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 6 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonAddie Moore and Louis Waters are neighbours in a small town on the Colorado plains, and both of them are widowed and living alone. Addie asks Louis whether he would come and sleep in her bed at night, for the company rather than anything else, and the arrangement they make changes the last part of both their lives.
Rating coming soonHerman Broder survived the war in Poland because a servant in his father's household hid him, and he married her afterwards out of the obligation he felt. In New York he also has a mistress he loves and a wife who was reported dead and has now come back, and he spends his days telling each of them what is convenient.
Rating coming soonJanuary Wayne is twenty-one when she comes back to New York after nearly three years in a hospital in Switzerland, and the city she left has moved on without her. Her father is a film producer she adores, the people around him are not what they say they are, and she has to find out what she wants now that she is well.
Rating coming soonPenelope Keeling is in her sixties, has just come out of hospital and is recovering at the house in Cornwall where she grew up. She is the daughter of a painter and his much younger French wife, and the novel moves between her present and the years of her marriage, the war and the raising of her three children.
Rating coming soonRachel Samstat is a food writer, seven months pregnant and married to a man whose politics she has been following in print, and she finds out during a dinner party that he is in love with somebody else. What follows is the dismantling of the marriage, told by somebody who knows exactly how absurd it is.
Rating coming soonTrixie Stone is a freshman at a small college when she accuses her former boyfriend of raping her at a party, and the town decides that it does not believe her. Her father is a comic book artist with a violent childhood behind him, her mother is having an affair with one of her students, and neither of them is in a position to give her what she needs.
Rating coming soonBilly Abbott is a teenager at a school in Vermont, where he develops feelings for the wrong people and begins the long process of working out who he is. He tells his own story across more than half a century, through a New England town, a library, a theatre, and the years in which people like him were much less safe than they are now.
Rating coming soonThe narrator of the novel looks back over the fortunes of his family, whose businesses and quarrels span the modern history of India, and whose story includes early deaths, forgotten loves and the various ways that money and power can be made and lost. He tells it from the position of a man whose own life is nearly over.
Rating coming soonThe Warden is the first of the Chronicles of Barsetshire. Septimus Harding, a gentle widower, is warden of Hiram's Hospital, an almshouse funded by a medieval bequest, and lives comfortably on its income with his younger daughter Eleanor. Then a young reformer starts asking who the charity really serves, and how much of it reaches the twelve old men it was meant for.
Rating coming soonBarchester Towers continues the story of Mr Harding and his daughter Eleanor. The old bishop has died, and the patronage that everyone expected to pass to Archdeacon Grantly goes instead to the Evangelical Bishop Proudie, whose wife manages both the diocese and her husband. The new bishop's chaplain, Mr Slope, has ambitions of his own, and the town has opinions about all of them.
Rating coming soonMary Barton is set in Manchester among mill workers and mill owners in the hungry forties. Mary, the daughter of a disillusioned trade unionist, turns down the working-class man who loves her in the hope of marrying the mill owner's son, and then finds herself at the centre of a murder case that puts her lover in the dock.
Rating coming soonIt is Natalie's first year of college, her first real time away from home, and she is not sure how to be an adult without anyone showing her the way. Nora is older, a little mysterious and entirely unknown to her. They are drawn to each other for different reasons, and both of them are carrying secrets.
Rating coming soonRosie Carpe arrives in Guadeloupe with her five-year-old son, pregnant and looking for her brother Lazare, who has been missing for five years. The man who comes to meet her calls himself Lagrand and may or may not be the brother she remembers, and her parents have turned up on the island as well, behaving strangely.
Rating coming soonDellarobia Turnbow is twenty-eight, married, poor and discontented, and one afternoon she sets off up the mountain to begin an affair. What she finds instead stops her in her tracks: an enormous population of butterflies, settling where they have no business being. The discovery changes her marriage and her village.
Rating coming soonGeorge Talboys comes home from the Australian goldfields to the wife and baby he left behind three years earlier, and learns that his wife is dead. He is drawn into the household of a friend's future family, and he and his companion begin to wonder about Lady Audley, whose past nobody can account for and whose composure seems harder to explain the longer they look.
Rating coming soonSquire Dale is an embittered old bachelor established in the Great House at Allington, and his sister-in-law lives with her two daughters in the Small House next door. The novel concerns the relations between the two houses and the courtship of Lily and Bell Dale, one of whom is loved by a man she does not want.
Rating coming soonIsma Pasha has spent years raising her younger siblings in London after their mother died, and an invitation from a mentor in America gives her the chance of a life of her own. She cannot stop worrying about her sister Aneeka or her brother Parvaiz, who has gone abroad to prove himself to the legacy of the father he never knew.
