Notes on a Scandal
by Zoë Heller
A chilling black comedy about the relationship between a teenage boy and his art teacher, Sheba. She confesses her affair, and the result is an inevitable car crash — and a compulsive read. (2003)
All That Man Is
by David Szalay
An intelligent, 100-megawatt work follows, in nine chapters, nine men at different stages of life. (2016)
The Noise of Time
by Julian Barnes
Gleaming with intelligence and literary flair, this elegantly composed fictional meditation on the life of Shostakovich offers a fresh gloss on a musical genius’s collisions and collusions with power. (2016)
Fingersmith
by Sarah Waters
Set in the 1860s, it is the story of two young women: one raised in a south London world of thievery and rough affection, the other in rural isolation. They come together for an outrageous but satisfying scheme. A literary delight. (2002)
Atonement
by Ian McEwan
Taking you into the world of a country house in 1935, McEwan opts for a slow, suffocating build-up of tension. As always, he is engrossed not merely by damage, but by its aftermath. Rich and intricate. (2001)
Train Dreams
by Denis Johnson
Set in the American West at the start of the 20th century, this is the tale of a construction worker who, after losing his wife and daughter to a wildfire, lives as a recluse in the woods. At only 116 pages, it’s a feat. (2011)
The Zone of Interest
by Martin Amis
Set in Auschwitz, though its name is never mentioned, the novel is more an extended rumination, a nightmare, filled with riffs on the subject of Nazi Germany. It’s exciting; it’s alive; it’s more than slightly mad, and dreadfully interesting. (2014)
You Don’t Have to Live Like This
by Benjamin Markovits
Two friends from Yale set about building a new America in the ruins of Detroit. Engrossing and satisfyingly complex. (2015)
Mothering Sunday
by Graham Swift
Mothering Sunday, 1924, and in rural Berkshire, war-depleted gentry keep alive the tradition of allowing servants a holiday to visit their mothers, which gives the opportunity for an intimate assignation across class barriers. Alive with sensuousness, a vanished world is resurrected with superb immediacy. (2016)
Digging to America
by Anne Tyler
You could pick almost any Tyler volume as a best-loved book. This account of two very different families each adopting a baby girl from Korea shows the author at her richest. (2006)
Small Island
by Andrea Levy
With a light touch and wry humour, Levy deals with Jamaican immigration to postwar Britain in a deservedly award-winning novel. (2004)
Breath
by Tim Winton
A growing protagonist overcomes a succession of obstacles in this haunting book, set in small-town coastal Australia. A familiar tale, then, but in the hands of an immensely skilful and experienced novelist such as Winton, the old stories can often be the most powerful. (2008)
The White Tiger
by Aravind Adiga
Adiga’s ingenious debut is narrated by the Bangalore businessman Balram Halwai, who reveals his rise from destitute origins to wealth and power in the Asian boom. (2008)
Little Fires Everywhere
by Celeste Ng
A book-club favourite, this is the compulsively readable story of a family in a placid, progressive suburb going off the rails. (2017)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz
The tough-love tale of Oscar, a grossly overweight and hopelessly romantic “ghetto nerd”, and his turbulent Dominican-American family. Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer prize, this first novel may not be brief, but it is wondrous. (2007)
The Blind Assassin
by Margaret Atwood
This Booker-winning novel encompasses half a century of family and political history and a risky affair, with revelations coming thick and fast. (2000)
The Secret Scripture
by Sebastian Barry
Alternating between the “scriptures” of a taciturn old woman and a senior psychiatrist, Barry’s tale is remarkable for the enduring richness of its voices. (2008)
The Year of the Runaways
by Sunjeev Sahota
A big, thorough book tracing the interwoven paths of a Croydon-born Sikh girl and three young Indians hoping for a better life in Britain. Sahota has a lot to say and he says it calmly, with great moral intelligence. (2015)
The Son
by Philipp Meyer
A thrilling cowboy saga following successive generations of a Texan family from the mid-19th century to the present day, it lassoes the reader from its brutal, unflinching start. (2013)
English Passengers
by Matthew Kneale
A richly evocative account of an 1857 expedition to locate the Garden of Eden, which a vicar has worked out must be located in Tasmania. A novel of ambition, successfully achieved. (2000)
The Interestings
by Meg Wolitzer
Six American teenagers meet at summer camp in 1974 and discover vodka and irony. The novel follows their lives over the next 30-odd years: a cradle-to-grave work in the best sense. (2013)
