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 5 of the shelf.
Search by title or author, filter with the subgenre chips, the primary-genre chips or the tag chips, or sort the list. Filtering happens in your browser and nothing about the visit is stored.
Showing 48 of 575 books
No books match those filters. Try a shorter name, or pick another subgenre.
Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
Rating coming soonOlivia 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.
Rating coming soonIn 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.
Rating coming soonA young black man from the South narrates the story of his own invisibility, beginning with the college he is expelled from after he shows a white benefactor the reality of black life, and continuing in Harlem, where he becomes an orator for an organisation known as the Brotherhood. In his new position he is both praised and threatened, and he is carried into a movement whose logic he does not fully understand.
Rating coming soonThe novel moves between three women in three different decades, each of them touched by Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. In 1923 in Richmond, Woolf is writing that novel while struggling with mental illness. In 1949 in Los Angeles, Laura Brown is reading it while she plans a birthday party for her husband, a veteran of the Second World War. In 1999 in New York, Clarissa Vaughan is preparing a party of her own, for a friend who is dying.
Rating coming soonJim Burden arrives in the fictional town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, on the same train as a family of Bohemian immigrants, the Shimerdas, having been sent to live with his grandparents after the deaths of his parents. He is ten years old, and the eldest daughter of the new family, Antonia Shimerda, is a child like him. The novel is his account of the years that follow and of what the two of them make of the country they have been brought to.
Rating coming soonIn 1944 in Brooklyn, fifteen-year-old Reuven Malter plays a baseball game between his Modern Orthodox school and a team from a Hasidic yeshiva, and the opposing team turns out to be carried by a single player, Danny Saunders. When Danny's line drive breaks Reuven's glasses and drives a piece of glass into his eye, the accident begins a friendship between two boys whose Jewish communities hold to very different doctrines.
Rating coming soonJarndyce and Jarndyce is a case in the Court of Chancery that has been grinding on for years, and it has drawn a disparate group of people into its orbit. Ada and Richard Clare have an inheritance that the legal costs are gradually eating; Esther Summerson is a ward of court whose parentage is a deepening mystery; and around them are the lawyer Tulkinghorn, the detective Inspector Bucket and a crossing sweeper named Jo. Dickens published it as a serial across twenty parts.
Rating coming soonJo March and her husband Professor Bhaer run Plumfield, a progressive school where the characters of Little Women have grown up and begun new work. With two sons of their own and twelve rescued orphan boys in the house, they try to make the school a happy, comfortable and stimulating place. The novel follows the life of the school and the children in it.
Rating coming soonThomas Gradgrind is a schoolmaster who believes in facts and nothing else, and the novel is Dickens's portrait of a Victorian industrial society built on that philosophy. It is set in Coketown, a northern mill town of red brick and machinery, and it puts Gradgrind's children and the people around them through the consequences of an education that leaves no room for imagination.
Rating coming soonMaxine Hong Kingston grows up Chinese-American in California, living in two worlds at once: the America her parents emigrated to, and the China of her mother's talk stories. Her mother tells her traditional tales of strong, wily women warriors, and those stories clash with the expectations placed on a girl in the family and the neighbourhood. The book blends autobiography with old Chinese folktales.
Rating coming soonDave Eggers's parents both died of cancer within a few weeks of each other, and the book is his account of what happened afterwards: he took over the care of his younger brother Christopher, known as Toph, and moved with him to California. It is a memoir about grief, family, and the business of being in your twenties and suddenly responsible for a child.
Rating coming soonDag, Claire and Andy are three friends in their twenties living together in the Coachella Valley in southern California, working at badly paid jobs with no future in them and telling one another stories. The tales they exchange are by turns heartfelt accounts of their own lives and fantastical stories of their own invention, and the novel is arranged so that the tales are told by different characters across three parts.
Rating coming soonDavid Lurie is fifty-two, twice divorced, and a professor of communications at a technical university in Cape Town who teaches a course in romantic literature. An affair with one of his students costs him his job and his standing, and he retreats to the isolated smallholding of his daughter Lucy in the Eastern Cape. What begins as a visit turns into an extended stay, and the book follows what happens there.
Rating coming soonEvelyn Couch is a middle-aged housewife in a slump when she meets Ninny Threadgoode, an elderly woman in a nursing home, and begins visiting her every week. Ninny tells her about her youth in Whistle Stop, Alabama, where her sister-in-law Idgie and Idgie's friend Ruth ran a cafe. The novel moves between the present and the past, and the two stories feed each other.
Rating coming soonClaireece Precious Jones is an illiterate sixteen-year-old in Harlem who has so far been invisible: to the father who rapes her, to the mother who beats her, and to the authorities who treat her as one more casualty. She is pregnant with a second child by her father when her school discovers the pregnancy and she is sent to an alternative school, where she meets a teacher who takes her seriously.
