Viper's Tangle
1932 · 220 pages
Louis, a rich dying lawyer, fills a long letter to his wife with decades of hatred and the fortune he means to withhold from his children. Mauriac tracks the moment the hardness breaks.
★ 6.0
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Rainbow
1915 · 528 pages
Three generations of one Nottinghamshire family, and Lawrence writes their marriages from inside the body: what draws two people together, what turns cold, and what the granddaughter Ursula cannot find.
★ 7.0
Howards End
1910 · 246 pages
Two families and one house. Forster sets the cultured Schlegel sisters against the money-making Wilcoxes, drags a poor clerk into the collision, and makes the question of who inherits England literal.
★ 7.0
The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, Vol. 1
The Golden Days
1764 · 540 pages
Bao-yu, born with a jade in his mouth, would rather write poems with his cousins than study for the exams, while his great eighteenth-century Chinese family slides toward ruin. Their world is ending.
★ 8.2
The Sound and the Fury
1929 · 321 pages
Four sections circle one Mississippi family's ruin, and the first belongs to a brother who cannot speak or keep time in order. Faulkner makes confusion itself carry the weight of grief.
★ 9.2
One Hundred Years of Solitude
1967 · 417 pages
Seven generations of one family in Macondo, where insomnia comes as a plague and the rain lasts four years. García Márquez reports the impossible as plain fact.
★ 9.5