The One Book Everyone Should Read

The Atlantic

12 hours ago

What should I read next? If only making that decision were simple: Recommendations abound online and off, but when you're casting about for a new book, especially if you're coming off the heels of something you adored, the paradox of choice can feel intense. You might turn to loved ones to ask which book would be just right for you. Avid readers frequently face a parallel dilemma; they find themselves bombarded by friends and family members who expect a perfectly tailored recommendation.
Staffers at The Atlantic get these inquiries a lot—often enough to recognize that for many of us, a pattern emerges. We end up suggesting the same book, again and again, no matter who's asking. Yet each recommender cites a different set of criteria for the work that rises to the top of their list. Some of us pick a read that feels so timeless, and so widely appealing, that it truly does have something for everyone. Others among us evangelize about something so singular that it must be experienced.
The 12 books below have nothing in common except for the fact that their advocates have shared them time after time, and believe in their power to delight or captivate readers who have a variety of tastes and proclivities. One of them will, we hope, be the title you pick up next.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Shehan Karunatilaka
Some people turn to books for history, others for lessons on human nature. They might hope to better understand longing, despair, joy, or love—or simply chase the high of genre fiction (ghost stories, political thrillers, tales of redemption). To all of these readers, I invariably advocate for Karunatilaka's journey into underworlds: both a supernatural realm beyond death and the demimonde of violence and corruption that fueled the Sri Lankan civil war. Seven Moons was the dark-horse winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, beating books by Percival Everett and Elizabeth Strout and rightly claiming its place in the magical-realism canon. The title character is a gay photojournalist with a conscience—which turns out to be a very dangerous combination in 1980s Colombo. In fact, when the novel opens, he's already dead. Before moving on from Earth, he gets seven days of purgatory—during which he must try to influence his living friends to publicize a trove of damning photographs while fending off literal demons and the dark truths he'd rather avoid. My closing pitch to friends: I've rarely read a better ending. — Boris Kachka
Made for Love, by Alissa Nutting
I love to suggest Nutting's work to people, even though it's been called 'deviant'—if folks avoid me afterward, then I know they're not my kind of weirdo. She has a talent for developing outrageous concepts that also reveal earnest truths about what people expect from one another and why. One of the best examples is her novel Made for Love, perhaps better known as an HBO show starring the excellent Cristin Milioti. The book, too, is about a woman whose tech-magnate husband has implanted a chip in her head, but it grows far more absurd. (A subplot, for instance, features a con artist who becomes attracted to dolphins.) Nutting's scenarios sometimes remind me of the comedian Nathan Fielder's work: You will probably cringe, but you'll be laughing—and sometimes even nodding along. — Serena Dai
These Precious Days, by Ann Patchett
Here's how I start my recommendation: 'Did you know that Tom Hanks's assistant and Ann Patchett went from total strangers to best friends?' And then, when my target inevitably shows interest in the out-there pairing of a beloved novelist and a Hollywood insider, I put These Precious Days in their hands. The titular essay is about this friendship, but the broader subject of Patchett's book is death: She contemplates the passing of the men who served as fathers in her life; she thinks about the potential demise of her husband, a small-plane pilot; and she considers the mortality of that assistant, a woman named Sooki. After Sooki, who starts her relationship with the author as a long-distance pen pal, is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she moves into Patchett's Nashville house during the coronavirus pandemic. Much of the writing, funny and sharp, follows the two of them as they work on their art, do yoga, take psychedelics—but the sentences get their power from their awareness of the gulf between life and death that will eventually separate the two women. — Emma Sarappo
Trust, by Hernan Diaz
