A Few Novels

Why do some novels stay with us long after their plots have faded?

In A Few Novels, Tom McPherson reflects on thirty-two books that have remained vivid over the years, from Stendhal and Dostoevsky to Virginia Woolf, Hermann Hesse, Anthony Burgess and Donna Tartt.

These are not summaries or conventional works of criticism. Each essay begins with something that persists: a scene, a gesture, an image, a particular way of seeing. From there, the writing stays close to the experience of the novel itself, following what continues to feel alive, unresolved or difficult to forget.

The essays move across nearly two centuries of fiction, but they are connected by the same question: what is it that a novel can hold so well? Uncertainty, contradiction, memory, attention, and the slow unfolding of a life from within all become part of the answer.

A Few Novels is a book about reading, but also about what remains after reading is over.