Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1983
1983 is the year the internet is born — ARPANET formally adopts TCP/IP on January 1 — and William Golding wins the Nobel Prize in Literature, the prize going to the author of the very English, very sober, very precise novels that the decade’s Booker juries had been recognising since 1980. The Booker itself in 1983 goes to J.M. Coetzee for a novel about a man with a harelip making an impossible journey across a South Africa at civil war, and the novel is so stripped, so luminous, so insistent on the inner life of a man society cannot accommodate that it wins despite being unlike everything else on the shortlist. Graham Swift publishes what will come to be considered his finest novel, set in the Fens and spanning two hundred and forty years, about a history teacher who has run out of history and can only offer his own. Raymond Carver publishes the collection that contains the title story most people point to when they try to explain what Carver does. William Kennedy, after years of rejection, wins the National Book Critics Circle Award and the following year the Pulitzer Prize. Stephen King publishes the novel he thought was too dark to release — and hid in a drawer for years before his publisher found it.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction · Updated May 2026
Life & Times of Michael K
Michael K is a gardener in Cape Town — a man with a harelip who has spent his childhood in institutions and has always been on the margin of a society that has no place for him. When his mother becomes ill during what appears to be a civil war, Michael constructs a rickshaw to carry her back to her birthplace in the countryside. She dies on the way. He continues alone. The novel follows Michael’s attempts to live outside the systems of war and bureaucracy — to tend a small garden in the veld, to survive on seeds and roots, to be left alone. But the war keeps finding him and returning him to camps. Coetzee wrote the novel while living in South Africa under apartheid. It won the Booker Prize in 1983. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. He won a second Booker for Disgrace in 1999.
Life & Times of Michael K is the novel most completely unlike anything else Coetzee has written — radically stripped, following a character who cannot make himself understood and is not trying to, who wants only to be left alone in the world in a way the world persistently refuses. The apartheid context is present without being named: the novel is about a system that categorises, imprisons, and camps its population, and about a man who keeps escaping not through heroism but through a kind of radical emptiness. Nadine Gordimer famously objected to Michael K’s passivity as a political stance; the argument was itself evidence of how seriously the novel demanded to be taken. If you have not read Coetzee, this is where I would begin.
Cathedral
Twelve short stories. A man whose wife has a blind friend coming to stay who she knew years ago, and who cannot understand what he is jealous of or afraid of. A couple whose son has been hit by a car, who sit in a bakery waiting for news, and who are called again and again by a baker who does not know the boy is dying. A man whose father has died and who sits in a hospital room with his father’s girlfriend, with whom he has nothing to say. A couple who find a couple’s furniture by the road. Carver’s third major collection was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1983. It is widely considered his finest book — the collection in which his stripped-down style opens slightly, admitting more light than What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and reaching, in the title story, for something that surprised even those who thought they knew what Carver was doing.
The title story of Cathedral is the one most teachers reach for when they want to explain what short fiction can do that the novel cannot. A man who has always dismissed his wife’s blind friend sits down at the end of an evening and draws a cathedral with him — and something opens. Carver’s stories are about people who cannot say the most important things, and about the moments when, despite that, something is communicated anyway. He was working with Gordon Lish at Knopf, whose editing of the earlier collections had stripped them toward minimalism; Cathedral is slightly less edited, and the effect is different — not warmer, exactly, but more expansive, the silences larger. One of the essential American short story collections.
Waterland
Tom Crick is a history teacher in a comprehensive school in Greenwich who has been told his department is being cut. In response, he abandons the curriculum and begins to tell his students the history of the Fens of East Anglia — his own family’s history across two hundred and forty years, the eel farmers and lock-keepers and brewery owners who lived along the rivers, the incest and the drowned body and the abortion that shaped what he became. Waterland won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1983 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A 1992 film starred Jeremy Irons. The novel is structured around Crick’s meditations on what history is — whether it explains anything, whether it is story or cycle, whether the great tidal flatness of the Fens is an image of meaning or of its absence.
Waterland is one of those novels that permanently reorganises the way a reader thinks about a particular question — in this case, the question of what history is for. Crick’s argument, delivered across a year of abandoned curriculum, is that the telling of stories is what keeps us from despair, and that the alternative to history is the void of the Fens: flat, featureless, refusing to mean anything. Swift structures the novel around that argument in a way that earns it: the family history is as strange and weighted as the theory requires. It is also simply one of the finest evocations of landscape in British fiction — the Fens as they actually are, not as picturesque backdrop but as a specific quality of light and water and silence.
Ironweed
Francis Phelan is a derelict and a drunk sleeping in the streets of Albany, New York in 1938. He is haunted — literally — by the people he has killed: the strike-breaker he threw a stone at in 1901, his infant son who he dropped accidentally when he was drunk, the man who fell under a streetcar during a street fight. He is trying to find a way to return to his wife and his family while simultaneously being unable to make himself do it. Kennedy had been working on his Albany Cycle — a series of interconnected novels about the Irish Catholic community of Albany — for twenty years. After multiple rejections, Ironweed was published in 1983 with the help of Saul Bellow, who wrote a letter on Kennedy’s behalf. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1983 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1984. The 1987 film starred Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.
