Reading List · Lisanne Swart
The Best Books of 1998
1998 was the year Ted Hughes ended thirty-five years of public silence about Sylvia Plath and their marriage, publishing eighty-eight poems addressed directly to her six months before his own death. It was the year Michael Cunningham published a novel about three women and one day and the way a single book can organise a life around itself. Barbara Kingsolver published the novel that would define her career. Irvine Welsh returned with his most technically inventive book. Richard Powers published what many consider his most perfectly structured novel. And Russell Banks published the most ambitious American historical novel of the decade. 1998 was not a year that announced itself — no single book dominated the way that some years produce a single unmistakable event. What it produced instead was range: six books that have nothing in common except that they have lasted.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · Fiction & Poetry · Published 1998
The Hours
Three women. Three different days, separated by decades. Virginia Woolf in Richmond in 1923, struggling with her health and beginning to write Mrs Dalloway. Laura Brown in Los Angeles in 1949, a housewife reading Mrs Dalloway on her son’s birthday while contemplating whether the life she is living is one she can continue to live. Clarissa Vaughan in New York in 1999, organising a party for her friend Richard — a poet dying of AIDS — who has always called her “Mrs Dalloway.” Cunningham weaves the three narratives in close alternation, each picking up and putting down the same questions: what it means to choose a life, what it costs to stay in one, and what reading a particular book can do to a person. The Hours won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 and was adapted into a film by Stephen Daldry starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep.
You do not need to have read Mrs Dalloway to read The Hours, but reading Woolf first deepens every page of Cunningham’s novel. What he understood about Mrs Dalloway — that it is a novel about the endurance of an ordinary day as a form of courage — is the foundation of his own book. The three narrative strands illuminate each other in ways that feel inevitable in retrospect: the writer, the reader, and the person living inside the story. The novel is short, precise, and genuinely moving in ways that sneak up on you.
The Poisonwood Bible
Nathan Price is a Baptist minister and a Vietnam veteran who takes his wife Orleanna and their four daughters from Georgia to a village in the Belgian Congo in 1959, convinced that he has been called to bring Christianity to Africa. He is also convinced that he knows best — about God, about Africa, about his family, about everything — and this certainty, combined with his inability to hear what the people around him are actually saying, produces a cascade of consequences that the novel follows across thirty years. Each of the five women narrates sections in a distinct voice: Orleanna looking back from the silence of old age; the four daughters — Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May — in their different registers and different understandings of what is happening to them. Kingsolver was in the Peace Corps in the Congo as a child; she spent years researching the political history of the independence movement and its aftermath.
The Poisonwood Bible is a novel about how American certainty — religious, political, cultural — meets the actual complexity of the world and what it destroys in the collision. Nathan Price is not a villain in any simple sense; he is a man who believes entirely in what he is doing and cannot update his model of the world to accommodate what the world is showing him. Kingsolver gives each of the five narrators a different relationship to what happened, which means you are never allowed to settle into a single interpretation. The Africa she describes is specific and historically grounded in ways that most American fiction about the continent is not.
Birthday Letters
Eighty-eight poems, all addressed directly to Sylvia Plath. Hughes published Birthday Letters in January 1998, six months before his death from cancer in October. It was his first sustained public statement about Plath and their marriage — which ended with her suicide in 1963 — after thirty-five years during which he had maintained almost complete silence, endured decades of public blame, and watched the mythology around Plath grow in ways he could not correct without contributing to what he wanted to refuse. The poems cover the arc of their relationship: their first meeting at a Cambridge party in 1956, the early years in America, the move to Devon, the collapse. They are addressed to her in the second person throughout — “You” — which creates an intimacy and a strange quality of reckoning. Birthday Letters won the Forward Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Whitbread Book of the Year. It spent months on the Sunday Times bestseller list, an almost unprecedented achievement for a poetry collection.
The experience of reading Birthday Letters changes depending on how much you know about the Plath-Hughes story. Read with knowledge of that story, the poems are not a defence or an accusation — they are something more uncomfortable: a man accounting to a dead woman for what he did and did not do, in the knowledge that he is about to die himself. The poem “Red” — the last in the collection, written after her death and left with her papers — is one of the most devastating pieces of writing about grief and love and their proximity to each other that exists in the English language.
Filth
Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson is a corrupt Edinburgh policeman. He takes drugs, he manipulates colleagues, he has sex with other men’s wives and lies about everything, including to himself. He is conducting what he calls a murder investigation, though the investigation is primarily a vehicle for the accumulation of personal leverage over everyone around him. The novel is narrated entirely in Robertson’s voice — which is to say, in the voice of a man who has constructed an elaborate system of self-justification so complete that he cannot see himself at all. Progressive sections of the text are interrupted and annotated by a tapeworm living in Robertson’s intestine, which begins to develop its own perspective on its host — a perspective that is, over the course of the novel, more honest than Robertson’s own. Welsh published Trainspotting in 1993 and Marabou Stork Nightmares in 1995; Filth is technically his most ambitious book.
Welsh is sometimes underestimated because of how funny his books are, and Filth is very funny in ways that make the dark material more accessible rather than lighter. Robertson is a magnificent grotesque — the novel understands exactly how a person constructs a self-image so impermeable that no evidence can reach it — and the tapeworm sections are a genuine formal invention: a device that initially reads as absurdist and gradually becomes the novel’s conscience. The ending, when it arrives, is not what you expect and exactly what it had to be.
