Endlessly Entertaining Novels Over 500 Pages

You might be hard-pressed to find a book that packs more of an emotional punch than Hanya Yanagihara’s finalist for the National Book Award and Man Booker Prize. This stunning novel centers around four college classmates as they follow their ambitions and move to New York City. Over each decade these friendships deepen as they deal with the highest of highs, and the lowest of lows. A box of tissues is a must, but you’ll be so glad you experienced this astonishing story. (832 pages)

In a society where angry young white men brandish guns to quell debate, a new disease takes root. Its sufferers become sleepwalkers, unable to be woken. When Shana’s little sister is afflicted, Shana is terrified and perplexed but determined to protect her. She follows her sister, who—despite being asleep—appears to be following a route to a specific destination. But the militia comprising those angry young men blame the new disease on immigrants, and the race is on to see whether Shana can solve the mystery of her sister before the country destroys itself. (800 pages)

Toby is a young Irishman working in an art gallery, whose sense of entitlement has real consequences in his work and in his private life. One night he gets drunk and refuses the help of his girlfriend, Melissa. Disaster strikes when home invaders find Toby home alone and beat him so badly that he is stripped of all his old personality and suffers from memory loss. French takes readers on a journey as Toby is asked to help care for his uncle Hugo, who is dying of cancer and badly in need of the comfort of family. Will Toby be able to overcome his shame at the frailty he now feels? Will Melissa stand by him even in his broken state? And will the home invaders be brought to justice? These are the early questions with which this book begins. By its end, readers will come to understand just what aspects of our brains and our memories are the ones crucial for continuing lives of beauty and redemption. (528 pages)

Atwood has written a novel inside a novel, and a memoir that, if published, will destroy lives. Iris Chase Griffen is the woman who wants the world to read her memoir about her scandalous life, but in doing so, she will expose her sister, Laura, who wrote the aforementioned novel. A complex tale of sibling rivalry and the decadent behavior of the rich and powerful. (544 pages)

Middlemarch features an intelligent, well-read woman, Dorothea, who makes a terrible mistake in marriage and becomes the wife of a man who fails to live up to any of the things she imagined of him. She meets a young man who sets her heart on fire—except he won’t approach her because she’s married, and thus he ends up married to an unsuitable woman. Add to these tales of mad love and mix them with wry social commentary on the momentous changes taking place in this English village, and you have a masterpiece. (800 pages)

Dr. Joanna Lander, a psychologist who has made her life’s work understanding what happens to human consciousness after death is drawn into a series of experiments in which participants who have been declared clinically dead—but then brought back to life—recount their experiences. She meets a brilliant neurologist who has developed a drug that replicates the near-death experience, and when he approaches her to experience death for herself, she is forced to make a choice. Willis bundles up all of our taboos and fears about death and turns them into the fodder for this novel.  (800 pages)

Once you start reading this thrill of a book, it isn’t hard to see why it won the Pulitzer Prize! Two young boys growing up in Brooklyn in 1939, during the Golden Age of comics, dream endlessly of superheroes. Together they create heroic tales that take their lives, and careers, to the top of the Empire State Building and around the world. You’ll fall in love with these characters and Chabon’s dazzling storytelling, and even though the book is 700+ pages, you’ll wish there was more. (704 pages)

Varlam Shalamov spent six years as a slave in the gold mines of Kolyma, part of the system of Siberian prison camps maintained by the Soviets. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison for “counterrevolutionary activities”—that is, for the words he wrote as a journalist and writer—and during that time, he wrote these two volumes: Kolyma Stories followed by Sketches of the Criminal World. In both volumes, he takes readers through a criminal underground previously imagined by Dostoyevsky (who himself suffered terrible punishments). Readers who want to understand what happens when thoughts are criminalized and thinkers thrown into prison will find much here to enlighten them. (1,344 pages)

