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
Drag items up and down to your preferred order then select the "Save Order" button.
The Luminaries
Eleanor Catton
Paper Book
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...
The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt
Paper Book
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...
Middlemarch
George Eliot
Paper Book
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;...
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Paper Book
Dostoevsky's final, greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov, paints a complex and richly detailed portrait of a family tormented by its extraordinarily cruel patriarch, Fyodor Pavlovich, whose callous decisions slowly decimate the lives of his sons--the eponymous brothers Karamazov--and lead...
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
Paper Book
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 questions about...
2666
Roberto Bolaño
Paper Book
A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: TOP TEN THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM "ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS" (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW)
The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco
Paper Book
In 1327, Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Bakersville arrives to investigate. His delicate mission is overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths that take place in the same number of days, and Brother William must turn detective to sort things out.
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Paper Book
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...
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A stunning "portrait of the enduring grace of friendship" (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST *...
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee
Paper Book
In this New York Times bestseller, four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan-the inspiration for the television series on Apple TV+.  In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored...
Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell
Paper Book
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER * The timeless, structure-bending classic that explores how actions of individual lives impact the past, present and future--from a postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in fiction   One of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of...
Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel's New York Times bestselling Wolf Hall is "a darkly brilliant reimagining of life under Henry VIII. . . ....
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
Paper Book
'BEST OF THE BOOKER' AWARD WINNER * This towering classic of international literature is at once a riveting family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people.   "One of the most important books to come out of the English-speaking world in this...
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe
Paper Book
Tom Wolfe's modern American satire tells the story of Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street "Master of the Universe" who has it all -- a Park Avenue apartment, a job that brings wealth, power and prestige, a beautiful wife, an even more beautiful mistress. Suddenly, one wrong turn makes it all go wrong, and...
Underworld
Don DeLillo
Paper Book
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Finalist for the National Book Award Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award Winner of the Howell's Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters One of The New York Times Book Review's 10...
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Susanna Clarke
Paper Book
The 20th Anniversary Edition of the Hugo-award winning, epic New York Times Bestseller and basis for the BBC miniseries, where two men change England's history when they bring magic back into the world, now with a new introduction from V.E. Schwab. In the midst of the...
Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry
Paper Book
The Pulitzer Prize­-winning American classic of the American West that follows two aging Texas Rangers embarking on one last adventure. An epic of the frontier, Lonesome Dove is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America. Journey to the...
A Suitable Boy
Vikram Seth
Paper Book
With more than 60,000 hardcover copies sold, this ecstatically acclaimed bestseller is an epic novel destined to become a literary classic. Seth offers a rich and spellbinding story of four extended families in postcolonial India in the 1950s. Lavishly detailed . . . Lovingly recounted. . . .--New...

Library staff! You can create and contribute to lists. Contact your catalog administrator or log in here.