In 1955, James Baldwin famously pilloried Uncle Tom's Cabin for its 'virtuous sentimentality,' and called its author, the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, 'not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer.' For Baldwin, Stowe's well-intentioned advocacy turned her characters into caricatures who existed only in service of her ideological aims—and as a result, he believed that her novel failed as art. This trap ensnares many fiction writers, and I have spent much time thinking about how they can avoid it when tackling contemporary problems. This is one reason I constantly bring up Díaz's Trust: It navigates the line between politics and artistry with rare skill. Set in New York City's late-19th-century financial world, the book is composed of four fictional texts, each focused on the same people but written from a different vantage point. The question is: Which narrator does the reader believe? Trust 's storytelling is impeccable, full of twists and surprises. The book is also a remarkable criticism of unbridled capitalism—but the story does not exist in service of a doctrine. It remains unlike anything else I've read. — Clint Smith
An American Sunrise, by Joy Harjo
Harjo's poetry collection begins by recounting a horrific event: In 1830, the United States government forced some 100,000 Indigenous people to walk hundreds of miles, at gunpoint, from the southeastern U.S. to lands west of the Mississippi River. Among those on this Trail of Tears were Harjo's Muscogee ancestors, who left Georgia and Alabama for Oklahoma, and whose memory the writer resurrects through poems that collapse the distance between generations, making history feel present-tense. The book deftly expresses both grief for all of the violence perpetrated on American soil and a profound love for all of the beings that inhabit this continent. Ancestors and descendants dance at the perimeter of Harjo's poems, and her definition of relative is wide enough to hold every living thing—panthers, raccoons, tobacco plants. Anyone could spend an afternoon with this book and come away with a refreshed, more capacious view of this country. 'These lands aren't our lands,' Harjo notes. 'These lands aren't your lands. We are this land.' — Valerie Trapp
An American Sunrise - Poems
By Joy Harjo
Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild, by Ellen Meloy
When Meloy, a desert naturalist, felt estranged from nature, she sought to cure it by stalking a band of bighorn sheep for a year in Utah's Canyonlands wilderness. She begins in winter and feels cold and clumsy. She envies the bighorns' exquisite balance as she watches them spring quickly up cliff faces. She feels 'the power and purity of first wonder.' Meloy's writing is scientifically learned—beautifully so—but this book does not pretend to be a detached study. When she hikes alongside these animals at dawn, she aches to belong. She fantasizes about being a feral child they raised. At first, the band is indifferent to her project. But animal by animal, they begin to let her into their world. To follow her there is to experience one of the sublime pleasures of contemporary American nature writing. Meloy gives an account of their culture, their affections for one another, even their conflicts. All these years after my first read, I can still hear the crack of the rams' colliding horns echoing off the red rock. — Ross Andersen
Will and Testament, by Vigdis Hjorth
When I picked up this novel some years ago, I'd never heard of Hjorth, and I was drawn to the book simply because of the quiet mood evoked by the cover of the English-language edition—a serene picture of a lonely cabin in the woods at twilight. What I found inside was a story that reads at once as a juicy diary and as a chillingly astute psychological portrait of a dysfunctional family. The story is narrated by Bergljot, a Norwegian theater critic who is estranged from much of her family because they refused to acknowledge the abuse that her father had inflicted on her. A dispute over inheritance brings the whole distant family back into painful contact. The novel was deeply controversial in Norway after Hjorth's family claimed that its contents were too close to reality. Later, Hjorth's sister published her own novelization of their family strife. But the scandal shouldn't detract from the novel itself, which is utterly specific yet universal: The author captures the pettiness of the family's drama and the damage they do to one another with equal fidelity. — Maya Chung
Alanna: The First Adventure, by Tamora Pierce
The kingdom of Tortall has many of the classic features of a fantasy world: strapping lords, tender ladies, charming rogues, mysterious magical forces that can be used for good or for evil. But what makes Pierce's Song of the Lioness series so timeless and reliable is its heroine, Alanna, who poses as a boy in order to train as a knight. The First Adventure, which introduced her to readers in 1983, serves as an excellent gateway to the fantasy genre. The book covers Alanna's years as a page in Tortall's royal palace, where, from the ages of 10 to 13, she must contend with her girlhood—which means navigating periods and growth spurts—while keeping her identity a secret. Pierce never devalues Alanna's feelings and experiences, and the author isn't didactic about the choices Alanna makes; readers will feel they're being taken seriously, no matter their age. — Elise Hannum
