Long Books for Long Days

Lengthy books for those looking for reads to immerse themselves in and to do so for a good, long while.
Updated September 19, 2022
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War and peace
Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910.
War and Peace centers broadly on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the best-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves behind...
Luminaries
Catton, Eleanor, 1985-
The bestselling, Man Booker Prize-winning novel hailed as "a true achievement. Catton has built a lively parody of a 19th-century novel, and in so doing created a novel for the 21st, something utterly new. The pages fly."-New York Times Book Review It is 1866, and Walter Moody has...
Goldfinch
Tartt, Donna.
A young New Yorker grieving his mother's death is pulled into a gritty underworld of art and wealth in this "extraordinary" and beloved Pulitzer Prize winner from the author of The Secret History that "connects with the heart as well as the mind" (Stephen King, New York Times Book...
Pillars of the earth
Follett, Ken.
Ken Follett is known worldwide as the master of split-second suspense, but his most beloved and bestselling book tells the magnificent tale of a twelfth-century monk driven to do the seemingly impossible: build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has ever known. Everything readers...
Middlemarch
Eliot, George, 1819-1880.
George Eliot's most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon;...
Brothers Karamazov
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881.
Dostoevsky's greatest novel is a story of murder told with hair-raising intellectual clarity and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature. Fyodor Dostoevsky's final novel, published just before his death in 1881, chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle...
Shogun : a novel of Japan
Clavell, James.
SOON TO BE AN FX LIMITED SERIES * A bold English adventurer. An invincible Japanese warlord. A beautiful woman torn between two ways of life. All brought together in an extraordinary saga aflame with passion, conflict, ambition, and the struggle for power. ...
Stand
King, Stephen, 1947-
For use in schools and libraries only. A monumentally devastating plague leaves only a few survivors who, in a desert world, experience dreams of good and evil in confrontation and, through their choices, move toward an actual confrontation.
Infinite jest
Wallace, David Foster.
A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America  Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential...
2666
Bolan?o, Roberto, 1953-2003.
THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM "ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS" (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW ) Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolano's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his...
1Q84
Murakami, Haruki, 1949-
"Murakami is like a magician who explains what he's doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers . . . But while anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it's the rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves." --...
Name of the rose
Eco, Umberto.
Now available from HarperVia in a deluxe paperback edition featuring never-before-seen illustrations by the author, the beloved internationally bestselling historical mystery about a brilliant monk called upon to solve a series of baffling murders in a fourteenth-century Italian abbey ...
Americanah
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 1977-
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A modern classic about star-crossed lovers that explores questions of race and being Black in America--and the search for what it means to call a place home. * From the award-winning author of We Should All Be Feminists and Half of a Yellow...
Outlander
Gabaldon, Diana.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The first book in Diana Gabaldon's acclaimed Outlander saga, the basis for the Starz original series. One of the top ten best-loved novels in America, as seen on PBS's The Great American Read!   Unrivaled storytelling....
Little life
Yanagihara, Hanya
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the...
Pachinko
Lee, Min Jin
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW TOP TEN OF THE YEAR * NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017 *A USA TODAY TOP TEN OF 2017 * JULY PICK FOR THE PBS NEWSHOUR-NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CLUB NOW READ THIS * FINALIST FOR THE 2018 DAYTON...
Cloud atlas
Mitchell, David
By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks | Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize A postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in twenty-first-century fiction, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen...
Wolf Hall
Mantel, Hilary, 1952-2022.
In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII's court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king's favor and ascend to the heights of political power England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed...
Queen of the night
Chee, Alexander
"This book is a glorious performance . . . Enveloping, seductive." --Karen Russell A National Bestseller, the mesmerizing story of one woman's rise from circus rider to courtesan to world-renowned diva--"a brilliant performance" (Washington...
Fingersmith
Waters, Sarah, 1966-
From the author of the New York Times Notable Book Tipping the Velvet and the award-winning Affinity: a spellbinding, twisting tale of a great swindle, of fortunes and hearts won and lost, set in Victorian London among a family of thieves. Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of...
Midnight's children
Rushdie, Salman.
The iconic masterpiece of India that introduced the world to "a glittering novelist--one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling" (The New Yorker) WINNER OF THE BEST OF THE BOOKERS * SOON TO BE A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
Bonfire of the vanities
Wolfe, Tom.
Underworld
DeLillo, Don.
Our lives, our half century. Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist...
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Clarke, Susanna.
In the Hugo-award winning, epic New York Times Bestseller and basis for the BBC miniseries, two men change England's history when they bring magic back into the world. In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars in 1806, most people believe magic to have long since disappeared...
Lonesome Dove
McMurtry, Larry.
A love story and an epic of the frontier, Lonesome Dove is the grandest novel ever written about the last, defiant wilderness of America. Richly authentic, beautifully written, Lonesome Dove is a book to make readers laugh, weep, dream and remember. Now a blockbuster television event.
A suitable boy : a novel
Seth, Vikram
Set in post-colonial India, this is a sweeping saga of four Indian families who must conduct their lives through an era of newborn independence and political crises, when Hindu, Muslim and Western cultures clash with new vehemence.

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