Very literary fiction recommends

[UntamedShrew]

Morning all. I’m looking for any recommends from those whose reading tastes lean towards the highbrow end of literary fiction.

I have a very bookish father and would like to get him some challenging but rewarding reads for the winter. Have you read anything that has stayed with you? He likes character led stories but has really broad ranging interests within this - doesn’t need to be modern or historical, British or international etc.

thank you ☺️

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.

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 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.

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.

Sparklingly witty and humorous, nonetheless!

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.

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.

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.

He’s a very youthful 80! So yes he might hit well have read lots of those currently unfashionable. He’s had a lot of time to do a lot of reading… but tells me one of the good things about getting older is you can’t always remember the endings 😊 So a re-read from the past is fun too.

James is a great shout as I don’t think he’s read that yet. My son and I have both enjoyed it. I’m looking at a big list but think there is room for Andrew Miller too. I’m going to need a bigger box…

thank you again for all of the suggestions, very kind of you all.

@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?

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?

Glad it’s been good for you too!

good idea, I’ll ask him when he’s back from his holiday. In the meantime I mentioned a couple we both enjoyed in the last year - Glorious Exploits and We the Drowned. If you haven’t read, would add those to your lists for sure. More to follow once he’s home ☺️

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.

Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig.

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)

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.

That is a brilliant novel

Ah, I think McEwan's masterpiece is Child In Time which is quite experimental in comparison with Atonement as it is written with time slips. It's one of my favourite novels ever

OP, it's not a novel, but Super Infinite - a biography of poet Jon Donne is gripping and exquisitely written.

Another vote for James.

I also found The Zone of Interest absolutely extraordinary though not really something to give as a present, it is very dark, perhaps particularly because it is funny.

I’m sure he’s read it but when I finally did manage to read Midnight’s Children, I thought it was every bit as good as its reputation. It’s not even difficult, once you tackle it the right way (chapter at a time).

I know it’s just been televised but/and The Narrow Road to the North was a wonderful book.

Also agree that Poor Things is spectacular though I didn’t exactly enjoy it.

Im not very far into it but Ducks Newburyport is very good.

One thing I’d factor in for an 80-ish person is font size and the weight of a tome, just to avoid fatigue. My bookish 92yo mother recently enjoyed Lucy Worsley’s biography of Agatha Christie, which she followed up with re-reading Roger Ackroyd.

Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks

Ooh thanks - will check this one out!

I came on here to recommend some female authors too - Louise Erdrich and Margaret Atwood (Alias Grace for example).

This is a superb book. It fills the brief - beautiful writing so you know you’re in safe hands, when the actual sentence and paragraphs, the composition itself, is satisfying.
The story line is long - from youth to old age, and the characters are credible, complex, with that sense of being real people in a real setting. You like and dislike each for their character traits, their beliefs, their decisions and their work. None is a baddie or a goodie. You root for each of them.

And to top it all, the work and world of their ideas, is mind-blowingly interesting. I talked to my loved ones about the ideas raised in this book, about what is a human mind, mental illness, religion, the source of language,again and again.

please please get him this book as it will not fail you or him!