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Love, Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, by Sarah Wynn-Williams
This book's summary sounds like something out of Black Mirror: An idealist embraces a new form of technology, convinced that it has the potential to change the world, only to become trapped in a hell of her own making. Wynn-Williams, a former director of public policy at Facebook, describes her experiences working at the social-networking giant with dark humor and a sense of mounting panic. I gasped a few times as Wynn-Williams recounted being commanded to sleep in bed next to Sheryl Sandberg, and being harassed by a higher-up while she was recovering from a traumatic childbirth that nearly killed her. But the real shock comes from seeing how Facebook, a site most people associate with college friends and benign memes, helped to amplify and exacerbate hate speech. This is exactly why I keep pressing it on people. The corporation, now Meta, has described some of the book's allegations as 'false'; regardless, Careless People makes a powerful case for why no single company or boss should have this kind of reckless, untrammeled power. — Sophie Gilbert
A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific, by Hua Hsu
The first thing I like to tell people about Hsu's debut book is that he took its title from a novel that had been lost, or maybe never even existed. The second thing is that it is about America, not China. A Floating Chinaman 's subject, broadly, is Asian American literature between the First and Second World Wars, but its main character is the eccentric novelist and immigrant H. T. Tsiang. Tsiang wrote prolifically at the same time as Pearl S. Buck, the white writer who won a Pulitzer for The Good Earth, her novel about Chinese farmers. Tsiang had high ambitions to combat Buck's rosy portrait of his birth country, but his manuscripts were dismissed again and again, partly for their political radicalism, their criticism of the U.S. and China, and their sheer weirdness. Tsiang had sketched a novel about a Chinese laborer who travels widely—but as far as Hsu can tell, Tsiang's book never materialized. Hsu honors the writer's obsession and perseverance while asking a more pointed question: Were Americans unready to accept an immigrant writer who called out weaknesses in their own country? — Shan Wang
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, by Christopher Beha
Beha's big-swing novel, set in the late 2000s, follows Sam, a young data-crunching blogger from the Midwest who gets hired to work at a legacy New York magazine. He arrives in the city certain that when one has the right information, the world is 'a knowable place'—but he is soon forced to reconsider his rational worldview. Sam encounters an apocalyptic preacher, falls for the daughter of a profile subject (though he's married), and cranks out a near-constant stream of articles while struggling with unexpected doubts. The novel takes on heady themes, but it never feels dull or brainy, and all the people I've shared it with over the years love it too. My New Yorker father told me how well it portrayed the city after the 2008 financial crisis; my friends in journalism affirm its perceptiveness about the industry's 'content farm' days; my church friends appreciate how it takes religious belief seriously. I push it upon pretty much everyone I know. — Eleanor Barkhorn
Black Swans, by Eve Babitz
Reading Babitz's early work is like being whisked from one glamorous party to another. A fixture of the 1970s Hollywood scene, Babitz transcribed dozens of her own libertine experiences with diaristic recall in autofictional works such as Eve's Hollywood. But by the time she released this 1993 short-story collection, the parties had fizzled out and the scene was over. Retreating from the zeitgeist didn't rob her of inspiration, though. As an older writer, Babitz possessed a new clarity about the meaning of all those youthful nights, and the stories in Black Swans —about former bohemians inching toward the staid life, and romantics bumping up against the limits of love—are told with tenderness that is unusual in her other work. Babitz is often contrasted with her frenemy Joan Didion —Babitz was cast in the popular imagination as the fun, ditzy sexpot, as opposed to Didion's cool, cold-blooded stenographer—but the maturity and thoughtfulness of these stories dispel any lazy stereotypes. Her early work is what made her reputation, but this later collection, in which she's looking back and making sense of it all, is simply better—a trajectory I wish for all writers. — Jeremy Gordon