Best Long Books Worth the Commitment: Epic Reads Over 600 Pages

The best long books are not long because their authors lacked economy but because the worlds they built required space. War and Peace needs its length to accumulate the weight of history it carries; A Little Life needs its length to make Jude’s suffering comprehensible and Yanagihara’s portrait of friendship credible; Middlemarch needs its length to demonstrate, slowly and without sentiment, how a life is formed by the choices it makes and the choices it fails to make.

The books listed here are the ones that repay the commitment they demand.

The Essential List

War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy (1869)

The greatest long novel ever written. Tolstoy’s account of five aristocratic families and their experiences during the Napoleonic Wars — the battles of Austerlitz and Borodino, Napoleon’s occupation of Moscow, the retreat — is simultaneously the finest historical novel in any language and the most complete psychological portrait of human life in fiction. Natasha’s adolescent joy and subsequent betrayal, Andrei’s disillusionment and death, Pierre’s hapless search for meaning, and the relationship between individual fate and the vast historical forces that determine it: these are not plotlines but lives, felt with the completeness that only very long fiction can achieve. Approximately 1,400 pages. The Pevear and Volokhanshy translation is the best available.

Middlemarch — George Eliot (1871–72)

The greatest English novel. Eliot’s portrait of provincial life in the fictional Midlands town of Middlemarch in the 1830s — Dorothea Brooke’s disastrous marriage to the elderly Casaubon, Lydgate’s medical idealism destroyed by his unsuitable wife Rosamond, Bulstrode’s hypocritical religious banking life, and the interwoven plots of an entire community — achieves what Virginia Woolf called ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.’ Its central subject is the way that idealism — Dorothea’s, Lydgate’s — meets the stubborn resistance of the world as it actually is. Approximately 900 pages.

A Little Life — Hanya Yanagihara (2015)

The most emotionally demanding contemporary novel. Yanagihara’s account of Jude St. Francis — whose childhood and adolescent abuse is slowly revealed across hundreds of pages — and the friendship of four men from their college years through middle age is simultaneously the most powerful portrait of male friendship in contemporary fiction and one of the most unflinching accounts of trauma and its lifelong consequences ever written. Readers describe finishing it as a physically exhausting experience; it is the one novel on this list that most severely tests whether the commitment is worth the cost. For many readers, it is. Approximately 720 pages.

Les Misérables — Victor Hugo (1862)

Hugo’s novel of post-Revolutionary France — Jean Valjean’s decades-long attempt to escape his past and the detective Javert’s pursuit of him — is the most widely adapted long novel in the Western tradition (stage musical, films, television series, opera). But the original is richer and stranger than its adaptations suggest: Hugo’s digressions on the Battle of Waterloo, the Paris sewers, and the argot of criminal Paris are as interesting as the central narrative. Approximately 1,200 pages in most editions; the Julie Rose translation is the best recent English version.

Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace (1996)

The most intellectually demanding American novel since Gravity’s Rainbow. Wallace’s near-future North America — where a tennis academy and a halfway house exist in uneasy proximity, and where an entertainment so pleasurable that it kills everyone who watches it has been deployed as a geopolitical weapon — is a sustained inquiry into the nature of addiction, entertainment, and the failure of irony as a mode of living. The novel’s 388 footnotes are not optional extras but integral to its argument; its multiple narrative threads converge only partially and deliberately. Approximately 1,079 pages. Requires patience and reward sustained attention.

The Luminaries — Eleanor Catton (2013)

The most formally ambitious contemporary long novel. Catton’s mystery, set in the New Zealand goldfields of 1866, is structured on an elaborate astrological schema: twelve characters representing the twelve zodiac signs, ten characters representing celestial bodies, a narrative that halves in length with each new section as the novel approaches its centre. The mystery plot (murder, fraud, a missing man) is engaging in itself; the formal architecture — which can be studied independently of the story — is extraordinary. Won the Booker Prize; the youngest author to do so. Approximately 850 pages.

The Corrections — Jonathan Franzen (2001)

The finest American family novel of its generation. The Lambert family’s final Christmas together — Enid’s determination to reassemble her disintegrating family, Alfred’s Parkinson’s disease, and the separate lives that each of the three adult children has constructed to escape the Midwest childhood they share — is narrated with a combination of satirical precision and genuine emotional warmth that Franzen has never quite equalled since. Approximately 580 pages; the shortest entry on this list, but long enough to earn its place.

Why Length Matters

The long novel offers something the short novel cannot: the experience of living with characters over time, of watching a world accumulate, of understanding how the events of chapter three shape the events of chapter forty. The best long novels require commitment but repay it with a depth of experience unavailable in any other form. Their length is not padding but precision — the space required to do what they set out to do.