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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Rating coming soonAugustus Melmotte arrives in London with a foreign accent and an enormous fortune, and London society decides to take him at his own valuation. He buys a seat in Parliament, entertains an emperor and arranges marriages for his daughter among families who need money more than they will admit. The question the novel keeps asking is how much of what he claims to own actually exists.
Rating coming soonNew York in 2001, in the months before the attack on the World Trade Center. Maxine Tarnow, a former fraud examiner, is asked to look into the finances of a computer security company run by a billionaire, and finds figures that do not add up, payments going to a website that no longer exists, and men following her who do not want to be noticed.
Rating coming soonDarashikoh Shezad is a banker in Lahore with a temper. An outburst gets him dismissed, his income disappears, and the distance between him and the wealthy friends he grew up with becomes visible to him for the first time. His best friend's wife, Mumtaz, becomes his lover, and he begins a descent into drugs and crime.
Rating coming soonArthur Less is a novelist of middling success in San Francisco, about to turn fifty, and he has just received an invitation to the wedding of a former lover. Rather than attend, he accepts every literary invitation he has spent years declining and leaves the country, which means travelling around the world in the company of his own habits and his unfinished manuscript.
Rating coming soonLarry Darrell comes back from the First World War a different man. He had been a pilot, and a friend died beside him, and the experience has taken away his interest in the life of comfortable Chicago that his fiancee and his friends expect him to settle into. He goes looking instead for an answer to a question he cannot state plainly.
Rating coming soonJohn Merlyn is a writer who spends too much time at the tables in Las Vegas and in the company of people who make their living in Hollywood and in publishing. He and his brother Artie live by a code of their own in a country where, in the circles they move through, the law and organised crime are often the same trade.
Rating coming soonSalamanca Hiddle's mother has left home, and Sal sets off on a long car journey with her grandparents, retracing the route her mother took towards Idaho. As they travel she tells them the story of her friend Phoebe, whose mother also left and whose family coped in its own way, and the two stories begin to run alongside each other.
Rating coming soonA light aircraft bound for the Galapagos Islands ditches into the sea, and the zoologist on board, Daniel Kennedy, has to decide whether to save himself or the woman he is with. In a second story set in 1917, his great-grandfather Andrew is preparing to go over the top at Passchendaele and will be tested in the same way.
Rating coming soonIn 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.
Rating coming soonAn old stone prison, seen through the eyes of a man on death row who survives it by reading and by imagining the world around him in brighter colours than it has. Into this place comes an investigator whose job is to dig up the history of the men waiting to be executed, and she finds information that unsettles the distinctions she has relied on.
Rating coming soonVern Riley grows up inside the Blessed Gardens of Cain, a Black separatist community where she is made to marry its leader and where she comes to believe that the visions the members suffer are not religious at all. She leaves, has her children alone in the woods, and finds that her body is changing in ways she cannot explain.
Rating coming soonA train called the Lucky Day is carrying a small party of passengers through a country that is not quite the one they boarded in. The narrator and his partner are along for a holiday they did not plan in detail, and the journey they get is stranger than the one they thought they had booked.
Rating coming soonMax moves with his German parents to Alabama, where the heat, the food and the religion are all unfamiliar to him and where he is taken up by the school football team. He learns to catch a ball, to handle a gun and to keep his own secrets, and then he meets Pan, the boy the school calls its witch.
Rating coming soonMakeda and Abby were born conjoined, daughters of a celestial demigod and a human woman, and were separated by surgery when they were small. Abby has the family's magic and Makeda does not, and the two sisters, now adults, are growing apart, which is why Makeda decides to move out and try to live as an ordinary person.
Rating coming soonPerdita Lee looks like an ordinary schoolgirl in London and her mother Harriet looks like an ordinary working mother, which is not quite the case for either of them. Their family keeps a recipe for gingerbread that hardly anybody in London appreciates and that is very well known indeed in Harriet's home country, which most accounts say does not exist.
Rating coming soonAlexis Spencer is having the sort of year in which she loses her job and her relationship on the same day, and she blames the world for it, including the younger version of herself who should have tried harder. Then she finds a bottle of vodka from her college days and wakes up in the year 2002.
Rating coming soonLaila wants a child and has lost every pregnancy she has carried, so she goes to the Melancons, an old and powerful Harlem family whose healing power comes from a caul that they keep and do not share. The deal she hopes for falls through, and the events that follow bring a baby into the family by another route.
