Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Adichie skewers racism and sexism in America in a story that is both affecting and hilarious.

Submergence

J. M. Ledgard

Escaping into Ledgard’s language is itself a kind of submergence—the book has a vaguely liquid quality as it moves between its characters and between the surface and the lower depths.

Lilith’s Brood

Octavia E. Butler

This collection of novels begins with a woman named Lilith, who survives a disastrous war on Earth only to find the planet invaded by aliens, themselves refugees from a world they can no longer remember.

Hild

Nicola Griffith

From the scant historical record of Hild of Whitby, Griffith spins an extraordinary story of a girl who learns to navigate the world of kings and thegns.

Angelmaker

Nick Harkaway

Perhaps my favorite novel in recent years. Part noir, part old-school Bond thriller, part apocalyptic science fiction tale, and completely magnificent.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects

Ted Chiang

As a novel, The Lifecycle of Software Objects suffers from expository writing, flat characters, and uninspired prose. But as a thought experiment, it’s surprisingly (if incompletely) compelling.

The Names

Don Delillo

A dense novel, concerning a small group of American ex-patriots and a series of cult murders. Strange and beautiful.

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes

Almost certainly the greatest novel ever written, and an early precursor to postmodernism.

Summertime

J. M. Coetzee

With Coetzee’s last few works of fiction, he seems to be making an effort to get out ahead of the biographers who will no doubt pounce on his grave while still warm.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis

Davis’ shorts are very short—sometimes only a paragraph—but they leave impressions larger than the tiny space they consume.

Collected Fictions

Jorge Luis Borges

Short, surreal little tales that experiment with the form of the story and often take the library as their subject.

Fateless

Imre Kertész

An autobiographical novel, in which Kertész addresses his childhood in Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Slow Learner

Thomas Pynchon

Pynchon’s early stories are facile at best, but the introduction to the collection—in which Pynchon addresses his readers and talks about his writing—is invaluable.

Diary of a Bad Year

J. M. Coetzee

Coetzee’s latest novel is written as two, entwined diaries—his own and that of a younger woman who he comes to pass the time with.

1984

George Orwell

The classic novel of authoritarianism. Also, the Bush administration’s how-to manual.

Gravity’s Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon

Pynchon’s famously difficult masterpiece. I destroyed three copies in a (failed) effort to grasp it completely.

Waiting for the Barbarians

J. M. Coetzee

Coetzee’s most important novel, sadly more relevant everyday.

Limbo

Bernard Wolfe

A bizarre dystopia in which the elite voluntarily amputate their limbs and have them replaced with high performing machines.