The Best Novels, Ranked

The coming-of-age novel is where literature does its quietest, most durable work: it watches a person become who they are..

Love is the subject the novel keeps returning to because it is never one subject: it is desire and duty, freedom and ruin, the self expanding and the self undone..

The war novel is rarely about the fighting..

No subject exposes a society faster than the question of who gets to rise..

The American Dream is a promise and a trap, and the American novel has spent a century turning it over to see which side is up..

These are novels that refuse to let race sit quietly in the background of a story.

Family is the novel's first laboratory: the place where love and obligation are indistinguishable, where the deepest loyalties and the oldest grievances share a house..

The most serious novels treat good and evil not as a costume but as a choice made under pressure, again and again, in bad light..

Grief is the subject that most exposes a writer's honesty, because it resists tidy consolation..

The Victorian novel is the form at its most ambitious.

Modernism broke the novel open to get at something the Victorians had left sealed: the actual texture of a mind in time..

The postwar decades produced a run of novels that feel, already, like classics.

The novella is the novel with nothing to waste..

The AP Literature open-response question rewards a novel you know deeply.

IB Literature asks for range.