British novelist and essayist Charlotte Mendelson is the author of Almost English, When We Were Bad, and Rhapsody in Green. Her latest novel, The Exhibitionist, was longlisted for the U.K.'s Women's Prize for Fiction.
The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard (1990–2012)
A panoramic unpacking of the intimate lives of three generations of one privileged family, Howard's intricate, painful, expansive sequence of five novels is usually, stupidly, dismissed as "domestic," a "historical saga" about the English middle class in the 1930s through '50s. Fools: It's a masterpiece. If the author were male, we'd all take it seriously. Buy it here.
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (1956)
James Baldwin, a gay Black man, knew Otherness; his writing about race is electrifying, but this short, harrowing novel about an American man's affair with an Italian waiter in Paris is unparalleled for its understanding of fear, poverty, passion, and the end of love. Buy it here.
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