Nathan Harris’ 6 favorite books that turn adventures into revelations

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Nathan Harris’ best-selling debut, The Sweetness of Water, was long-listed for the 2021 Booker Prize. In his new novel, Amity, a brother and sister recently emancipated from slavery in New Orleans travel separately through Mexico seeking true freedom.

‘The Good Lord Bird’ by James McBride (2013)

This is McBride at his best, blending historical fiction of the highest order with his signature sense of humor. It’s something of a buddy travelogue, one that never runs out of steam, even as you know where it ultimately ends up. Buy it here.

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‘The Remains of the Day’ by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)

I can still hear Butler Stevens’ voice in my ear—so poised, so professional, and yet brimming with loneliness, loss, and guilt. I had never encountered a narrator quite like this one, and the elegance of the performance, as orchestrated by Ishiguro, is one I return to often when I wish to see a master at work and recalibrate my own writing. Buy it here.

‘Knowledge of Angels’ by Jill Paton Walsh (1994)

A miraculous fable. It soars both as a philosophical meditation and as an intimate character study, with a remarkable evocation of the medieval world. Buy it here.

‘Little Big Man’ by Thomas Berger (1964)

A picaresque that strikes me, above all, for its literary courage. Berger is so unafraid to go wherever he wishes with his narrative. From Jack Crabb’s years with the Plains Indians to his wanderings across the frontier, the novel hums with that childhood thrill, as a reader forging on, of not knowing what might happen next. Buy it here.

‘In the Distance’ by Hernán Diaz (2017)

For its prose alone, this is such a gorgeous novel. But beneath the sentence level, this story about a 19th-century journey from California to the other end of the country lights upon everything that a good adventure novel might be. And all of it is told from such a unique perspective, that of a young foreigner who, in a foreign land, among so many misfits, still feels singularly out of place. Buy it here.

‘The North Water’ by Ian McGuire (2016)

I get the shivers just thinking about this novel—and a little seasick as well! When you feel transported like that, just by the faint recollections of a reading experience, well, you know you were in the hands of a master storyteller—and that’s Ian McGuire here, at the height of his talents. Buy it here.