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 7 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonLinden Hills is the neighbourhood a black family moves to when it has done everything right, and its best address is Tupelo Drive. Two young men come to work there over a Christmas holiday, one of them hoping to marry into the family that has owned the place for generations. The houses on Tupelo Drive come up for sale more often than anyone remarks on.
Rating coming soonKatie Carr is a doctor in London, married to David, who has spent years being furious about everything and has made a career out of it. She is also having an affair, and she has decided that the two facts balance out. Then David meets a healer, stops being angry and starts giving his money away, which is much harder to live with.
Rating coming soonTaylor Greer is raising the Cherokee child who was given to her years ago, and the two of them are getting by in Tucson. When Turtle appears on television and a lawyer starts asking questions, a tribal authority in Oklahoma disputes the adoption. Taylor takes her daughter to the Cherokee Nation to find out what the law and the family have to say.
Rating coming soonTambu is a Shona girl in Rhodesia in the 1960s whose older brother has just died, and whose ambition is to go to school. Her brother's death gives her the chance, because the family's money for education is now free for her to use. She goes to live with her uncle's household at a mission school, where she learns exactly what her education will cost.
Rating coming soonIn 1963 two young men, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, are hired to spend a summer herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. They have almost nothing in common and no reason to expect to meet again after the season ends. What begins on the mountain follows both of them through the next twenty years of their marriages and their work.
Rating coming soonSix friends speak in turn, from childhood to middle age, and the reader hears only their voices and their thoughts. Bernard tells stories, Susan wants a house and children, Rhoda cannot hold on to a self, Neville loves one man, Jinny lives in her body, and Louis measures himself against everyone. Between their soliloquies the sea moves through a single day.
Rating coming soonA young man in Bangalore sits in an old coffee shop and thinks about his family: the years of scarcity, the uncle whose spice business made them rich, the large house they moved into and what money did to everyone in it. He also thinks about the woman he let go. The phrase the book is named after was invented by his wife and her brother.
Rating coming soonDaniel 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.
Rating coming soonA tsunami leaves two sisters in coastal India orphaned, and a friend of their father offers to take them to safety. He sells them instead, and the older sister does what she can to protect the younger one in a brothel in Mumbai. On the other side of the world a lawyer takes a sabbatical with an organisation that prosecutes traffickers.
Rating coming soonThe 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.
Rating coming soonOliver Watson has a wife, three children and a career he is proud of, and he assumes the arrangement will hold. When Sarah leaves the marriage to go back to university, he is left to run a household he has never had to think about. In the same period his mother dies and his father begins to change.
Rating coming soonAnnie McGairy is eighteen and Carl Brown is twenty when they marry against the wishes of both their families, and Annie takes a train alone to the university town where Carl is studying law. They rent a room near the campus with very little money and no idea how to run a household. The novel covers their first year together.
Rating coming soonBarnaby Gaitlin is nearly thirty, divorced, and works for a company called Rent-a-Back, doing heavy chores for elderly clients. When he was seventeen he was caught burgling the neighbours' houses, and nobody in his philanthropic family has forgotten it. He is waiting for the family's guardian angel to appear to him, as it appeared to his great-grandfather.
Rating coming soonThe Mulvaneys are the family everyone in the small town of Mt. Ephraim admires: a thriving roofing business, four good-looking children and a farm outside town. On Valentine's night in 1976, after a school dance, the daughter of the family is raped by a boy whose father is a friend of her father's. Nothing in the family is the same afterwards.
Rating coming soonHarley Altmyer is nineteen and bringing up his three younger sisters in a coal town in western Pennsylvania, because his mother is in prison for killing their abusive father. He works two minimum-wage jobs and does the cooking and the laundry. He is also falling in love with a woman who lives down the road, and that is not the last secret in the family.
Rating coming soonAlice Goodwin and her husband left the city to run the last dairy farm in a small midwestern town, and six years later the farm is barely making money and her elder daughter is having rages nobody understands. One June morning a child drowns in the pond while Alice is responsible for her. The town's reaction divides the family's life in two.
Rating coming soonNariman Vakeel is seventy-nine, has Parkinson's disease, and lives in a decaying Bombay flat with his two middle-aged stepchildren. When he breaks an ankle, the burden of his care moves to his daughter Roxana and her husband Yezad, who are already short of money. The arrangement strains everyone it touches, and it turns a family held together by habit into one that has to decide what it owes.
