Absalom, Absalom!
1936 · 313 pages
Thomas Sutpen arrives in Mississippi from nowhere with a band of slaves and a French architect and builds a dynasty that destroys itself. Two students retell it until it swallows them.
★ 9.0
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 Grapes of Wrath
1939 · 464 pages
The Joads lose their Oklahoma farm and drive west to California, where the promised work is a lie. Steinbeck's fury at what was done to them still comes off the page.
★ 9.0
The Cairo Trilogy
1957 · 1313 pages
A Cairo merchant rules his household as a tyrant and drinks his nights away with singers while his wife may not step outside. Over three generations, revolution and war reach inside that house.
★ 7.8
The Radetzky March
1932 · 369 pages
A lieutenant knocks Emperor Franz Joseph off his horse at Solferino and saves his life. Three generations of Trottas ride that accident down into 1914, and the Habsburg empire dissolves around them.
★ 7.0
Red Sorghum
A Novel of China
1986 · 359 pages
Bandits waylay a bride bound for a leprous distiller, and the son conceived in the sorghum grows up under Japanese occupation. Mo Yan makes rural Shandong's violence gorgeous and unbearable at once.
★ 6.8
East of Eden
1952 · 602 pages
Two generations of a Salinas Valley family repeat Cain and Abel, and Steinbeck stakes everything on one Hebrew word: timshel, thou mayest, which leaves a man free to choose against his blood.
★ 6.7
Atonement
2001 · 351 pages
In 1935 a thirteen-year-old girl watches her sister and the charwoman's son by a fountain, misreads what she sees, and accuses him of a crime. McEwan follows the wreckage through Dunkirk.
★ 6.7
O Pioneers!
1913 · 122 pages
Alexandra Bergson inherits her father's failing Nebraska claim and mortgages it to buy more land while the neighbors give up and leave. Cather made the American prairie a landscape fit for epic.
★ 6.7
Clear Light of Day
1980 · 182 pages
In a decaying Old Delhi house, two sisters reopen everything the family did to each other in 1947, the year of Partition. Desai makes still summer afternoons unbearable.
★ 6.1
The House of the Spirits
1982 · 433 pages
Clara predicts the future and moves furniture without touching it, while three generations of her family reach from the era of the great estates to the 1973 coup that comes for them.
★ 5.7
White Teeth
2000 · 464 pages
Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal met in a tank in 1945 and are still arguing in North London, while their children reject every inheritance on offer. Smith made multicultural Britain a comic epic.
★ 5.2
Middlesex
2002 · 544 pages
Cal Stephanides was born a girl in Detroit and became a boy at fourteen, and traces the gene responsible back through Asia Minor to grandparents who were brother and sister.
★ 5.2