Very literary fiction recommends

That is a brilliant novel

I'd assume a man in his 80s with an English degree would be less likely to have read books in translation and/or books by women. So I'd suggest Sigrid Undset, Olga Tokarczuk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Buchi Emecheta, Elena Ferrante, Claudia Piñeiro, Leïla Slimani, Tove Ditlevsen, Irmgard Keun, Yoko Tawada, and Yoko Ogawa.

Oh, and someone mentioned Poor Things. Much as I loved it, Alasdair Gray's masterpiece is Lanark. Although a knowledge of Glasgow helps with both.

Also delighted to see the Deptford Trilogy and other Robertson Davies mentioned. Apologies if I missed any upthread, but would also recomment AS Byatt - obviously Possession, but also the Fredrica Quartet (Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman)

Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig.

For a keen reader it can be quite fun to do a pair of related books eg Mrs Dalloway (he will have read it but a lovely edition might be welcome) + The Hours; Demon Copperhead/David Copperfield; The Odyssey (newish translation by Emily Wilson is great and he may not have it) + Ulysses; On Beauty/Howards End; Sian Hughes' Pearl/Simon Armitage's new translation of the Pearl Poem etc etc.

There are also some new very early Virgina Woolf stories published recently- The Life of Violet. Haven't read them yet but the lady in Waterstones was very excited about it.

Thanks for a great thread to boost a TBR @UntamedShrew !
To turn your request around, could you ask your father which book he would recommend for us?

@NorWouldTilly @ParmaVioletTea You are of course right!
OP, your father sounds brilliant and clearly my list should have skewed more towards cutting-edge modern fiction.
Not at all cutting-edge, but has he read A S Byatt? Nabokov? (I think he would like Pale Fire). Thomas Love Peacock?

PS Can anyone remember a limerick which goes '.... Mother Superior/....dreary, no drearier/...than...games/or late Henry James/or an evening of opera seria?

A pp mentioned Tim Pears. I would recommend In a Land of Plenty which I really enjoyed. It was made into a tv drama in the early 90s, but doesn't seem.to be well known.
Also Jonathan Coe, the trilogy which starts with The Rotters Club ( Followed by The Clised Circle and Middle England).
Rose Tremain has written some good novels too.

The Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard.
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil

I think if he has an English degree from Cambridge your father will have read most of the books suggested here.

I’m in my sixties and if he’s anything like me would have devoured all or most of the ‘currently unfashionable’ writers you list during his teens and twenties!

Ditto @NorWouldTilly In my English degree, I read most of James, most of Trollope, all of Eliot, Gaskell, Dickens and the Brontes, plus a lot of Fielding, Burney and Richardson. And Ann Radcliffe as well as Austen of course. And that was just the fiction strand of my degree.

Sparklingly witty and humorous, nonetheless!

I wonder what age the OP’s father is?

I’m in my sixties and if he’s anything like me would have devoured all or most of the ‘currently unfashionable’ writers you list during his teens and twenties!

What Maisie Knew was my first encounter with Henry James - at 15 on a school exchange coach winding its way through Northern Europe. (I was ostensibly reading The Tin Drum, in German, so Maisie was light relief.) He is by some distance my all time most beloved novelist. (I once used the phrase late Henry James in an interview on my professional work; it was cut from the published piece to avoid accusations of elitism …)

I’ve never read Andrew Miller though - will make a note.

My introduction to Rosalind Belben (born 1941) - Our Horses in Egypt - was briefly interrupted last month by not at all highbrow new releases from R. Galbraith and Philip Pullman, but I’m back on it now and it may qualify to be included in this thread. Stylistically interesting - seems to require concentration even though the writing is pared to the bone.

I was thinking last night of the first time I read The Sea, The Sea. I couldn't put it down, and then worked my way through the rest of Iris Murdoch in about 6 months. Amazing writer & brain to encounter.

Someone who taught me had been taught by her. We were talking about an incident in Nuns and Soldiers where Christ appears to a character, and my tutor had asked her whether she deep down believed. Murdoch's answer was something like: "These important things to think about whether they are real or not." Philosophy & fiction - wonderful to encounter that intellect.

Man on a Donkey by HFM Prescott. A wonderful book set around the dissolution of the monasteries and the Pilgrimage of Grace.

Hilary Mantel said it inspired her and Eamon Duffy-and others- have called it a masterpiece.

Perfect for the autumn and winter

I’ve just finished Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, which was AMAZING - will stay with me for a long time.
Late Henry James is worth turning to later in life when one has more patience. What Maisie Knew is a very challenging masterpiece about how we make sense of the world.
Ronald Firbank might not be familiar to him - very mannered, very strange. Ditto Ivy Compton Burnett.
talking of mannered and strange, Mervyn Peake?
Agree with PP on Angus Wilson. Other currently unfashionable novelists include Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage - well worth a go), Galsworthy (Forsyte Saga), Graham Greene (breathtakingly good), J B Priestley.

Miss Smila's Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg

The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif

He's probably read A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry?

In a similar vein, The Master by Colm Tobin.

If he likes classic texts, maybe he would enjoy work inspired by them? I read James by Percival Everett this summer, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn.

Louise Erdreich
Jonathan Coe

If he reads translations, I highly recommend Thomas Bernhard

The really interesting (and very under-read) Ishiguru novel is of course, The Unconsoled. I tend to think this is his true masterpiece - it's stayed with me for 20 years since I read it.

See how your papa likes that one @UntamedShrew ?

It's hard to recommend such books. All I can do is list the books I love that are either considered classics or are by classic/great writers:

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
Dickens: David Copperfield
Oscar Wilde: Dorian Gray
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha
Willa Cather: My Antonia
Ford Madox Ford: Parade's End
Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited, The Sword of Honor, Decline and Fall
Antony Powell: A Dance to the Music of Time
Nabokov: Pale Fire
Aldous Huxley: Chrome Yellow, Point Counter Point
Iris Murdoch: The Sea, The Sea
Patrick Fermor: A Time of Gifts
James Joyce: Dubliners
Robert Graves: Goodbye to All That

How about classic non-fiction? I'm a big fan of essays. Maybe try the selected essays of Montaigne or Aldous Huxley or Bertrand Russell. Orwell's collected essays are wonderful – much better than his fiction.

The Remains of the Day is such a good book. Also Hold Me Close, it still haunts me, brilliant, but I sort of wish I hadn’t read it.

I’m realising simply linking to another thread, as I have above, won’t tell anyone who isn’t familiar with her work about Helen DeWitt.

If my own bookish father had still been alive in 2000 I would have been able to share her first book

The Last Samurai

with him. And we could have been excited together about the prospect of her new book. This article tells you everything:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/books/helen-dewitt-your-name-here.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xE8.djsu.Fage3B-Tz7Ob&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare