and makes a fool of herself, and who believes that her yin eyes let her see the dead and talk with them at night. The novel follows the two sisters, the Chinese stories Kwan tells, and a journey back to China.
Daniel Lavette is born on the ship that brings his French father and Italian mother to America, and grows up helping on his father's fishing boat in San Francisco. When the earthquake of 1906 destroys the city and his parents with it, he earns money ferrying survivors across the bay and uses it to start a business. He does not stop there.
In an unnamed Latin American city, the machines of Doctor Hoffman are changing reality: mirages, apparitions and impossible places crowd into the ordinary world, and the government is losing its grip on what its citizens can be persuaded is real. Desiderio, who works for a government minister, falls in love with Hoffman's daughter, and sets out to find the doctor.
In a crumbling house below Mount Kanchenjunga, a retired judge wants to be left alone and is not. His orphaned granddaughter Sai has arrived to live with him, his cook looks after her while thinking about his own son, and the hills around Kalimpong in 1986 are filling with a political movement that will reach the house. The cook's son, Biju, is in New York without papers.
A hurricane levels the estate of the Bas-Thornton family in Jamaica, and the parents decide that their children should be sent back to England for safety. On the way, the ship is taken by pirates, and the children end up aboard the pirate vessel instead. The captain, Jonsen, is a well-meaning man who has no idea what to do with his new passengers.
Four Chinese women who came to San Francisco meet every week to play mahjong and to tell one another the stories of what they left behind in China, and four daughters grow up hearing none of it. The book is built out of what each of the eight of them has to say.
The novel follows a Lithuanian immigrant family in the Chicago stockyards at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it exposes the conditions of their working lives. Sinclair set out to show the odds against immigrants and other working people who were trying to secure a share of the American dream, and the book instead became a national scandal about the meatpacking industry.
Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years, and now Helen, who believes that she is dying, wants to bring everything into the open. Winnie's answer is that she will tell her American-born daughter, Pearl, about her own past, including the part of her life in China that she has never once discussed.
Harrison William Shepherd is born in the United States and grows up in his mother's Mexico, where he mixes plaster for the mural painter Diego Rivera and then cooks for Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo. He also works as a secretary for Leon Trotsky during his exile, and the politics he witnesses there follow him north.
Lionel Verney, the orphaned son of an impoverished nobleman, is befriended by a king's son and drawn into the politics of a Britain that has become a republic. His sister Perdita marries Lord Raymond, the soldier who becomes Lord Protector, and the family's fortunes rise before the sickness reaches Europe. Then a plague arrives and sweeps across the world, and Verney is left to write down what happened to everyone he knew.
The novel presents itself as a memoir, but its narrator is so effusive and so fond of digressions that he begins with his own conception and does not get as far as describing his birth until the third volume. He is trying to explain four accidents in his early life that he believes have doomed him to unhappiness, and he keeps wandering away from the subject.
In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill house of the Fedden family. Gerald Fedden is a Conservative Member of Parliament, his wife Rachel has money, and their son Toby was at Oxford with Nick. Over the boom years of the mid-1980s he becomes part of their world of parties and alliances, while the life he leads outside it is something the family accepts only by never mentioning it.
In a small Mississippi town, a nine-year-old boy called Robin Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree on his family's property, and nobody was ever charged. Twelve years later his younger sister Harriet is twelve herself, brilliant and difficult, and the rest of the household has never recovered: her mother spends her days in a chair and her father is long gone. Harriet decides to find out who killed her brother, and recruits her friend Hely and a great deal of nerve.
Sonia and Sunny see each other for the first time on an overnight train in India, and both of them are embarrassed, because their grandparents once tried to arrange a marriage between them and the attempt drove them apart before they ever met. Sonia has come home from studying in Vermont; Sunny is a journalist who has been living in New York.
Rickie Elliot arrives at Cambridge from a miserable boarding school and finds, for the first time, a place where he is not simply the sum of his lameness and his shyness. He falls in with Stewart Ansell and a circle of argumentative undergraduates. Then his old friends from home appear: Agnes Pembroke, whom he half loves, and her brother. When Agnes's fiance is killed, Rickie takes on the role of consoler, which leads him into a marriage and a family secret that will not stay buried.
On a Virginia plantation in the years before the Civil War, the oldest and most respected enslaved man on the estate begins to tell the story of his life. His son Chapel has taught himself to read, has fallen in love with the owner's daughter, and intends to run north. The father has to decide what he is willing to do about it.
