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 2 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonKilgore Trout, an aging and widely published but mostly unknown science fiction writer, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The novel follows the events leading to the chance encounter between the two men, and it uses pictures drawn by the author alongside the text. The dealer's mistake is the book's subject rather than its joke.
Rating coming soonSet in a near-future society with a youth subculture of extreme violence, the novel is narrated by a teenage protagonist named Alex, who describes his violent exploits and his experiences with state authorities intent on reforming him. Part of the book is written in a Russian-influenced slang of the author's invention, taking its name from the Russian suffix equivalent to the English ending of the teenage years.
Rating coming soonThe novella is set in a future dark age of the great we, a world that deprives individuals of name, independence and values. Its protagonist lives in that age and dares to love a woman of his own choosing, and in a period that has lost the traces of science he seeks knowledge.
Rating coming soonHeaven Casteel returns to the West Virginia hills and begins to live out her childhood dreams: she becomes a respected schoolteacher at the local school and marries her sweetheart, Logan Stonewall. After their wedding trip to Farthinggale Manor, Tony Tatterton persuades the two of them to stay in Boston, but old ghosts rise up around her fragile happiness and threaten her marriage with scandal and jealousy.
Rating coming soonNel Wright and Sula Peace meet as children in the town of Medallion, Ohio, and their friendship survives the town's opinion of them, a secret they share and the very different lives they choose. Nel marries and stays; Sula leaves and comes back. The novel follows both women and the community around them across four decades.
Rating coming soonJake Barnes lives in Paris in the 1920s among American and British expatriates, and he is in love with Lady Brett Ashley, an attachment that cannot be consummated. The group travels south to Pamplona for the festival of San Fermín, where the drinking, the bullfights and the tensions between them come to a head.
Rating coming soonPecola Breedlove is eleven and prays every night for blue eyes, because she has decided that they would change how her family, her classmates and her town treat her. The novel follows her across a year in Lorain, Ohio, and her wish is answered in the worst way the book can imagine.
Rating coming soonIn 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.
Rating coming soonShuggie Bain grows up in public housing in Glasgow in the 1980s, the youngest of three children and devoted to a mother who cannot stop drinking. As the pits and the docks close around them and the household shrinks to the two of them, Shuggie tries to hold his mother together and to work out who he is.
Rating coming soonSusie 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.
Rating coming soonMichael 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.
Rating coming soonDick Diver is a promising young psychiatrist in Europe who marries Nicole, a wealthy patient he has been treating, and builds a life around her money and her needs. Set on the French Riviera in the last years of the Jazz Age, the novel follows the slow unmaking of the marriage and of the man.
Rating coming soonAt the end of the Second World War, four damaged people are living in a ruined Italian villa: a nurse, a Sikh sapper, a thief and a burned man who cannot remember his own name. As they care for the patient his past as a desert explorer returns in fragments, and the others reveal what the war has cost them.
Rating coming soonWalter 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.
Rating coming soonJean Louise Finch, twenty-six and living in New York, returns to her home town of Maycomb, Alabama, to visit her father Atticus and finds the place changed less than she has. What she discovers about the people she grew up with forces her to separate the father she loves from the man he actually is.
Rating coming soonSharon Rabbitte is twenty and pregnant, and she will not name the father. Her family in Barrytown reacts the way a large working-class household does, with argument, gossip and a certain amount of sympathy, and Sharon has to get through the pregnancy and the birth while the neighbourhood works out what it thinks of her, in a place where everyone knows everyone's business.
Rating coming soonSusan Barton is cast away on the island where Robinson Cruso and his mute servant Friday have been living, and after a year the three of them are rescued. What follows is Susan's attempt to have her account written down, and her discovery that the story belongs to whoever tells it, and that one of them cannot tell it at all.
Rating coming soonAdunni is fourteen and living in rural Nigeria when her father marries her to a man who wants a son, and then sends her into domestic service in Lagos. She still wants the education her mother told her about, and the novel follows her through a household where she has no rights and a city where she has no protection.