Rating coming soonOn her twenty-first birthday Nell learns that she was adopted, that she was found on an Australian wharf in 1913 at the age of four, and that nobody ever discovered her name. The news rearranges her life. Sixty years later a set of clues sends her to Cornwall, to a house called Blackhurst Manor and to the author of a book of fairy tales.
Rating coming soonGrace 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.
Rating coming soonJasmine and Camelia Rasheed grow up after the Second World War in a mansion on Virgins of Paradise Street in Cairo, watched over by their grandmother and the women of the family. The city is glamorous and the household still keeps the rules their generation is beginning to question. Both sisters leave the family, in very different directions.
Rating coming soonShane Galanter is ready to settle somewhere after years of moving, and the woman he has never forgotten is on his mind. Lauren Gibbs has spent her working life as a war correspondent and has given up on the future she once wanted. Emily Anderson is a college student raised by her grandparents who discovers, in her first year, a love story with a tragic ending that turns out to be her own beginning.
Rating coming soonBirdie Lee and her sister Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother who met in the civil rights movement in Boston. Cole is taken for black and Birdie for white, and that difference decides what the family is allowed to be. When the marriage breaks apart and the parents believe federal agents are after them, Birdie and her mother take new names and disappear to a small town in New Hampshire.
Rating coming soonRuby, Oklahoma, is a town founded by freed slaves who wanted a place that was entirely their own, and for most of a century it has kept outsiders out. Seventeen miles away, in a mansion that once housed a school for Native American girls, a small group of women live in a way the town cannot tolerate. One morning in July 1976, nine men from Ruby walk into the Convent with guns.
Rating coming soonFramboise Simon comes back to Les Laveuses, the village on the Loire where she grew up, and opens a small restaurant there. Nobody recognises her as the daughter of the woman the village still blames for what happened during the German occupation, and she intends to keep it that way. In the scrapbook of recipes and notes her mother left her, she begins to find the record of one summer, and of a girl of nine who kept a secret from her family.
Rating coming soonIn the summer of 1953, Owen Meany hits a foul ball in a Little League game in Gravesend, New Hampshire, and kills the mother of his best friend, John Wheelwright. Owen is the smallest boy in town and his voice never broke. He is also certain that everything about him, including how and when he will die, has been arranged in advance, and he spends his childhood preparing for it.
Rating coming soonJohn Singer is deaf and mute and has shared a room with another deaf man, Spiros Antonapoulos, for ten years. When Antonapoulos is committed to an asylum, Singer moves alone into a boarding house in a mill town in Georgia. Four people in the town begin to visit his room and tell him their lives, and each of them is sure that he understands what nobody else does.
Rating coming soonSara Smolinsky is ten years old and lives with her parents and three older sisters in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the rent is almost always overdue. Her father studies the Torah and will not take a job to feed them, and her mother takes in boarders to keep the family in the room. Sara decides early that she will not live the way her sisters do.
Rating coming soonMary Thorne is the orphaned niece of the doctor in the village of Greshamsbury, and she has been a favourite at the great house since she was a child. When Lady Arabella discovers that her only son Frank is in love with her, Mary is banished from the house: the family's debts are so bad that Frank has to marry money, and Mary has none.
Rating coming soonNick Carraway takes a small house on Long Island for the summer of 1922, next door to a mansion where enormous parties are thrown by a man nobody seems to know. The host is Jay Gatsby, whose money has no visible source and who has spent years arranging to meet Nick's cousin Daisy, now married to a rich and careless man. Nick is drawn into the middle of it, and what he is told is not always the same as what he sees.
Rating coming soonAmy Dorrit was born and raised inside the Marshalsea, the London prison for debtors where her father has been held for so long that he has become one of its institutions. She sews for wages outside the walls to keep the family fed, and she thinks of the prison as home. Then Arthur Clennam comes back to England after twenty years abroad and begins asking about her family.
Rating coming soonNell 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.
Rating coming soonFanny Price is ten years old when her overburdened family in Portsmouth sends her to be raised at Mansfield Park by her wealthy aunt and uncle. Her cousins treat her as a dependant, and only Edmund is kind to her, so she learns to watch and to hold her tongue. The arrival of the fashionable Crawfords some years later gives her plenty to watch.
