Are there any books that you find truly amazing because the author invested a great deal of time and effort into researching the story? I’m always impressed by novels where the details feel so real that you can tell the writer has deep knowledge of the subject. I just read The Martian by Andy Weir and I was amazed by how he tried to incorporate scientific accuracy into the plot. That must have been really time consuming and required a lot of effort to do the research before writing the novel. The way he described science, physics, botany, chemistry and space science was really impressive and detailed.
by Delicious_Maize9656
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Pachinko.
if you liked The Martian, Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett might hit too, dude basically became a medieval architecture expert just to write it. also Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts feels like it came straight from lived experience and wild research, especially about Mumbai’s underworld.
Masters of Rome series by Colleen Mccullough.
Maybe not research exactly, but I’m always so amazed at how Susanna Clarke managed to blend in historical novel and fantasy so well when writing *Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*!
It truly reads and feels like a 19th century novel written by a Dickens or Gaskell contemporary, when it actually was published in 2004. The tone and prose are just *so* spot on. The fact it was a debut novel makes it even more fascinating to me.
Lots of them, that’s the nature of so-called “encyclopaedic” or “systemic” novels. Something like Hugo’s “Les Miserables” or Delilo’s “Libra” or Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow”. They’re not JUST amazing because of the research that went into them, but typically also because the author synthesises that mass of research into a persuasive vision of the workings of the era and world system the books portray the kinds of subjectivity that world system produces, and the range of experiences and phenomena those world systems create for the people who inhabit them. This was a very in-vogue thing in the 80s and 90s literary fiction world, usually by authors inspired by books like Moby Dick and The Recognitions.
Ben Aaronovitch does an amazing amout of research for the Rivers of London books which makes the rich and always a good reread.
i only just started it but Chain Gang All Stars by (forgive my spelling) Nana Kwame Adjei Brenyah has a lot of tidbits about the american prison system in the footnotes which i appreciate
Foucault’s Pendulum.
“The Wolf in the Whale” by Jordanna Brodsky. While there are some parts of the story I find quite weak and I have certain gripes regarding the charaterization of the Aesir pantheon, the portrayal + background research of Inuit culture was done quite well
I recently read Lonesome Dove, and it was so engrossing with all the details about the Wild West. I didn’t care much about Westerns before and fell in love with so many of the cowboys in this novel. I highly recommend reading it.