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 11 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonA professional thief in Toronto is asked by a woman he has befriended to steal objects from her brothers and sisters, because she believes that each of them holds one clue to where a large inheritance has been hidden. He takes the job, and then he has to solve the puzzle. What he is looking for may not exist at all.
Rating coming soonFive years after the death of a celebrated New York painter, two biographers are competing to write his life, and both of them go to the women who knew him: his wife, his mistress and his sister, who is a painter herself. What each woman tells them does not add up to one story.
Rating coming soonAlmeyda grows up as a slave on a plantation in Brazil in the 1670s, with a mother who is stern and a grandmother who is not like anybody else. She hears about Palmares, a city governed by freed and escaped slaves, and her life becomes a long journey through the country. She is looking for her husband, and the country is very large.
Rating coming soonA young man leaves his family's hard-working farm in Vermont after killing his girlfriend by accident, and the only communication between him and the family he has left behind is the postcards he sends. He moves across the American West, and the family he left gets on with its life without him. He never tells them where he is, and he never hears back.
Rating coming soonMaud finds a note in her own handwriting that reads Elizabeth is missing, and she cannot remember writing it. She is becoming forgetful, but she is certain that something has happened to her friend Elizabeth, and she sets out to find out what, while the people around her are not sure she can. Her memory is not helping.
Rating coming soonMarion Lafournier is a gay Ojibwe man living on a reservation in northern Minnesota, in a town he cannot seem to leave. One night he brings to life a dog from underneath the elementary school playground, and the animal leads him to the grave of a murdered Ojibwe basketball player. The town knows more about the dead boy than it says.
Rating coming soonOn the week of her wedding, a bride is visited by a bird that she recognises as her dead grandmother, and the bird tells her not to get married and to go and find her brother. What follows takes her away from the altar and into a journey that keeps turning strange. The bird stays with her.
Rating coming soonMoshe Fisher is born without skin, as the people of his Jamaican village put it, and nobody who looks at him can tell what race he belongs to. Arrienne Christie makes it her business to protect him, and the novel follows the two of them across most of a lifetime. It is also the history of an island.
Rating coming soonA social worker in Montana tries to help an eleven-year-old boy who is living wild in the woods and barely surviving, and in doing so he meets the boy's father, a paranoid survivalist who is waiting for a final conflict. Meanwhile the social worker's own family is coming apart. Nobody in the story is easy to help.
Rating coming soonFiruzeh and her brother Nour are children of a country at war, and when their parents decide to leave Afghanistan the two of them are told stories about the country they are going to. What follows is a long journey through Pakistan, Indonesia and Nauru towards Australia. The country they are promised is not the country they find.
Rating coming soonZoey comes to an island off the coast of South Carolina to claim her dead mother's apartment in an old cobblestone building called the Dellawisp. What she finds there is a group of secretive neighbours and a set of stories that are still being written. The little birds of the island are as much at home as the people.
Rating coming soonStarr Carter is sixteen, black, and lives in a poor neighbourhood while attending an elite private school in a white and wealthy part of the city. On her way home from a party she is in the car when a white police officer shoots and kills her childhood friend Khalil. The grand jury's decision afterwards leads to a riot.
Rating coming soonA 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.
Rating coming soonFour 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.
Rating coming soonMartin Eden is a young working-class man in Oakland who educates himself in order to become a writer and to win the woman he loves. What he meets instead is a trade in which manuscripts come back by return post, and a set of people who cannot see what he is worth until he succeeds.
Rating coming soonOscar de León is a Dominican boy growing up in New Jersey who is overweight, loves science fiction and fantasy, and keeps falling hopelessly in love. His family is also carrying a curse, and the novel follows them back to the Dominican Republic under the dictator Trujillo. It is a family history as much as it is the story of one boy.
Rating coming soonAugust Pullman is ten and has a facial difference that has kept him out of school and in and out of hospital for years. His parents decide to send him to a mainstream private school for the fifth grade, and the novel follows his first year there. Not everybody at the school is kind about it.
Rating coming soonAn American serving as a lieutenant in the ambulance corps of the Italian army during the First World War falls in love with an English nurse, and the two of them try to live a life of their own while the war goes on around them. The novel is told in his voice.
Rating coming soonSal Paradise and Dean Moriarty cross and re-cross the United States in search of experience, jazz and whatever else they find on the way. The novel is based on the author's own travels, and the characters stand in for himself and for his friend Neal Cassady. The road itself is the subject, and the book is still widely read in the United States.
Rating coming soonDavid is an American living in Paris whose girlfriend has gone to Spain to think about whether to marry him, and while she is away he begins an affair with an Italian bartender named Giovanni. The novel is his account of what happened between the three of them, and Paris is the city the whole of it takes place in.
Rating coming soonAri Mendoza is fifteen, angry and lonely, with a brother in prison, and he has never asked himself many questions about who he is. Then he meets Dante at the local swimming pool, and the friendship that follows changes what he is willing to ask. Ari was not looking for a friend, and he does not know what to make of finding one.
Rating coming soonHolden Caulfield, who is about to be expelled from his school, leaves early and spends three days in New York City, and the novel is his account of what he did with them. He is nearly of age, he has opinions about almost everything he sees, and it is one of the most widely read American novels.
Rating coming soonOedipa Maas is named as the executor of the estate of a former lover, a wealthy California man, and what she finds while sorting out his affairs is a possible centuries-old feud between two mail companies, and a conspiracy she cannot prove. She cannot tell whether any of it is real, and neither can the reader.
Rating coming soonRob Fleming is thirty-five, he owns a record shop in London, and he has just been left by his girlfriend Laura. What follows is his attempt to work out what went wrong, beginning with a list of the five most memorable break-ups of his life. Rob has some work to do on himself, and he knows it.
