Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1987
1987 was the year the stock market crashed on Black Monday, the year Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down this wall, and the year Tom Wolfe published a novel about Wall Street excess that became one of the decade’s defining documents. It was also the year Toni Morrison published Beloved — a novel so far beyond its moment that it took a decade and a Nobel Prize for the culture to fully catch up with it. Between those two poles — the decade’s vanity and its buried guilt — 1987 produced some of the richest literary work of the entire postwar period. The writers were ahead of what was coming. They almost always are.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Updated June 2026
Beloved
Sethe is a formerly enslaved woman living in Cincinnati after the Civil War, haunted — literally — by the daughter she killed rather than let be taken back into slavery. The ghost becomes flesh. The novel asks what memory does to a person who has survived the unsurvivable, and what the dead are owed by the living. Morrison based it on the true story of Margaret Garner. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and the Nobel in 1993, and it is the novel by which American literature of the second half of the twentieth century will be measured.
Beloved is one of those books that change the coordinates of what fiction is understood to be capable of. Morrison wrote about slavery from inside its psychological aftermath — not as history, but as a wound that is still open, still bleeding, still determining what is possible. The prose operates at a pitch most novelists never reach. There is no comfortable way to read it and there is no way to read it and remain unchanged. It is the great American novel of the postwar period, and nothing else from 1987 comes close.
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Sherman McCoy is a bond trader at a white-shoe Wall Street firm who considers himself a Master of the Universe. One wrong turn off the highway in the Bronx — a car accident, a young Black man, a lie his mistress tells — and everything he has built begins to come apart. Wolfe spent two years reporting on New York before writing a word, and the result is a novel of almost documentary precision about race, class, money, media, and the machinery of American justice in the Reagan decade.
The Bonfire of the Vanities is the novel that 1987 deserved — a full-scale satirical portrait of a decade that had confused wealth with worth and was about to discover the difference. Wolfe understood that the city was a system of interlocking grievances, and he mapped it with the precision of a journalist and the timing of a comic novelist. It has dated in the best possible way: the targets are still recognisable, the mechanisms still running. Read it as the period document it is, then notice how little has changed.
Libra
DeLillo’s novel about the assassination of John F. Kennedy imagines Lee Harvey Oswald from the inside — his childhood, his defection to the Soviet Union, his return, the weeks before Dallas — while also following the CIA operatives who may or may not have set the whole thing in motion. It is a novel about conspiracy, coincidence, and the American instinct to believe that nothing happens by accident. DeLillo finished it in 1987; it was published in 1988 and immediately recognised as a major work.
Libra is DeLillo’s most controlled novel and the one that most clearly demonstrates what he understood about America that most novelists missed: that the country runs on narrative, that when the official narrative breaks down the unofficial ones multiply, and that the space between what happened and what people believe happened is where the culture actually lives. Oswald is the perfect DeLillo subject — a man who wanted to be a historical actor and became one in a way he did not choose. Read it alongside Underworld, which continues the argument.
The Unconsoled
Replacing with: An Artist of the Floating World · Kazuo Ishiguro · 1986, peak readership and influence 1987. Masuji Ono is a retired painter in postwar Japan who gradually reveals, through the evasions and qualifications of his narration, that his wartime work served Japanese imperialism and that he has never fully reckoned with what that means. Ishiguro writes in the same register he used in The Remains of the Day — the unreliable narrator whose blind spots are the subject — and the result is a portrait of complicity so precise it becomes universal.
An Artist of the Floating World asks the question that all of Ishiguro’s best work asks: what do we do with the parts of ourselves that cooperated with something we would rather not have cooperated with? Ono is not a monster; he is a man who made choices that seemed reasonable at the time and is now living with the aftermath. The novel’s restraint is itself an argument — the things Ono cannot say are the most important things in the book. Read it alongside The Remains of the Day to understand the full range of Ishiguro’s project.
The Periodic Table
Each chapter of Levi’s memoir is named for a chemical element — Argon, Hydrogen, Zinc, Iron, Gold — and each uses that element as a lens through which to examine an episode in his life: his Jewish family in Turin, his chemistry studies, his time in Auschwitz, his postwar work as a chemist. It is one of the most formally inventive memoirs ever written, and Levi died in April 1987, throwing the book into retrospective focus as both a life’s accounting and a farewell.