Rating coming soonDominic Salt and his three children are the caretakers of Shearwater, a small island near Antarctica that holds a seed vault and very little else. A woman named Rowan is shipwrecked on the shore during a storm, and the family has to decide what to do about her while the weather closes in and the island's purpose is called into question.
Rating coming soonA doctor performs an operation on a young woman that opens her mind to what he calls the great god Pan, and the experiment leaves her ruined. Years later her son, and everyone who comes into contact with him, are changed by whatever entered the world through that operation, and the trail is followed by a man who was present at it.
Rating coming soonDouglas Spaulding is twelve in the summer of 1928 in Green Town, Illinois, and the season is made of small ceremonies: picking dandelions for wine, a first pair of new sneakers, firecrackers and a friend who has just moved in. The novel follows him through the months as he works out, for the first time, that he is alive and will die.
Rating coming soonManfred, the lord of the castle of Otranto, is preparing his son for marriage when a gigantic helmet falls out of the sky and kills the groom. Determined to keep the castle in his own line, he sets out to marry the intended bride himself, and the household is overtaken by omens, apparitions and the return of the rightful heir.
Rating coming soonMiles Cheshire has been looking for his twin brother for ten years, following the identities he leaves behind in different parts of the country. In a parallel thread a young man is told that the person he believed was his uncle is not a relative at all, and a third story follows people who make a living out of other people's names.
Rating coming soonAtlas has been condemned to hold up the world, and Heracles, on his way to another of his labours, offers to share the burden for a while. The novel retells the myth with both men describing what they are carrying, and turns it into a story about the difference between a load that is given and one that is chosen.
Rating coming soonFrancis Phelan returns to Albany in 1938 after years on the road, drinking and taking casual work, and the novel follows him through two days of Halloween as he visits the graves and the houses of the people he left behind. The dead he has known keep him company while he decides whether he can stay.
Rating coming soonIn 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.
Rating coming soonRetta Winters is a writer and translator in her mid-forties whose eldest daughter has left home to sit on a street corner with a sign that reads Goodness. The novel follows Retta through a year of trying to understand the decision, and through the ordinary apparatus of her working life.
Rating coming soonAt a dinner party in Greenwich, a guest named Miles Garth goes upstairs, locks himself in a spare bedroom and does not come out. Over the months that follow, the household, the neighbours and the people who knew him have to decide what his refusal means, and the novel follows their reactions rather than his reasons.
Rating coming soonEbby Freeman was ten when she saw her brother Baz shot dead and a centuries-old jar shattered beside him, and the murder was never solved. Years later, when a new relationship brings her back into public attention, the case is reopened and the family has to live through it again in public.
Rating coming soonHoward W. Campbell Jr, an American who grew up in Germany, became a famous playwright and then a broadcaster of Nazi propaganda. He is also, by his own account, an American agent, and the novel is his memoir, written in an Israeli prison while he waits to be tried for what he said on the radio.
Rating coming soonAlexandra Bergson inherits the family farm on the Nebraska Divide when her father dies, and makes it succeed while her brothers doubt her judgement. The novel follows the family for more than a decade, and then turns to the next generation and to the people Alexandra has loved, among them the man she has waited for since she was young.
Rating coming soonIn a Mexican state where the church has been suppressed, a whisky priest is the last of his kind still at large, moving between villages and avoiding the police. He is not a good man, and the novel follows his flight and the people who shelter or betray him as the pursuit closes in.
Rating coming soonThomas Sutpen arrives in a Mississippi town with a group of enslaved people and builds a plantation out of nothing, and the novel is the story of what he did and what it cost his family. Several narrators reconstruct it, among them his son, his friend and a student at Harvard who hears the story second-hand.
