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 8 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonThe narrator is a bestselling novelist living in Paris with the money and freedom that success has brought him. His wife Esther is a war correspondent, and one day she simply does not come back, and does not explain. The police conclude nothing, and he begins asking where she has gone and what kind of man he has been.
Rating coming soonMarian works at a market research company, shares an apartment with a friend who keeps borrowing her clothes, and has a boyfriend she is not sure about. Then he proposes, and the wedding begins arranging itself around her. At about the same time she stops being able to eat, and the food she cannot eat starts to look like the people around her.
Rating coming soonAdolf Verloc runs a shop in Soho that sells photographs and other things the neighbours do not mention, and he is paid by an unnamed foreign embassy for information. His employers want a bombing in London that will be blamed on the anarchists, and they want it soon. Verloc is not a man who has ever been asked to do anything difficult.
Rating coming soonIn an outdoor cafe in Lahore, a Pakistani man called Changez introduces himself to an American stranger and starts to talk. He tells the man about his education, about the job he took at a valuation firm in New York, about the woman he loved there, and about the year he decided to leave the United States. The American has to wait for his tea and for the end of the story.
Rating coming soonEva Khatchadourian never wanted to be a mother, and the son she had turns out not to want anything from her either. Two days before his sixteenth birthday, Kevin kills seven of his fellow students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher who had tried to be friendly to him. Two years later, Eva begins writing letters to her husband about what happened.
Rating coming soonChristopher Banks grows up in the Shanghai International Settlement with his parents and his friend Akira, and then both of his parents disappear within a short time of each other. He is sent to England, becomes the country's most celebrated detective, and never stops thinking about the case he could not solve. He returns to Shanghai to finish it.
Rating coming soonEtsuko lives alone in England, and her younger daughter Niki is visiting. The two of them talk about the recent death of Etsuko's older daughter Keiko, and about the life Etsuko led in Nagasaki after the war, when she was young and had a husband and a child and knew a woman called Sachiko who was trying to leave.
Rating coming soonLin Kong is an army doctor in a Chinese city, and for seventeen years he has been in love with a nurse called Manna Wu. In his home village there is a wife called Shuyu whom his parents chose for him, and every year he goes back to ask her, again, for a divorce. The two lives he is keeping apart take a long time to meet.
Rating coming soonFour people meet in Rome and become entangled there: Miriam, a painter with a past she does not describe and a persecutor who follows her; Hilda, a copyist whose innocence makes her severe; Kenyon, a sculptor who loves Hilda; and Donatello, a young Italian count who resembles the marble faun of Praxiteles and has something of its nature. Then a crime is committed.
Rating coming soonVirginia Shreves is fifteen and a sophomore at a private school in Manhattan, where she is the one member of her family who is not thin, brilliant and good-looking. Her sister has gone to Africa to get away from their mother, and her brother Byron, whom she has always admired, has been suspended from Columbia University. Virginia is hiding most of herself, and then she stops hiding.
Rating coming soonEugene Gant is born in 1900 in a small town in North Carolina, the youngest of a large family, and the novel follows him until he leaves home at nineteen. His father carves headstones and drinks, his mother takes in boarders, and the family's business is other people's money and other people's grief. Eugene reads everything and wants out.
Rating coming soonSquire Allworthy comes home from a trip to London and finds a baby asleep in his bed. He decides to raise the foundling, calls him Tom Jones, and the boy grows up beside the squire's nephew and near the daughter of a neighbouring landowner. Tom is generous, careless, good-natured and always in trouble, and his feelings for Sophia Western are the beginning of a long journey.
Rating coming soonIn Monterey, the day between Lousy Wednesday and Waiting Friday is called Sweet Thursday, and by that point in the week anything can be arranged. Doc has come home from the war to find his laboratory wrecked and his friends in trouble. A woman called Suzy has moved into the brothel next door and does not intend to stay in it, and the people of the Row decide the two of them would be good for each other.
Rating coming soonConstance and Sophia Baines grow up over their father's drapery shop in Bursley, a town in the Potteries, and their lives run in opposite directions. Constance stays, marries the shop's assistant and keeps the business. Sophia runs away to London with a travelling salesman, goes with him to Paris, and disappears from her family's life for thirty years.
Rating coming soonSophie Bentwood is bitten on the hand by a stray cat she has been feeding, and she refuses to see a doctor about it. She is a translator, her husband Otto is a lawyer in the middle of a bitter split from his business partner, and the two of them are childless and comfortable in a brownstone in Brooklyn. The bite is the start of a long weekend.
Rating coming soonOn a snowy morning in upstate New York, two girls take their horses out and a truck comes round the bend. One girl and one horse are killed, and Grace Maclean is left with a partly amputated leg and a horse called Pilgrim that will not be handled. Her mother Annie, who has built a career as a magazine editor, decides that both of them are going to be saved.