Rating coming soonThe third Dollanganger novel is narrated by the two half-brothers of the household. Jory is fourteen, good-looking and talented, and wants to follow his mother Cathy into ballet; Bart is nine, sees himself as plain and clumsy, and feels inferior to his brother. Their parents are living as husband and wife while hiding their history from everybody, and Bart has begun retreating into a world of his own making.
Rating coming soonBernadette Fox is a notorious figure in Seattle: to her husband, who works at Microsoft, a fearlessly opinionated partner; to the other mothers at her daughter's private school, a disgrace; and to Bee, her fifteen-year-old daughter, simply her best friend and her mother. Then Bernadette disappears, shortly before the family trip to Antarctica that Bee asked for as a reward for her perfect report card.
Rating coming soonA young man arrives in Ukraine with a tattered photograph in his hand, looking for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis fifty years earlier. His guides are Alex, a translator whose English has become a language of its own, a blind old man haunted by memories of the war, and an undersexed guide dog called Sammy Davis, Jr, Jr. The book tells the story of that search and the history of the town it is trying to find.
Rating coming soonSatan and the rebel angels, defeated and cast out of heaven, plot their revenge on God, and the struggle they begin ranges across heaven, hell and earth. Its victims are Adam and Eve, who are tempted and fall, and the poem is the story of the Fall of Man told on an epic scale. Milton wrote it in blank verse, and it is divided into twelve books.
Rating coming soonSantiago 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.
Rating coming soonTheodore Decker is thirteen when he and his mother visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a day that ends with a bomb going off inside it. His mother is killed. In the confusion he carries out a small Dutch painting she had pointed out to him, and the painting stays with him through the years that follow, through a friend's family home on Park Avenue and the antiques trade in which he learns his business.
Rating coming soonSamuel Johnson is melancholy, ill and increasingly difficult company when he is introduced to the family of a London brewer, whose country house at Streatham becomes his refuge. He grows closest to the eldest daughter, Hester Maria, known as Queeney, and the girl watches a friendship between her mother and the great man that nobody in the house can quite name.
Rating coming soonA narrator named Bram Presser tries to find out what happened to his grandparents during the war, working from the small hoard of writing and correspondence they left behind. Jakub Rand and Dasa Roubickova were deported from Poland to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz, and the closer he gets to the record the more the family stories and the documents refuse to agree.
Rating coming soonHenry James spends the 1880s and 1890s moving between London, Venice and Paris, writing novels, cultivating friendships and trying to succeed in the theatre. The novel follows his friendship with the artist George Du Maurier, his attachment to the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, his disaster as a playwright, and the long years afterwards. It is as much about the cost of a vocation as about the famous man himself.
Rating coming soonErnest Hemingway married four times, and this novel gives each of the four women a turn: Hadley Richardson in Paris, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn in Spain and Cuba, and Mary Welsh. Each of them tells what it was like to be married to a man who turned his own life into material, and each learns in her turn that the role has a successor already in view.
Rating coming soonAt a party in Portofino in 1953, the playwright Tennessee Williams and his partner Frank Merlo meet a young Swedish woman who will not say much about herself. The novel follows the three of them across the next decade, through the theatre, the film business and the friendships that held Williams's work together, and the success that came to one of them rather than the other.
Rating coming soonHoward Belsey teaches art history in a New England college town, and after thirty years of marriage he is trying to find his way back to his wife Kiki. Their three grown children are each working out what they believe, and the family's arguments keep running into those of a conservative scholar who has just arrived in the same town with a family of his own.
Rating coming soonHarry Clifton grows up in Bristol expecting to work on the docks like his father and uncle, and he has one thing they did not: a voice good enough to be noticed. A choir mistress, a schoolteacher and an old soldier all take an interest in him, and the question of who his father really was follows him from the docks to a scholarship and a war.
Rating coming soonJackson Brodie is a former police inspector making a living as a private investigator in Cambridge, and three old family tragedies come to him at once: a little girl who vanished from a garden thirty years ago, a woman who killed her husband with an axe, and a solicitor's daughter murdered for no reason anybody can find.
Rating coming soonLuLing Young is in her eighties and beginning to lose her memory, so she writes down what she can remember of her life as a girl in China. Her daughter Ruth, who makes a living writing other people's books, arranges for the Chinese manuscript to be translated, and learns a version of her mother's history that she had never been given.
Rating coming soonLarry Cook is an ageing farmer in Iowa who decides to hand his thousand acres over to his three daughters, and when the youngest objects she is cut out of the arrangement. What follows is a legal quarrel inside a family that has kept its worst history to itself, told by the eldest daughter, Ginny, who has been keeping quiet for years.
