Great literature about the human condition

She’s wonderful, isn’t she??? When I first read The Door, I kept phoning people to tell them how good it was.

Second the Stone Diaries. Read it last year and it sat with me for days afterwards. Fantastic. In fact this has reminded me that I bought other Carol Shields books off the back of it and haven’t read them yet.

@PondGhost Good God, are you me? 😂

William Maxwell is an excellent shout, though I’d recommend The Chateau, which is about the first American holidaymakers starting to come back to France after WW2.

Anne Enright is brilliant — start with The Gathering or The Green Road.

I read Murdoch obsessively in my teens, but when I pick up any of her novels now, they seem like philosophical treatises thinly disguised as fiction, even The Sea, the Sea, which I’ve taught to undergraduates a few times.

@PondGhost Magda Szabo, brilliant suggestion! Especially The Door and Iza's Ballad. Two books I love the very bones of.

And thinking of Eastern Europeans, and segueing into poetry - because why not? - Wislawa Szymborska.
I'm just going to keep thinking of more and more. Think I'll be back to this thread later! 😂

I'm going to recommend 3 that are quite short but pack the same punches - IMHO - as the long classics.

A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler - just 160 pages.
Stoner by John Williams. Amazon says it's 320 pp but it honestly felt shorter. Lovely, lovely book.
Academy Street by Mary Costello. Under 200 pp.
Dammit I just thought of another one and then forgot it. I'll come back later when I remember.
Other writers to look at - Anne Enright, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Richard Powers.
Special shout out to Iris Murdoch. I adored her for years and years (last century) and have read almost everything she wrote, much of it more than once. I don't know that she's aged well. I find her hard to get into now. Maybe that's me though, because essentially I'm done with her?

Oh I've remembered - William Maxwell, They Came Like Swallows. Also under 200 pp. 🙂

Which is absolutely glorious!

Agreeing with the suggestions of Zweig and Annie Ernaux and Zola, but would suggest Stendhal’s Education sentimentale rather than anything by Balzac. Olga Tokarczuk, Magda Zsabo, Jenny Erpenbeck for some more contemporary European fiction. Have you read Woolf? Maybe start with Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse? Joyce’s Ulysses which is humane and wise.

And to go off-piste entirely, Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows (Canadian, 2014) which is a brilliantly wise, funny, sad novel about life, death, family, inheritance, suicide.

If you've got a lot of time on your hands, you could read In Search of Lost Time by Proust.

Another vote for Life and Fate.

Kazuo Ishiguro was who came to my mind first as well.

I also agree with Middlemarch. I read it as a teen and want to reread it now I’m a fair bit older!

Life and Fate By Vasily Grossman.

Honestly it's wonderful, heartbreaking and fantastic.

The story of how it was published is pretty mad too.

Sorry, I've just spotted that you said fiction only, so I'll reduce my list to Six Stories by Stefan Zweig!

Elizabeth Gaskell - North and South
Some lovely reflections on that topic. I just read it and wish I had read it much sooner

Thinking in terms of books that made me really reflect on what it means to be a person -

Bel Canto by Anne Patchett
All the light we cannot see by Anthony Doerr
North Woods by Daniel Mason

I Will Never See the World Again by Ahmet Altan
Six Stories by Stefan Zweig
The Years by Annie Ernaux
The Return by Hisham Matar

I would also add Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad by Daniel Finkelstein, which is very good on the randomness and luck involved in life.

I haven’t heard of Jane Smiley, I’ll definitely look her up thank you!

Jane Smiley has written many books and I really like that she dips into different genres. My top three would be:

• The All True Travels And Adventures of Lidie Newton (1850s USA, a feminist Huckleberry Finn in some ways)
• Duplicate Keys (1980s New York, murder mystery + mediation on friendship)
• A Thousand Acres (mid West USA farming, take on King Lear).

Also recommend Huckleberry Finn itself.

South Riding, Winifred Holtby.

Another vote for Middlemarch. An extraordinary novel.

What makes you think the Russians and Germans have all the answers? The Brits haven’t done so bad!! George Eliot’s Middlemarch? Dickens? Jane Austen? You can be funny and profound. It’s a mistake to think a funny writer can’t have anything serious to say (btw, both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky admired Dickens and were influenced by him). How about Thomas Hardy?

Personally, I’ve always found Aldous Huxley, Oscar Wilde and Iris Murdoch deep and profound writers.

Then of course there is Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Blake.

Diana Athill 'Somewhere Towards The End'. Although it's autobiography it reads more like a novel, she wrote it in her late 80's and she contemplates life in a wise and sharp way.

Kazuo Ishiguro. Deceptively simple prose but really make you think.
Never Let Me Go
Remains of the Day
Klara and the Sun

It's not great literature but fantastic for reflecting on the human condition is Irvin Yalom. He's a therapist first, writer second.

How about the c19th French realists? Zola or Balzac.

The Brothers Karamazov - my favourite.
The Idiot
Crime and Punishment

You're in for a treat!