Rating coming soonHenry Chinaski becomes a substitute mail carrier in Los Angeles, quits for a while to live on what he wins at the race track, and comes back as a mail clerk. The novel follows years of that work, and the drinking and the women that go with it. The job is not the only thing in it, and nobody in the book is going anywhere.
Rating coming soonA North Vietnamese agent is embedded in the South Vietnamese army and goes into exile with the community he has been sent to watch. The novel is his own account, told years later, of what he did and of the two halves of himself that he could not bring together. He is both a mole and an immigrant.
Rating coming soonMagnus Pym, a diplomat of high standing, disappears after attending his father's funeral, and the intelligence service he worked for begins to look for him. What it finds is that his whole life has been made of secrets, including the largest one of all. The search for him turns up the larger secret of his career.
Rating coming soonClyde Griffiths is brought up by poor and devoutly religious parents, and he spends his youth taking whatever work will help to support them. What he wants is a life like the one he can see other people having, and the way he goes after it is what destroys him. The novel is based on a real murder and on the trial that followed it.
Rating coming soonIn 1939 a nineteen-year-old refugee from Prague arrives in New York and moves in with his seventeen-year-old cousin, who was born in Brooklyn. Between them they invent a superhero, and the two of them become part of the golden age of the comic book. The Escapist is their way of fighting back.
Rating coming soonIn a village in Afghanistan in 1952, a ten-year-old boy and his three-year-old sister are separated when their father decides to sell the girl to a childless couple in Kabul. The decision follows the family for generations, and the book is told by nine different people. Each of the nine speaks in their own voice.
Rating coming soonWang Lung is a Chinese farmer who works his land and takes pride in it, and the novel follows him and his wife O-Lan from poverty to a position where the family of the great house nearby is no longer above him. The land is what he holds on to and what he loses sight of.
Rating coming soonA poverty-stricken young American is living in Paris and writing about it, and the book is his own account of the streets, the rooms and the people he is getting through the days with. There is very little plot and a great deal of the narrator. It is as much about the voice as about what happens.
Rating coming soonJack Gladney teaches Hitler studies at a college in a small American town, and he lives there with his wife and their blended family. An industrial accident releases a cloud of something into the air, and the ordinary worries of the household turn into something larger. The household has fears of its own to deal with as well.
Rating coming soonFranny Glass is a college student who has come to the end of her patience with the people around her, and she is trying to get out of it by spiritual means. Her younger brother Zooey, an actor, is the one who tries to talk her through it, and he does most of the talking.
Rating coming soonNine 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.
Rating coming soonThe novel is set on a street of sardine canneries in Monterey, California, during the Depression, and it is about the people who live there: a grocer, a marine biologist and the leader of a group of derelict men who decide to do something for him. What happens matters less than who is there.
Rating coming soonJohn Grady Cole leaves Texas for Mexico, where he finds work breaking horses on a ranch and falls in love with the owner's daughter. What he has done to get there follows him, and the novel is the story of what it costs him. He is not the only person in the book who pays for it.
Rating coming soonAn American veteran of the Second World War goes back to Germany after the fighting to find the woman he left there, and stays. What he finds is a country in ruins where the currency everybody deals in is not money but American cigarettes. He stays there far longer than he meant to.
Rating coming soonWanda 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.
Rating coming soonWinter Santiaga is the teenage daughter of a Brooklyn drug kingpin, and she has grown up certain that she deserves the best of everything and that her father's power will always be standing behind her. Then he is arrested for drug trafficking and she is sent to a girls' home with nothing but the habits she learned from watching him.
Rating coming soonAgent Pendergast was buried alive behind a wall at the end of the previous book, and the brother who digs him out and nurses him back to health did not do it out of kindness. Pendergast's ward calls in Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta and shows him a letter Pendergast had written about Diogenes, with a single date in it: the twenty-eighth of January.
Rating coming soonA secret order in Ankh-Morpork means to replace the Patrician with a puppet king, and its method is to summon a dragon to terrify the city and then have the puppet appear to slay it. Standing in the way is the Night Watch, which nobody takes seriously, and its newest recruit: a human orphan raised by dwarves who has read the manuals.
Rating coming soonJohn Flory is a timber merchant in Kyauktada, a district of British Burma in the 1920s, and he is the only European in the place who does not share the prejudices of the club he belongs to. He is also lonely, and the arrival of a young Englishwoman gives him something to hope for in a society with no room for the life he wants.
Rating coming soonOne 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.
Rating coming soonTony Last is a contented but shallow English country squire with a large house, a wife and a son, and he is fond of the life he has. His illusions are taken from him one at a time, and once they are gone he goes looking for comfort somewhere else: an expedition into the Brazilian jungle, where he ends up trapped in a remote outpost.
Rating coming soonSolar radiation has melted the polar ice caps, temperatures at the equator have become unbearable, and London is now a flooded tropical lagoon. Robert Kerans is a biologist working there, and the novel follows him as he is drawn further into the drowned city and the world that has replaced it, and further away from restoring what was there before.
Rating coming soonSilas Marner is a linen weaver living near the village of Raveloe, and before that he belonged to a small congregation in a town where he was falsely accused of stealing its funds. The lots were drawn against him, the woman he was going to marry married his accuser, and he left. What he does with the rest of his life is what the novel is about.
Rating coming soonCaroline Meeber, known at home as Sister Carrie, is eighteen and unhappy with life in rural Wisconsin, and she takes the train to Chicago to live with her sister and brother-in-law. On the way she meets Charles Drouet, a travelling salesman. She discourages him from calling at her sister's flat, but he is not finished with her, and she is not finished with the city.
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