Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1986
1986 is the year the Challenger space shuttle disintegrates seventy-three seconds after launch, Chernobyl explodes, and the Iran-Contra affair begins to emerge. It is a year of institutional failure and of cover-ups beginning to unravel. The literature of this year is not a direct response to those events — fiction rarely works that fast — but it is a literature of accounting: of people reckoning with the past, with what they have done and left undone, with what institutions have promised and failed to deliver. Kingsley Amis wins the Booker Prize at sixty-four for a novel about old friends drinking in Welsh pubs and confronting the fact that they have become the people they once mocked. E.L. Doctorow wins the National Book Award for a semi-autobiographical novel about a Bronx childhood and the 1939 World’s Fair that works as a portrait of a particular American optimism and its costs. Reynolds Price wins the National Book Critics Circle Award for a first-person Southern novel so alive in its narrator’s voice that it seems less written than remembered. Peter Taylor, Doctorow’s finalist, wins the Pulitzer Prize the following year for a novel set in the same landscape. These are novels about memory, about the South, about the weight of the past on the people who carry it.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction · Updated May 2026
The Old Devils
Alun Weaver — a writer of modest celebrity who has made a career out of being publicly Welsh — returns to Wales with his wife Rhiannon after decades in London, and immediately resumes contact with the group of old friends who stayed. The men drink together in pubs every afternoon. Their wives manage them with varying degrees of exasperation and affection. The arrival of the Weavers disturbs a settled equilibrium: old desires resurface, old resentments reassert themselves, and the people involved must reckon with who they have become rather than who they once intended to be. Amis was sixty-four when it was published. The Old Devils won the Booker Prize in 1986. It was Amis’s twenty-third novel. Kingsley Amis died in 1995.
The Old Devils is the novel most likely to surprise readers who know Amis only through Lucky Jim — it is the work of a much older man, and it is about what age actually does to people who were never quite sure of what they believed. The comedy is still there, and the sharpness of ear for how men talk to each other in pubs, but there is a weight underneath that the earlier novels did not have: an acknowledgement that life has mostly been lived, and that the accounting is now available. The portrait of Alun Weaver — charming, fraudulent, beloved, and somewhat ghastly — is one of Amis’s finest characters. This is the right novel to read after Lucky Jim if you want to see what a lifetime of writing did to his gifts.
World’s Fair
Edgar — a boy of nine or ten in the Bronx in the late 1930s — tells the story of his childhood: his family’s apartment, his parents’ marriage (loving, strained, periodically on the edge of financial catastrophe), his brother Donald, the street, the neighbourhood, the radio serials, the war that is approaching from Europe. The novel culminates with the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where Edgar submits an essay about the typical American boy and wins a ticket to the opening day. Doctorow drew closely on his own childhood; he was born in the Bronx in 1931. World’s Fair won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1986.
World’s Fair is Doctorow’s most personal novel and the one that reads most unlike his other work — less formally experimental than Ragtime, less epic than Billy Bathgate, more intimate, more directly felt. The Bronx childhood is rendered with the precision of someone who has been thinking about it for fifty years and now knows which details were the ones that mattered. The 1939 World’s Fair — its promise of a better technological future, its specific American confidence — is used with exactness: not as nostalgia but as a measure of what was believed before the war, and how that belief felt from inside a nine-year-old’s body.
Kate Vaiden
Kate Vaiden is fifty-seven years old, diagnosed with cancer, and beginning to think about the son she abandoned at seventeen — a boy now forty years old who does not know she is alive. The novel is Kate’s first-person account of her own life: the murder-suicide that killed her parents when she was eleven, her adolescence in the small-town South, the pregnancy and the decision she made about it, and the forty years since. Price wrote the novel while dealing with a spinal tumour that had left him partially paralysed; he was at Duke University in a motorised wheelchair while writing one of the most physically energetic narrator voices in American fiction. Kate Vaiden won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1986.
Kate Vaiden is the novel that most clearly establishes what Reynolds Price — who spent his career in the shadow of Faulkner and in the institutional obscurity of being a Duke English professor — could actually do. Kate’s voice is the achievement: not the reliable narrator of conventional fiction but a woman who tells her story fully aware that she has been cruel and incapable of motherhood, and who recounts both without apology and without self-pity. The Southern setting is specific and evoked without sentimentality. It is a novel that demonstrates what first-person narration is for — not access to a reliable account but access to a consciousness, with all the distortion that implies.
A Summons to Memphis
Philip Carver is a New Yorker in his forties — a book editor, never married, leading the contained and orderly life of a man who has managed his past very carefully — when his two middle-aged sisters summon him back to Memphis. Their elderly father, widowed and newly in love, is planning to remarry at eighty. Philip and his sisters want to prevent it. The novel examines the relationship between a Southern family’s past and its present: the move from Nashville to Memphis that shattered their lives when Philip was a teenager, the father’s autocratic control of his children’s romantic lives, and what that control has cost each of them in adulthood. A Summons to Memphis was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1987. It was Taylor’s first novel in thirty years.
