Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1928
1928 is the year British and American obscenity law collides head-on with serious literature, three separate times in the same twelve months. D.H. Lawrence has his explicit, class-conscious final novel privately printed in Florence because no British publisher will touch it. Radclyffe Hall publishes a lesbian love story so comparatively restrained that it contains no explicit content whatsoever, and watches a British court order every copy destroyed anyway. Virginia Woolf, perhaps amused by all of it, publishes a playful, genre-defying fantasy in which her protagonist lives for three centuries and changes sex partway through, dedicated as an open love letter to the woman she loved. Meanwhile, in Germany, a war veteran named Erich Maria Remarque publishes the novel that will become the most widely read account of trench warfare ever written, just in time for a generation to read it before the next war made its warnings irrelevant.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction · Updated June 2026
Orlando: A Biography
Orlando is a young nobleman at the court of Elizabeth I who lives for over three centuries without aging, sleeps for a week partway through the novel, and wakes to discover he has become a woman, continuing her extraordinarily long life into the early twentieth century while England’s literature, fashion, and social mores transform around her. Woolf described the book in her own letters as a kind of joke, and wrote it as a deliberate change of pace after the demanding interior seriousness of To the Lighthouse, but it is also a genuine, openly affectionate tribute to her lover Vita Sackville-West, whose own family estate and aristocratic lineage are written directly into Orlando’s fictional history. The novel was Woolf’s first major commercial success.
Orlando is one of the most purely joyful books Woolf ever wrote, and also one of her most quietly radical: by having her protagonist’s gender change without trauma, explanation, or crisis, Woolf treats the entire premise of fixed gender identity as far more arbitrary and far less stable than her era’s laws and conventions assumed. The novel is simultaneously a satire of literary biography, a love letter, and a serious meditation on how identity persists, or fails to persist, across centuries of changing social context. Read it as Woolf at her most playful without ever being any less serious.
All Quiet on the Western Front
Paul Bäumer is a German schoolboy who enlists for the First World War alongside his classmates, full of patriotic idealism instilled by a schoolmaster who never has to fight himself, and the novel follows Paul and his small circle of friends through the trenches as the war systematically strips away every illusion they arrived with, until almost none of them survive to the armistice. Remarque, himself a veteran of the Western Front, wrote the novel in a deliberately plain, unsentimental prose that refuses both heroic glorification and easy political moralising, focused instead on the immediate physical and psychological reality of men trying to survive day to day. It was serialised in a German newspaper before book publication and became an immediate sensation across multiple countries.
All Quiet on the Western Front remains the most widely read novel ever written about the First World War, and its power comes specifically from its refusal to offer any larger meaning for the suffering it depicts. Paul and his friends do not die for a cause the novel asks the reader to admire; they simply die, often suddenly and absurdly, while the institutions that sent them remain comfortably untouched. The novel was publicly burned by the Nazis in 1933, and Remarque’s sister was later executed by the regime partly in retaliation for his work. Read it as the foundational text of anti-war literature in the twentieth century.
The Well of Loneliness
Stephen Gordon is raised by aristocratic parents who, expecting a son, name her Stephen even after her birth, and she grows into a skilled horsewoman, fencer, and eventually a celebrated novelist who falls in love with women throughout her life while her family and English society offer her no acceptable place to exist as she actually is. The novel follows Stephen from a difficult, isolated childhood through wartime ambulance service and into a series of relationships that the surrounding culture refuses to recognise as legitimate, ending on a passage that is, even by today’s standards, a startlingly direct plea for acceptance. Despite containing no explicit sexual content whatsoever, the British government prosecuted the novel for obscenity within weeks of publication, and a magistrate ordered every copy destroyed.
The Well of Loneliness became, almost entirely because of the prosecution against it, the single most famous lesbian novel of the twentieth century, read clandestinely by generations of women who had access to almost no other literature that acknowledged their existence at all. The novel’s own politics are more complicated and more conservative than its later reputation sometimes suggests, but its historical importance as the book British authorities found so dangerous that mere depiction, without a single explicit scene, warranted total suppression, makes it an essential document in the history of both censorship and queer literature.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Constance Chatterley is married to Sir Clifford, a baronet paralysed and rendered impotent by a war wound, and she eventually begins an affair with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on her husband’s estate, in a relationship that crosses rigid English class lines as decisively as it crosses the sexual boundaries Lawrence wanted to write past. Lawrence, already notorious for the censorship battles surrounding his earlier novels, had the full, unexpurgated text privately printed in Florence in an edition of one thousand copies, since no British publisher would touch it; a heavily censored version reached American readers the same year. The complete novel was not legally published in Britain until 1960, when Penguin’s trial under the new Obscene Publications Act became a landmark test of literary merit as a legal defence against obscenity charges.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is on this list as much for the argument Lawrence was explicitly making, that sexuality could and should be written about in serious literary language rather than confined to euphemism or pornography, as for the novel itself. His treatment of class, industrial alienation, and physical vitality is inseparable from the explicit content that got the book banned for over three decades, and the 1960 trial that finally permitted its publication remains one of the most significant legal tests of literary merit in English publishing history. Read it knowing it took thirty-two years to legally reach the readers it was written for.