Edward Rutherfurd specializes in writing enormous novels that provide the history of one particular city. He began with Sarum, which chronicled the city of Salisbury from the Stone Age through Stonehenge and into modern times. In New York, he takes readers back into the past when one of the world’s great cities was a Native American village. Part of the magic of his novels is that he establishes characters early in his narratives, and then as time marches on, readers see what those original characters’ great-great-great-x-100 grandchildren are doing in the cities where their ancient ancestors once lived. If New York is the Big Apple, than Rutherford’s book is the caramel coating that gives it extra flavor. (880 pages)

When the late, great Umberto Eco turned his attention to writing his first novel, he combined his love of Sherlock Holmes—his main character’s name is William of Baskerville—with a riveting story of a serial murderer who is bumping off the monks of an abbey. When the terrifying inquisitor, Bernardo Gui (a real historical character who literally wrote the book on rooting out heresy), shows up to question the monks, the tension explodes. If you like books that combine historical fiction with puzzles, this is the novel for you. (600 pages)

In Mistry’s epic novel, India experiences a crisis in the mid-1970s when the government of Indira Gandhi declared a State of Emergency. This disrupts lives, and among them are Mistry’s four characters, who seek ways to avoid the draconian crackdowns imposed from above. Forced sterilizations, imprisonment, and torture awaited those caught up in sweeps, and how these characters carry on their daily lives while looking out for loved ones and trying to stay safe gives readers a view of India far from the romanticized versions written by Westerners. Mistry’s novel is a wonder. (624 pages)

The earlier books begin in the early 12th century, when an ambitious church official imagines a glorious cathedral in his town. Covering over 300 years of English history and populated with a rogues’ gallery of characters, this saga is high entertainment. (2,960 pages, as a series)

This tale follows Captain Tripps, the super-flu that wipes out most of the population, leaving two groups of survivors. One group has arranged themselves around Mother Abagail, the centenarian who gathers her peace-loving followers in Boulder. And then there’s Randall Flagg, the “Dark Man,” whose followers revel in death and destruction. King has made art out of the oldest story: good versus evil in a fight for world supremacy. (1,200 pages)

A small group of college students become devoted to their Svengali-like classics professor, who convinces them it’s possible to live another way. They immerse themselves in classical philosophy and literature and eventually become convinced of their own god-like abilities. When something goes terribly wrong at a Dionysian party, members of the group turn on one another. Marrying a murder mystery with a college novel, Tartt was heralded as a voice of her generation when the book was first published in 1992. It hasn’t lost any of its zing. (576 pages)

In his novel set in medieval Paris about the men in love with the beautiful and exotic Esmerelda, Hugo provides loads of details that will transport readers to a time when the wrong religion or attracting the attention of the wrong men could seal your fate. Add to Hugo’s timeless story the character of Quasimodo, whose name indicates that he is gentle as a “newborn babe,” but whose physical deformities make him hideaway within Notre Dame’s bell tower. When he rescues Esmerelda, readers will be forgiven for hoping for a fairytale ending. (528 pages)

Another book that transports readers to Paris, this time during the Reign of Terror, the days of Madame la Guillotine that followed the French Revolution of 1789. But the story also contains a love story. Both Charles Darnay, the dashing French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, the brilliant English lawyer, fall in love with Lucie Manette. Lucie has only recently been reunited with her father, Dr. Manette, who has been released from the notorious Paris prison, the Bastille, after 18 years. Switching back and forth between London and Paris, Dickens heightens the tension as love for Lucie demands the ultimate sacrifice. Start it for the famous “It was the best of times,” and finish it with the devastating declaration that “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.” (544 pages)

Ifemelu moves to America from Nigeria, and she starts a blog in which she shares her stories. Her observations about American culture attract a lot of followers, and she enjoys some small measure of success in her adopted home. Her ex, Obinze, chooses a different route after the couple has been forced to leave Nigeria during a military crackdown. He ends up as an undocumented immigrant in London, and his story interweaves with Ifemelu’s as they both seek ways to get back to each other. Told over the course of 15 years, this marvelous novel is a love story, an immigrant story, and a political story. In other words, an all-American novel that reflects back to us the experiences of those who have come to the United States seeking sanctuary. (608 pages)