Ironweed is the novel that repays reading most slowly on this list — it does things with time and with the dead that only become fully visible in retrospect. The ghosts are not a device or a stylistic flourish but the structure: Francis Phelan carries his dead with him physically, and the novel is about the weight of that, and about whether the living ever escape the people they have killed. The Albany of 1938 — its Irish saloons and flophouses and baseball fields and political machines — is rendered with the specificity of a writer who has spent decades inside this world. Kennedy published eight Albany novels; Ironweed is the right place to start.
Shame
In a country that is obviously Pakistan but which Rushdie refuses to name, three women share a husband by a complex arrangement and produce a son, Omar Khayyam Shakil, who grows up in the margins of the novel he is supposedly the hero of. The real story is the rivalry between Iskander Harappa — clearly modelled on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto — and Raza Hyder — clearly General Zia ul-Haq — as they alternate in power and eventually destroy each other. Between them is Sufiya Zinobia, Hyder’s daughter, who was supposed to be a boy and who metabolises the shame of her entire culture and eventually becomes something terrifying. Rushdie wrote Shame two years after Midnight’s Children, and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1983.
Shame is the novel Rushdie wrote about what he could not say directly — about the creation of Pakistan as an artificial country, about the specific forms of political violence that postcolonial states generate, about the relationship between gender and shame in a patriarchal Islamic society. It is a more angry and less celebratory novel than Midnight’s Children, and it is less read, partly because it is less immediately accessible and partly because the events it addresses were more politically sensitive. The monster Sufiya Zinobia becomes is one of Rushdie’s most concentrated images: shame that cannot be contained turning into something that destroys the society that produced it. A crucial companion to Midnight’s Children.
Pet Sematary
The Creed family — Louis, Rachel, their daughter Ellie, and their toddler Gage — move to rural Maine. Behind the house is a pet cemetery. Beyond the pet cemetery is something older, something the local ground maintains a hold over. When Gage is killed by a truck on the road, Louis — a doctor who has spent his professional life fighting death — cannot accept it. King wrote the novel in 1983 but kept it in a drawer, considering it too dark to publish. His publisher found it and included it as the final book to fulfil his contract with Doubleday. It reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list and was adapted into a film in 1989. King has described it as the novel that frightens him the most.
Pet Sematary is the King novel that most directly confronts what he has always been circling: not the supernatural but the specific terror of grief, and what it does to rational people. Louis Creed is a doctor — a man who understands death biologically, professionally, intellectually — and the novel is about the collapse of that understanding when the dead person is your child. The horror works because the thing Louis does is comprehensible: not mad, exactly, but a grief-logic that is internally consistent and completely wrong. King has said that after he finished it he thought he had gone too far. He was right that he had gone far, and that is why the novel lasts.
Winter’s Tale
New York City across a century: from the fin de siècle robber barons and the frozen Hudson and a white horse that appears from nowhere, through the twentieth century and its transformations, to a future New York of such beauty that it seems to be approaching perfection. The novel follows Peter Lake, a burglar and mechanic, and the consumptive girl Beverly Penn he falls in love with on a winter’s night, and the crime boss Pearly Soames who pursues him across time. Winter’s Tale is written in a style deliberately unlike the stripped minimalism of much American fiction of its decade — lush, encyclopaedic, full of set-pieces that proceed more like music than like narrative. It was not widely reviewed on publication; it has accumulated its readership over decades, becoming one of those novels that readers discover rather than are directed to.
Winter’s Tale is the most formally eccentric novel on this list — it is trying to do something that is not quite what the novel usually does: to construct a mythology for New York the way Tolkien constructed one for England, to make the city sacred. Whether it fully succeeds is a genuinely open question; what it unquestionably does is create passages of prose — the horse on the ice, the sunrise over the Hudson, Beverly Penn’s death — that are unlike anything else in American fiction of the period. It has been called a failed masterpiece, which is one of the more interesting things a novel can be. It rewards the reader who is willing to surrender to its velocity without always understanding its destination.
Where to start
If you want the finest and most concentrated novel of the year
→ Read Life & Times of Michael K. Coetzee at his most stripped — a novel about a man who cannot be categorised and refuses to be, in a country built on categorisation. The Booker Prize was right.
If you want the finest short fiction
→ Read Cathedral. Carver’s title story alone justifies the collection — a man and a blind man drawing a cathedral together in the middle of the night, and something opening. One of the essential American short story collections.
If you want the most ambitious historical novel
→ Read Waterland. Swift’s most complex and most fully achieved novel — a history teacher’s meditation on what history is for, set against two hundred and forty years of Fenland family history. It asks questions that stay with you.
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“It was on the blind side of a road, there was a noise like a pillow slapping and something lifting up: and then the truck was gone.” — Stephen King, Pet Sematary
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