Point Counter Point
A large cast of London intellectuals, artists, and aristocrats move through interlocking romantic and philosophical entanglements, with Huxley structuring the novel explicitly on a musical contrapuntal principle, weaving multiple independent storylines and ideological positions against and around each other rather than resolving them into a single narrative voice. The character Mark Rampion, an artist with strong opinions about industrial society and physical vitality, is widely understood to be modelled directly on Huxley’s close friend D.H. Lawrence. The novel is as much a vehicle for competing intellectual positions on art, science, sex, and modernity as it is a conventional story, anticipating the ideas Huxley would develop more fully four years later in Brave New World.
Point Counter Point is the most formally ambitious satire of 1920s English intellectual life published that decade, and its structural device, characters and ideas literally counterpointing each other the way musical voices do, gives the novel a genuine intellectual seriousness beneath its satirical surface. Huxley’s portrait of Mark Rampion as a thinly disguised version of Lawrence offers a fascinating contemporary perspective on how Lawrence’s contemporaries actually understood him, distinct from his own self-presentation. Read it as Huxley working out, in fictional form, several of the ideas about technology, vitality, and social control that would crystallise in his most famous novel.
Decline and Fall
Paul Pennyfeather is a mild, unremarkable Oxford theology student who is expelled in disgrace after a prank entirely orchestrated by other students, and the novel follows his absurd, escalating misfortunes as he is forced into a series of increasingly ridiculous positions, schoolmaster at a disastrous Welsh boarding school, fiancé to a glamorous and criminally connected society woman, and eventually convicted prisoner, entirely through bad luck and the casual cruelty of a British upper class that never faces any consequences of its own. Waugh’s debut novel established the cold, precise comic voice that would define his subsequent career, satirising the British class system’s capacity to destroy ordinary people while protecting its own.
Decline and Fall is the funniest book on this list and one of the sharpest satires of British class hypocrisy published in the interwar period, precisely because Waugh refuses to let his protagonist learn anything or grow from his ordeal; Paul simply absorbs catastrophe after catastrophe with a passivity that becomes the novel’s whole point. The English upper class, in Waugh’s telling, is not merely indifferent to the damage it causes but actively structured to ensure the damage always lands on someone else. Read it as the funniest possible argument that the British class system is, in its own quiet way, a genuinely violent institution.
Quicksand
Helga Crane is a mixed-race woman who moves between a Black college in the American South, Harlem during the height of the Renaissance, and Denmark, where her white relatives live, never finding a community or an identity in which she feels fully, comfortably at home, and the novel follows her restless, often self-destructive search for belonging across continents and racial categories that none of which fully contain her. Larsen, herself of mixed Danish and Black West Indian heritage, drew directly on her own sense of displacement to construct one of the most psychologically complex portraits of racial identity published during the Harlem Renaissance. The novel was published by Alfred A. Knopf and received serious critical attention immediately, though it has historically received less popular recognition than some of its male contemporaries.
Quicksand is one of the most psychologically unflinching novels of the Harlem Renaissance precisely because Larsen refuses to give Helga Crane a comfortable resolution or a single community that finally accepts her fully. The novel’s refusal to resolve Helga’s restlessness into either racial pride or assimilation was genuinely uncomfortable for some contemporary readers who wanted the period’s fiction to serve a clearer uplift narrative, and that discomfort is precisely what makes the novel still feel so psychologically honest today. Read it as one of the most underappreciated American novels of the decade.
Where to start
If you want Woolf at her most purely inventive
→ Read Orlando. A love letter disguised as a centuries-spanning fantasy biography, and one of the most genuinely joyful books in her entire body of work.
If you want the novel that most completely defines anti-war literature
→ Read All Quiet on the Western Front. Remarque’s refusal to give the deaths he depicts any larger meaning is exactly what makes the novel so devastating, and so enduring.
If you want to understand what British censorship was actually afraid of
→ Read The Well of Loneliness alongside Lady Chatterley’s Lover. One was banned for depicting love without a single explicit scene; the other for depicting sex directly. Read both and consider what each ban actually reveals.
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“They died as if it had been everything.” — Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
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