Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1985
1985 is the year Live Aid raises $127 million for Ethiopian famine relief, the first .com domain is registered, and Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power in the Soviet Union. It is also one of the most remarkable years in American and international fiction of the decade. Don DeLillo — already a cult writer for fifteen years — publishes the novel that wins him the National Book Award and makes his reputation: a satire of American consumer culture, death anxiety, and the way television has replaced reality, set in a college town where the Professor of Hitler Studies cannot speak German. Margaret Atwood publishes the novel that will define her legacy: a dystopian America called Gilead in which women have been reduced to reproductive function, told in the voice of a woman who has survived it and is trying to remember. Cormac McCarthy publishes the novel that Harold Bloom will call one of the four great American novels of the twentieth century, about a gang of scalp hunters on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1840s, written in prose so biblical and so violent that it was largely ignored on publication and accumulated its reputation across the following decades. It is a year that asks very difficult questions.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction · Updated May 2026
White Noise
Jack Gladney is the founder and chairman of the Department of Hitler Studies at a liberal arts college in the American Midwest — and cannot speak a word of German. He lives with his wife Babette and their four children from various previous marriages in a house full of televisions, supermarkets, and the specific white noise of American consumer life. When a train accident releases a toxic chemical cloud — an “airborne toxic event” — over their community, and Babette confesses to an addiction to an experimental drug supposedly capable of eliminating the fear of death, the novel’s comfortable surface is disturbed. White Noise won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1985. Netflix adapted it into a film in 2022 starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig.
White Noise is the novel that most completely anatomises what DeLillo understood about American life in 1985 — and, since those conditions have only intensified, it reads now as more accurate than it did then. The consumer products, the television, the supermarket as a site of transcendence, the way that American life has organised itself around the management of death anxiety without ever quite naming it: DeLillo renders all of this in a style that is simultaneously satirical and serious, funny and genuinely disturbing. The airborne toxic event is not the novel’s subject — it is the revelation of what was already present. This is DeLillo’s most accessible novel and the right entry point to his work.
The Handmaid’s Tale
The Republic of Gilead has replaced the United States — a theocratic military dictatorship that has stripped women of their property, their identities, and their legal existence, and assigned fertile women to Commanders as reproductive servants called Handmaids. Offred — the Handmaid of the narrative — remembers her previous life: her name, her husband, her daughter. She survives by managing information, by not fully trusting anyone, and by telling herself the story she is telling us. The novel was published in Canada on April 17, 1985. It won the Governor General’s Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A television adaptation began in 2017 and ran for six seasons; it won multiple Emmy Awards and brought the novel to a new generation of readers who recognised Gilead in their own political moment.
The Handmaid’s Tale is the novel from 1985 with the most direct purchase on the present — not because Atwood was prophetic in the simple sense, but because she was diagnostic. She took elements that already existed in the world of 1985 — the religious right’s political ambitions, the debate over reproductive rights, the historical precedent of theocratic states — and extrapolated them with formal rigour. Atwood has said she used nothing in the novel that had not already happened somewhere. The red cloak has become one of the most recognisable symbols in contemporary protest. The sequel, The Testaments (2019), won the Booker Prize.
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
In the late 1840s, a nameless sixteen-year-old boy known only as “the kid” drifts across the Texas-Mexico borderlands and joins the Glanton Gang — a historical group of scalp hunters contracted by the Mexican government to kill Apache raiders, who proceeded to kill anyone they encountered for any scalps that would bring payment. The novel follows the gang’s year of unrelenting violence across the Sonoran Desert, mediated by Judge Holden — an enormous, hairless, omniscient figure who dances and plays the fiddle and kills children and is never satisfactorily explained. McCarthy researched the historical record obsessively: the Glanton Gang existed, and most of the events in the novel occurred. Blood Meridian was published in April 1985, received little attention, and accumulated its reputation slowly. Harold Bloom called it one of the four genuinely sublime American novels since 1855, alongside Moby-Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.
Blood Meridian is the most difficult novel on this list and the one that most divides readers — some find it irredeemably nihilistic, and the violence, which is relentless and described without moral commentary, is a genuine obstacle. What makes it worth the difficulty is the prose: McCarthy writes the landscape and the violence with a biblical lyricism that the content seems to contradict and the effect seems to require. Judge Holden is one of the most unsettling figures in American fiction — not a devil, not a symbol, just a presence that embodies the novel’s argument, which is that violence is not aberration but substrate. It is not a novel that can be summarised. Either you are inside it or you are not.
The Bone People
On the New Zealand coast, three people find themselves drawn into a necessary and damaging intimacy: Kerewin, an artist living in a tower she has built for herself, who has retreated from the world; Simon, a mute child who appeared from the sea after a shipwreck and who steals small things; and Joe, Simon’s Māori foster father, who loves the boy with a ferocity he cannot control and beats him. The novel is written in multiple registers — standard English, Māori words and phrases, stream of consciousness, myth — and it refuses the kind of narrative resolution that makes violence into a problem that can be solved. Hulme took seventeen years to write it. It was rejected by publishers across New Zealand before the Spiral Collective, a feminist press, published it in 1983. Heinemann published it internationally in 1985 and it won the Booker Prize. It is the only New Zealand novel ever to have won the award.
