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 4 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonJohnny O'Brien, better known as White Folks, learned to use his light skin to work the Chicago con game, and he is finished with small money. With his mentor Blue dead and the city used up, he takes his polished act north, where a crew of grifters is assembling around a long con and the stakes are counted in thousands.
Rating coming soonWhite Folks is the son of a Black woman working the streets and a white man, and his complexion is light enough to pass. Blue Howard, an older hustler, raises him and teaches him the con, and together the two of them work the gap between Black and white Philadelphia for everything the marks are willing to hand over.
Rating coming soonIn New Orleans in 1891, the Morningstar children, each of them named by their father after a disease, are growing up in a city of voodoo, race and class, and of a music that is only just being invented. Something older and angrier than any of them is loose in their lives, and the family will have to reckon with it.
Rating coming soonThe Potter family owns a newspaper empire, and Mrs Potter writes the romantic novelettes that fill the shop-girls' magazines the firm prints. She has lost the ability to tell her own inventions from fact, and when her son-in-law is murdered she goes to a medium for the truth, with consequences for everybody in the family business.
Rating coming soonMariam is an illegitimate teenager from Herat, married off to a shoemaker in Kabul after a family tragedy. A generation later Laila grows up in the same city with more than Mariam ever had, until a loss of her own forces her to accept a proposal from Mariam's husband, and the two women's lives become one story. Around them the country they live in is being remade by war.
Rating coming soonHarrison William Shepherd is born in the United States and grows up in his mother's Mexico, where he mixes plaster for the mural painter Diego Rivera and then cooks for Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo. He also works as a secretary for Leon Trotsky during his exile, and the politics he witnesses there follow him north.
Rating coming soonJacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader making his living on the edges of colonial America when he accepts a young girl, Florens, from a debtor in place of payment and takes her home to his farm. His wife Rebekka came from England to marry a man she had never met, and the household they make is one of people who have all lost the places they came from.
Rating coming soonKing David of Israel is old, close to death and in no mood to make his memoirs tidy. He remembers the sheep, the prophet Samuel, the giant Goliath, Saul and Jonathan, Bathsheba and the arrangements around her, and the children whose quarrels he could never settle, and he argues with God about all of it.
Rating coming soonNed Kelly writes the story of his own life for the child he will never meet, beginning with his father, an Irishman transported to Van Diemen's Land and settled in the colony of Victoria. From the family's farm at Avenel to the years on the run, the account is Kelly's own, and it is written for a country that never stopped arguing about him.
Rating coming soonJody Tiflin is ten years old and lives on his father's ranch, where the work is hard, the grown men are mostly busy and the days have a shape he has grown used to. Then he is given a red pony of his own, and looking after it teaches him things about birth, illness and death that the ranch hands could not have explained to him.
Rating coming soonIris Chase is an old woman looking back at the death of her sister Laura more than fifty years earlier, and she tells the story of two sisters raised in a small Ontario town who grew up into very different lives. Inside her account there is another book, a novel about a secret affair and a writer of pulp science fiction, and nobody agrees about who wrote it.
Rating coming soonA world economic crisis leaves a small, mismatched group of people shipwrecked on a fictional island in the Galapagos, and then a disease makes every other human on the planet infertile. The survivors are the only fertile people left, and the novel follows their descendants across the next million years from the point of view of a ghost watching it all.
Rating coming soonHenry Smart is born in the Dublin slums in 1901, the son of a one-legged whorehouse bouncer, and he has to grow up fast because the city gives him no other option. He is in the General Post Office during the Easter Rising as a boy soldier, and he carries what he learns there into the guerrilla war that follows.
Rating coming soonFour friends meet at college in New York and stay in one another's lives for the decades that follow: Jude, a lawyer with a history he refuses to discuss; Willem, an actor; JB, an artist; and Malcolm, an architect. The novel follows them into middle age, and as it goes on its attention narrows onto Jude, whose past is the one thing his friends have never been able to reach.
Rating coming soonLaura Ingalls lives with her Ma and Pa, her older sister Mary and the baby Carrie in an isolated log cabin in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, where the nearest neighbour is miles away and the family lives off what it can grow, hunt and preserve. The book follows a year of that life, from the work of autumn through a winter spent almost entirely in the cabin.
Rating coming soonWhen Mr Dashwood dies, the estate passes to his son by his first marriage, and his second wife and three daughters are left with very little to live on. Taken in by a distant relative, Elinor and Marianne must each find their way in a world where a woman's marriage is the only security available, and where feeling and prudence pull the two sisters in opposite directions.