Cloudsplitter
Owen Brown is the last surviving son of the abolitionist John Brown. He is very old, living alone in California, when a young researcher comes to ask him about his father — about the man who believed that God had chosen him to end slavery by force, who raised a large family in poverty, who moved them repeatedly across the northern states, who eventually led the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October 1859, was captured, tried for treason, and hanged. Owen narrates the whole of his father’s life and his own involvement in it — the years of travelling with the old man, the violence at Pottawatomie, the long preparation for Harpers Ferry, the raid itself and its aftermath — in a voice that is simultaneously devoted and damaged, proud and ashamed, never quite able to separate what his father was from what his father did. Banks spent years researching the historical record and is scrupulous about what he invents.
John Brown is one of the most contested figures in American history: a hero to the abolitionist tradition, a terrorist to those who saw Harpers Ferry as an act of murder, a madman to those who thought only his methods were wrong. Banks does not resolve the ambiguity — he inhabits it, through a narrator who loved his father completely and watched him destroy things that love could not justify. Cloudsplitter is Banks’s most ambitious novel, nearly seven hundred pages, and it earns every one. It is the best American historical novel of the 1990s and one of the most sustained examinations of how idealism and violence coexist in a single human being that exists in fiction.
Gain
Two narratives, never directly touching. The first follows Clare Soap and Chemical Company across a hundred and fifty years — from its origins as a small Boston chandlery in the 1830s through its growth into a nineteenth-century manufacturer, a twentieth-century multinational, a global conglomerate producing everything from soap to pesticides to pharmaceuticals. The second follows Laura Bodey, a divorced real estate agent living in Lacewood, Illinois — a town whose economy is organised around the local Clare plant — who is diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The two stories never intersect. Clare never appears in Laura’s story; Laura never appears in the corporate history. The gap between them is where the novel’s argument lives. Powers had been thinking about the corporation as an entity — legally a person, historically immortal, structurally amnesiac — for years before writing this book.
Powers is a writer who works at the intersection of scientific and humanistic knowledge, and Gain is his most controlled deployment of that method. The Clare sections are not satirical — they are genuinely interested in how a business grows and changes and loses its original character over generations, and they are often beautiful in unexpected ways. The Laura sections are written with a restraint that makes her situation more present rather than less. The question the novel raises — who bears the cost of what corporations produce? — has not become any less relevant since 1998.
How to navigate this list
If you want the most beautifully constructed novel
→ Read The Hours. Cunningham’s three-strand structure is a formal achievement, and the novel is short enough to read in a sitting.
If you want the most politically serious novel
→ Read The Poisonwood Bible. Kingsolver spent years on the research and it shows — the Congo she describes is specific and historically grounded in ways that matter.
If you want the most emotionally devastating book on the list
→ Read Birthday Letters. A man accounting to a dead woman for what happened between them, written while he was dying. The poem “Red” alone is worth the collection.
If you want the most ambitious novel
→ Cloudsplitter — nearly seven hundred pages, scrupulously researched, and the finest American historical novel of the 1990s.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1998
What books were published in 1998?
1998 produced several enduring works of fiction and poetry. The Hours by Michael Cunningham won the Pulitzer Prize. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver became one of the most widely read American novels of the late 1990s. Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes — 88 poems addressed directly to Sylvia Plath after 35 years of public silence — appeared six months before his death. Irvine Welsh published Filth. Russell Banks published Cloudsplitter, his most ambitious novel. And Richard Powers published Gain, which many critics consider his most formally perfect book.
What is The Hours about?
The Hours by Michael Cunningham weaves together three women across three different time periods: Virginia Woolf writing Mrs Dalloway in Richmond in the 1920s; Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife in Los Angeles reading Mrs Dalloway on her son’s birthday while contemplating whether to leave her life; and Clarissa Vaughan, a New York editor in the 1990s who is organising a party for her friend Richard, a dying poet. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 and was adapted into a film starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep.
What is The Poisonwood Bible about?
The Poisonwood Bible follows Nathan Price, a Baptist missionary who takes his wife Orleanna and their four daughters from Georgia to a village in the Belgian Congo in 1959, convinced that he is doing God’s work. The novel is narrated by five voices — Orleanna and each of the four daughters — and spans thirty years, following the family’s dispersal after things go catastrophically wrong. Kingsolver uses the family’s experience as a lens on the history of American involvement in Africa, the independence movements of the 1960s, and the long aftermath of colonialism.
What is Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes?
Birthday Letters is a collection of 88 poems by Ted Hughes, all addressed directly to Sylvia Plath. Hughes published it in January 1998, six months before his death from cancer in October. It was his first sustained public response to Plath and their marriage after 35 years during which he had maintained almost complete silence on the subject. The collection won the Forward Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. It was on the Sunday Times bestseller list for months — an unusual achievement for a poetry collection.
What is Gain by Richard Powers about?
Gain by Richard Powers tells two parallel stories: the 150-year rise of Clare Soap and Chemical, a fictional American corporation that grows from a small Boston chandlery into a global conglomerate; and the story of Laura Bodey, a divorced real estate agent in Lacewood, Illinois, who is diagnosed with ovarian cancer that may be linked to the local Clare plant. The two narratives never directly intersect, but their proximity raises the question of what we pay for corporate prosperity — and who pays it.
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