Doorstoppers. Chonkers. Big boys. These books will drag you into their stories and not let you out until page five hundred and something.
Star 111, by Lutz Seiler (translated by Tess Lewis)
“Disintegration was promise, not death, just life, that was the paradox of the time”; so thinks Carl, the protagonist of Star 111.
Set after the fall of the Berlin wall, the novel maps the movement of disintegration and German unification. Carl, a bricklayer, literally helps reconstruct the broken world around him, yet finds means to reconstruct family, community and his own identity as a poet. Inhabiting the city’s underground bars, anarchist cafes, and abandoned buildings, Star 111 is a novel alive with ideas and possibility. Through incantatory, and sometimes mystical, prose, Seiler’s very language mirrors a world in process, making new laws and meanings for itself.
Always Coming Home, by Ursula K Le Guin
Sure we can talk about Infinite Jest and Gravity’s Rainbow and all the other male experimental novels of 800 pages plus, but why is no one talking about Always Coming Home? Potentially the most interesting and experimental of the bunch? Without being halfway as pretentious?
Le Guin is of course better known for The Earthsea Quartet, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed — all of which are top tier bangers. But Always Coming Home holds a special place in my heart. To put it into a sentence: it’s an anthropological account of a future society written from the perspective of someone in the present who seems to be seeing into the future. But when I say anthropological account, I mean that entirely literally. Always Coming Home contains poetry, records of oral traditions, recipes, an alphabet and glossary – all of a future hunter-gatherer society called The Kesh who will live in the place we call Northern California long after that place has changed to be totally unrecognisable. Don’t worry, there are actual novelettes and stories in this book that allow you to hang your coat on something tangible. But the rest is pure worldbuilding and an absolute masterpiece.
Ursula even collaborated on an album (“Music & Poetry of The Kesh”) where she and musician Todd Barton made original instruments and performed songs in made up languages. The first edition of the book came with a cassette tape, but the album is available on your favourite streaming service…
The Recovering, by Leslie Jamison
Let it be known that while all info about this book listed online and in our own meta-data states it is around the 300 page mark, it is factually not. It crosses the 500 page line and I must correct these lies!
Besides being a physical whopper, The Recovering is also an emotional whopper and one of our all-time favourite books. Jamieson is a devastatingly good essayist. The Recovering is part-memoir, part thorough journalistic investigation into addiction in all its forms, the history of the AA, society’s gendered view of alcoholism and art, and Jamieson’s own history with addiction and writing. Flawless but you may want to lie down afterwards.
Do Not Say We Have Nothing, by Madeleine Thien
Do Not Say We Have Nothing is both a grand, beautifully realised epic, and an affecting personal tale of one woman’s journey to self-discovery.
Thien covers thousands of miles, over a hundred years, and generations of family history while maintaining a tight focus on a handful of poets, musicians and lovers in Revolutionary China up to the present day – and she almost makes it seem easy! One to totally immerse yourself in.
The Overstory, by Richard Powers
The opening 100 or so pages of this book are some of the greatest very short stories to be written this century – to then weave them into one seamless epic where dozens of characters and storylines collide IN THE NAME OF SAVING TREES makes this novel almost unbearably compelling.
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
Art theft, deplorable behaviour, rich idiots and a cosy antiques shop: all the ingredients for a decade-defining page turner of monumental scope.
Tomb of Sand, by Geetanjali Shree (translated by Daisy Rockwell)
This literal tome might look daunting but it is more than worth a read. Over the course of 700 pages, this deft novel looks a wide variety of themes including old age, depression, the Partition, borders, queerness, mother-daughter relationships and colonialism, with intelligence, humour and great tenderness.
A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara
Legendarily searing modern classic tale of four close college friends whose lives split and re-entwine throughout their wrought existences. Transfixing and addictive.
Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez (translated by Megan McDowell)
It might be 700 pages long, it might be deliriously, psychedelically gruesome, but it is also one of the most deeply involving novels you’re likely to read. The sheer length and extremity of the material only serve to highlight what a work of intense craft and construction it really is. Gaspar is a special boy, born into a family bound by a generations-long occult obsession, one that his father has tried to protect him from across a period of decades. Intergenerational drama, shocking outbursts of nightmarish violence, trippy Jodorowskian visuals, an ingenious weave through modern Argentinean history: it’s got everything you could possibly want from a book with a gigantic claw on the cover.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon
Basically we wish Michael Chabon was our dad. Why can’t he be our dad. Anyway, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is Chabon’s greatest work – a wartime epic, a comic book caper, a Jewish folklore fantasy, and a slick-talking New York classic. Does pretty much everything novels are good at doing.
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
A true American classic, and one that doesn’t get nearly enough praise! Ralph Ellison’s only novel is the profound and absurd life story of the eponymous “invisible man”: a Black man who comes of age into the Kafka-esque machinations of New York in the Civil Rights era. This is well worth your time.
City of Night, by John Rechy
A relatively overlooked mid-century American classic: imagine On the Road by Jack Kerouac, if it were much, much queerer and actually really very good (sorry, Kerouac enthusiasts, but that’s just how it is.) Through a beguiling stream-of-consciousness style, Rechy follows one “youngman” hustling aimlessly across the US, jumping between different scores, scenes and slums on an erotic and spiritual odyssey. Utterly unique.
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco (translated by William Weaver)
Some books are classics for a reason. And with The Name of The Rose, it turns out that reason is: because it’s really, really good.
It’s the middle ages. We’re in an Italian Abbey. We’re deep in the weeds of ecclesiastical politics and theological disputes, and à la David Fincher’s Se7en, it seems like someone (a clergyman, probably, although maybe Satan?) is going around murdering people in accordance with the deadly sins.
In comes Brother William: our Sherlock Holmes, if Sherlock was a medieval monk. Yes, this is sort of a detective story. But this is no potboiler crime, despite being a thrilling page-turner with a fantastic villain and a shocking twist. I will admit to a slightly slow start, but this is well worth the page count.
Native Son, by Richard Wright
Groundbreaking and still painfully relevant, Richard Wright’s raw and desperate story of a young black man on the run is by turns wince-inducing and tear-jerking, with one of the most spectacular courtroom finales ever committed to the page.