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 9 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonMark Dunn's third novel tells the life of Jonathan Blashette, a circus performer born with three legs who makes a fortune in the deodorant business and becomes a celebrated philanthropist. The biography itself does not survive: letters between the author and his editor explain that the only manuscript was knocked into a bathtub, leaving the endnotes to be published alone.
Rating coming soonDouble or Nothing is told by a writer who plans to shut himself in a room for a year with nothing but food and supplies, on the theory that the isolation will force a book out of him, and by the book he keeps failing to produce. The second narrative follows a Jewish man arriving in America and keeps changing as the first narrative reshapes it.
Rating coming soonSusan Hayes grew up on Sullivan's Island off Charleston and returns there in middle age with an unfaithful husband, a resentful teenage daughter and a long store of painful memories. Her sister's house on the beach, the sea and the island's storms give her somewhere to look back at the childhood and the family secrets she has carried with her.
Rating coming soonAntonio is an Italian immigrant living in Sydney's working-class western suburbs, where he has lived for decades, forced into early retirement after an accident at work and left with too much time to think. Around him the city is convulsed by the Tampa affair, in which more than four hundred refugees were left stranded at sea, and his wife Rose and their drifting children find the family's own unravelling colliding with the crisis.
Rating coming soonKif Kehlmann is a young and broke writer when the corporate criminal Siegfried Heidl telephones him in the middle of the night and offers him ten thousand dollars to ghost-write his memoir in six weeks. Heidl is about to stand trial for defrauding the banks of seven hundred million dollars, and as the deadline approaches Kehlmann begins to fear that the man is rewriting him.
Rating coming soonFlorian Herscht is a gentle giant in the small eastern German town of Kana, convinced after adult education classes in physics that the destruction of all physical matter is imminent. He writes one-sided letters to Chancellor Angela Merkel about it, works as a graffiti cleaner for the local neo-Nazi boss, and is dragged into the hunt for whoever is defacing the region's Bach monuments.
Rating coming soonCrisostomo Ibarra comes home to San Diego from Spain to mourn his father, and finds that the rich man was ill treated in his final years and in the trial that followed his death. He decides to carry on his father's plan of building a school, to marry his childhood sweetheart Maria Clara, and to hold his ground against the parish priest and the colonial government.
Rating coming soonAlan Duncan comes home to his parents' sheep station in Australia after the war, a lawyer who lost both feet in an air crash, and finds that the housekeeper has killed herself. Searching the house for the papers she hid, he discovers that she was not who the household believed her to be, and her letters and diaries lead him back to the war and to his own family.
Rating coming soonA boy has fled his home in a drought-stricken country ruled by violence and is walking across an infinite, arid plain to escape the people pursuing him. One night he meets an old goatherd who lives simply and decently, and their paths become entwined as the boy decides whether to choose hope or the cycle of violence he has grown up in.
Rating coming soonLakshmi is thirteen and lives with her family in a hut in the mountains of Nepal. When the monsoon washes away what is left of their crops, her stepfather says she must leave home to earn, and a charming stranger arranges work for her that turns out to be a brothel in India.
Rating coming soonIn the winter of 1953, twenty-year-old Boy Novak runs away from her father in New York and arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking for beauty and the opposite of the life she has left behind. She marries a local widower with a daughter called Snow and becomes a stepmother in a family with a secret.
Rating coming soonMemphis, 1939: twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger brothers and sisters live aboard their family's shantyboat on the Mississippi until their mother is taken to hospital one stormy night and strangers arrive. The children are taken to a Tennessee orphanage, and the novel also follows a present-day family changed by the same injustice.
Rating coming soonLucy Snowe has neither friends nor family, and she sails from England to find work at a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she has to keep hold of herself among unruly pupils, a headmaster who does not trust her, and her own complicated feelings for two very different men.
Rating coming soonMichael K is a poor man with a cleft lip who has spent his childhood in institutions and works as a gardener in Cape Town. When civil war and martial law close over the country and his mother falls ill, he builds a cart to carry her back to the rural birthplace she remembers, Prince Albert.
Rating coming soonThree people live in different kinds of isolation on the coast of New Zealand's South Island: a reclusive artist, a mute boy, and the boy's foster father. Over the course of the novel they form a tentative relationship, are driven apart by violence, and come back together, with Māori and Pākehā language and myth woven through the book.
Rating coming soonThe Liverpool Merchant is a slave ship working the triangular trade in the middle of the eighteenth century, and two cousins are bound up with it: Erasmus Kemp, the son of a wealthy Lancashire merchant, and Matthew Paris, a physician and scientist who sails on the voyage. The novel's subject is greed, and slavery is the medium it uses to examine it.
