The Novels We’ll Argue About This Autumn

Every autumn a handful of novels become more than books. They become reference points, things people say “have you read” about before they ask how you are. This year, five of them have already started arguments in our office, and we have decided to share the fight.

A Hundred Small Hours

A woman returns to the seaside town where she grew up, ostensibly for a week, to sort out her mother’s house. The novel takes place over a hundred hours and almost nothing happens, which is exactly the point. It is a book about attention, written in sentences so exact that you read them twice for pleasure.

Why we are arguing: half of us found it quietly devastating. The other half found it very quiet.

The Salt Orchard

A debut about a family that farms on a flood plain and the generation that decides whether to stay. It is lush, ambitious and a little overstuffed, with a middle section that sags and an ending that stays with you for weeks.

Why we are arguing: whether a great last fifty pages can redeem a difficult middle.

Nobody Calls Anymore

A comic novel about a group of friends in their forties who discover, at the same moment, that they have stopped talking to each other. It is very funny and unexpectedly sharp about how friendships end: not with a quarrel, but with a series of small postponements.

Why we are arguing: nobody agrees on which character is the villain, which is the mark of a good ensemble.

Letters Never Sent

A novel in the form of drafts: letters written, abandoned and finally posted over thirty years. The form could easily be a gimmick; instead it becomes a moving study of what we are willing to say and what we are willing to leave in the drawer.

Why we are arguing: whether the form is the book or merely carries it.

The Last Good Summer

The most commercial book on the list, and the most accomplished at what it sets out to do: a page-turning story of three sisters, a house and a secret. It is bingeable, clever and has a twist most of us did not see coming.

Why we are arguing: whether being unputdownable is a virtue or a limitation.

The best novels are not the ones everyone agrees on. They are the ones everyone insists you read so that you can argue with them.

How to read them

If you can only manage one, read A Hundred Small Hours slowly, over a week, in the evenings. If you have a long journey, take The Last Good Summer. If you want to laugh, Nobody Calls Anymore. And whichever you choose, tell someone. That is where the book really happens.