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by Sigrid Undset
“[Sigrid Undset] should be the next Elena Ferrante.” —Slate
Undset's ability to present a meticulously accurate historical portrait without sacrificing the poetry and narrative drive of masterful storytelling was particularly significant in her homeland. Granted independence in 1905 after five hundred years of foreign domination, Norway was eager to reclaim its national history and culture. Kristin Lavransdatter became a touchstone for Undset's contemporaries, and continues to be widely read by Norwegians today. In the more than 75 years since it was first published, it has also become a favorite throughout the world.
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Author: Jim Harrison
Length: 288 pages
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by Vladimir Nabakov
The most famous and controversial novel from one of the greatest writers of the 20th century tells the story of Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.
“The conjunction of a sense of humor with a sense of horror [results in] satire of a very special kind.”—The New Yorker
Most of all, it is a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
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Author: James Hilton
Length: 241 pages
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by Gustave Flaubert
One of the world’s most celebrated novels, soon to be a major motion picture starring Mia Wasikowska.
In the story of a provincial doctor and his wife’s tawdry affairs, Gustave Flaubert found the stuff of great literature. A perfect novel about imperfect people, Madame Bovary is the rare classic that exceeds expectations and feels as fresh now as it did the day it was written.
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Author: Jane Austen
Length: 520 pages
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by Richard Hooker
Before the movie, this is the novel that gave life to Hawkeye Pierce, Trapper John, Hot Lips Houlihan, Frank Burns, Radar O'Reilly, and the rest of the gang that made the 4077th MASH like no other place in Korea or on earth.
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Author: George Eliot
Length: 752 pages
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Author: Herman Melville
Length: 608 pages
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Author: Frederick Douglass
Length: 366 pages
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by Willa Cather
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of O Pioneers! presents a moving study of an ambitious woman and her troubled marriage in this 1926 novella.
Known for novels like O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather wrote predominately about pioneers and the American West. In 1923, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel One of Ours.
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Author: Hermann Hesse
Length: 320 pages