Rating coming soonNeil Narayan grows up in the Atlanta suburbs with parents whose expectations of him are as high as the ones they have for his perfect older sister. What he wants is the girl across the cul-de-sac, Anita Dayal, and Anita has a secret: she and her mother have been brewing an alchemical potion out of stolen gold that carries the ambition of whoever owned it.
Rating coming soonGretel grew up on a canal boat with her mother, and the two of them made a language that belonged to nobody else. She has not seen her mother since she was sixteen, and she works now as a lexicographer, which suits a woman who lives alone. A telephone call from a hospital sends her back to the vocabulary and the river she left behind.
Rating coming soonHumphrey Van Weyden is a literary critic whose ferry collides with another vessel in the fog, and he is picked out of the water by the crew of a sealing ship. The captain who rescues him, Wolf Larsen, is a man of enormous physical strength and no moral restraint whatsoever, and he has no intention of putting his guest ashore.
Rating coming soonJim is a young British seaman with a romantic idea of the life he means to lead, and an early voyage gives him the chance to prove it. It goes the other way: he and the rest of the officers abandon a passenger ship in distress, the ship does not sink, and the crew are publicly condemned for leaving eight hundred people aboard.
Rating coming soonIn the early 1950s an eleven-year-old boy boards a ship in Colombo, bound for England, travelling on his own. At meals he is seated at the cat's table, the one furthest from the captain's, with two other boys and a collection of adults the rest of the passengers have no use for, and over three weeks at sea the three of them find out what is on board.
Rating coming soonIn the Judean desert, about two thousand years ago, five travellers are strung out along the road that a caravan took earlier that morning: three men, a woman, and someone too far behind for anyone to guess at, walking barefoot with no staff, no water and no food. They are all going into the wilderness for their own reasons, and the heat is the least of what they will find there.
Rating coming soonNhamo is eleven and lives in a Shona village in Mozambique, in a country in the middle of a war she only half understands. When a cholera epidemic and a proposed marriage to a man she does not want leave her with nothing to stay for, she takes her grandmother's blessing, some gold nuggets and a small boat, and sets out alone.
Rating coming soonDon Tillman is a professor of genetics who has decided that the time has come to find a wife, and being a scientist he approaches the problem the way he approaches everything else: with a sixteen-page questionnaire designed to screen out drinkers, smokers and anyone who arrives late. Then he meets Rosie Jarman, who fails every item on the list.
Rating coming soonJakarta, 1965. An Australian journalist, a Chinese-Australian photographer and a British diplomat are thrown together in the Indonesian capital in the summer and autumn of a year that ends in a coup attempt. Each of them is in the country for his own reasons, and each of them is being used for somebody else's.
Rating coming soonHenry Skrimshander is a shortstop at a small college on the shore of Lake Michigan who seems certain to play professionally, until a routine throw goes off course and the lives of five people around him change. The college president, the team captain, Henry's roommate and the president's daughter all have something at stake in what happens next.
Rating coming soonKorede is a nurse in Lagos, sensible and used to cleaning up after her younger sister Ayoola, who is the favourite child, the beautiful one, and in the habit of killing her boyfriends. Three of them have died now, and it is Korede who arrives with the bleach and the large car boot while Ayoola goes about her ordinary business.
Rating coming soonNine-year-old David has lost his mother in an accident, and he has moved with his father and grandmother from Minnesota to Pennsylvania. Primrose is thirteen, cynical and bossy, and lives with her fortune-telling mother in a house where she is mostly left alone. The two of them meet at an Easter egg hunt neither of them wants to attend.
Rating coming soonEric Packer is twenty-eight and very rich. One morning he gets into a white stretch limousine that has been fitted out as an office and gives his driver an instruction: he wants a haircut, and the barber he uses is on the other side of Manhattan. Between his apartment and the barber's chair there is a presidential motorcade, a protest and a funeral.
Rating coming soonOne autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen-year-old Luisa does not go home from school. She gets on a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomas, a boy she hardly knows, partly because he seems to represent everything missing from her life and partly because he may help her find a troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs who have walked out of a Soviet circus touring Mexico.
