The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway, 1952
An old Cuban fisherman, eighty-four days without a fish, rows out alone and hooks something enormous.
Contemporary fiction: books to read
These books turn on ordinary people whose small, fixed worlds get disturbed — by a fish, a kindness, a neighbour. In «Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine» that disturbance is a single gesture that loosens a carefully narrowed life, and in «The Old Man and the Sea» it is one enormous thing hooked far out alone. You come to them for close, patient attention to how people hold themselves together, and what it takes to let go.
A page that shows it
The difference between calling the sea a woman and calling it an enemy.
He always thought of the sea as la mar, which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her, but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fisherman, those who used buoys as floats for their lines or had motorboats bought when the shark lovers had much money, spoke of her as el mar, which is masculine, they spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine, as something that gave or withheld great favors. If she did wild or wicked things, it is because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought. -
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Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
Gail Honeyman, 2017
A woman who has arranged her life into perfect, narrow routines discovers that a small kindness can crack it open.
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Little Fires Everywhere
Celeste Ng, 2017
A planned suburb where everything is arranged just so, two mothers who each know what is best for a child, and a house on fire.
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Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2013
A Nigerian woman returns to Lagos after years in America, and a love story becomes a sharp, funny reckoning with race, hair and belonging.
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A Day Late and a Dollar Short
Terry McMillan, 2001
A mother and her four grown children each tell their own version of the same family — money, grudges, love — in voices that keep talking back to each other.
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In This Mountain
Jan Karon, 2002
A retired Episcopal priest in a small mountain town discovers that leaving the pulpit doesn't settle the question of what he's for.
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The Correspondent
Virginia Evans, 2025
A woman in her seventies in Annapolis writes to a novelist she has never met: thank-you notes, refusals, invitations, and a whole life in the margins.
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Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
A confession so seductive in style that readers must keep asking what the charm is hiding.
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Ken Kesey, 1962
A huge, laughing drifter talks his way onto a locked psychiatric ward and shows the men there what defiance costs — and what it's worth.
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My Friends
Fredrik Backman, 2025
A teenage vandal, a perfect plan, and a painting worth more than a life—Backman’s funniest, most tender voice yet.
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My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Ottessa Moshfegh, 2018
A young woman with a trust fund, a psychiatrist, and a plan to sleep for a year—a deadpan satire of self-care and modern numbness.
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Convenience Store Woman
Sayaka Murata, 2016
A woman who has worked in a convenience store for eighteen years finds its manual clearer than society's unwritten rules.
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Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand, 1957
A railroad executive fights to keep a collapsing America moving while the nation’s most capable people vanish one by one.
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An American Marriage
Tayari Jones, 2018
A newly married couple's life is split open by circumstance, and the novel asks what marriage owes when the future they planned is no longer available.
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She’s Come Undone
Wally Lamb, 1992
A lonely Connecticut girl grows up amid family secrets, television dreams and bottomless wanting, narrating her life with raw, comic honesty.
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White Oleander
Janet Fitch, 1999
A girl raised by a brilliant, dangerous mother moves through foster homes, learning that beauty and damage can be the same inheritance.
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Still Alice
Lisa Genova, 2007
A Harvard cognitive psychologist with early-onset Alzheimer's fights to keep her language, work and family as her mind erases them.
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Blue Sisters
Coco Mellors, 2024
Three sisters return to the apartment where they grew up, carrying grief, rivalry and the question of whether they can be a family without the one who held them together.
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Fairy Tale
Stephen King, 2022
A boy who learned to survive his father's drinking follows a neighbor's dog into a world where fairy tales have gone wrong.
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The Night She Disappeared
Lisa Jewell, 2021
When a teenage couple disappears after a night out, a crime writer new to the village finds a note in her garden that says 'Dig Here'.
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The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt, 2013
A boy walks out of a museum bombing with a small Dutch painting, and it quietly shapes the next thirty years of his life.
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The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand, 1943
An architect who will not build anything he doesn't believe in, against a city that rewards charm. The novel that made selfishness an argument.
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I Know This Much Is True
Wally Lamb, 1998
A twin brother's breakdown, a family's buried history, and one man's long climb toward forgiveness—told with the pace of a page-turner.
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Theo of Golden
Allen Levi, 2023
A gentle, aphoristic novel about an old man, small-town kindness, memory, and the choice to let sadness become wisdom.
A taste of the feed
When a flat stops being a home and becomes a place no one enters.
No one’s been in my flat this year apart from service professionals; I’ve not voluntarily invited another human being across the threshold, except to read the meter. You’d think that would be impossible, wouldn’t you? It’s true, though. I do exist, don’t I? It often feels as if I’m not here, that I’m a figment of my own imagination. There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I’d lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock.
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine · Gail Honeyman
The rules for describing racism without making anyone uncomfortable.
If you’re telling a non-black person about something racist that happened to you, make sure you are not bitter. Don’t complain. Be forgiving. If possible, make it funny. Most of all, do not be angry. Black people are not supposed to be angry about racism. Otherwise you get no sympathy. This applies only for white liberals, by the way. Don’t even bother telling a white conservative about anything racist that happened to you. Because the conservative will tell you that YOU are the real racist and your mouth will hang open in confusion.
Americanah · Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The routine question that catches a man out, long after he thought he was safe.
After nearly four years of retirement, why hadn’t he been able to formulate a pat answer? He usually reported that he supplied various churches here and there, which was true, of course, but it sounded lame. Indeed, he once said, without thinking, “Oh, nothing much.” Upon hearing such foolishness out of his mouth, he felt covered with shame.
In This Mountain · Jan Karon
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