Beloved
1987 · 360 pages
Sethe escaped slavery years ago and cannot escape the daughter she lost, who comes back to the house as a young woman. Morrison writes American history's worst chapter with unbearable tenderness.
★ 9.4
Browse by time · decade
1980s
1980 – 1989
Showing 94 books from the 1980s
Blood Meridian
1985 · 337 pages
Scalp hunters ride the Mexican border in 1849, among them a runaway Tennessee boy and the hairless giant Judge Holden. McCarthy writes the violence in Old Testament prose and never once looks away.
★ 9.1
Life and Fate
1980 · 896 pages
During the siege of Stalingrad, a Soviet physicist receives his mother's last letter from a Nazi ghetto. Grossman wrote the war at Tolstoy's scale and said plainly that both tyrannies were one thing.
★ 8.7
Midnight's Children
1981 · 560 pages
Saleem Sinai is born at the exact midnight India becomes independent, which gives him telepathy and welds his life to the country's. Sixty years of history arrive as one unreliable, delighted confession.
★ 8.7
The Book of Disquiet
1982 · 468 pages
Pessoa invented an assistant bookkeeper in Lisbon and gave him hundreds of fragments on being alive in a rented room. Open the book anywhere and someone is already thinking your thoughts.
★ 8.4
Love in the Time of Cholera
1985 · 348 pages
Turned down as a young man, Florentino Ariza waits fifty-one years for the woman he loves to be widowed. García Márquez makes old age more erotic than youth.
★ 8.4
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
1987 · 838 pages
At a London crossing in 1933 a physicist grasps how a chain reaction could work. Rhodes follows the idea to Los Alamos and Hiroshima, making the physics clear and the human cost unbearable.
★ 7.9
Battle Cry of Freedom
1988 · 952 pages
McPherson carries the whole Civil War in one volume, from the fights over slavery in the 1840s through Antietam to the surrender at Appomattox, and it reads like dispatches filed the same day.
★ 7.9
The Name of the Rose
1980 · 579 pages
Monks are dying at an Italian abbey in 1327, the library is a labyrinth no one may enter, and a Franciscan detective and his novice go in. Eco made medieval theology a thriller.
★ 7.7
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
1984 · 320 pages
Kundera puts a Prague surgeon who cannot stop having affairs, the woman who loves him, and the Soviet tanks of 1968 together, then asks whether a life lived once can weigh anything.
★ 7.7
The Remains of the Day
1989 · 245 pages
Driving across England in 1956 to see the housekeeper he worked beside, a butler remembers the Nazi sympathizer he served with pride. What he cannot bring himself to say is the whole novel.
★ 7.7
The Handmaid's Tale
1985 · 336 pages
In the theocracy that replaced the United States, fertile women are assigned to powerful men to bear their children. Atwood put nothing in it that had not already happened somewhere.
★ 7.7
Parting the Waters
America in the King Years, 1954-63
1988 · 1088 pages
Branch follows Martin Luther King from the Montgomery bus boycott to Birmingham, moving between black church basements, the Kennedy White House, and the FBI, and ten years become full American history.
★ 6.9
Lonesome Dove
1985 · 858 pages
Two aging Texas Rangers drive cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana, one talking constantly and one saying nothing. McMurtry gives the whole crew interior lives, then lets the trail take them.
★ 6.9
With the Old Breed
1981 · 352 pages
Sledge fought as a Marine mortarman on Peleliu and Okinawa, then set down the mud, the maggots, and the looting of corpses. The critic Paul Fussell ranked it with the finest war memoirs.
★ 6.8
The Soul of a New Machine
1981 · 320 pages
Working nights in a Massachusetts basement, a crew of young engineers races to build a new computer in a year, and Kidder catches every argument. Nobody had made engineering a literary subject.
★ 6.8
This Earth of Mankind
1980 · 368 pages
Minke, a Javanese student under Dutch rule, loves the daughter of a concubine running the estate its Dutch owner cannot. Indonesia banned it for a generation and now claims it as its greatest.
★ 6.8
The Color Purple
1982 · 287 pages
Celie is fourteen, writing to God because there is nobody else to tell. Walker took her from there to a life she owns and won the first fiction Pulitzer given a Black woman.
★ 6.8
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
1981 · 120 pages
Two brothers spend a morning announcing they will kill Santiago Nasar over their sister's wedding night, and nobody stops them. García Márquez reconstructs it from the witnesses who let it happen.
★ 6.8
A Confederacy of Dunces
1980 · 394 pages
Ignatius J. Reilly, obese and certain the modern age is beneath him, is pushed out of his mother's New Orleans house to find work. Toole wrote the funniest American novel of its century.
★ 6.8