Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1978
1978 is the year the first test-tube baby is born, Space Invaders arrives in arcades, and the Camp David Accords are signed. It is also, by any measure, an extraordinary year for fiction. John Irving publishes a novel about a writer and his feminist mother that is simultaneously a comedy, a family tragedy, and a sustained meditation on how much danger ordinary life contains — and it becomes a cultural phenomenon. Stephen King publishes the most ambitious novel of his career to that point, a post-apocalyptic epic that 150,000 cut words will not survive in its first edition. Tim O’Brien reimagines the Vietnam War as a soldier’s fantasy of escape, and wins the National Book Award. John Cheever collects sixty-one stories spanning thirty years and wins the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the same year. Georges Perec publishes the novel he spent nine years building, a puzzle-novel about a single Parisian apartment building that the Boston Globe will compare to Joyce and Proust. Iris Murdoch wins the Booker Prize. Ken Follett writes a World War Two thriller that invents his career. It is a year that rewards paying attention.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Updated May 2026
The World According to Garp
T.S. Garp is the illegitimate son of Jenny Fields — a nurse who wanted a child without a husband, and who will become an accidental feminist icon when she publishes a memoir about exactly that decision. Garp grows up, becomes a writer, marries, has children, and spends the rest of the novel trying to protect his family from the violence and randomness that keep finding them anyway. Irving structures the novel around excerpts from Garp’s own fiction, around his mother’s celebrity and its consequences, and around a series of accidents and acts of violence that are both deeply comic and genuinely devastating. The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979; its paperback edition won the award the following year. The 1982 film starred Robin Williams and Glenn Close.
The World According to Garp is the novel that established Irving as a major American writer, and the one that most clearly demonstrates what he does that other writers don’t: he makes you laugh and then kills someone you love, and the two things are not in tension but in sequence, which is how life actually works. The novel’s argument — that we are all, as Garp puts it, terminal cases — is delivered through comedy and then earned through loss. Jenny Fields is one of the great American characters: funny, infuriating, entirely herself. If you have not read Irving, start here.
The Stand
A weaponised superflu escapes from a US military laboratory and kills 99.4% of the world’s population in a matter of weeks. The handful of survivors begin to find each other, drawn by dreams: some toward a 108-year-old Black woman named Mother Abagail in Nebraska, others toward a figure called Randall Flagg — the Dark Man, who is assembling his own community in Las Vegas. The novel was King’s most ambitious to that point, and was published in 1978 with more than 150,000 words cut from the original manuscript at the publisher’s request. King restored the full text in a revised edition in 1990. It introduced Randall Flagg, who would become the recurring antagonist of King’s fictional universe.
The Stand is King at his most mythologically serious — this is not a horror novel about a supernatural threat but an American epic about the end of one civilisation and the question of what kind of civilisation its survivors will choose to build. The allegory is transparent: the good community operates on trust and democratic agreement, the bad one on fear and charisma. What makes the novel work is the specificity of its characters, and particularly the care King gives to the people in the middle — the ones who do not choose cleanly or without cost. King has said he receives more reader mail about this novel than any other. It deserves that.
The Sea, the Sea
Charles Arrowby is a celebrated London playwright and theatre director who retires to a remote house on the English coast to write his memoirs and reflect on his life in art, with all its loves and betrayals. He believes he has stepped out of the world. Almost immediately, he discovers that the woman he loved as a boy — Hartley, now elderly, living in the nearby village with a husband he considers unworthy — is within reach, and the novel becomes about his increasingly obsessive and deluded attempts to recover something he lost or never had. The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize in 1978. It is Murdoch’s most sustained study of self-deception and the violence that narcissism does to other people.
Murdoch wrote twenty-six novels and The Sea, the Sea is the one that most repays close reading — partly because Charles Arrowby is one of literature’s most precisely observed unreliable narrators. He tells you everything you need to know to see his delusion clearly, and he tells you in a voice so assured and self-congratulatory that the reader must do the work of interpretation that Arrowby refuses to do for himself. The novel is also a serious book about what art costs its practitioners — the relationships they consume, the blindness that seems to accompany the gift. If you have not read Murdoch, this is the right place to start.
Going After Cacciato
Paul Berlin is a young American soldier in Vietnam, standing watch on an observation post on a single night in 1968. During his watch, he imagines a story: a soldier named Cacciato has walked away from the war — literally walked, intending to walk from Vietnam to Paris — and Paul Berlin and his squad have followed him. The novel alternates between Paul Berlin’s actual watch post, his real memories of combat and death, and the extended imagined journey through Laos, India, Afghanistan, Iran, Greece, and France. O’Brien uses the structure to ask what the imagination is for: whether fantasising escape is cowardice or the only honest response to an impossible situation. Going After Cacciato won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979.
