I'm a sucker for beautiful prose. But I've found that some authors write glittery gold while the narrative behind it is lacking, uninteresting, or tangential to the author stroking their ability to write beautifully (Examples: James Joyce's The Dead, basically everything written by Virginia Woolf, and Lolita).
What are your favorite novels that are able to fuse beautiful language and prose with compelling, gripping narratives? I'll bullet a few examples of my personal favorites that I feel capture both elements I'm looking for:
- Rebecca; Daphne Du Maurier.
- Cormac McCarthy's entire catalogue, but specifically No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses.
- I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman.
- The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
What are your suggestions and favorites that fit this bill?
by AlfredsLoveSong
12 Comments
Guy Gavriel Kay
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Honestly I’ve been working my way through all of Kingsolver’s books and they’re all amazing, but you should definitely read Demon Copperhead next.
I love all of Octavia E Butlers books, but especially The Parable of the Sower series and Kindred.
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake series
My favorite writer who excels at both craft and plot is Michael Ondaatje. If he was more read, he would be more highly rated by a wider audience.
Lolita, by Nabokov
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë
A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khalid Hosseini
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Maia, by Richard Adams
The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K LeGuin
Lord of the Rings
I just finished Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy and I feel like it was beautiful in spots and had a bit of mystery that kept me turning pages. I’m absolutely obsessed with all sea-life, so I’m sure that helped!
– “East of Eden” by John Steinbeck
– “Station Eleven” by Emily St John Mandel
– “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” by Carson McCullers
The invisible life of Addie La roux
The Book Thief and All the Light We Cannot See
Under the Tuscan Sun
I like to describe I’ll Be Gone In The Dark by Michelle MacNamara as fact prose