Rating coming soonCal Stephanides begins the story of his own life with his grandparents, a brother and sister who left a village in Asia Minor and ended up in Detroit as a married couple. A mutated gene runs through the family into the third generation, where it makes itself known in a child raised as a girl, and the novel is the account that child gives of how it happened.
Rating coming soonClarissa Dalloway goes out to buy flowers on a June morning in London and spends the rest of the day preparing for a party she is giving that evening. As she moves through the city, her thoughts run backwards and forwards over her life, and the people she passes, including a shell-shocked veteran, are drawn into the same day in their own minds.
Rating coming soonIn Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb laid out according to a plan in which every detail was decided in advance, the Richardson family owns an apartment they rent to a woman who is not like them. Mia Warren is an artist who has moved from place to place with her teenage daughter, and the arrival of the two of them sets off something the neighbours cannot control.
Rating coming soonWilliam Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a poor farming family in Missouri and sent to the state university to study agriculture. In an English course he encounters a Shakespeare sonnet, understands something about his own life that he had never suspected before, changes his course of study without telling his parents, and becomes a teacher of literature.
Rating coming soonAn engineer spending the winter in the New England town of Starkfield notices a limping man named Ethan Frome and asks the neighbours about him. What he learns opens the story of how Frome was injured, and of the years he spent on a failing farm with a wife who was constantly ill and a cousin who came to help in the house.
Rating coming soonRachel Chu, who teaches in New York and was raised by a single mother, agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend and meet his family. She is expecting a quiet visit with traditional relatives, and what she finds is an older and far wealthier world than she knew existed, with a grandmother who has strong opinions about who her grandson should marry.
Rating coming soonEsperanza Cordero is a twelve-year-old girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, and the house her family has bought on Mango Street is not the house she was promised. Over the course of a year she watches the people in her neighbourhood and the women in her own family, and she works out what she wants for herself and what she intends to leave behind.
Rating coming soonAnna Fitzgerald is thirteen, and she was conceived so that her blood could be used to treat her older sister's leukaemia. When she is told that she will now have to give Kate one of her kidneys, Anna goes looking for a lawyer and sues her own parents for the right to decide what may and may not be done with her body.
Rating coming soonKambili Achike is fifteen and lives in a large house in Nigeria, in a family whose standing rests on her father's success as a businessman and on his reputation for generosity and Catholic devotion. At home he rules his wife and children with violence, and it takes a visit to her aunt's house for Kambili to see that another kind of life exists.
Rating coming soonAlfred and Enid Lambert have raised three children in a Midwestern suburb, and Alfred is slipping into Parkinson's disease and dementia while Enid decides that the family should spend one more Christmas together. Their children are spread across the country and occupied with the lives they have built, and every one of them is dealing with something they have not told their parents about.
Rating coming soonQuoyle is thirty-six, a third-rate newspaperman in upstate New York, and his life comes apart when his wife dies in a car accident with another man. His aunt persuades him to take his two daughters to the ancestral family home on the coast of Newfoundland, where he finds work at a small local paper and begins to make a life out of the wreckage.
Rating coming soonThe Ramsay family spend their summers in a house on the coast of Scotland, and the question of whether the weather will allow a trip to the lighthouse nearby is the small argument the book begins with. Around that unhurried plan, the family, its guests and its eight children are seen through their own thoughts, and then through the years that follow.
Rating coming soonIn the provincial town of Middlemarch, in the years around the Reform Act of 1832, Dorothea Brooke marries a scholar she believes will give her a life of useful work, and Tertius Lydgate arrives as a new doctor with plans to reform the medicine of the town. Both of those ambitions meet the expectations of a community in which everyone knows everyone else's business.
Rating coming soonOn New Year's Day 1975, a middle-aged Englishman called Archie Jones tries to kill himself in his car and is interrupted by a man delivering meat. He marries a woman much younger than himself, and his friendship with Samad Iqbal, whom he served with during the war, joins two families and three cultures across the decades that follow them into the present day.
Rating coming soonA young widow called Helen Graham arrives at Wildfell Hall, an Elizabethan mansion that has stood empty for years, with her small son and one servant. She keeps to herself, sells her paintings for money and refuses to explain her past, and the village decides that a woman living like that must be hiding something, until the man who falls in love with her learns the truth.
Rating coming soonCaptain Charles Ryder's battalion is sent during the last years of the Second World War to a country house he knows well, and the sight of it takes him back over twenty years. He remembers being drawn into the Flyte family, wealthy English Catholics living in a palatial mansion, and his friendships with two of them, Lord Sebastian and Lady Julia.
Rating coming soonAn insurance agent named Robert Smith jumps from the roof of a hospital trying to fly, and the crowd that gathers to watch includes a pregnant woman who goes into labour. Her son becomes the first African American child born in that hospital, and the novel follows him from childhood into a search for the family history his parents have never explained.
