Is there a (fiction) novel that is universally acclaimed and loved?

[JMSA]

Looking for book recommendations for a book group I've just joined. I'm a little nervous about putting forward my first title, as I really don't know these people very well. I'm thinking it makes sense to 'play it safe' with my first choice of book. It has to be fiction and not onerously long. Max 400 pages.
We've just finished Hidden Windows by Jason Rekulak.
Group is mostly made up of secondary school English teachers, so something a wee bit different would be good, as the Classics will have been covered!

Thank you very much

The Mermaid of Black Conch was brilliant @hazandduck and not what I was expecting. I really liked Still Life but a couple of people at book club weren't impressed.

I love Du Maurier too. Our book group really enjoyed her "House on the Strand".

Cecelia Ahern writes books that are like modern fairy tales. They will never win literary prises but always cheer me up.

I recently discovered O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker - recommended by Maggie O'Farrell - and couldn't put it down. It would be great for a book group I think, and not long either as a bonus.

Or local book shops. Two of those closest to me run them.

I do think you need to go for something quite contemporary as I would imagine an English Teacher will have read a lot of the suggestions. I second:

Pirenesi
Trespasses
The Bee Sting
and maybe Demon Copperhead which is newer than Poisonwood Bible so maybe less well read? Still Kingsolver at her best and is a modern take on David Copperfield so lots to discuss.

For a less recent suggestion, how about Burial Rites by Hannah Kent. An absolutely beautiful (though devastating) book.

Any of the following are truly great works:

Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders
Jane Austen (anything)
Thackeray: Vanity Fair
Dickens: Bleak House
Wilde: Dorian Gray
Bronte: Jane Eyre
D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers
Ford Madox Ford: Parade's End
Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited

How about suggesting Powell's Dance to the Music of Time? McEwan's Atonement, Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, Capote's In Cold Blood, Edward St Aubyn's Melrose novels, Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.

How about some French or German classics? Proust might be a bit too much. Maybe Madame Bovary or The Magic Mountain? Or an Italian classic like Lampedusa's The Leopard?

Thank you for this thread, I am saving all of these titles for future reference. Finally getting back into reading after finally coming out of the brain dead fog of babies and toddlers!

Much better than the miniaturist but set at a similar time in the Netherlands was ‘the words in my hand’ by Guinevere Galsfurd - this was universally loved by our book club. Not super well known, should be more so.

More recently, we all very much enjoyed Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake.

We don’t generally all agree!

enjoy the book club, OP.

I loved Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Also a huge fan of The Age of Innocence!

I know, how did the author make it so believable! Just brilliant.

Haven't read the full thread so might have been recommended already.

Dictionary of lost words by Pip Williams or its companion novel, Bookbinder of Jericho.

Also second Month in the country. Beautiful.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? When I've recommended it, everybody has loved it.

John Irving Books - A Prayer for Owen Meany?

I hated the Bee Sting and stopped reading it and gave it away. It was the rambling of one of the characters, the way it was written stressed me out.

I love this thread so much and am making a list. Thank you.

@JaneyGee isn’t Tom Jones about 800 pages long?

I threw it away about 3/4 in and I only persisted that long because I was travelling and had no other book. Did not enjoy.