Rating coming soonPollyanna Whittier is eleven and newly orphaned when she is sent to live with her aunt in the town of Beldingsville. Aunt Polly is wealthy, strict and has no idea what to do with a niece, while Pollyanna arrives with a game her father taught her: finding something to be glad about in whatever happens.
Rating coming soonA history teacher at a California high school cannot answer his students when they ask why ordinary Germans went along with the Nazi party, so he sets out to show them. The experiment he runs gives the class a slogan, a salute and a uniform way of behaving, and it does not stay inside his classroom.
Rating coming soonThe volume holds six short stories and a novella called Bounty, and the people in them are all trying to get by in a world that has gone haywire around them. Their jobs, their families and the language of improvement they have been taught no longer match the reality they are living in.
Rating coming soonIn a small town in Georgia in the 1950s, a store owner named Paris Trout kills the younger sister of a man he has been doing business with and wounds the man's mother. The killing follows a car deal that went wrong, and the town has to decide what it is prepared to do about a man everybody knows.
Rating coming soonColin is eighteen and has just come out to himself when he meets Ray at a cruising ground near Dorking on the Sunday of his birthday. Ray is ten years older, wears leather and rides a motorbike, and what begins that day becomes a relationship lasting more than six years and built on Ray's control of a boy who has almost nothing of his own.
Rating coming soonBeth is married to Frank, a farmer, and the two of them have built a life on the understanding that the past stays where it is. Then Frank's brother shoots a dog that has been worrying the sheep, and the dog turns out to belong to Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager, who has come back to the village with his young son.
Rating coming soonThe stories here are set in Florida and around it, among storms, snakes and sinkholes that sit at the edge of ordinary life. The people in them include two sisters left to manage on their own, a man who grew up lonely, a couple who have not settled, a woman with nowhere to live, and a wife and mother who appears more than once.
Rating coming soonA Korean-American family in Virginia is thrown into confusion when the father and his younger son do not come back from a walk in a nearby park. The father's daughter Mia, who is twenty and has an explanation for everything, is not worried at first, and then her brother arrives home alone and covered in blood.
Rating coming soonElliott writes for television, has a boyfriend who adores him and presents a life that photographs well. Underneath it he is drinking more than he admits, paying for sex behind his boyfriend's back and struggling with what cerebral palsy means for how he is seen, and the novel follows his attempt to change all of it.
Rating coming soonSybil Van Antwerp writes letters. In the mornings she writes to her brother, to her closest friend, to a university president who has refused to let her sit in on a class, and to authors whose books she has just finished, and she also writes, over and over, a letter that she never sends. Then something arrives that makes her read it again.
Rating coming soonWalking home from a club at four in the morning, the narrator notices the date: it is the birthday of the man who was, more or less, their first love. Ten years earlier they and Thomas James spent the summer after graduation in each other's company, and what began then lasted across years and continents before it ended badly.
Rating coming soonMarguerite is the heir to a fortune until she is orphaned and her guardian takes charge of both her money and her life, spending the inheritance and taking her with him on an expedition to New France. On the voyage she and the guardian's servant fall in love, and when the affair is discovered the two of them are punished and left on a small island with no prospect of rescue.
Rating coming soonThe book moves between San Francisco in the years of the AIDS epidemic and Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, following a circle of friends and family through both. It is told in short fragments rather than a single storyline, and the people in it speak from the middle of events they are still trying to make sense of.
Rating coming soonIt is 1928, and Matilda Simpkin, once a militant in the suffrage campaign who was jailed five times, now lives on lectures and small routines. Finding an old wooden club in a cupboard brings the past back, and a meeting with an old comrade who has joined the Fascists convinces her that a new cause has arrived. She starts a club for girls.
Rating coming soonThese stories take place in schools, in sleepy seaside towns and in cities that have stopped behaving normally, and the bodies of the people in them keep changing shape. Teenagers develop appetites that will not be satisfied, a city loses the ability to sleep, and parts of one body are used to build a better one.
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