Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1979
1979 is the year Margaret Thatcher comes to power, Three Mile Island narrowly avoids catastrophe, the USSR invades Afghanistan, and Sony releases the Walkman. The decade ends not with resolution but with a new set of catastrophes queuing up. The literature of this year is, in some ways, a reckoning with what the previous decade had been. William Styron publishes his final novel — a book set in Brooklyn in 1947, about a Polish survivor of Auschwitz and the secret she carries, which wins the National Book Award and produces what many consider Meryl Streep’s greatest performance. Joan Didion collects the essays that define how a generation understood the collapse of the 1960s. Octavia Butler sends a Black woman back to slavery via a time-travel mechanism that she insists is not science fiction. Douglas Adams destroys the Earth to make room for a hyperspace bypass and invents an entire comedy of the universe. It is a year of very serious books and one very funny one, and the funny one has lasted just as long as the serious ones.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Updated May 2026
Sophie’s Choice
Stingo is a twenty-two-year-old aspiring writer from the American South who has moved to a Brooklyn boarding house in the summer of 1947 to write his first novel. In the house he meets Sophie Zawistowska — a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz — and her volatile, brilliant, mentally unstable Jewish lover Nathan Landau. The novel is narrated by Stingo forty years later, reconstructing that summer: Sophie’s story, her relationship with Nathan, and the secret she carries about the choice she was forced to make in the camp. Sophie’s Choice won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1980. The 1982 film, with Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, won Streep the Academy Award for Best Actress. It was Styron’s last novel.
Sophie’s Choice is a novel about what cannot be said — about the impossibility of giving adequate language to the worst thing that has happened to a person, and the impossibility of a survivor being understood by someone who was not there. Styron structures the novel around Stingo’s innocence and desire, using his unreliability as a narrator of Sophie’s experience to dramatise that gap. The choice itself — the most devastating moment in twentieth-century American fiction — works not because it is dramatised at length but because of the weight the novel has built around it. This is one of those books where knowing the secret before you read it changes nothing.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Arthur Dent’s house is about to be demolished to make way for a bypass. While he lies in the mud in front of the bulldozers, his friend Ford Prefect — who is, it turns out, not from Guildford but from somewhere near Betelgeuse — explains that the Earth itself is also about to be demolished, to make way for a hyperspace express route. Arthur is rescued moments before the Vogons destroy the planet. He then encounters the two-headed ex-President of the Galaxy, a depressingly sentient robot named Marvin, and the in-universe electronic encyclopaedia that gives the book its name. The novel was adapted from the first series of Adams’s BBC Radio 4 comedy broadcast in 1978. It was first published in paperback by Pan Books on 12 October 1979 and sold 250,000 copies in the first three months.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of the funniest books ever written in English, and it is funnier because it is also genuinely philosophical. Adams is not using comedy as decoration — the jokes are the argument. The universe is absurd, bureaucratic, and indifferent to human dignity; the only sane response is to carry a towel, not panic, and maintain a sense of curiosity about the absurdity rather than despair at it. The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything being 42 is not a punchline but a statement about the relationship between questions and answers. If you have not read it, the radio series is also extraordinary, but the novel is where to begin.
Kindred
Dana Franklin is a twenty-six-year-old Black woman living in Los Angeles in 1976, celebrating her birthday with her white husband Kevin, when she is suddenly pulled back in time to antebellum Maryland in 1815. She has been called to save a drowning boy named Rufus — who she slowly understands is her distant ancestor, the son of a plantation owner whose assault of an enslaved woman will result, generations later, in Dana’s birth. Dana returns repeatedly, sometimes with Kevin, always in moments of Rufus’s danger, staying for weeks or months at a time and experiencing slavery not as history but as immediate physical reality. Butler described it as a “grim fantasy” rather than science fiction because there is no explanation for the mechanism of time travel — what matters is the destination, not the method.
Kindred is the novel that most directly asks what it would feel like to have been enslaved — not as testimony or history but as bodily experience, lived by a contemporary person who knows what they have come from and what they will return to. Butler said she wrote it after hearing young Black Americans minimise the severity of slavery; she wanted readers to feel the weight of it rather than simply know the fact of it. The novel is now a staple of American college syllabi across ethnic studies, women’s studies, and literature departments. It is the founding text of a tradition — neo-slave narratives using speculative fiction — that runs through Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad to Jesmyn Ward.
