Reading List
Nathan Harris
Novelist
Nathan Harris published The Sweetness of Water in 2021, at twenty-nine, and it was longlisted for the Booker Prize and chosen for Oprah’s Book Club in the same year. Set in Georgia in the days after emancipation, it follows two brothers newly freed and the farmer who takes them in, and it was written while Harris was completing the Michener Center for Writers programme in Austin. His reading runs to historical fiction that takes formal risks, which is the register he works in himself.
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The North Water
by Ian McGuire · 2016 · Fiction
“When you feel transported like that, just by the faint recollections of a reading experience” — via Article
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In the Distance
by Hernan Diaz · 2017 · Fiction
“For its prose alone, this is such a gorgeous novel. But beneath the sentence level, this story about a 19th-century journey from California to the other end of the country lights upon everything that a good adventure novel might be.” — via Article
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Little Big Man
by Thomas Berger · 1964 · Fiction
“A picaresque that strikes me, above all, for its literary courage. Berger is so unafraid to go wherever he wishes with his narrative.” — via Article
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Knowledge of Angels
by Jill Paton Walsh · 1994 · Fiction
“A miraculous fable. It soars both as a philosophical meditation and as an intimate character study, with a remarkable evocation of the medieval world” — via Article
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro · 1990 · Fiction
“I had never encountered a narrator quite like this one, and the elegance of the performance, as orchestrated by Ishiguro, is one I return to often when I wish to see a master at work and recalibrate my own writing.” — via Article
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The Good Lord Bird
by James McBride · 2013 · Fiction
“This is McBride at his best, blending historical fiction of the highest order with his signature sense of humor.” — via Article