The Bone People is the Booker Prize winner that most surprised the literary establishment — Hulme was unknown outside New Zealand, the novel was formally unusual, and the subject matter — child abuse within a loving relationship — was not what the prize tended to recognise. What the judges saw, and what subsequent readers have confirmed, is a novel that does something rare: it holds the full complexity of a situation that resists simple moral categorisation, in prose that moves between registers without losing control of its effect. Kerewin is one of the most memorable characters in Commonwealth fiction of the decade. The novel is long and not easy; it is worth the difficulty.
The Accidental Tourist
Macon Leary writes travel guides for businessmen who don’t want to be where they are — books advising how to find the most familiar food, the most predictable hotel, the least amount of genuine encounter with wherever they have travelled to. He is himself a man constructed entirely of resistance to experience: ordered, methodical, grief-stricken after the murder of his twelve-year-old son, recently separated from his wife. Then his dog needs training, and the trainer is Muriel Pritchett — chaotic, cheerful, with a fragile son of her own and a belief in the possible. The Accidental Tourist won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and was adapted into a film in 1988 starring William Hurt and Geena Davis, for which Davis won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
The Accidental Tourist is Tyler at her most formally controlled — a novel structured around the question of whether a person can re-enter the world after grief has made the world too painful to be in, and whether that re-entry can come from something as unpredictable as another person’s energy. Macon Leary is one of her finest characters: a man whose elaborate systems of self-protection are simultaneously comic and heartbreaking, and whose recognition that he has been wrong is rendered without any of the sentimentality that a lesser novelist would reach for. If you have read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and want more Tyler, this is the right next novel.
Lonesome Dove
Two retired Texas Rangers — Augustus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call — lead a cattle drive from Lonesome Dove, Texas, to the Montana Territory in the late 1870s, accompanied by dozens of cowhands, a woman who has spent her life on the frontier, and a cast of secondary characters whose fates the novel follows with equal attention. McMurtry wrote the novel in the early 1970s as a screenplay that was never produced, converted it into a novel over a year of sustained work, and published it in June 1985. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1986. A four-part television miniseries in 1989 starred Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones and remains one of the most watched television dramas in American history.
Lonesome Dove is the American Western novel that most completely rehabilitated a genre that literary culture had largely dismissed. McMurtry is not writing a celebration of the frontier myth — the novel is full of the violence, the casual cruelty, and the profound loneliness that the myth suppresses — but he is writing about what is genuinely heroic in it: the friendship between Gus and Call, which is one of the great male friendships in American literature. The novel is very long (nearly 900 pages) and the length is the point: you need time to love these people, and by the end of the novel you have had enough time to love them the way you love the dead. It earns every page.
The Old Forest and Other Stories
Seven stories set primarily in Nashville and Memphis, ranging across sixty years of Southern upper-class life — the debutante balls, the gentlemen’s clubs, the arranged marriages, the racial hierarchies, and the particular forms of repression that money and breeding impose on everyone within their reach. The title story follows a young man on the eve of his wedding in 1937 who is involved in an accident with a girl from outside his social world — not his fiancée — and the days that follow, during which his fiancée investigates who the girl was and what she meant. Taylor had been publishing short stories since the 1940s, was a close friend of Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell, and was considered by many of his contemporaries the finest American story writer of his generation. The collection won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1985.
Peter Taylor is the most underread serious writer on this list — a man whose critical reputation among those who know his work is extremely high and whose general readership has never been proportionate to that quality. The stories in this collection are about the costs of social arrangements that no one has chosen and everyone has inherited — the way class, race, and gender operate as constraints that the people inside them barely perceive. Taylor writes about the South with the specificity of Chekhov writing about Russia: from within, with compassion and without sentiment. The title story is one of the finest American short stories of the twentieth century. Start here if you have not encountered Taylor.
Where to start
If you want the novel most relevant to the present moment
→ Read The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood took elements that already existed in the world of 1985 and extrapolated them with formal rigour. She has said she used nothing that had not already happened somewhere. The red cloak has since become one of the most recognisable symbols in contemporary protest.
If you want the most formally accomplished American novel of the year
→ Read White Noise. DeLillo’s National Book Award winner — funny, precise, and disturbing in equal measure — about the way that American consumer life has organised itself around the management of death anxiety. His most accessible novel and the right entry point to his work.
If you want the most ambitious and the most demanding
→ Read Blood Meridian. McCarthy’s fifth novel, largely ignored on publication, accumulated its reputation over decades. Harold Bloom called it one of the four great American novels since 1855. The prose is extraordinary. The violence is relentless. Neither thing is separable from the other.
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“Offred, I wish I could tell you that what I did next was brave.” — Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
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