Levi belongs on this list because 1987 was the year his death made the world re-read him, and The Periodic Table is the work that rewards that re-reading most richly. His method — chemistry as a way of thinking about purity, contamination, resistance, and transformation — is unlike anything else in Holocaust literature. He is precise where others are lyrical, analytical where others are elegiac, and the result is a book that illuminates more than it mourns. Saul Bellow called it the greatest book written by a survivor.
The Closing of the American Mind
Bloom’s argument was that American universities had abandoned the great books tradition in favour of a relativism that left students unable to think seriously about what a good life might be. The book was a surprise bestseller and one of the most discussed and disputed works of nonfiction of the decade. Whether or not you agree with Bloom — and many serious people do not — the argument forced a conversation about education, culture, and the purpose of the humanities that is still unresolved.
The Closing of the American Mind belongs here not because Bloom is right — his account of popular culture is sometimes absurd and his political conclusions contested — but because the questions he was asking were serious ones and the decade was not asking them. What is education for? What do young people need to know to live well? What does a culture lose when it stops transmitting its inheritance? These are still live questions, and Bloom asked them with a clarity and a fury that cut through the comfortable answers.
Fools of Fortune
Replacing with: The Enigma of Arrival · V.S. Naipaul · 1987. Naipaul’s most personal book follows a Trinidadian writer living in rural Wiltshire, watching the English countryside change around him over years, meditating on arrival, displacement, impermanence, and the experience of being a colonial subject who has arrived at the centre of the empire only to find the centre also decaying. It is part novel, part memoir, and entirely its own form.
The Enigma of Arrival is the book in which Naipaul finally wrote directly about what it felt like to be him — to have come from somewhere that English literature had not prepared him for, to have spent a career looking at other people’s societies, to have arrived in England and found it not what he expected and not what it expected of itself. The prose is measured and beautiful and shot through with melancholy. Whatever you think of Naipaul as a person — and there is much to object to — this book is one of the finest literary achievements of the decade.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Jeanette grows up in a Pentecostal household in the north of England, raised by a mother who believes she is destined for missionary work. When Jeanette falls in love with a girl, the community’s response reveals the distance between what religion claims to offer and what it actually does. Winterson wrote it at twenty-five and it is the most autobiographical thing she has published — which she has spent thirty years variously acknowledging and denying, in a way that is itself part of the work.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit matters because Winterson found a way to write about religious coercion and queer identity that was funny before it was angry, and that refused to give the reader the comfortable position of looking down on the community it described. The mother is frightening and also recognisable and also, in her own logic, coherent. That refusal to simplify is what makes the book last. It is very short and completely consuming. Read it in an evening.
And the Band Played On
Shilts’s account of the first decade of the AIDS crisis — the science, the politics, the inaction, the deaths — is one of the most important works of American journalism of the twentieth century. He spent three years reporting it, interviewing scientists, doctors, patients, and officials, and what he found was a story of institutional failure so comprehensive and so deadly that the book reads, decades later, as both history and indictment. Shilts was himself HIV-positive while writing it and died in 1994.
And the Band Played On belongs on this list because 1987 was the epicentre of what the book describes — the years when the epidemic was killing thousands while the government looked away — and because Shilts wrote it with a precision and a moral urgency that journalism rarely achieves. It is not a comfortable book, but it is a necessary one. Read it as the definitive account of what happens when a society decides that the people dying are the wrong kind of people to save.
Moon Palace
Replacing with: The New York Trilogy · Paul Auster · 1985–1986, collected edition and peak readership 1987. Three novellas — City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room — in which Auster uses the detective story as a philosophical instrument. In each, a man is hired to watch another man and becomes, in the process, uncertain of his own identity. The city becomes a text. Identity becomes a performance. The genre’s conventions are used against themselves until they dissolve.
The New York Trilogy belongs to 1987 because that was the year it found its wide readership in the collected Faber edition, and because its concerns — narrative, identity, surveillance, the instability of the self — were the concerns the decade was circling. Auster understood that the detective novel was the form that best expressed postmodern anxiety: the promise of meaning, the investigation, the resolution that never quite resolves. City of Glass alone is one of the strangest and most compelling things written in English in the 1980s. Start there.
Where to start
If you want the novel that defines the postwar American canon
→ Start with Beloved. There is no qualifier needed. It is the book.
If you want the novel that best captures what the 1980s actually were
→ Read The Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe saw the decade whole — the money, the race, the media, the machinery — and rendered it with a satirist’s precision.
If you want something formally strange that will stay with you
→ Read The New York Trilogy. Start with City of Glass. Give it twenty pages and it will not let you go.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1987
From the bookshelf
“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom.” — Toni Morrison, Beloved
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