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.
Samantha Harvey‘s most recent novel, “Orbital,” was last year’s winner of the Booker Prize. Now available in paperback, the novel tracks the experience of a team of astronauts on the International Space Station across a 24-hour span.
‘The Siege of Krishnapur’ by J.G. Farrell (1973)
Farrell fictionally constructs, explores, and deconstructs the 1857 siege of Lucknow in this brilliant, funny, moving novel. He rinses the British imperialists for their arrogance and stupidity, but nobody is spared his satire. One of the best books of the 20th century, no argument. Buy it here.
‘Home’ by Marilynne Robinson (2008)
My first novel ended up on the Orange Prize shortlist many years ago. When I read through the shortlist, I got to Home and I thought, Oh well, there goes my chance of a win. Home did win, of course. It’s a masterpiece, an exquisite, attentive, intricately balanced novel, with the dialogue and dramatic intensity of a stage play. Buy it here.
‘Mountains of the Moon’ by I.J. Kay (2012)
This novel will one day be considered a classic. It’s a gritty but tender tale of a damaged life, with prose that’s deft, quick, and spirited, a plot that pulls like a freight train, and one of the best child narrators you’ll ever encounter. Buy it here.
‘All That Man Is’ by David Szalay (2016)
This novel consists of nine portraits of masculinity, each a different man in a different decade of life. The effect is virtuosic, almost operatic. To write with such aliveness to a character, and to do it nine times, is genius. Anybody who reads about the French teenager holidaying in Cyprus will be gifted with mental imagery they will never again dispel. Buy it here.
‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot (1860)
I could just as easily have chosen Silas Marner, but had to whittle it down. I’ve heard people say that Eliot’s writing lacks humor, and this I can’t understand; The Mill on the Floss is scored with wit and with a sly understanding of life’s absurdities. Buy it here.
‘Overview’ by Benjamin Grant (2016)
This book of satellite imagery of Earth had its genesis in Grant’s Instagram project The Daily Overview. Except for the last chapter, “Where We Are Not,” the book focuses on imagery of humankind’s impact on the planet: permafrost melt, lithium mines, shipping containers. Strange, lovely, troubling. The book asks us to wake up to ourselves as a species. 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.