Jessica Francis Kane's 6 favorite books that prove less is more

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Jessica Francis Kane's new novel, Fonseca, fictionalizes an event in the life of British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald. It follows the future literary legend as she and her 6-year-old son travel to a small town in Mexico in 1952, hoping to claim an unexpected inheritance.

'The Beginning of Spring' by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)

I've been steeped in everything by and about Fitzgerald for the better part of a decade, and this is my favorite of her novels. A city (Moscow), a landscape (winter giving way to spring), and a vanished time (pre-revolutionary Russia) are all mastered in less than 200 pages. The English printer Frank Reid—confused husband, loving but baffled father, patient friend—is one of her best creations. Buy it here.

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'The Means of Escape' by Penelope Fitzgerald (2000)

Fitzgerald was preparing this book, her only story collection, when she died in 2000. Like her novels, the stories are precise and morally astute. They range across countries and ages, stretch from the historical to the supernatural, and are all mordantly funny. My favorite is "Our Lives Are Only Lent to Us"; it provides clues to her thinking about a place like Fonseca. Buy it here.

'The Afterlife' by Penelope Fitzgerald (2003)

After you've read all of her novels (there are only nine), you'll want more of Fitzgerald's distinctive sensibility. That is when you turn to this collection, full of brilliant literary and personal essays. Buy it here.

'According to Queeney' by Beryl Bainbridge (2001)

Bainbridge was a contemporary and an acquaintance of Fitzgerald, as well as a fellow master of the supreme art of what and exactly how much to leave out. This novel about Samuel Johnson captures the great man's personality with dexterity, humor, and compassion. Buy it here.

'The Queen of the Tambourine' by Jane Gardam (1991)

Gardam, an approximate contemporary, and the third guest at my dream dinner party after Fitzgerald and Bainbridge, shares their wit and humor. Gardam is well known for her Old Filth series, but this novel about a woman losing and then regaining her sense of self is not to be missed. Buy it here.

'Beautyland' by Marie-Helene Bertino (2024)

This beautiful novel about Adina, a girl not quite of this world, is my favorite novel of the past year. Fitzgerald would have admired the way it champions the underdog and the misunderstood, her heroes to the end. Buy it here.