Rating coming soonTom Wingo teaches and coaches football in South Carolina until his twin sister's third suicide attempt takes him to New York to talk to her psychiatrist. He tells the doctor the story of the family the two of them came from, and in doing so he describes a childhood on an island in the low country that neither of them has ever quite escaped.
Rating coming soonRosemary Cooke begins the story of her family in the middle, and she begins it by explaining that she was raised with a chimpanzee. Her father is a behavioural psychologist, the experiment was a long one, and the sister she grew up with was taken away. Rosemary is in her twenties before she can give an account of what her childhood did to all of them.
Rating coming soonHarriet and David Lovatt marry young, share a taste for the settled family life they cannot find elsewhere, and buy a large house with room for the children they intend to have. The first four arrive to general disapproval and private happiness. Then Ben is born, and the household that was built for a particular kind of contentment cannot hold him.
Rating coming soonThe Pontifex family rises over four generations from a small English village to wealth and respectability, and the novel is hardest on the version of that success that is built on piety and pretence. Ernest Pontifex, brought up by a clergyman father and a mother who watches appearances, is the one who has to work out how much of it he can live inside.
Rating coming soonRee Dolly is sixteen and lives in the Ozarks, where her father has put the family house up as bail and then disappeared on a charge of running a meth lab. If he fails to appear in court the house is lost, and she has two younger brothers to keep. To keep them she has to find a man the neighbours would rather she left alone.
Rating coming soonDaisy Goodwill Flett is born in Canada in 1905, and her mother dies a few hours later. What follows is an ordinary twentieth-century life told in ten chapters, through marriage, motherhood, work and widowhood, and through the accounts of other people who think they know what happened to her. The voice telling the story is not always her own.
Rating coming soonPaula Spencer is thirty-nine and tells her own story: her childhood in Dublin, the courtship that turned into an eighteen-year marriage, the violence inside it, and the year her husband was shot by the Guards. The excuse she gave for a bruise he caused gives the novel its title, and she is the one deciding what to say now.
Rating coming soonLyman Ward is a retired historian who uses a wheelchair and has lost touch with his son, and he decides to spend what time he has writing the story of his grandparents. Their letters describe a life spent on the frontier of the American west, and the work of reconstructing it makes him examine his own marriage at the same time.
Rating coming soonCarol Milford marries a doctor and moves with him to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, a small town she intends to improve. The town has its own opinions about a young woman with ideas, and the novel follows the years in which she tries to live there without giving up what she thinks, while the judgement of her neighbours follows her into everything she does.
Rating coming soonSelina Boyce is ten and lives with her Barbadian family in a brownstone in Brooklyn during the Depression. Her mother is saving to buy the house they rent, her father dreams of going back to Barbados, and Selina has to work out who she is going to be while the two of them pull in opposite directions.
Rating coming soonJulian English is a car dealer in a small Pennsylvania town, comfortably married and still inside the social circle he was born into, and in the course of three days he does everything necessary to destroy his position. The novel follows his own evening of recklessness and the town's reaction to it, hour by hour.
Rating coming soonEskibahçe is a village in south-western Anatolia where Greek Christians and Turkish Muslims have lived beside each other for centuries, speaking a mixture of both languages and sharing the same water, weddings and grief. Two children growing up there, Philothei and Ibrahim, fall in love, and the century that follows does not allow them to keep it.
Rating coming soonJohn Wade has just lost a campaign for the United States Senate, and he and his wife Kathy have gone to a lake in the Minnesota north woods to put themselves back together. One morning he wakes up and she is gone, and the novel sets out to establish what happened to her without ever settling the question.
Rating coming soonRajkumar is a poor boy in Burma when the British invade in 1885, and he is there when the royal family is taken out of their palace and sent into exile. He becomes friends with Dolly, one of the queen's attendants, and from that beginning he builds a life in the Burmese timber trade, and a family whose story runs through the century that follows.
Rating coming soonThree generations of the Brangwen family live in the Erewash Valley, on the border between Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, and the novel follows them from the 1840s to the beginning of the twentieth century. Each generation has its own way of loving, and each of them runs into the limits that the life around them sets.
Rating coming soonThe Jordache family lives in a small American town, and the novel follows three of the children from the end of the Second World War into the 1960s. Each of them pursues success on his own terms and pays for it differently, and the book is about what the country they grew up in promised them and what it took.
Rating coming soonLouisa Mae Cardinal is twelve and living in New York in the 1940s when a car accident kills her father and leaves her mother unable to look after anybody. She and her younger brother are sent to the Virginia mountains to live with a great-grandmother they hardly know, on a farm where the work is real and the neighbours have long memories.
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