“I read Les Misérables when I was a kid and then re-read it last summer and…I am now convinced that it is the greatest novel of all time. Every story in the world is somewhere in there. It’s extremely sentimental, it’s extremely historical and digressive, there are parts of it that are boring as hell – but that’s true of War and Peace and other great novels. Overall, it’s such a compendious, wonderful thing, full of gems…He was in exile on the island of Guernsey from where he could almost see France on a clear day. And one big dimension of Les Misérables is it’s a novel of nostalgia – he’s trying to reconstruct the Paris of his youth” Read more...
The Greatest French Novels
David Bellos ,
Biographer
“Patria has been the biggest hit in Spanish literature, with over a million copies sold. And it’s an 800-page book! The easy blurb is that this is the Spanish War and Peace . It’s set in a very small town in the Basque Country and it’s about ETA and the ETA period—ETA being the Basque separatist terrorist movement that ran a violent campaign between 1960 until the ceasefire in 2010 that prompts the narrative of Patria . It’s the story of two families who are both unhappy in their own way. And it’s about the relationship between them.” Read more...
The Best Novels by Spanish Authors
Richard Village ,
“Life and Fate… is probably the most important work of fiction about World War II. But, in fact, it is more than just a fiction because it is based on very close reporting from his time with the soldiers. It is a deliberate act of literary homage to Tolstoy as one can see in the title. It is definitely the War and Peace of the 20th century.” Read more...
The best books on World War II
Antony Beevor ,
Military Historians & Veteran
“The three thousand pages of his magnificent novel, packed with people, emotions, parfums, reflections, are not presented as happening in reality, but as emerging from the memory of the protagonist…Proust’s art thus brings to life a key intuition that we can find in thinkers ranging from St Augustine to Husserl, and which I think is crucial for understanding our experience: the fact that the time of our experience is only weakly related to the time of physics. Mostly, it is a space, a clearing, opened up by our memories and anticipations. What we call time in our daily life is these memories and anticipations.” Read more...
The best books on Time
Carlo Rovelli ,
Physicist
“The Tale of Genji was completed in the early 11th century and is one of the oldest — perhaps the oldest — novel in the world… The book follows the life of Genji, a prince, and is a wonderful long read — a psychological novel that not only describes life at court in Heian Japan (794-1185) but also explores universal themes including love and power.” Read more...
Five East Asian Classic Books Worth Reading
Tuva Kahrs ,
Five Books Editor
“Once you get to know the characters, which does take a while, it becomes a book that you just can’t wait to get back to. It’s funny to think that a 1,400-page Victorian-type novel is something you can’t wait to get back to, but that’s exactly my experience of reading it. It takes a while to get a sense of who everyone is and to feel comfortable with the various characters and families. It’s a big cast and it’s like going up a hill to get to know them, and then there is this enormous downhill, this freewheeling period, when you’re enjoying yourself. It’s a fantastically entertaining book.” Read more...
Ed Smith on My Life and Luck
Ed Smith ,
Sportspersons & Sportswriter
“Tolstoy famously said of War and Peace that it wasn’t even a novel. In a sense, it’s a total history of that epoch in Russia in a fictional form…It’s very interesting what happens with the novel linguistically. There’s been a study of the French words in the novel, because there are a large number, and they feature particularly in the early phases of the novel. Towards the end, the novel becomes more Russian in its literary and vernacular style, in its lexicon and syntax. In a sense, the Russian language is the true character of the novel. The growing Russianness of the language is the epiphany, that moment of self-discovery, that the Russian aristocracy goes through at that time.” Read more...
The Best Russian Novels
Orlando Figes ,
Historian
“This book is believed by many to be the greatest Chinese novel ever written. For me, it is like a bible for everything to do with Chinese culture. Cao belonged to the Han Chinese clan and the book is a huge family novel written in the 18th century…It really is a wonderful book which has been translated by Penguin since 1970 and reprinted again and again. But many Westerners don’t know about this book, which is a shame because it is such a powerful book” Read more...
The best books on Understanding China
Xinran ,
Nonprofit Leaders & Activist
“Most fundamentally, Rand was a militant atheist and rejected conservatism’s attempt to ground free society in religious principles…she is as absolutist a moralist as you can come across. Her intellectual project is to ground the case for liberty in natural rights – freedom and individual liberty are necessary to the fulfilment of human nature.” Read more...
The best books on Traditional and Liberal Conservatism
Brink Lindsey ,
Political Commentator
“King is one of the writers that had the most impact on me growing up. His sprawling storytelling has been compared to that of Charles Dickens, and I think his novels certainly provide huge mosaics that synthesise the dynamics of twentieth-century small-town America. It is a novel about a group of teenagers (The Losers Club) growing up into adults, and the disappointments that come with this process. But then there’s this creature—an alien entity—that can morph into your worst fear” Read more...
Scary Books
Xavier Aldana Reyes ,
Film Critics & Scholar
“I was 15, I think, when I read it. I couldn’t believe that no one had ever written other books like it. I remember going to my English master at school and saying ‘What else is like this? I want to read more books like this!’ I can’t remember what he recommended, but I can remember picking them up and thinking they were nothing like Shogun . I was so entranced by the world of the 16th century he created that I’ve really had a fascination for it all my life.” Read more...
The best books on Life in the Tudor Era
Ian Mortimer ,
Historian
“Infinite Jest is 1100 pages long, set in the near future and difficult to encapsulate. There are two central protagonists. One is Hal Incandenza, a 17-year old top level tennis player at Enfield Tennis Academy outside of Boston. The other is called Don Gately, who is a recovering alcoholic and counselor at a halfway house. The book is all about addiction in a sense…I think Infinite Jest is the major American novel of the past 25 years…I think it’s the book on which his reputation will rest, and I think people are going to read it for a long time. You never know how something is going to be seen in 50 years, and Infinite Jest is an incredibly long and in some ways difficult book, so it does present some barriers to continued popularity. But I do think he contributes something extremely valuable.” Read more...
Novels with Sporting Themes
Chad Harbach ,
Novelist
“This trilogy is the gold standard in terms of fantasy writing….It was that sense of scale, as well – that sense of this vast world going on, then a vast story being set inside it. It was all very inspiring to a small lad. I read it several times while growing up and each time I got something different from it.” Read more...
Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Young Adults
Philip Reeve ,
Children's Author
“The novel charts the evolution of Scarlett O’Hara from a spoiled, sheltered, and superficial pre-war belle to a shrewd postwar plantation and business owner operating in and around Atlanta, Georgia. Scarlett’s family and their plantation home of Tara face endless challenges brought on by the war and its aftermath – including poverty, disease, runaway slaves, labor shortages, marauding Yankee soldiers, the burning of Atlanta, postwar carpetbaggers, crime, inflation, and the death of family and loved ones. Yet Scarlett’s relentless drive to protect her home leads her to overcome each obstacle in turn, including a love triangle that threatens to tear her family apart. For many readers the novel tells the story of the South’s surviving the Civil War, with the new South emerging to replace and succeed the storied South of old.” Read more...
Classic Novels of the American Civil War
Craig A. Warren ,
Literary Scholar
“It’s a tale as old as time: boy meets girl, boy is wrongly imprisoned for many years, boy escapes, discovers enormous fortune on mysterious Mediterranean island, boy exacts revenge on the people who locked him up in the first place. It was a lockdown read for me: it’s 1200 closely-typed pages, and surprisingly thrilling given how long it is.” Read more...
Novels of the Rich and Wealthy
Andrew Hunter Murray ,
Comedians & Humorist
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