Ailey Pearl Garfield grows up in a northern city and spends her summers in Chicasetta, Georgia, where her mother's family has lived since their ancestors were brought from Africa. Her grandmother expects her to become a doctor and Ailey wants to be a historian. The book moves between her own life and the generations before her, from slavery through the civil rights movement to the present.
Susie Salmon is fourteen when she is raped and murdered near her home, and the novel is narrated by her afterwards, from a personal heaven. From there she watches her family and friends try to carry on and to work out what happened, while she comes to terms with what her death has done to the people she loves.
Walter Moody arrives in Hokitika on the New Zealand goldfields in 1866 and walks into a meeting of twelve men who are trying to work out a series of crimes committed in the town. Each of them holds a piece of the story, and the novel assembles them into a structure that mirrors the heavens.
Quentin Coldwater is a brilliant, unhappy high school senior in Brooklyn who is still half in love with a series of children's books about a magical land called Fillory. On the day of his interview for Princeton he is taken instead to Brakebills, a college of magic in upstate New York, and spends four years there. Graduation leaves him with powers and no idea what they are for.
The Ambersons are the first family of a midwestern town, and their magnificence rests on a fortune made in 1878 and a house everybody knows. Three generations live on it while the town grows into a city around them and their money is overtaken by people who make things. George Amberson Minafer, the grandson, is the last to notice.
Nicholas Urfe takes a teaching post at a school on a small Greek island to get away from an unhappy affair in London. He is bored and mostly alone until he is invited to the estate of a wealthy Englishman who lives there, and who begins to involve him in games that are more elaborate and less harmless each time.
In a park in London a policeman falls into conversation with a man who says he is an anarchist, and talks his way into the strange council that runs the movement's affairs in Europe. He is given the name of a day of the week and the position that goes with it, and he has not met the man at the head of them all.
Four people meet in Rome and become entangled there: Miriam, a painter with a past she does not describe and a persecutor who follows her; Hilda, a copyist whose innocence makes her severe; Kenyon, a sculptor who loves Hilda; and Donatello, a young Italian count who resembles the marble faun of Praxiteles and has something of its nature. Then a crime is committed.
Michael Henchard, a hay trusser, sells his wife and child to a sailor at a country fair while drunk, and swears an oath never to drink again. Eighteen years later he is the mayor of Casterbridge, wealthy and respected, and the family and the consequences he thought he had left behind return to the town.
In early March 1964, Dr David Henry is forced to deliver his wife Norah's twins himself, with the help of a nurse named Caroline Gill. Their first child, Paul, is born healthy; the second, Phoebe, is born with Down syndrome. David hands the baby to the nurse and asks her to take the child to an institution, and the novel follows what happens next.
In a West African city recovering from a long civil war, a dying man named Elias Cole spends his last weeks talking about a woman he was obsessed with and her husband, whose life he ruined. A psychologist newly arrived from England listens, and a local surgeon who lived through the war has his own account of what happened.
Between life and death there is a library whose shelves go on forever, and every book in it offers the chance to try another life that might have been lived. Nora Seed reaches a breaking point in her own life and finds herself in that library, where the clocks are frozen at midnight and where she can explore the infinite versions of her life.
One day the village of Midwich loses consciousness: every person inside a hemisphere two miles across simply drops, and the army cannot get near it. The next day the effect stops, the object photographed on the ground is gone, and the villagers wake with no apparent harm done. Some months later, every woman of child-bearing age is pregnant.
Tom and Maggie Tulliver grow up at Dorlcote Mill on the River Floss, near the village of St Ogg's in Lincolnshire. Maggie is clever and hungry for affection, and her brother Tom is the one sent away to be educated and given authority in the family, and the difference in what is expected of the two of them shapes everything that happens between the brother and sister.
The final instalment of Hilary Mantel's trilogy charts the last four years in the life of Thomas Cromwell, minister at the court of King Henry VIII, from 1536 until his execution in 1540. It follows Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and completes the rise and fall of the man who ran the king's business, on whom the whole machinery of the reign depends.
Grace Byler is twenty-one and wants to find her mother, who left the family home three weeks ago without explanation, taking nothing and leaving no word. Grace suspects that her reserved and uncommunicative father knows why. In the same period an English woman has come to the Amish country to revisit the place where her mother lived, and to face a diagnosis of her own.
Charles Strickland is a London stockbroker with a wife, two children and no apparent interest in anything else. One day he leaves them, moves to Paris with very little money and begins to paint. The woman he has left behind sends an acquaintance to talk to him, and the novel follows that narrator's attempts to understand a man who does not want to be understood.
The narrator of the novel looks back over the fortunes of his family, whose businesses and quarrels span the modern history of India, and whose story includes early deaths, forgotten loves and the various ways that money and power can be made and lost. He tells it from the position of a man whose own life is nearly over.