Rating coming soonA small group of teenagers is hiding in the bush while an unnamed foreign power occupies their part of Australia. They have already lost two of their number and do not know what has become of either of them, and in this second summer of the war they decide that they have to find out, which means going back into the town they escaped from.
Rating coming soonCal and Frida have left the wreckage of Los Angeles behind them and live in a shack in the wilderness in northern California, farming and foraging and getting by. Their arrangement works, narrowly, until Frida discovers she is pregnant, and the two of them have to decide whether to raise a child alone in the woods or look for other people.
Rating coming soonIn the South American republic of Costaguana, a long history of tyranny and revolution has been interrupted by a spell of order, and an English-born mine owner is determined to keep his silver concession working. When the country rises again, the question becomes what happens to the silver, and who will be trusted to carry it.
Rating coming soonMaximilian Ophuls, once the United States ambassador to India, is murdered in Los Angeles by the man who used to drive his car. The novel goes back from that killing to the village in Kashmir where the killer grew up, to the tightrope walker he once was, and to the American daughter whose life was bound up with both of them.
Rating coming soonIn 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.
Rating coming soonSeven characters, most of them in Los Angeles and one of them in Mexico, are followed through a single week in which the city's freeways seize up, a package arrives at the airport and a man who used to be a doctor conducts the traffic from an overpass as though it were music.
Rating coming soonOn board a warship in the last years of the eighteenth century, a young sailor known to the whole crew as the handsome sailor is pressed into service and makes friends of almost everyone aboard. The one man who cannot bear him is the master-at-arms, and what follows destroys them both. The ship is a world of its own, and the trouble that comes to it comes from inside.
Rating coming soonCaptain MacWhirr takes the steamer Nan-Shan out of port with a cargo and a crew who do not much like him, and runs her straight into a tropical cyclone. He is a dull man with no imagination, his first mate has already advised him to change course, and MacWhirr sees no reason to alter any of his arrangements.
Rating coming soonA young Irish woman called Brida has been interested in magic for as long as she can remember, and what she is looking for now is something the books she has read cannot give her. Her search brings her to two teachers, a wise man who lives in a forest and a woman who knows how to dance to the music of the world.
Rating coming soonYu Yuan is a young Chinese officer sent to Korea as one of the volunteers Mao contributed to the Communist side, and he is captured by United Nations forces. Because he knows some English he becomes the unofficial interpreter in the psychological warfare that runs through the prison camp, and the book is his memoir of what happened to him there. It is the camp, and the men in it, that the book is really about.
Rating coming soonA pregnant white woman arrives in a Mississippi town on foot, looking for the father of the child she is carrying, and a man who passes as white but believes himself to be of mixed ancestry is living in the same part of the country. The book follows the two of them and the people they are connected to. The town they are in has its own opinions about both of them.
Rating coming soonA famous novelist who has not been seen in public for years is working on a book that he refuses to finish, and the people around him are not sure he ever will. When a writer is taken hostage in Lebanon, he leaves the house he has been living in and goes to see whether he can do anything about it.
Rating coming soonA retired professor of classics in his seventies is accused of racism by two students after he uses a word they take as a racial insult, and the uproar ends his career. The writer who lives nearby and becomes his neighbour is the one who tells the story of what happened. What the neighbours make of him is only part of it.
Rating coming soonA man who is recovering from an emotional collapse caused by a sleeping pill travels to Israel to interview a writer, and learns while he is there that somebody with his own face and his own name has been passing himself off as him. What follows is partly an intelligence operation and partly a story about identity.
Rating coming soonAn unnamed woman in an Ohio town makes pies and tarts to sell to local restaurants while she looks after her four children, and the novel is made out of what goes on in her mind while she does it. It is written mostly as a single long sentence that runs for a thousand pages. Her thoughts are as ordinary as anybody's, and they go on for a very long time.
Rating coming soonA banker from the Netherlands finds himself living in the Chelsea Hotel in New York after his English wife takes their son back to London, and he is at loose ends in a city he had come to think of as home. Then he comes across a game of cricket, and through it a friendship that changes things. Cricket, it turns out, is one way of belonging to the city.
Rating coming soonOn an island in Puget Sound, where the people make their living from salmon fishing and strawberry farming, a Japanese American fisherman is on trial for the murder of a fellow fisherman. It is 1954, the war is recent, and the internment of Japanese Americans during it hangs over the courtroom. The case turns on what the islanders remember and what they would rather not.
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