Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1994
1994 is a year of unlikely literary phenomena. A journalist named John Berendt publishes his first book, a nonfiction account of a murder trial in Savannah, Georgia, with an initial print run of 25,000 copies. It will spend a record-breaking 216 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and permanently change the tourism economy of an entire American city. In Glasgow, a Scottish novelist writes an entire book in working-class vernacular with no quotation marks, and wins the Booker Prize amid a jury walkout and public outrage that calls the award “an embarrassment to the whole book trade.” In Tokyo, Haruki Murakami begins releasing what will become his most ambitious novel in three volumes, weaving an ordinary man’s search for his missing wife and cat together with the suppressed history of Japan’s occupation of Manchuria. And in small-town Ontario and the swamps of the upper Midwest, two very different American and Canadian writers are doing quieter, no less serious work: Alice Munro publishing some of the finest short stories of her career, and Tim O’Brien returning to the Vietnam War he could never quite leave behind.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Updated June 2026
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
In the early morning hours of May 2, 1981, shots rang out in the grandest mansion in Savannah, Georgia. The antiques dealer Jim Williams claimed self-defense in the killing of Danny Hansford, a young, volatile local hustler; the case went to four trials over nearly a decade. Berendt, a former editor of New York magazine and Esquire columnist, had been visiting Savannah for weekend trips since the early 1980s and eventually moved there to write the book, weaving the unresolved murder case together with a gallery of the city’s most eccentric residents, including the drag performer the Lady Chablis. Random House published it with an initial print run of just 25,000 copies. It went on to spend 216 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, still the record for a hardcover, has sold more than three million copies, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is one of the purest demonstrations of what narrative nonfiction can achieve when a writer’s affection for a place equals his interest in the crime at its center. Berendt’s genius was recognising that the murder mattered less than the city it happened in, and his fly-on-the-wall account of Savannah’s eccentrics is written with such warmth and precision that the book transformed Savannah’s tourism economy almost overnight. By the author’s own admission, the book is “99 percent true and 1 percent exaggeration” — the timeline was compressed and the narrator’s own role reshaped for the sake of the story. Read it as the gold standard for what is sometimes called the nonfiction novel.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Toru Okada is an unemployed, mild-mannered man in a Tokyo suburb whose cat disappears, and then whose wife disappears as well, drawing him into an increasingly surreal search that involves a psychic prostitute, a clairvoyant teenage girl, a mysterious dry well in an abandoned yard, and the suppressed history of Japan’s wartime occupation of Manchuria. The first two of the novel’s three volumes were published in Japan on April 12, 1994, with the third following in August 1995. It was, at the time, Murakami’s longest and most ambitious novel, spanning nearly 1,400 pages across the three Japanese volumes, and it earned him the Yomiuri Literary Award — presented, notably, by Kenzaburō Ōe, one of Murakami’s harshest former literary critics.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is widely considered Murakami’s masterpiece, the novel in which his signature blend of domestic mundanity and metaphysical strangeness reaches its fullest scale. The chapters set during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria are among the most harrowing depictions of wartime atrocity in modern fiction, and they suggest that Japan’s unacknowledged historical guilt seeps into the present like contaminated groundwater. The novel does not explain itself, and Murakami intends that as a feature rather than a flaw: the reader is asked to inhabit ambiguity rather than resolve it. This is the Murakami to read once you already love Norwegian Wood and want to see what he is capable of at full scale.
How Late It Was, How Late
Sammy is a Glasgow ex-convict who wakes up after a weekend bender to find that he is blind, and possibly that he has been beaten by the police, and the entire novel unfolds in his consciousness as he tries to navigate a city, a bureaucracy, and his own life without his sight. Kelman writes the whole book in Glaswegian working-class vernacular, in a continuous stream with no quotation marks separating speech from thought, and the prose is dense with profanity used as ordinary, expressive, functional language rather than shock value. When the novel won the Booker Prize on October 11, 1994, judge Rabbi Julia Neuberger publicly called it “a disgrace” and walked out of the ceremony; a WHSmith marketing manager called the award itself “an embarrassment to the whole book trade.” Waterstone’s in Glasgow, where the novel is set, reportedly sold just thirteen copies the following week.
How Late It Was, How Late is on this list as much for the argument it provoked as for the book itself, which is a genuinely radical formal achievement: a sustained, unbroken immersion in working-class Glaswegian interiority that refuses every politeness the literary establishment expected of a Booker winner. Kelman’s defence of his own novel — that the language of the streets is as legitimate a literary register as anything spoken at a London dinner party — was itself a significant statement about who gets to be a literary subject. The controversy says as much about the British literary establishment of 1994 as the novel says about Sammy.
