My reading list - fiction
Explore a curated fiction reading list featuring literary masterpieces by Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, and Cormac McCarthy. From gothic mysteries like The Thirteenth Tale to modern classics like White Noise, discover compelling novels that define contemporary fiction.
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Libra
by Don DeLillo
From the author of the National Book Award-winning novel White Noise comes an eerily convincing fictional speculation on the events leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy In this powerful, unsettling novel, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald’s odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When “history” presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped. A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created, Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche.
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The Thirteenth Tale
by Diane Setterfield
In this rousingly good ghost story, Setterfield's debut novel rejuvenates the genre with a closely plotted, clever foray into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths.
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Portnoy's Complaint
by Philip Roth
The groundbreaking novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral that originally propelled its author to literary stardom: told in a continuous monologue from patient to psychoanalyst, this masterpiece draws us into the turbulent mind of one lust-ridden young Jewish bachelor named Alexander Portnoy. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years “Deliciously funny . . . absurd and exuberant, wild and uproarious . . . a brilliantly vivid reading experience”—The New York Times Book Review “Touching as well as hilariously lewd . . . Roth is vibrantly talented”—New York Review of Books Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. "The Puzzled Penis," Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.
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Saturday
by Ian McEwan
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement follows an ordinary man through a Saturday whose high promise gradually turns nightmarish in this “dazzling [and] powerful” novel (The New York Times). Henry Perowne—a neurosurgeon, urbane, privileged, deeply in love with his wife and grown-up children—plans to play a game of squash, visit his elderly mother, and cook dinner for his family. But after a minor traffic accident leads to an unsettling confrontation, Perowne must set aside his plans and summon a strength greater than he knew he had in order to preserve the life that is dear to him. Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons, coming in September!
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No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road comes a "profoundly disturbing and gorgeously rendered" novel (The Washington Post) that returns to the Texas-Mexico border, setting of the famed Border Trilogy. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law—in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell—can contain. As Moss tries to evade his pursuers—in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives—McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines. No Country for Old Men is a triumph. Look for Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Passenger, coming October '22.
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Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
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White Noise
by Don DeLillo
Jack Gladney, a professor of Nazi history at a Middle American liberal arts school, and his family try to handle normal family life as a black cloud of lethal gaseous fumes threatens their town. Reprint.
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The Plot Against America
by Philip Roth
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The chilling bestselling alternate history novel of what happens to one family when America elects a charismatic, isolationist president whose government embraces anti-Semitism—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral. “A terrific political novel.... Sinister, vivid, dreamlike...You turn the pages, astonished and frightened.” —The New York Times Book Review One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.
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Beyond Black
by Hilary Mantel
Trouble spirals out of control for a psychic and her personal assistant when they take up with a spirit guide and his drowned therapist after moving to a suburban wasteland.
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Kingdom of Shadows
by Alan Furst
“Kingdom of Shadows must be called a spy novel, but it transcends genre, as did some Graham Greene and Eric Ambler classics.”—The Washington Post Paris, 1938. As Europe edges toward war, Nicholas Morath, an urbane former cavalry officer, spends his days working at the small advertising agency he owns and his nights in the bohemian circles of his Argentine mistress. But Morath has been recruited by his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi, a diplomat in the Hungarian legation, for operations against Hitler’s Germany. It is Morath who does Polanyi’s clandestine work, moving between the beach cafés of Juan-les-Pins and the forests of Ruthenia, from Czech fortresses in the Sudetenland to the private gardens of the déclassé royalty in Budapest. The web Polanyi spins for Morath is deep and complex and pits him against German intelligence officers, NKVD renegades, and Croat assassins in a shadow war of treachery and uncertain loyalties, a war that Hungary cannot afford to lose. Alan Furst is frequently compared with Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and John le Carré, but Kingdom of Shadows is distinctive and entirely original. It is Furst at his very best. Praise for Kingdom of Shadows “Kingdom of Shadows offers a realm of glamour and peril that are seamlessly intertwined and seem to arise effortlessly from the author’s consciousness.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Subtly spun, sensitive to nuances, generous with contemporary detail and information discreetly conveyed. . . . It’s hard to overestimate Kingdom of Shadows.”—Eugen Weber, Los Angeles Times “A triumph: evocative, heartfelt, knowing and witty.”—Robert J. Hughes, The Wall Street Journal “Imagine discovering an unscreened espionage thriller from the late 1930s, a classic black- and- white movie that captures the murky allegiances and moral ambiguity of Europe on the brink of war. . . . Nothing can be like watching Casablanca for the first time, but Furst comes closer than anyone has in years.”—Walter Shapiro, Time
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Flashman's Lady
by George MacDonald Fraser
When his beautiful and brainless wife Elizabeth is abducted from Singapore by a half-breed ex-Etonian millionaire, Harry Flashman sets out on an odyssey of reluctant pursuit.