The White Album
Twenty essays, written between 1968 and 1978, examining the disintegration of the American consensus in the years that followed the promise of the 1960s. Didion writes about Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, the women’s movement, the shopping mall, the construction of water infrastructure in California, a stint at a psychiatric facility, her experience of watching a culture collapse around her while her own sense of narrative coherence collapsed simultaneously. The collection opens with one of the most quoted sentences in American nonfiction: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It is Didion at her most diagnostic — a precise intelligence applied to the question of what the decade had actually been, stripped of its myths.
The White Album is the nonfiction companion to Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), and the one that most clearly explains what Didion understood that other journalists of her era did not: that narrative is a coping mechanism, not a description of reality, and that when reality stops yielding to narrative — as it did in the late 1960s — the disorientation is itself the story. Her style is inseparable from her argument: the controlled, clipped sentences are a performance of composure in the face of incomprehensibility. If you want to understand how American culture writing changed in the 1970s, this is the essential book.
The Dead Zone
Johnny Smith is a schoolteacher in Maine who is in a coma for four and a half years after a car accident. When he wakes, he can see the future of anyone he touches — not all of it, and not always clearly, but enough to have already saved a child from drowning and identified a serial killer. The novel’s central dilemma arrives when Johnny shakes hands with a populist politician named Greg Stillson and sees, with terrible clarity, that Stillson will become President and launch a nuclear war. It was King’s first novel to reach number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and the 1983 film starred Christopher Walken and Martin Sheen.
The Dead Zone is King’s most politically prescient novel — the portrait of Stillson, a charismatic, unqualified, crowd-pleasing demagogue whose followers interpret his obvious indecency as authenticity, has been cited repeatedly in the decades since as an uncanny anticipation of a certain kind of political figure. What makes the novel more than a thriller is the question it refuses to resolve: if you could stop a catastrophe before it happened, by committing a smaller evil, would you? King builds that question slowly and carefully, and the answer the novel reaches is neither comfortable nor simple. It is the right entry point to King if you want to understand his capacity for political seriousness.
Smiley’s People
George Smiley is called back one final time when an old Soviet-era asset is murdered in London. The case leads him to a single weakness in the professional armour of Karla — the Soviet intelligence chief who has been his adversary across a career and two previous novels — and Smiley assembles the pieces of one last operation. Smiley’s People is the conclusion of the Karla trilogy that began with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) and continued with The Honourable Schoolboy (1977). The 1982 BBC adaptation starring Alec Guinness is considered one of the finest television dramas in the British tradition.
Smiley’s People completes one of the most sustained literary achievements in spy fiction — a trilogy in which the moral cost of intelligence work accumulates across three novels, and the final confrontation between Smiley and Karla is quiet, dignified, and devastating. What le Carré achieves in this ending is something very rare: a resolution that feels earned by everything that preceded it, and that is still ambiguous about whether Smiley has won or lost anything that matters. If you have read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and want to continue, read The Honourable Schoolboy first — Smiley’s People is the right ending to arrive at, not a shortcut to it.
The Ghost Writer
Nathan Zuckerman is twenty-three, a newly published writer from Newark, and he spends a winter evening at the home of E.I. Lonoff — an elderly, celebrated, reclusive Jewish-American fiction writer he reveres. Lonoff lives with his wife in rural New England and keeps a young woman named Amy Bellette as his assistant and companion. Nathan, uncomfortable with the reaction his own stories have provoked in his family and community, constructs a fantasy: Amy Bellette is Anne Frank, who survived the war and came to America under a false identity. The novel is the first of four featuring Zuckerman, and the one in which the concerns of all four — the relationship between a writer’s life and his fiction, the responsibility of Jewish-American writers to Jewish experience — are established most precisely.
The Ghost Writer is Roth’s most compressed novel and the one that most clearly states his central question: what does a writer owe the community that shaped him, and what happens when his fiction is experienced as betrayal? The Anne Frank fantasy is not a digression but the argument — a young writer imagining how his family might respond if the person they believed he had dishonoured turned out to be a Holocaust survivor. It is a short book, under two hundred pages, and the Zuckerman Bound trilogy that follows it (Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, The Prague Orgy) extends what it begins. Start here.
Where to start
If you want the finest and most serious novel
→ Read Sophie’s Choice. Styron’s final novel won the National Book Award and produced what many consider the finest screen performance in American cinema. The secret at its centre cannot be unknowed.
If you want the novel that speaks most directly to the present
→ Read Kindred. Butler’s time-travel narrative of American slavery is now taught in almost every American university, and the tradition it founded — speculative neo-slave narrative — runs through to the present day.
If you want to understand the 1960s and 1970s in American culture
→ Read The White Album. Didion’s essays are the most precise diagnostic account of what the decade actually was, stripped of the myths it told about itself. The opening sentence is reason enough.
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“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” — Joan Didion, The White Album
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