Rating coming soonLionel Burger is a white South African doctor sentenced to life imprisonment for organising political resistance to apartheid, and the novel follows his daughter Rosa. She has grown up inside the movement, and after her father's death she has to decide what her own life is for when the cause no longer gives her an identity.
Rating coming soonWillow O'Keefe is born with osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease, which means hundreds of broken bones and a lifetime of pain. As the family struggles to cover medical costs, her mother Charlotte considers a wrongful birth lawsuit against the obstetrician who cared for her in pregnancy, a case that would require her to say in court that she would have terminated.
Rating coming soonDuring the Blitz, Elizabeth White is sent from London to the small Irish town of Kilgarret, where she meets Aisling O'Connor and her crowded household. The two become best friends, and the novel follows them for three decades of marriages, children and disappointments, through the sort of trouble that only a friend would ever be told about.
Rating coming soonBret Ellis, the narrator of this novel, is the author whose first book made him famous while he was still at college. After years of wealth, drugs and grief he tries to build a family life with a former partner and their son, and a series of bizarre events and murders connects everything happening to him back to his own past.
Rating coming soonOn a windy afternoon in the Chilterns, Joe Rose's ordered life is interrupted by a ballooning accident and by a brief encounter with a stranger called Jed Parry. Nothing much passes between them at the time. In Parry it gives rise to an obsession powerful enough to test Joe's rational certainties and the love of his wife.
Rating coming soonMark Robarts is a young clergyman with a good living at Framley and ambitions above his income. His father is a physician with no private money but a lucrative practice, and Mark's education has given him a taste for company he cannot afford, which is how he comes to accept the wrong kind of help from the wrong kind of man.
Rating coming soonPaul and Rochelle Isaacson are tried and executed for passing secrets to a foreign power, and their children Daniel and Susan are left to grow up in the glare of the case. The novel is Daniel's attempt to write the story of his family, and he is unable to keep it in order or to settle what actually happened.
Rating coming soonThe novel begins at the funeral of its unnamed protagonist and then works backwards through his life: his first encounter with death as a child on a summer beach, his career as a commercial artist, three marriages, two sons who despise him and a daughter who adores him, and finally the physical decline of old age.
Rating coming soonJack Boughton comes home to Gilead, Iowa, after twenty years away, an alcoholic carrying two decades of secrets, and he is at odds with his traditionalist father even though he remains the old man's favourite child. His sister Glory has come home too, with troubles of her own, and the two of them try to make a life in the house.
Rating coming soonSelina Peake Dejong marries into a Dutch farming community outside Chicago, is widowed young and has to make a living from the land. She becomes a truck farmer, raises her son Dirk and sends him to the city, and the novel follows both her success and what her son does with the chances she bought him.
Rating coming soonVictoria Dawson has always felt out of place in a family obsessed with appearances, in a city that measures people by how they look. Her parents are disappointed by her and make no secret of it, and her younger sister is the child they can admire. The novel follows Victoria out of that house and into a life of her own choosing.
Rating coming soonJoe Allston is a retired literary agent who describes himself as killing time until time gets around to killing him. His parents and his only son are dead, and he goes through life as a spectator rather than a participant. A postcard from an old friend sends him back to the journals of a journey he once made to his mother's birthplace.
Rating coming soonIn New York, a fourteen-year-old girl named Alma Singer is trying to find a cure for her mother's loneliness, and she believes the answer lies with the author of a book her mother is translating. Across the city, an old man called Leo Gursky is living out his last years and thinking about the woman he loved in Poland sixty years earlier, and about the manuscript he wrote for her.
Rating coming soonBigger Thomas is twenty years old, black, and living with his mother and his brother and sister in one room on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s. A relief agency finds him work as a driver for a wealthy white family, an opportunity that frightens him more than it reassures him. Within a day of taking the job he kills the daughter of the house, and the novel follows what comes next.
Rating coming soonStephen Dedalus grows up in Ireland in a Catholic family that is slowly losing its money and its standing. He is sent to a boarding school and then to university in Dublin, and he discovers that the religion, the politics and the language of the country he was born into are all things he must either accept or refuse. His answer is to leave.
Rating coming soonIn the summer of 1953, Esther Greenwood wins a month-long internship at a New York fashion magazine and finds that the life she was supposed to want leaves her cold. She comes home to Massachusetts, and the distance between what she can feel and what everyone expects of her widens until she cannot work, sleep or read. The novel follows her through the doctors and hospitals that follow.
