Julia Phillips' 6 favorite books that explore the beauty and brutality of life

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

Novelist Julia Phillips is the author of "Disappearing Earth," a 2019 international best-seller that was also a National Book Award finalist. In her new novel, "Bear," the bond between two sisters is tested when a grizzly arrives on the island where they live.

"Middlemarch" by George Eliot (1871)

About marriage, love, expectations, and class, this novel is an exquisite and moving account of how the people in one small town built their lives together. Eliot crafts her characters with unparalleled honesty and tenderness. She shows people as they really are. Buy it here. 

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)

Through the story of the rise and fall of one family, this novel shows the entire world, not only as it is but as it might be: lush, fantastical, heartbreaking. Nobody does it like García Márquez. Nobody could. Buy it here. 

"The Color Purple" by Alice Walker (1982)

From its very first words, this novel is ferocious — a gorgeous and shocking depiction of violence, intimacy, desire, and dreaming. Walker's voice on the page is like no other. She grabs you and doesn't let you go. And somehow, though this story contains so much pain, it ultimately is built on hope: the belief, eventually made real, that these characters can not only survive but also triumph. Buy it here.

"The Underground Railroad" by Colson Whitehead (2016)

Whitehead is, without a doubt, one of our greatest living writers, creating stories that are as beautiful as they are brutal, as narratively satisfying as they are form-­breaking and inventive. This novel is my favorite of his. To read it is to witness a genius at work. Buy it here. 

"Women Talking" by Miriam Toews (2018)

A truly perfect novel, this book is unforgettable. It takes the facts of a real story — a series of sexual assaults at a Mennonite colony in the early 2000s — and creates from those an astounding work of art that explores justice, forgiveness, and faith. It asks what is, to my mind, the most essential question of all: How do we keep going? How do we live? Buy it here.

"The End of Drum-Time" by Hanna Pylväinen (2023)

A work of historical fiction about the collision between reindeer herders and Lutheran missionaries in the Scandinavian tundra, this novel astounded me. It is epic, rich, and deeply beautiful, like seeing the northern lights on the page. Buy it here.

This article was first published in the latest issue of The Week magazine. If you want to read more like it, you can try six risk-free issues of the magazine here.