Rating coming soonIn a crumbling house below Mount Kanchenjunga, a retired judge wants to be left alone and is not. His orphaned granddaughter Sai has arrived to live with him, his cook looks after her while thinking about his own son, and the hills around Kalimpong in 1986 are filling with a political movement that will reach the house. The cook's son, Biju, is in New York without papers.
Rating coming soonSophie Caco is twelve and has been brought up in a village near Port-au-Prince by her aunt, who tells her stories and teaches her what she knows. Then a letter comes from Sophie's mother, who left for New York years earlier and has sent for her. Sophie travels alone to a country she does not remember, and to a mother whose nightmares she will come to understand.
Rating coming soonOn a Virginia plantation in the years before the Civil War, the oldest and most respected enslaved man on the estate begins to tell the story of his life. His son Chapel has taught himself to read, has fallen in love with the owner's daughter, and intends to run north. The father has to decide what he is willing to do about it.
Rating coming soonDr Fridolin is a physician in Vienna, comfortably married, and one evening his wife tells him about a fantasy she had about another man. The confession unsettles him more than he admits. Over the next two days and nights he moves through the city, meeting people who give him pieces of a world he did not know was there, and it ends with a masked ball.
Rating coming soonCathy Scarlet and Tom Feather met at catering college and have been friends ever since, and now they are going into business together under the name Scarlet Feather. Cathy is married to Neil Mitchell, whose mother has never accepted that her son married the daughter of the woman who used to clean her floors. Tom's girlfriend Marcella wants to be a model. The first year of the business is going to be difficult.
Rating coming soonFather Tim Kavanagh is the rector of a small church in the town of Mitford, North Carolina, where he lives alone with a dog nobody planned on and a house that needs more work than he can pay for. Into his routine come a boy from the settlement at Little Mitford Creek who has been abandoned by his mother, a neighbour who writes children's books, and a doctor who wants to know why Tim never married.
Rating coming soonPip Mackenzie is eleven and has already lost most of the people she had, and her mother Ophélie has retreated into a grief she cannot climb out of. Left to herself on the beach below their house, Pip begins talking to a man walking his dog. Matt Bowles is an artist, divorced, and he has his own reason to notice a lonely child. Her mother does not approve at first.
Rating coming soonPearl Andreas has been raised in a New Orleans mansion filled with kindness and laughter, and she wants to go to college and become a doctor. Her graduation party is almost as festive as Mardi Gras. What she keeps wondering about is the family history nobody discusses, and in the summer that follows she takes a job as a nurse's aide at an elegant old hospital, where an intern befriends her.
Rating coming soonMeredith stayed in Washington state to raise her children and run the family's apple orchard, and her sister Nina left to become a photojournalist. Their mother Anya has always been cold to both of them, and it was their father who held the family together. When he becomes ill he asks the women for a promise: that Anya will tell her Russian fairy tale one last time, all the way to the end.
Rating coming soonBetween 1979 and 1981 more than forty black children were taken and killed in Atlanta, in a city that had elected its first black mayor and liked to describe itself as too busy to hate. Zala Spencer holds down several jobs and is raising three children on her own. One Sunday morning in July 1980 she wakes to find her teenage son Sonny gone.
Rating coming soonA hurricane levels the estate of the Bas-Thornton family in Jamaica, and the parents decide that their children should be sent back to England for safety. On the way, the ship is taken by pirates, and the children end up aboard the pirate vessel instead. The captain, Jonsen, is a well-meaning man who has no idea what to do with his new passengers.
Rating coming soonJamie and Siri are estranged sisters, both in the middle of a quarter-life crisis, and both watching the careers they had planned for drift out of reach. After thirteen years apart and on opposite coasts, they run into each other at a nature retreat, and they decide to swap lives and go home in each other's place.
Rating coming soonMichaela arrives at Fairfax College, the only all-female residential college on campus, as a scholarship student from interstate looking for a fresh start in Sydney. She is quickly struck by the long-standing private school cliques and social circles, and her new neighbour is twenty-year-old Eve, who has already taken a gap year. Fairfax is a college with its own rituals, and Michaela has to learn them without any guidance from home.
Rating coming soonTwo days after the siblings Levi and Charlotte McAllister spread their mother Edith's ashes in Notley Fern Gorge, she returns to life, walks to their father Jack's house and sets herself alight on his front lawn. Charlotte becomes increasingly paranoid that the same thing will happen to her. The novel takes the form of a journey across the island, and the family at its centre keeps changing shape as it goes.
Rating coming soonNora is a single mother living in bohemian share houses in Melbourne, and she narrates her increasingly tumultuous relationship with a heroin addict while raising her daughter at the same time. The two parts of her life pull against each other for the whole of the book. The novel is set in Melbourne in the 1970s and stays inside its narrator's own circle.