Rating coming soonAnne Elliot is twenty-seven and unmarried, and her father is renting out the family estate to reduce his debts. When she was nineteen she was engaged to a naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, and her friends and family persuaded her to break it off because he had no fortune. The new tenants are his sister and her husband, so he will be visiting, and nobody in the family has thought about what that will mean for Anne.
Rating coming soonThe Compsons of Mississippi owned land once, and the family has been living on the reputation of it for a generation. There are four children, and the slow collapse of their household reaches the reader in four separate accounts that disagree with each other, most of them tangled around a single weekend in 1928 and the loss of a sister called Caddy.
Rating coming soonAntonio Márez y Luna is six years old when the curandera Ultima comes to live with his family in rural New Mexico, near the end of the Second World War. She becomes his teacher and his protector, and she shows him a knowledge of herbs, weather and dreams that the church in the village will not admit to having. His parents have different plans for his future.
Rating coming soonWillie Stark comes out of a poor farming family in Louisiana and ends up in the governor's mansion, and the people who made him and the people who stand in his way learn what he is prepared to do. Jack Burden, a reporter from one of the old families, works for him and watches. Years later, Jack tries to explain his part in it.
Rating coming soonAnnie John grows up in Antigua in a house where her mother is the centre of everything, and for years the two of them are inseparable. Then Annie becomes a teenager, and the closeness turns into something harder to live with. The novel follows her through school, through an illness, and towards the ship that will take her away from the island.
Rating coming soonBenny Profane has just left the navy and wants nothing more than to drift through New York with the artists and hangers-on he calls the Whole Sick Crew. Herbert Stencil, who does want something, is trying to identify a woman known only as V., whose name appears in the journals his father kept as a diplomat before the war. Their two stories are told in alternating runs.
Rating coming soonGeorge F. Babbitt is a real estate broker in his late forties in the Midwestern city of Zenith, and he has everything a man in his position is supposed to want: the house, the car, the clubs, the business contacts and the opinions. He is also restless. When his closest friend does something that upsets the arrangement of his life, Babbitt begins to look for something else.
Rating coming soonTony Webster is retired, divorced and on reasonable terms with his daughter, and he has spent decades not thinking about his school friends. Then a solicitor's letter arrives and the past requires his attention: a bequest from someone he barely knew, a diary he is not allowed to read, and a version of events he has been repeating for forty years without checking.
Rating coming soonCharles 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.
Rating coming soonIn the early 1950s there is no work for Eilis Lacey in her Irish town, and a visiting priest arranges a job and lodgings for her in New York. She sails alone, works the floor of a department store, takes night classes in bookkeeping and lives in a boarding house run by a woman who misses nothing. Then she meets Tony Fiorello at a dance.
Rating coming soonIt is July 1962, and Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting have been married since the morning. He is a history graduate who wants to be a writer; she is a violinist in a string quartet and the daughter of parents with firm ideas about the world. They have dinner in their hotel room on the Dorset coast, and both of them are thinking about the same thing.
Rating coming soonJacob Flanders grows up in pre-war England, goes to Cambridge, reads whatever he can find and later moves to London, and the reader learns almost nothing about him directly. He is assembled out of what other people notice: his mother's letters, the impressions of the women who fall in and out of his life, and the rooms he leaves behind.
Rating coming soonNicholas 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.
Rating coming soonMaurice Bendrix is a writer in London, and he is telling the story of an affair he had during the war with Sarah Miles, the wife of a civil servant he has counted as a friend. He is telling it because she has died, and because he wants to know what happened in the months when he was sure she had left him for someone else.
Rating coming soonMacon Leary writes travel guides for businessmen who hate travelling, and he dislikes it himself, which is part of why the books work. His son has been killed in a shooting at a fast-food restaurant, his wife has moved out, and his own dog has put him in hospital. He goes back to the family house in Baltimore to be looked after.
Rating coming soonWalls of ice are advancing across the world, and governments are losing the argument with the weather. A man who may be a narrator or may be several narrators is looking for a girl: pale, silent, and always being taken somewhere else by someone with more authority. The same search happens over and over, in different cities and with different outcomes, and the ice keeps coming.
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