Rating coming soonNew York, 2000. A young woman from a wealthy family, two years out of art school and recently orphaned, decides that the best thing she can do for herself is to sleep for a year. She finds a psychiatrist willing to prescribe almost anything, stops answering her doorbell, and begins. Her only regular visitor is a friend she does not much like.
Rating coming soonChief Bromden, a huge half-Native American man who has been in an Oregon psychiatric hospital for years, pretends to be deaf and dumb and watches everything that happens on the ward. Then Randle McMurphy arrives, having faked insanity to serve his sentence in hospital rather than on a work farm, and starts testing the authority of Nurse Ratched. The ward becomes a contest between the two of them.
Rating coming soonHoward Roark is an architect who will not design anything he does not believe in, which costs him the commissions that would make his career. Peter Keating, who was at school with him, takes the opposite approach and prospers. Around them are arranged a critic, a newspaper publisher and a woman who cannot decide whether she wants Roark to succeed or to be destroyed.
Rating coming soonIrene Redfield lives comfortably in Harlem with her physician husband and two sons, arranging charity events for the city's black elite. On a hot afternoon she runs into Clare Kendry, a childhood friend who has been passing as white and is married to a man who does not know she is black. Clare wants Irene's world back, and Irene cannot decide whether to admire her or fear her.
Rating coming soonSterling, New Hampshire, is a small town where very little happens, until a morning when a bomb goes off in a school car park and a student walks into the building with a gun. Nineteen minutes later ten people are dead. The novel follows the shooting, the trial and the years of bullying that came before it, through the eyes of the judge, her daughter and the shooter's mother.
Rating coming soonQuentin Coldwater is a brilliant, unhappy high school senior in Brooklyn who is still half in love with a series of children's books about a magical land called Fillory. On the day of his interview for Princeton he is taken instead to Brakebills, a college of magic in upstate New York, and spends four years there. Graduation leaves him with powers and no idea what they are for.
Rating coming soonEmil Sinclair grows up in a comfortable middle-class German household that he thinks of as one world, and discovers that there is another, darker one at the edge of it. A boast he makes to impress a local boy puts him in the power of a bully, and he is rescued by Max Demian, a classmate who reads the Bible in a way nobody else does. Demian changes how Sinclair sees everything.
Rating coming soonEddie is the maintenance man at a seaside amusement park, and on his eighty-third birthday a ride comes apart and he is killed trying to save a child. He wakes in heaven, where he is told that he will meet five people whose lives crossed his own. The first of them is a stranger whose death Eddie caused without ever knowing it.
Rating coming soonOn the Thames at Battersea Reach, a small community of people live aboard barges moored to the mud at low tide. Nenna is waiting for her husband to come back to her while her two daughters run along the foreshore. Maurice next door is sympathetic and makes his living in a way the others do not discuss. An elderly painter called Willis wants to sell his boat.
Rating coming soonAt a hotel in Chicago, Beth Cappadora leaves her three-year-old son Ben with his older brother for a few minutes while she checks in for her school reunion. When she turns round he is gone. The disappearance breaks the family apart, and nine years later a boy knocks on her door and asks whether she wants her lawn mowed.
Rating coming soonFrank and April Wheeler live in a new house in suburban Connecticut with their two children, and both of them are certain that they were meant for something better. Frank commutes to a job in the city that bores him, April has given up acting, and the neighbours are watching. Their plan to leave for Europe is the thing that keeps them going.
Rating coming soonRuby Lennox begins her story at the moment of her conception above a pet shop in York, and from there she talks her way through a childhood in a family that is not much interested in her. Between the chapters of Ruby's life are the stories of the women who came before her: her mother Bunty, her grandmother Nell and her great-grandmother Alice, each of them told in the first person.
Rating coming soonAbby and Red Whitshank have lived for decades in the house Red's father built in Baltimore, and their four grown children gather on the porch to hear the story of how their parents met. Everyone there has heard it many times. As Abby and Red get older, the question of who will look after them, and who will get the house, begins to divide the family.
Rating coming soonVictor Mancini dropped out of medical school to look after his mother, who is in a nursing home and does not always remember who he is. To pay for her care he pretends to choke on food in restaurants and lets strangers save his life. He keeps a list of everyone who has ever rescued him, and writes to them about the debts he says he cannot pay.
Rating coming soonIn Dublin, a school opens an evening class in Italian, and a group of people who have nothing else in common sign up for it. Their teacher is an Irishwoman who lived in Italy for years and came home after the death of the man she went there with. Over the course of a year the class changes what several of the students do with their lives.
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