Rating coming soonHolland lives on a property in western New South Wales with his daughter Ellen, and over the years he plants hundreds of eucalyptus trees on the land until it becomes a kind of outdoor museum. When Ellen is nineteen he announces that she may marry only a man who can correctly name every gum tree on the property.
Rating coming soonA young Wiradjuri woman returns home to Australia from the United Kingdom for a funeral and discovers that her ancestral lands are threatened by mining. The novel is concerned with language, colonialism, environmental damage and the things that are passed down between generations. It is built around strands that meet in the same place, including a dictionary of the Wiradjuri language.
Rating coming soonTom Keely is alone, living at the top of the Mirador apartments, a highrise in Fremantle in Western Australia. He was once a high-powered environmental activist, and he is now divorced and destitute, which is where the novel finds him. Fremantle is the setting, and the apartment block he lives in gives the book its title.
Rating coming soonEster is a family therapist with an appointment book full of the anxieties of the middle class, and she spends her days helping other people find happiness while her own family relationships are tense and frayed. The novel takes place on one rainy day in Sydney. Hilary's decision is what the day turns on, and both of her daughters have to respond to it.
Rating coming soonTheodora Goodman is a lonely middle-aged woman who travels to France after her mother's death and then goes on to America, where she experiences what may be either a gradual mental breakdown or an epiphanic revelation. The novel is her story from beginning to end. It follows her from Australia to France and then to America, and it never explains what she is looking for.
Rating coming soonDombey and Son is both a firm and a family, and the ambiguous connection between public and private life is at the heart of the novel. Paul Dombey runs his domestic affairs the way he runs his business, calculatingly and coldly. His relations with his son, his two wives and his neglected daughter Florence are the substance of the book.
Rating coming soonJohn Peerybingle is a slow but honest carrier, and he lives with his young wife Dot, their baby boy and their nanny, Tilly Slowboy. A cricket chirps on the hearth and acts as a guardian angel to the family, and then a mysterious elderly stranger comes to visit and takes up lodging in the house.
Rating coming soonPip is an orphan, and the novel follows his education from a graveyard in Kent where he is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch to the London life that a mysterious benefactor pays for. It is a coming-of-age story told entirely in the first person. It was Dickens's second novel narrated in that way, after David Copperfield.
Rating coming soonThe book is presented as a nine hundred and ninety-nine line poem called Pale Fire, written by the fictional poet John Shade, with a foreword, a lengthy commentary and an index supplied by his neighbour and academic colleague Charles Kinbote. Together the parts make a narrative in which both fictional authors are characters.
Rating coming soonThe narrative is a frame story about a reader who is trying to read a book with the same title as the novel. Each chapter, apart from the last, is divided into two sections: the first describes the reader's attempts to get hold of and read the next part, and the second is the opening chapter of a completely different book.
Rating coming soonGadsby is a novel written without a single word containing the letter E, which is the most common letter in English. Its plot turns on the dying fictional city of Branton Hills, which is revitalised by the efforts of its protagonist, John Gadsby, and a youth organiser. The constraint applies to the whole book, which runs to over fifty thousand words.
Rating coming soonJoe Saul is an ageing man who badly wants a child, and his young wife, Mordeen, who loves him, suspects that he is sterile. In order to give him the child he craves she decides to seduce his young assistant, and when her husband discovers the truth he has to come to terms with his pride.
Rating coming soonGeorge Hall is an unobtrusive man, a little distant and a little cautious, and not quite at ease with the emotional demands of fatherhood. He does not understand the modern obsession with talking about everything, and his view is that the secret of contentment lies in ignoring many things completely.
Rating coming soonDelia Grinstead is forty, and on a family holiday she is last seen walking down the Delaware shore with a beach tote holding five hundred dollars inside. To her husband and her three nearly grown children she has vanished without trace or reason. Her family has no explanation for the decision, and neither, at first, does she.
Rating coming soonThe Western Lands is the final book of the trilogy that begins with Cities of the Red Night and continues with The Place of Dead Roads. Its title refers to the western bank of the Nile, which in Egyptian mythology is the land of the dead. The book takes its inspiration from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Rating coming soonThe novel moves back and forth through American history and follows Hailey and Sam, two wayward teenagers who crash parties in New Orleans, barrel up the Mississippi and make their way through the Badlands towards other adventures. The story alternates between two narratives, both involving the same pair of teenagers.
Rating coming soonSleep Has His House combines autobiography with surrealist experiment, setting an account of a life against sections of subconscious wandering. It was first published in New York in 1947 as The House of Sleep, and it is a dark coming-of-age narrative rather than a conventional memoir. It mixes a semi-autobiographical account of a life with sections of subconscious wandering.
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