A novelist held captive by his number-one fan; the hobbling scene.
A superflu kills 99% of humanity and the survivors gather in Boulder and Las Vegas; King's epic.
Seven children in Derry, Maine against a clown that eats fear, twice, twenty-seven years apart.
The Torrances winter at the Overlook Hotel; King's haunted house, different from Kubrick's.
A quiet Missouri professor's uneventful life; the forgotten novel that became a bestseller fifty years on.
Two retired Texas Rangers drive cattle to Montana; the western as great American novel.
Four friends in New York and Jude's past; the novel readers warn each other about.
A boy walks out of a bombed museum with a Dutch painting; 800 pages and a Pulitzer.
Six classics students at a Vermont college and the murder they commit; Donna Tartt's debut.
A dying Iowa preacher writes to his seven-year-old son; the quietest Pulitzer.
Two sisters raised by an eccentric aunt in an Idaho lake town; Marilynne Robinson's first.
A tiny boy with a wrecked voice who believes he is God's instrument; a foul ball kills his best friend's mother.
A writer raised by a nurse who wanted no husband; Irving's comedy of accidents.
Oedipa Maas and a secret postal system; Pynchon in 150 pages.
V-2 rockets, a lieutenant whose erections predict strikes and the end of the war; Pynchon's monster.
The Lambert family assembles for one last Christmas in St Jude; Franzen's breakthrough.
A tennis academy, a halfway house and a film so entertaining it kills; 1,079 pages and 388 endnotes.
A professor of Hitler studies, an airborne toxic event and the fear of death; DeLillo's comedy.
From the 1951 home run to the Cold War's waste; DeLillo's 800-page America.
A former basketball star walks out on his family; the first of four Rabbit Angstrom novels.
Alexander Portnoy tells his analyst everything; the novel that scandalised 1969.
Swede Levov, the perfect Newark athlete, and the daughter who bombs a post office; Roth's Pulitzer.
A hunter takes a case of drug money and Anton Chigurh follows with a coin; the Coens changed little.
A father and son push a shopping cart through a burned America; the ending is why people read it.
The Glanton gang scalp their way across the border in 1849 and the Judge dances; McCarthy's violent Bible.
Ignatius J. Reilly, hot-dog vendor and medievalist, against New Orleans; published eleven years after the author's suicide.
Celie's letters to God and to her sister in 1930s Georgia; Alice Walker's Pulitzer.
Milkman Dead searches for gold and finds his family's past; Morrison's flying men.
Sethe, a runaway slave, and the ghost of the daughter she killed; Morrison's masterpiece.
A nameless Black narrator from a Southern college to Harlem, in a basement lit by 1,369 bulbs.
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