Edgar Allan Poe printed The Murders in the Rue Morgue in Graham's Magazine in 1841. It is a short story in which a man in Paris sets out to solve the killing of two women in a house that was locked up, and Poe called it a tale of ratiocination; it is usually named as the first modern detective story.
In 1987 Cora is trapped in an abusive marriage and has just given birth to a boy, and the novel follows what happens depending on the name she chooses for him. Three versions of the child's life unfold from that single decision, each with its own consequences for the family and for the people around it.
A man comes back to the town he grew up in for a funeral and finds himself at the farm at the end of the lane, where he remembers a girl called Lettie Hempstock, who had told him that the pond behind her house was an ocean. The past he had forgotten comes back to him there.
Nell Trent is not quite fourteen, and she lives with her grandfather in his shop of odds and ends near the Strand in London. He adores her and he is gambling away everything they own. The moneylender Quilp has begun to take an interest in the shop and in the girl, and one night the pair walk out of the city with nothing.
Alun Weaver, a writer of modest celebrity, comes back to his native Wales with his wife Rhiannon, who was once a famous beauty. They move into a quiet retirement community that turns out to be full of people Alun used to know, and he takes up with a group of men who have stayed there all along.
Santiago is an ageing fisherman in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, and his luck has run out: he has gone a long time without a catch. He sets out alone once more and hooks a giant marlin that takes him far out to sea and into a struggle lasting for days. The story is also the story of a young boy, Manolin, who has been taught by the old man and cares about him.
Constance and Sophia Baines grow up over their father's drapery shop in Bursley, a town in the Potteries, and their lives run in opposite directions. Constance stays, marries the shop's assistant and keeps the business. Sophia runs away to London with a travelling salesman, goes with him to Paris, and disappears from her family's life for thirty years.
Ivan has spent twenty-seven years behind the glass walls of an enclosure in a shopping mall and has grown used to humans watching him. He hardly thinks about his life in the jungle, and occupies himself with television, his friends Stella and Bob, and painting. Then he meets Ruby, a baby elephant taken from the wild, and is forced to see their home and his art through new eyes.
Nine Americans, whose lives have each been changed by trees in some way, are brought together by the destruction of forests. One of them was shot out of the sky in Vietnam and saved by a banyan tree, and the book is made of their separate stories. The trees are the ones with the longer story.
Henri is a French soldier who follows Napoleon out of a village that expected nothing of him, and he ends up running the Emperor's larder, cooking for the man who has become the reason for his life. Villanelle is the daughter of a Venetian boatman, married to a gambler who has wagered away her heart. The novel follows the two of them through the Russian campaign and back toward Venice, where the news of the war has not entirely arrived.
The story follows Kino, a pearl diver, and explores questions of purpose as well as greed, defiance of social convention and evil. Steinbeck took the material from a Mexican folk tale he heard in La Paz in Baja California Sur, in a region that had once been rich in pearls, and the book is often described as a parable.
In 1950 a young doctor named Norton Perina joins an expedition to a remote Micronesian island in search of a tribe that may not exist. The expedition finds the tribe, and finds as well a turtle whose meat appears to hold off age, which makes Perina's scientific career and sets off everything that follows him afterwards.
In 1959 Nathan Price, an evangelical Baptist missionary, takes his wife and four daughters from Georgia to the village of Kilanga in the Belgian Congo. The family's belongings and beliefs are both transformed by the country they arrive in, and the novel is told by the five women who came with him.
Literary fiction here means a novel whose language and structure are doing as much work as its plot. The subject is often ordinary - a marriage, a house, a job, a death in a family - and the interest lies in the telling: a voice the reader has not heard before, a structure that circles instead of marching, or an honesty about people that a genre plot would smooth over.
The shelf is deliberately not a prize list and not a ranking. Modern classics sit next to books published this decade, and translated fiction sits next to novels written in English, because the shelf is a description of the writing rather than of its reputation. A novel that uses a mystery, a love story or a fantastic premise as part of its design still belongs here when the writing is the reason to read it, and it can also sit on that other shelf.
Experimental work, autofiction, campus novels, family novels, social realism and magical realism all fit. What does not fit is the review-voice judgement about which books are important: the page states the setting, the people and the shape of the story, and leaves the verdict to the reader.
The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.
676 booksPrimary genreEpic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.
685 booksPrimary genreGeneration ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.
536 booksPrimary genreHaunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.
381 booksPrimary genreDetectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.
599 booksPrimary genreCathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.
580 booksPrimary genreShipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.
324 books