Rating coming soonVernon Gregory Little is a teenager in Martirio, Texas, whose life falls apart when his best friend shoots their classmates in the schoolyard and then kills himself. The town comes under a media siege, Vernon is taken in for questioning, and he finds himself blamed for the massacre and drawn into a series of increasingly strange events.
Rating coming soonAzaro is an abiku, a spirit child, living in an unnamed African city, and he is able to move between the spirit world and the world of people. The novel follows him and his family through poverty and political upheaval, with the two worlds running alongside each other rather than one being a figure for the other.
Rating coming soonThree of Molly Lane's former lovers meet at her funeral: the newspaper editor Vernon Halliday, the composer Clive Linley, and the Foreign Secretary Julian Garmony. Clive and Vernon are old friends, and the pact they then make with each other about how their lives should end becomes the engine of the story.
Rating coming soonClaudia Hampton is a seventy-six-year-old historian, terminally ill in a London hospital bed, who decides to write a history of the world and finds herself writing her own instead. The novel moves backwards and forwards through her life, from a childhood competing with her brother for fossils to the war and the people she has loved.
Rating coming soonSammy, a shoplifter and ex-convict in Glasgow, wakes in a lane after two days of drinking and is beaten badly by plain-clothes policemen. When he comes round he is blind, and the novel follows him as he learns to manage a city he can no longer see, in a working-class Scottish dialect that runs the whole length of the book.
Rating coming soonEdith Hope is a romantic novelist who has been sent by her friends to a hotel on the shore of Lake Geneva to think about the mess she has made of her life. She arrives determined not to change, and spends her time watching the other English guests, among them a wealthy mother and daughter and an attractive middle-aged man.
Rating coming soonMehring is a rich white businessman in apartheid South Africa who is not satisfied with his life. On a whim he buys a four-hundred-acre farm outside the city, and although he knows nothing about farming and the black workers run it, the land becomes the place where his wealth and his losses start to press on him.
Rating coming soonCharles Arrowby is a successful London theatre director who decides to leave the world behind and write his memoirs in a house beside the sea. There he thinks he sees a sea monster and then meets his first love, Hartley Fitch, whom he has not seen since they were young, and he becomes determined to have her.
Rating coming soonThe Ghost Road is the last book of a trilogy about shell-shocked British officers at the end of the First World War. Its main figures are the real psychoanalyst William Rivers and the fictional working-class officer Billy Prior, who has been treated for shell shock and is preparing to go back to France.
Rating coming soonThe novel is framed as a fictional oral history of the attempted assassination of a reggae singer in Jamaica in 1976 and everything that followed from it. It runs through the crack wars in New York in the 1980s and a changed Jamaica in the 1990s, and it is told by many voices rather than by a single narrator.
Rating coming soonA woman travels to India to find out about Olivia, the first wife of her grandfather, and she reads Olivia's letters as she goes. Through them, and through her own experience of the country, she learns what happened to Olivia in the 1920s, when a bored English colonial wife was drawn into the orbit of a minor Indian prince.
Rating coming soonLiam Hegarty, an alcoholic, has killed himself in the sea at Brighton, and his mother and eight of the nine surviving children gather in Dublin for his wake. The narrator is his sister Veronica, who is thirty-nine, and the novel follows her through the family's past and her own memory of what was done to Liam as a child.
Rating coming soonA group of men who have been friends since the Second World War travel from Bermondsey to Margate to scatter the ashes of Jack Dodds into the sea, as he asked them to do. The journey gives the novel its spine, and their memories of work, family, the racetrack and the pub, and of the women they married and the children they raised, fill it out.
Rating coming soonNorman is the clever one of a close-knit Jewish family in the East End of London: an infant prodigy, a brilliant barrister and the pride of his parents. At forty-one he is a drug addict confined to his bedroom, at the mercy of hallucinations and paranoia, and his committal to a mental hospital is where the novel begins.
Rating coming soonLola Bensky is nineteen, a high-school dropout who irons her hair straight and asks a lot of questions, and she has been sent by an Australian newspaper into the middle of the London music scene in 1967. She interviews musicians at the height of their fame and works out who she is at the same time.
Rating coming soonAfter her final year at college, a young writer takes a part-time job as an emergency dispatch operator in Sydney. Over the course of an eight-hour shift she is dropped into hundreds of crises and hears only a piece of each, and the stress of listening to faraway disasters seeps into the rest of her life.
