Two young people from different social backgrounds form a fraught, recurring relationship from secondary school into university.

Set against the realities of a mid-20th-century reform school in the American South, the novel follows young boys who confront daily physical and moral violence inside a state institution.

Set in an early 20th-century Brooklyn neighborhood, the novel follows a young girl growing up amid economic hardship and complex family dynamics. It traces the pressures of poverty, education, and personal ambition as the child negotiates loyalty to family and the desire for a different future.

Set after a catastrophic nuclear war, the novel follows members of a Catholic monastery who preserve fragments of scientific knowledge while centuries pass and human societies slowly re-form.

A contemporary, character-focused novel centered on characters navigating fraught private relationships and ethical pressure in an American setting. The narrative opens from intimate vantage points and builds tension through choices, secrets, and the slow widening of consequences rather than by external action.

An academic family in the American Midwest navigates everyday routines, consumer culture, and family dynamics while an external technological/industrial threat forces questions about death, risk, and how people manage fear.

The novel follows a single day in post–World War I London as a well-to-do woman readies an evening party while the narrative follows through multiple characters' inner thoughts and memories.

Set in rural Georgia during the cotton/sharecropping era, the novel follows Grange Copeland and the consequences of his decisions across generations.

Set in mid-20th-century England, the story focuses on a physician who becomes entwined with a once-grand house and its family as strange occurrences and social decline intensify. The pressure comes from the intersection of a medical, rational viewpoint with uncanny events tied to a deteriorating domestic world.

Set in a recent historical past, the story focuses on a coal-merchant and shopkeeper whose ordinary routines are interrupted when he encounters evidence of suffering connected to a local institution.

Set before and after a fictional, devastating influenza pandemic, the book traces several connected people — including actors who tour small settlements — as they navigate loss, survival, and the persistence of art.

An elderly Congregational minister composes an extended letter to his young son late in life, recounting his own family history, the tensions between pacifism and militant abolitionism in his forebears, and the spiritual convictions that shape his sense of duty and affection.