long, challenging novels not many people have heard of - recommendations please?

[highlandcoo]

I have a tradition going with my nephew .. he's very well-read and every year I take on the challenge of sending him something he hasn't already come across. I've often chosen English translations of books set in Eastern Europe or Russia but I don't always succeed in finding a book he hasn't read.

In recent years I've sent:

Second Hand Time
The Pear Field
The Tsar of Love and Techno
Angel Maker
The Gone-Away World
The Story of a Life

I wondered about Prophet Song this year but would like one or two other novels to add to it. Any suggestions gratefully received.

TIA 😊

@pinkspeakers I keep thinking about reading The Eighth Life, looks right up my street but the length keeps putting me off.

I don’t remember struggling to finish it - and it’s not often I read books that long. However, I do remember thinking that surely someone in the family should be able to get through their life without something unspeakably awful happening!

How about Marcel Proust? I was told that everyone can say they read it because no one can challenge them 😜 I started the first book and it's a lovely read.. it's just so bloody long and 7 books in total woooosh!

The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley

It is a wonderful epic of medieval Greenland settlers across generations. It's a hefty tome and much overlooked, but a cracking read.

Halldór Laxness . Independent people
https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2022/01/where-to-start-reading-guide-halldor-laxness

Yes and her american trilogy is fabulous

Some Luck
Early Warning and
Golden Age

follows the same family for more than a century

I love the sound of The Greenlanders for myself. I really enjoyed her American trilogy - a great big family saga is just my sort of thing.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon - Rebecca West

It's about Wests travels through the former Yugoslavia in the 1930s.

@JaninaDuszejko I have it staring down at me from my shelf. I’m broadly planning it for my summer holiday when I’ll have downtime to give it my full attention.

Not a big book at all, but I always buy Antonio Tabucchi’s Pereira Maintains for people who read quite widely already.

Pereira Maintains is on my TBR list thanks to you @StColumbofNavron . Wonder if I can fit it in by the end of the year?

It’s tiny, I’m sure you could. There is something melancholically beautiful about it.

And thank you from me, too. I’ve just downloaded Pereira Maintains from the library.

@JaninaDuszejko Your username always makes me smile.

The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, Polish Nobel prize winner for literature. This epic book is 928 pages.

Back cover description:

“In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas begin to sweep the continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumours of his sect's secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs. In The Books of Jacob, her masterpiece, 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk writes the story of Frank through the perspectives of his contemporaries, capturing Enlightenment Europe on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence.”

Am loving this thread. Tend to stick to the same genre.
On the recommendation of this thread I've bought A Fine Balance. Only a few chapters in but really enjoying it.

Olga Tokarczuk is amazing (though I’ve not read that one.) Flights is brilliant.

Has he done the German post-war stuff? Gunther Grass, "The Tin Drum"? Wolfgang Borchert, "The Man Outside"? (Technically a play, not a book, but still.). Both are spectacularly depressing, mind you.