Rating coming soonTess Durbeyfield is sixteen, the eldest child of a haggler in a poor rural family, when the local parson tells her father that his surname is a corruption of d'Urberville and that he is descended from an ancient Norman family. Her father celebrates by drinking, the family's wagon crashes on the road to market, and the loss of their horse starts everything that follows.
Rating coming soonIn the late summer and autumn of 1952, seven-year-old Luke Chandler picks cotton on his family's farm in rural Arkansas alongside hired Mexican workers and a family of hill people from the Ozarks. His family is in debt and the harvest has to pay for the whole year, and over the months that follow Luke sees and hears things that the adults around him would far rather he had not.
Rating coming soonAgnes Grey is the younger daughter of a clergyman whose attempt to improve the family's fortunes leaves them poorer than before, and she decides that she will support herself as a governess. What follows is a series of positions in gentry households where the children are ungovernable, the parents careless and her own position somewhere between a servant and a guest.
Rating coming soonIn 1956, the Reverend John Ames of Gilead, Iowa, is seventy-six years old and knows that a heart condition will kill him before long. He begins a letter to his seven-year-old son, who will grow up with almost no memory of him, and the letter becomes the account of his own life and of the three generations of preachers before him.
Rating coming soonTaylor Greer leaves her home in Kentucky and heads west to see something of the country. In Oklahoma, near Cherokee territory, a stranger puts a baby girl into her car and disappears, and Taylor decides to keep the child, drives on until the car breaks down in Tucson, Arizona, and starts a life there with the help of people she meets by accident.
Rating coming soonWinnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years, and now Helen, who believes that she is dying, wants to bring everything into the open. Winnie's answer is that she will tell her American-born daughter, Pearl, about her own past, including the part of her life in China that she has never once discussed.
Rating coming soonRufus Scott is a jazz drummer in New York, and by the end of the first chapter he is dead by his own hand. What follows concerns the friends and lovers he left behind, among them a white southerner, a woman who loved him and a magazine editor's family, and the book follows all of them between Greenwich Village, Harlem and France.
Rating coming soonAddie Bundren is dying in a farmhouse in Mississippi while her eldest son builds her coffin outside the window. When she dies, her husband and children set out to carry the body to the town where she wants to be buried, and the journey takes them through flood, fire and the opinions of everyone they meet.
Rating coming soonAnthony Comstock Patch is a Harvard-educated young man with artistic ambitions and a substantial inheritance he has not yet received, and Gloria Gilbert is a celebrated beauty of the New York social scene. They marry into a life of parties, hotels and borrowed money, and spend the years of the Jazz Age waiting for the money that is supposed to make it all permanent.
Rating coming soonPaul Morel grows up in a mining family in the English Midlands, the son of a woman who married beneath the class she was raised in and a father who drinks and works underground. His mother turns her hopes and her possessiveness towards her sons, and Paul's attempts to love two very different women are made impossible by the bond he cannot break.
Rating coming soonMassoud Behrani is a former colonel in the Iranian air force who fled his country after the revolution, works in America at jobs far beneath his old life and hides the fact from the other exiles. Kathy Nicolo has been evicted from the house her family owned, because of unpaid taxes the county wrongly claimed she owed, and both of them want the same small bungalow.
Rating coming soonHarry Angstrom is twenty-six, a former high school basketball star who now sells a kitchen gadget called the MagiPeeler, and he is married to Janice, who is pregnant. They live in a small town near Brewer, Pennsylvania, with a two-year-old son, and one evening Harry gets into his car and drives away from all of it.
Rating coming soonIn the spring of 1984, two high school students in the small town of Oriental, North Carolina, fall in love. Amanda Collier and Dawson Cole come from opposite sides of the town and the difference between their families is not something either of them can ignore, and the years that follow take the two of them into separate lives far from where they began.
Rating coming soonTom and Maggie Tulliver grow up at Dorlcote Mill on the River Floss, near the village of St Ogg's in Lincolnshire. Maggie is clever and hungry for affection, and her brother Tom is the one sent away to be educated and given authority in the family, and the difference in what is expected of the two of them shapes everything that happens between the brother and sister.
Rating coming soonPaul is a lonely student at the University of Toronto who gives some tablets to band members he was hoping to befriend, one of whom dies shortly afterwards, and who then flees to the apartment of his half-sister Vincent. Five years later the two of them are working at a hotel at the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island, where a line of graffiti written on the lobby window with an acid marker is discovered. Vincent meets the investor who owns the hotel, and the book follows what that meeting costs everyone connected to him.
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