Rating coming soonJesse sees his baby sister Rachel in a blanket at the hospital and knows that he will be the one to look after her. Their mother is always moving on and always bringing trouble home, and when her appetite for destruction leads the little family into the arms of a man named Ray Crow, the charm comes off the arrangement and the children are left to manage what follows.
Rating coming soonIn the 1950s, in the Victorian town of Cohuna, Betty the nurse lives on the outskirts of town next door to Harry, a dairy farmer whose wife has left him for a man from the local bird fanciers' club. The novel follows the pair of them and Betty's son Michael through a year of small-town life.
Rating coming soonCoonardoo is an Aboriginal woman who has been prepared since childhood to be the housekeeper of Wytaliba station in north-west Australia, in an age when white settlers were taking control of more and more of the bare plains. She falls in love with the station's owner, Hugh Watt, a white man, and the novel describes the difficult relationship between them.
Rating coming soonJonah is a hunchback larrikin who lives in a Sydney slum and leads the local street gang, which is known as the Push. He is feared and respected in the neighbourhood, and his life changes when he becomes the father of a son, after which he sets out to break away from the world he has grown up in.
Rating coming soonG. is set in Europe before the First World War, and its protagonist, who goes by the initial G., is a lover of women in the tradition of Don Juan or Casanova. His affairs take him across the continent, through a series of misadventures and disguises, and as he goes he gradually arrives at a political consciousness.
Rating coming soonAlun Weaver, a writer of modest celebrity, comes back to his native Wales with his wife Rhiannon, who was once a famous beauty. They move into a quiet retirement community that turns out to be full of people Alun used to know, and he takes up with a group of men who have stayed there all along.
Rating coming soonRusty-James runs into an old friend, Steve Hays, at the beach, five years after they last saw each other. Steve is at college and Rusty has only recently come out of the reformatory, and when Steve recognises the scar on Rusty's side the two of them are pulled back into the story of the summer when Rusty was fourteen and lost his brother.
Rating coming soonA man answers an advertisement from a teacher looking for a pupil, and finds that the teacher is a gorilla named Ishmael who communicates by telepathy. What follows is a long conversation about the assumptions that drive modern civilisation, about the cultural myths those assumptions rest on, and about the consequences they have for the planet.
Rating coming soonMark and Bryon have lived as brothers since Mark's parents died when the two of them were children. As they turn sixteen their interests divide, girls and gangs and drugs take up more of their time, and the friendship that has held them together begins to come apart, until Bryon has to decide what he is going to do about Mark.
Rating coming soonOn New Year's Eve in 1982 Oona Lockhart is about to turn nineteen and has to choose between going to London to study economics and staying in Brooklyn for her music and her boyfriend. At midnight she faints and wakes up thirty-two years later, in her fifty-one-year-old body, and learns that she will live the rest of her life out of order.
Rating coming soonNew York is a city that has become conscious, and its avatar has fallen into a coma and vanished. Five new avatars, one for each borough, are waking up instead: a graduate student who steps off a train without his memory, a gallery director in the Bronx, a politician in Brooklyn and others, and all of them have the same enemy.
Rating coming soonPaddy Clarke is ten years old and lives in Barrytown, in north Dublin, at the end of the 1960s. He spends his days roaming the streets with his friends, tormenting his younger brother Sinbad and getting into trouble at school, while at home his parents' marriage comes slowly apart and he has no way of naming what is happening to his family.
Rating coming soonCrispin Salvador, the most controversial writer in Philippine literature, is found dead in the Hudson River in the middle of winter. His final manuscript has disappeared with him, and his student and friend Miguel travels to Manila to find out what happened to both, piecing the old man's life together from his novels, his interviews and his enemies.
Rating coming soonMichael Terny has been at seven schools in four years and knows what to expect at each of them, because he is the fat kid and there is always somebody willing to make his life difficult. He is also a lucid dreamer, able to recognise that he is asleep and arrange what happens next, and the dream world is the one place where he is safe and in charge.
Rating coming soonJane is twelve and lives by the sea with her mother and her younger brothers and sisters. She wants the summer to be an adventure, and it obliges: a ride in a hot-air balloon, a string of men who might be her father, and a friendship with a preacher who claims to see the future.
Rating coming soonTony Miglione is thirteen and lives in Jersey City with his family until his father sells an invention and makes them rich, at which point they move to a prosperous town on Long Island. Everything about the new life is difficult: his mother's ambitions, his grandmother's unhappiness, and the stomach pains that arrive when he cannot say what is wrong.
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