Charles Dickens

British · David Copperfield (1850), Great Expectations (1861), Our Mutual Friend (1865)

Dickens wrote fifteen novels, most of them serialised in monthly parts, which is why they are long, densely plotted and full of characters who disappear for two hundred pages and return at exactly the moment they are needed. Orphans, absent fathers, inheritances, coincidence used shamelessly and social outrage underneath the comedy: Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Great Expectations. He gave public readings until they ruined his health, and died in 1870.

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Günter Grass

German · The Tin Drum (1959), Cat and Mouse (1961)

The Tin Drum is narrated from a mental institution by Oskar Matzerath, who decides at three to stop growing, keeps a tin drum and can shatter glass by screaming, and whose story carries Danzig from the 1920s through the war. Grass received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. In 2006, at seventy-eight, he disclosed that he had served in the Waffen-SS as a teenage conscript, having spent decades as Germany's foremost moral voice on the Nazi past, and the revelation caused a lasting controversy. He died in 2015.

Kurt Vonnegut

American · Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Cat's Cradle (1963)

Slaughterhouse-Five is about the firebombing of Dresden, which Vonnegut survived as a prisoner of war in an underground meat locker, told through a man who has come unstuck in time and keeps being abducted by aliens, because he could not write it any other way. He taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the mid-1960s, where his students included Irving, and died in 2007.

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Robertson Davies

Canadian · Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972), World of Wonders (1975)

The Deptford Trilogy begins with a snowball thrown in an Ontario village in 1908 that misses its target, hits a pregnant woman and sets three lives running for sixty years: a schoolmaster who becomes a scholar of saints, a millionaire, and a boy who is abducted and becomes a great magician. Davies edited a newspaper, founded a university college in Toronto and wrote three trilogies, and died in 1995.

Michael Chabon

American · The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007)

Kavalier & Clay follows two cousins, one of whom escapes Prague in 1939 in a crate with a golem, who invent a comic-book superhero in New York and get rich and ruined by it; it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. The Yiddish Policemen's Union imagines a Jewish settlement in Alaska instead of Israel and puts a detective story inside it. Chabon has also written screenplays and a good deal about fatherhood.

Wally Lamb

American · She's Come Undone (1992), I Know This Much Is True (1998)

Lamb taught high school English in Connecticut for twenty-five years and wrote two enormous novels about damaged New England families that both became Oprah's Book Club selections and sold in the millions. I Know This Much Is True follows identical twins, one of whom has schizophrenia, across forty years and a family history reaching back to Sicily; HBO adapted it in 2020 with Mark Ruffalo playing both brothers. He has taught writing in a women's prison for decades.

T. C. Boyle

American · World's End (1987), The Tortilla Curtain (1995), Drop City (2003)

Boyle has published around twenty novels and hundreds of stories, at a pace that has become part of his reputation. World's End, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, runs three centuries of Hudson Valley families into each other; The Tortilla Curtain puts a liberal Los Angeles couple and an undocumented Mexican couple on a collision course; Drop City takes a California commune to Alaska. He was also taught at Iowa, a few years after Irving.

Salman Rushdie

British-Indian · Midnight's Children (1981), The Satanic Verses (1988), Knife (2024)

Midnight's Children tells Indian independence through Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947 and telepathically linked to the thousand other children born in that hour; it won the Booker Prize and later two anniversary votes for the best of all its winners. The Satanic Verses brought a fatwa in 1989 and nine years in hiding. In August 2022 he was stabbed on stage in New York and lost the sight in one eye; Knife is his account of it.

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Nicole Krauss

American · The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010), Forest Dark (2017)

The History of Love braids an old Polish Jewish refugee in New York, a teenage girl named after a character in a lost book, and the manuscript that connects them across sixty years. Great House, a National Book Award finalist, follows a desk through several owners and continents. Forest Dark moves between Tel Aviv and New York and takes Kafka's afterlife seriously as a plot.

Richard Ford

American · The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), Canada (2012)

The Frank Bascombe novels follow a failed novelist turned sportswriter and then estate agent through four books and forty years of ordinary American life in New Jersey: a divorce, the death of a child, an election weekend, a diagnosis. Independence Day won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1996, the first novel to take both. Almost nothing happens in them, on purpose.