Home Fire
by Kamila Shamsie
Shamsie brings the story of Antigone into the present day and ingeniously sets it among British Muslims. Her prose is unfailingly elegant, the plot propulsive and her eye for detail acute. (2017)
Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson
An elderly preacher worries over the return of his godson, the scapegrace Jack Boughton, to the small Iowa town that gives Robinson’s serene book its title. (2004)
True History of the Kelly Gang
by Peter Carey
Passionate, partisan and poignant, Carey’s luminous account of the life of the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly gives us a hero worthy of the author’s worship. (2000)
Star of the Sea
by Joseph O’Connor
Multiple narratives drawn from diaries, letters and conversations weave together on a famine ship voyaging from Ireland to New York in 1847, in a novel hailed as a spectacular breakthrough. (2004)
Stay with Me
by Ayobami Adebayo
An impressive debut — immediate, unpretentious, with whip-smart dialogue — centred on a family breakdown in Nigeria. (2017)
The Constant Gardener
by John le Carré
Le Carré is on exceptional form in this polemical, disturbing story of death and corruption in Africa. (2001)
Midwinter Break
by Bernard MacLaverty
A portrait of a long marriage that plunges back into the Troubles. Damage done by toxic ideology is the persisting theme in MacLaverty’s fiction. And he has never dealt with it more powerfully than here. (2017)
Harvest
by Jim Crace
A community in pre-industrial rural England is torn apart by the enclosure movement in this beautifully written book. (2013)
Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel
The first of Mantel’s evocative Thomas Cromwell volumes: you watch as if via a camera mounted on his shoulder as this ambitious, clever man eases his way to power through Tudor society. (2009)
Home
by Toni Morrison
In a magisterial mapping of the black American experience, Frank, a psychologically damaged soldier returned from Korea, travels through the US to his home in Georgia. It’s brief, but encompasses a whole era. (2012)
The Siege
by Helen Dunmore
“Life has become better, comrades, life has become more cheerful.” The monstrous absurdity of Stalin’s 1935 statement to his people has never been more effectively exposed than in Dunmore’s harrowing book. (2001)
How to Be Good
by Nick Hornby
A bitingly clever novel of ideas: how would a totally good person, a saint or a Jesus Christ clone, get on in the modern world? (2001)
Lincoln in the Bardo
by George Saunders
As the grief-stricken Abraham Lincoln cradles the corpse of his 11-year-old son Willie in a nocturnal crypt in Georgetown, Washington, the cemetery around him swarms with voluble spectral presences. Saunders’s first novel is a brilliantly imaginative excursion into a postmortem world. (2017)
The Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst
In this luminous book set in Thatcher’s London, Hollinghurst provides the 21st-century equivalent of the clinical gaze of Henry James, proving a supreme anatomist of the manners and mores of the haut monde. (2004)
The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
A shattering meditation on America’s original sin, casting slavery as a nightmare from which there’s no escape. (2016)
Darkmans
by Nicola Barker
An enormous, witty and well-staged epic in which a cast of confused characters blunder their way haphazardly through a few chaotic days in Ashford. (2007)
Dissolution
by CJ Sansom
A brilliant historical crime novel set during the dissolution of the monasteries, this is Sansom’s debut and the first in his Matthew Shardlake series. (2003)
The Book of the Heathen
by Robert Edric
An Englishman goes on trial for the murder of a young African girl in the Congo Free State in 1897. This disturbing and haunting work echoes Conrad at his best. (2000)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon
A celebration of fiction, told through a magical and moving story of two New York cousins who gain fame as cartoonists in the 1930s and 1940s. (2000)
I’ll Go to Bed at Noon
by Gerard Woodward
The effects of alcohol on a north London family are depicted through a narrative that is crisp, resourceful and sometimes hilarious in its description of the myriad ways in which people drink. This is both a moral and a literary tale. (2004)
My Brilliant Friend
by Elena Ferrante
Ferrante’s tetralogy is an intense saga of a rivalrous friendship between two girls growing up in the roughest quarter of Naples in the 1950s. It hoovers up all the big topics: class, sex, women, politics and violence. (2012-15)
Suite Française
by Irène Némirovsky
A modern classic: Second World War France gets the War and Peace treatment in two superb novellas written by an author who was murdered in Auschwitz, but not published until 2004.
