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.
Julian Barnes is the Booker Prize–winning author of "Flaubert’s Parrot," "The Sense of an Ending" and 12 other novels. His most recent, "Elizabeth Finch," charts its narrator’s long obsession with a woman who taught his adult education class on cultural history.
'The Widow Couderc' by Georges Simenon (1942)
Every year, Simenon would rage at the “idiots of Stockholm” who yet again had refused him the Nobel Prize in literature. I used to think this was crazy; now I think it quite sane. His romans durs are spare and harsh, with a deep understanding of human nature; this is one of his finest. Buy it here.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
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.
'Boys in Zinc' (or Zinky Boys) by Svetlana Alexievich (1989)
Alexievich did win the Nobel, and rightly, in 2015, for her polyphonic oral histories of the end of Soviet Communism. "Boys in Zinc," about the terrifying experiences of Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, was the first to be translated into English. Later she assembled voices from Chernobyl, and the experiences of women and children in wartime. buy it here.
'The Beginning of Spring' by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
Set in pre-Revolution Russia, this is the finest of Fitzgerald’s four great final novels. Wry, wrong-footing, wise and tender toward the incompetent, Fitzgerald’s fiction has a moral grace that will outlast most flashier fiction of our age. "But how does she know all that?" we are often left thinking. Buy it here.
'Persuasion' by Jane Austen (1817)
My favorite three 19th-century English novels are by women, Middlemarch and Jane Eyre being the other two. Persuasion is Austen’s last novel, dark, ironic and intense. Imagine what she’d have written had she not died at 41. Buy it here.
'Amours de Voyage' by Arthur Hugh Clough (1849)
A great long poem and also a great short novel — about love, doubt and travel; about failing to seize the day; about misreading, overanalyzing and moral cowardice. Clough was "unpoetical," according to his friend Matthew Arnold, which I take as an unintended compliment. Clough is contemplative, argumentative, witty and fiercely modern. Buy it here.
'Ethan Frome' by Edith Wharton (1911)
Wharton said this was "the book to the making of which I brought the greatest joy and the fullest ease." With most editions running scarcely more than 100 pages, it combines the novel’s density of character and theme with the fleshlessness and onrush of a short story. Like many of her books, a tragedy for a non-tragic age. And she originally wrote it in French! 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.
-
Metaverse: Zuckerberg quits his virtual obsessionFeature The tech mogul’s vision for virtual worlds inhabited by millions of users was clearly a flop
-
Frank Gehry: the architect who made buildings flow like waterFeature The revered building master died at the age of 96
-
Is MAGA melting down?Today's Big Question Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Laura Loomer and more are feuding
-
Frank Gehry: the architect who made buildings flow like water
Feature The revered building master died at the age of 96
-
6 lovely barn homesFeature Featuring a New Jersey homestead on 63 acres and California property with a silo watchtower
-
Film reviews: ‘Marty Supreme’ and ‘Is This Thing On?’Feature A born grifter chases his table tennis dreams and a dad turns to stand-up to fight off heartbreak
-
Heavenly spectacle in the wilds of CanadaThe Week Recommends ‘Mind-bending’ outpost for spotting animals – and the northern lights
-
It Was Just an Accident: a ‘striking’ attack on the Iranian regimeThe Week Recommends Jafar Panahi’s furious Palme d’Or-winning revenge thriller was made in secret
-
Singin’ in the Rain: fun Christmas show is ‘pure bottled sunshine’The Week Recommends Raz Shaw’s take on the classic musical is ‘gloriously cheering’
-
Holbein: ‘a superb and groundbreaking biography’The Week Recommends Elizabeth Goldring’s ‘definitive account’ brings the German artist ‘vividly to life’
-
The Sound of Music: a ‘richly entertaining’ festive treatThe Week Recommends Nikolai Foster’s captivating and beautifully designed revival ‘ripples with feeling’