In the Lake of the Woods
John Wade is a politician whose career has just collapsed after the revelation of his role in a Vietnam War massacre, and the novel opens with him and his wife Kathy retreating to a remote lake house in northern Minnesota to recover. Kathy then disappears. O’Brien structures the novel as a kind of inquest, interspersing the narrative with footnoted chapters of testimony, evidence, and speculation, and he deliberately refuses to resolve what actually happened to Kathy or what Wade is capable of. O’Brien, himself a Vietnam veteran and the author of The Things They Carried, draws on the real My Lai massacre as the buried historical event beneath Wade’s psychological collapse.
In the Lake of the Woods is one of the most formally controlled American novels about the long psychological aftermath of war, precisely because it refuses the reader the comfort of certainty. The footnoted “evidence” chapters create the unsettling sensation of reading a case file that cannot actually be solved, and the ambiguity around John Wade’s culpability is the novel’s entire point: violence committed at a remove, then buried, does not stay buried, and the not-knowing becomes its own form of horror. O’Brien was already established as one of the defining voices on Vietnam through The Things They Carried; this novel pushes that project into a different and darker register.
Open Secrets
Eight stories, all rooted in the small-town rural Ontario landscape that Munro had been mapping across her career, about women balanced uneasily between conventional pasts and presents that tip them, often quietly and without warning, into something stranger and more dangerous than they expected. The stories move across decades and sometimes across continents, and they share Munro’s characteristic interest in the gap between what people present to their communities and what is actually happening beneath the surface of ordinary rural life. Munro had already established her reputation as one of the finest short story writers in English; Open Secrets is frequently cited among the strongest collections of her middle period.
Open Secrets demonstrates what made Munro, eventually a Nobel laureate, one of the most quietly radical writers of her generation: her refusal to treat the short story as a minor form, and her insistence that the entire scope of a life — its compromises, its hidden violences, its accumulated secrets — could be contained within twenty or thirty pages. The title is the key to the collection: these are not stories about hidden facts so much as stories about the things everyone in a small community quietly knows and agrees not to say aloud. Munro’s prose is unshowy in a way that disguises how precisely constructed every sentence is.
The Waterworks
Set in New York City in 1871, the novel follows a newspaper editor investigating the apparent appearance of a dead, corrupt millionaire’s ghostly white stagecoach moving through the city’s fog-bound streets at dawn. The investigation leads into the underground machinery of Boss Tweed-era municipal corruption, medical experimentation, and the literal and figurative waterworks of a city whose infrastructure of pipes, reservoirs, and hidden tunnels becomes a metaphor for the corruption running beneath its visible surface. Doctorow, already established for Ragtime and Billy Bathgate, returns to his recurring interest in reimagining specific moments of American urban history through atmospheric, genre-inflected narrative.
The Waterworks is Doctorow at his most gothic, building a Poe-inflected mystery atop a precisely researched portrait of Gilded Age New York corruption. The novel’s reach for moral and historical significance is more ambitious than its plot mechanics can always fully support, but its atmosphere — fog, gaslight, a ghostly white coach, the literal underground infrastructure of a city built on graft — is sustained with real conviction. Read it as a companion piece to Ragtime: another instance of Doctorow using a specific, vividly rendered historical moment as a lens for examining the corruptions that persist underneath American progress.
The Shipping News
Quoyle is a third-rate, hapless newspaperman in his thirties whose unfaithful wife dies in a car accident, and who relocates with his aunt and two young daughters to his ancestral home on the remote, weather-battered coast of Newfoundland to begin again. Proulx writes in a distinctive, clipped, fragmentary style, opening each chapter with a quotation from a real knot-tying manual she found at a yard sale for a quarter, using the imagery of knots and coiled rope as a recurring metaphor for the way human lives and relationships are tied, untied, and retied. The novel won the National Book Award in 1993 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1994, along with the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and was adapted into a 2001 film starring Kevin Spacey.
The Shipping News earns its place here for its unusual style as much as its story: Proulx’s clipped, sometimes deliberately incomplete sentences create a staccato rhythm that mirrors the harshness of the Newfoundland landscape she is describing, a landscape that is as much a protagonist as Quoyle himself. The novel’s central metaphor — that human relationships, like rope, can be tied, snarled, and eventually rewoven into something stronger — gives the book a structural elegance beneath its quirky surface. It is a novel about the specific, hard-won satisfaction of rebuilding a life in a place that asks real things of the people who live there.
Where to start
If you want the book that became a cultural phenomenon
→ Read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A first-time author’s account of a Savannah murder trial spent 216 weeks on the bestseller list and permanently changed an entire city’s tourism economy. The gold standard of the nonfiction novel.
If you want Murakami at the height of his ambition
→ Read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. His longest and most rewarding novel, where domestic strangeness and buried wartime history collide at full scale. Begin here once you already know you love his shorter work.
If you want the book that asks the hardest formal question
→ Read In the Lake of the Woods. Tim O’Brien refuses to resolve what happened to Kathy Wade or what her husband is capable of, and the not-knowing becomes the novel’s own form of horror.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1994
From the bookshelf
“A coil of rope is nothing until it is tied into a useful knot.” — The Ashley Book of Knots, epigraph to The Shipping News
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