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
Leo Tolstoy
Introduction by A. N. Wilson * Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once an epic of the Napoleonic Wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the...
The Luminaries
Eleanor Catton
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
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...
The Pillars of the Earth
Ken Follett
Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read #1 New York Times Bestseller Oprah's Book Club Selection The "monumental masterpiece" (Booklist) that changed the course of Ken Follett's already phenomenal...
Middlemarch
George Eliot
George Eliot's beloved masterpiece in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with a foreword by Rebecca Mead, author of the bestselling memoir My Life in Middlemarch A triumph of realist fiction, George Eliot's Middlemarch- A Study of Provincial Life explores a fictional...
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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
James Clavell
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. ...
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
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
Roberto Bolaño
A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER 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 Bolaño's life, 2666 was...
1Q84
Haruki Murakami
"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." --...
The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco
ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME * A spectacular best seller and now a classic, The Name of the Rose catapulted Umberto Eco, an Italian professor of semiotics turned novelist, to international prominence. An erudite murder mystery...
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
Diana Gabaldon
#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....
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara
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
Min Jin Lee
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
David Mitchell
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
Hilary Mantel
WINNER OF THE 2009 MAN BOOKER PRIZE WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by...
The Queen of the Night
Alexander Chee
"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
Sarah Waters
"Oliver Twist with a twist...Waters spins an absorbing tale that withholds as much as it discloses. A pulsating story."--The New York Times Book Review   The Handmaiden, a film adaptation of Fingersmith, directed by Park Chan-wook and starring...
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
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
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe
Vintage Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, the #1 bestseller that will forever define late-twentieth-century New York style. "No one has portrayed New York Society this accurately and devastatingly since Edith Wharton" (The National Review)
Underworld
Don DeLillo
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
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
Larry McMurtry
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
"Surrender to this strange, beguiling world and be swept away on the wings of story. . . . It is difficult to imagine that many contemporary writers could give us a novel that provides so much deep satisfaction." --Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World A sweeping panoramic portrait...

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