A Summons to Memphis is the Taylor novel that most directly addresses the question his stories circled around throughout his career: what does a Southern family’s culture do to the individuals inside it, and how long does that damage persist? Philip Carver is the finest of Taylor’s contained, over-civilised characters — a man whose orderliness is the scar tissue of an old wound, and whose return to Memphis is about more than his father’s remarriage. The relationship between the past and the present — between the Nashville of thirty years ago and the Memphis of the present — is handled with a precision that earns the Pulitzer. Start here if you have not read Taylor; the short stories await you after.
The Beet Queen
In 1932, two children — Mary and Karl Adare — are abandoned at a butcher’s shop in the fictional North Dakota town of Argus when their mother flies away in a barnstormer’s plane. Mary stays. Karl gets back on the train. The novel follows the next forty years of their lives — Mary’s, and the lives of the people around her in Argus — across the same landscape and community as Love Medicine but a generation earlier, before the reservation families of that novel have fully entered the frame. It is the second of Erdrich’s North Dakota Series, published two years after Love Medicine and set in an earlier period, with some overlapping characters. The Beet Queen was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986.
The Beet Queen is the Erdrich novel most focused on white, small-town North Dakota life — the butcher, the beauty parlour owner, the Air Force base nearby — rather than on the Ojibwe reservation that provides the moral centre of Love Medicine. It is also the Erdrich novel most interested in a specific kind of emotional coldness: Mary Adare is one of her most complex protagonists, a woman whose capacity for love is present but systematically suppressed by circumstance. If you have read Love Medicine and want to continue the North Dakota Series, this is the right next step — it enriches the earlier novel by showing the world around its edges.
Roger’s Version
Roger Lambert is a middle-aged professor of theology at a Boston divinity school — divorced, comfortable, quietly faithless — when a young computer science graduate student named Dale Kohler arrives with a proposition: he believes he can prove the existence of God through mathematics, through the emerging science of computation and chaos theory, and he wants Roger to help him get a university grant to pursue the research. Roger finds him irritating, probably wrong, and disturbingly present in his household. The novel is an explicit retelling of The Scarlet Letter — Roger as Chillingworth, Dale as Dimmesdale, Roger’s wife and niece sharing the role of Hester — filtered through late-1980s computational theory, pornography, urban poverty, and Updike’s characteristically elaborate prose. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986.
Roger’s Version is Updike’s most formally ambitious novel of the decade and the one that reads least like what people assume Updike novels are — suburban domestic realism. The confrontation between theology and computation — can God be proved mathematically? does it matter? — is the novel’s genuine intellectual subject, not its window dressing. Roger Lambert is one of Updike’s most complex first-person narrators: a man whose scepticism is itself a kind of faith, who watches Dale’s fervour with a combination of contempt and envy that he cannot quite bring himself to examine. Updike was at the peak of his technical command. This is the right book for readers who think they know what he does.
Paco’s Story
Paco Sullivan is the only survivor of a company of American soldiers wiped out in a single night in Vietnam — a fact narrated by the ghosts of his dead comrades, who address him directly and speak collectively throughout the novel. He makes his way back to the United States, finds a job washing dishes in a small Midwestern town, and tries to live with what happened to him. The novel is structured around the impossibility of that accommodation: the town cannot understand what he is, and he cannot explain it. Heinemann drew on his own service in Vietnam. Paco’s Story won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1987, in a decision that shocked the literary establishment — both Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Philip Roth’s The Counterlife were expected to win, and their loss prompted forty-eight Black writers to issue a statement lamenting that Morrison had not yet received the recognition she deserved.
Paco’s Story is the most unusual novel on this list formally — the second-person address from the collective dead is either exactly right or deeply wrong, and most readers who encounter it find themselves quickly inside it. Heinemann understood what Vietnam did to the men who came back from it in a way that had not yet been fully rendered in American fiction: not as drama but as a specific quality of daily damage, of men who have been reshaped by something the civilian world will not look at directly. The controversy around its National Book Award is itself part of its significance — the question of what the literary establishment was willing to honour was not resolved by Paco’s Story winning, and the answer eventually came with Beloved the following year.
Where to start
If you want the most surprising Booker Prize winner of the decade
→ Read The Old Devils. Amis at sixty-four, writing about old age without self-pity and without consolation — his richest and most fully realised novel, and one of the most honest books ever written about what it is to grow old.
If you want the finest first-person voice of the year
→ Read Kate Vaiden. Reynolds Price wrote a narrator so fully realised and so morally complex that the novel feels less like fiction than like testimony. Written while he was in a wheelchair recovering from spinal surgery.
If you want to understand what the literary establishment was arguing about in 1986
→ Read Paco’s Story. The novel that won the National Book Award over Beloved and The Counterlife, and whose victory triggered one of the most significant public debates about race and literary recognition in American publishing history.
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“What did one want of one's old age? That it should be the same as young age, only longer.” — Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils
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