All for Nothing
by Walter Kempowski
In 1945, the Red Army is advancing. In East Prussia, the von Globig family is cocooned in a ramshackle mansion. Kempowski tells his story of individuals caught up in history’s wider sweep with a dispassionate simplicity. (2015)
The Yacoubian Building
by Alaa Al Aswany
This Egyptian novel caused a huge stir when it was first published in Arabic. With a beguiling cast of characters living in one Cairo building, it lifts the lid on the country’s many contradictions. (2004)
Limonov
by Emmanuel Carrère
Carrère is the foremost exponent of the “non-fiction novel”, and this is his tightest and most satisfying, retelling the extraordinary life of an anarchic Russian adventurer punk-poet who fought in the Balkan Wars. (2014)
Alone in Berlin
by Hans Fallada
Fallada wrote Alone in Berlin in 1947, but English readers had to wait 62 years for it. Based on a true story, it is a tale of brutality and defiance as a couple are put on trial for denouncing the war after the death of their son. (2009)
Submission
by Michel Houellebecq
The French controversialist imagines an Islamist France in a melancholic satire on the decline of western liberal values in the face of an easy life. (2015)
War & Turpentine
by Stefan Hertmans
In the life of his Belgian grandfather, Hertmans discovers the terrible hardships of poverty in early-20th-century Ghent and a wholly different side of the First World War. (2016)
Lullaby
by Leïla Slimani
This shocking novel about a nanny killing her charges is a clever way into the role of women and the burdens of maternal obligation, from a writer who has become a star in France. (2018)
The Unseen
by Roy Jacobsen
It’s the 20th century, but life on a tiny Norwegian island is so hard, and resources are so meagre, it could be the 17th. This is a compelling read: the characters are blessed with a humanity that develops in unexpected directions. (2016)
Your Face Tomorrow Trilogy
by Javier Marias
A “novel in parts” in a world of spies, where Jacques Deza’s talent for reading faces makes him a recruitment target for a mysterious Oxford group. It deals with the nature of how we understand and trust others through stories. (2005-09)
Frog
by Mo Yan
An indictment of the brutal enforcement of China’s one-child policy told through the story of a party-zealot midwife, this is a powerful novel from the Chinese Nobel laureate. (2014)
The Great Swindle
by Pierre Lemaitre
It’s rare for a crime writer to win the Prix Goncourt, but Lemaitre did with this story of post-First World War France. It has been compared to Balzac in the sweep of its vision. (2015)
Flights
by Olga Tokarczuk
The Polish writer won the Man Booker International prize with this miscellany of narratives, from the life of a 17th-century anatomist to a modern Polish biologist flying back home to visit a dying boyfriend. (2017)
Austerlitz
by WG Sebald
Only late in life does Jacques Austerlitz begin to discover the hidden truth of his arrival in England on a Kindertransport: a melancholy meditation on identity and history. (2001)
The Explosion Chronicles
by Yan Lianke
This fictional history of the Chinese town of Explosion gives more insight into the country as a phenomenon of our time than a shelf-load of economic studies. It’s also an exhilarating read. (2017)