Going After Cacciato is the Vietnam War novel that most seriously addresses what fiction can do that journalism cannot: it renders the soldier’s inner life, his retreat into imagination, as both a form of survival and a moral question. The three-part structure — the watch post, the memories, the fantasy — is not a device but the argument itself. O’Brien understood that the war could not be told straight, that the imagination was not an escape from it but the only way to find its meaning. This novel and The Things They Carried (1990) together form the finest literary account of Vietnam in any language.
Life: A User’s Manual
At precisely 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975, the facade of an apartment building at 11 rue Simon-Crubellier in Paris is removed, and every room is simultaneously visible. Perec’s novel describes what is in each room — its objects, its history, its inhabitants past and present — moving through the building’s ninety-nine chapters according to the route of a knight’s tour of a chessboard. The constraints governing what each chapter must contain were determined by a complex combinatorial system borrowed from mathematics. The result is not a puzzle but a novel: a rich, melancholy account of human accumulation, ambition, obsession, and loss, structured around the story of a man named Bartlebooth who spent his entire life working toward a project that would leave no trace. It won the Prix Médicis. Paul Auster called it a masterpiece.
Life: A User’s Manual is the most formally ambitious novel on this list, and the one that most rewards the patience it requires. The constraints are the point: Perec believed that art required resistance, that the arbitrary rule was what forced genuine creativity. But the novel is not cold or mechanical — the accumulation of stories, the weight of all the lives lived in these rooms, produces something genuinely affecting. The figure of Bartlebooth — who spent fifty years developing a skill, using it to create something beautiful, and then systematically destroying it — is one of the great images of the artist’s impossible ambition. Start with a Perec short work if this feels too large; return to this when you are ready.
The Stories of John Cheever
Sixty-one short stories spanning thirty years of Cheever’s career, from his early New York work in the 1940s through the suburban Connecticut stories that made his reputation at The New Yorker in the 1950s and 1960s. The collection includes “The Swimmer” — a surrealist account of a man swimming home across Westchester County’s pools, arriving to find everything gone — “The Enormous Radio,” “Goodbye, My Brother,” “The Country Husband,” and dozens of others that together constitute the definitive portrait of a certain kind of mid-century American anxiety. The collection won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1978, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1979, and the National Book Award for Fiction in 1981.
Cheever is called the Chekhov of the suburbs, which is accurate but undersells what he does. His subject is not suburban life as satire — it is the extraordinary pressure of ordinary expectations, the way that the obligation to appear content produces a specific kind of interior catastrophe. The characters in these stories want things they cannot name and feel things they cannot admit, and Cheever gives those unnamed wants and inadmissible feelings their full weight without either judging or excusing. “The Swimmer” alone justifies the collection: it is one of the finest American short stories, and it earns its surrealism by never explaining it.
Eye of the Needle
Heinrich Faber — code name “the Needle” — is Germany’s most valuable spy in Britain, a cold and ruthless operative who has spent the war gathering intelligence while evading detection. In 1944, he discovers the most important secret of the war: the Allied invasion of Europe will not come at Calais but at Normandy, and the elaborate deception mounted to convince the Germans otherwise is a fiction. If he can reach a German submarine, the D-Day landings may be repelled before they begin. His escape route takes him to a remote island off the Scottish coast, where only a woman and her paraplegic husband stand between him and the sea. Follett was thirty when he published it, working from an outline he had written in a weekend. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel.
Eye of the Needle is the thriller that most changed what Follett could do — he had published several novels before it, under pseudonyms and under his own name, but none had found a large audience. What makes this one work is the same thing that makes le Carré work: the antagonist is given the full weight of a protagonist. Faber is competent, entirely without sentiment, and sympathetically rendered as a professional doing his job. The climax — on the island, in the storm — is one of the most sustained pieces of tension in popular fiction of the decade. If you want to understand why certain thrillers last and others don’t, this is the template.
Where to start
If you want the novel that best captures 1978 as a cultural moment
→ Read The World According to Garp. Funny, dark, structurally inventive, and built around the questions about feminism, art, and the randomness of violence that defined the late 1970s. Irving’s most accessible novel and still his best.
If you want the finest literary writing
→ Read Going After Cacciato. O’Brien’s Vietnam novel won the National Book Award and remains the most formally ambitious fiction about that war — a soldier’s imagination used as an argument about what imagination is for.
If you want short fiction
→ Read The Stories of John Cheever. Sixty-one stories, three major prizes, and a portrait of mid-century American life that has no rival. “The Swimmer” alone is worth the book.
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“We are all terminal cases.” — John Irving, The World According to Garp
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