10 Long Books for QuaranREADING

Are you looking for long reads to satisfy your reading thirsts during your quarantine? Here are 10 book recommendations that have the great possibility to make your lockdown a lot quicker…and easier:

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

672 pages

Perfect for fans of Arthur Conan Doyle, this ultimate classic will have you on the edge of your seat and guessing at every turned page.

 

Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

679 pages

Wives and Daughters is far more than a nostalgic evocation of village life; it offers an ironic critique of mid-Victorian society. ‘No nineteenth-century novel contains a more devastating rejection than this of the Victorian male assumption of moral authority’, writes Pam Morris in her introduction to this new edition, in which she explores the novel’s main themes – the role of women, Darwinism and the concept of Englishness – and its literary and social context. (Penguin Classics)

 

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

654 pages

The Mysteries of Udolpho is a long and dense novel but that should not stop you from this unique novel. Ann Radcliffe is credited for giving Gothic fiction its respectability in the 18th century. It is also fun to read the novel that was satirized in Austen’s Northanger Abbey.

 

Middlemarch by George Eliot

904 pages

Taking place in the years leading up to the First Reform Bill of 1832, Middlemarch explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life: art, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships. Among her characters are some of the most remarkable portraits in English literature: Dorothea Brooke, the heroine, idealistic but naive; Rosamond Vincy, beautiful and egoistic: Edward Casaubon, the dry-as-dust scholar: Tertius Lydgate, the brilliant but morally-flawed physician: the passionate artist Will Ladislaw: and Fred Vincey and Mary Garth, childhood sweethearts whose charming courtship is one of the many humorous elements in the novel’s rich comic vein. (Credit: Signet Classics)

 

 

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

637 pages

It opens with these simple, resonant words: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge.” They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura’s death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura’s story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a-novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist. (Credit: Virago Press)

 

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

496 pages

Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan’s finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee’s complex and passionate characters–strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis–survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history. (Credit: Grand Central Publishing)

 

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

579 pages

Witches, vampires, history, sorcery, romance….what more can you ask for in an action packed long novel? This fantasy novel may be long but it definitely will make you forget the outside world for a change.

 

Camilla by Fanny Burney

992 pages

First published in 1796, Camilla deals with the matrimonial concerns of a group of young people – Camilla Tyrold and her sisters, the daughters of a country parson, and their cousin Indiana Lynmere-and, in particular, with the love affair between Camilla herself and her eligible suitor, Edgar Mandlebert. The path of true love, however, is strewn with intrigue, contretemps and misunderstanding. An enormously popular eighteenth-century novel, Camilla is touched at many points by the advancing spirit of romanticism. As in Evelina, Fanny Burney weaves into her novel strands of light and dark, comic episodes and gothic shudders, and creates a pattern of social and moral dilemmas which emphasize and illuminate the gap between generations. (Credit: Oxford World’s Classics)

 

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

432 pages

US title: The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

Bloody brilliant this one! I still don’t know Turton was able to write such a fantastic novel as this one but he did. You will devour this book so quickly that you will completely forget how long it is!

 

What is your “long read” suggestion? Post in the comments below.