Reading List · Lisanne Swart
The Best Books of 1998
1998 was the year Ted Hughes ended thirty-five years of public silence about his marriage to Sylvia Plath, publishing eighty-eight poems addressed directly to her nine months before his own death. It was the year Michael Cunningham published a novel about three women, one day each, 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 · All first published in 1998
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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 husband’s birthday, baking his cake with her small son, while contemplating whether the life she is living is one she can continue to live. Clarissa Vaughan, a New York publisher, at the end of the twentieth century, 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. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published The Hours on 11 November 1998. It won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999, and Stephen Daldry filmed it in 2002 with 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 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 a veteran of the Second World War: wounded on Luzon and evacuated while the rest of his regiment was captured and died on the Bataan Death March, and eaten ever since by the conviction that he survived as a coward and owes God the souls of everyone who did not. 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 from 1959 across the decades that come after. 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 seven when her father, a physician, took the family to the Congo to do medical work — not as missionaries and not with the Peace Corps — and she has said the novel is not autobiographical. She spent years researching the political history of the independence movement and its aftermath. HarperFlamingo published the book in the autumn of 1998; it was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999, and an Oprah’s Book Club selection.
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. Faber and Faber published Birthday Letters in January 1998, nine months before Hughes died of cancer on 28 October that year. The cover painting is by Frieda Hughes, his daughter with Plath. 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 for Best Collection and the T. S. Eliot Prize for 1998, and then the Whitbread Book of the Year, announced on 26 January 1999 — which made Hughes the first writer to take the Whitbread twice, and in successive years, after Tales from Ovid won it for 1997. It went straight to the top of the bestseller lists and was, as the Irish Times put it, the fastest-selling collection of poetry of the century.
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 — 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. Jonathan Cape published Filth in 1998, and W. W. Norton in America the same year. It is Welsh’s third novel: Trainspotting came in 1993 and Marabou Stork Nightmares in 1995, with the story collections The Acid House (1994) and Ecstasy (1996) in between. 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 a son of the abolitionist John Brown, and the last surviving member of the raiding party at Harpers Ferry — not, as is often written, the last surviving son: three of his brothers outlived him. It is 1899 and he has been living alone in the San Gabriel Mountains of California for some thirty years when Miss Katherine Mayo, assistant to the biographer Oswald Garrison Villard, comes looking for material 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 chases her off, changes his mind, and then writes her a series of very long letters, narrating 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 in the historical record, and says in his preface that the book is fiction and is not to be read as biography or history. The frame gives that away by itself: the real Owen Brown died in 1889, ten years before the novel has him sit down to write.
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 — HarperFlamingo published it in March 1998 at 768 pages — and it earns every one of them. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner in 1999 and won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. 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 about a hundred and seventy years — from its origins as a candle and soap business run by three brothers out of their father’s shipping firm in early nineteenth-century Boston, 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 share a scene, and neither character ever meets the other side of the book. But they are not separate: Clare put its agricultural products division in Lacewood, and Laura’s cancer most likely comes from it. The gap on the page, and the absence of any gap in fact, is where the novel’s argument lives. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Gain on 1 June 1998, and it won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction the following year.
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 in the last year of his life. The poem “Red” alone is worth the collection.
If you want the most ambitious novel
→ Cloudsplitter — 768 pages, scrupulously researched, and the finest American historical novel of the 1990s.
Books first published in 1998
Twelve books whose first publication genuinely falls in 1998, next to the six above, with what makes each one worth knowing about.
Charming Billy
National Book Award
Alice McDermott · Farrar, Straus and Giroux, January
Won the National Book Award for Fiction that November.
Paradise
Toni Morrison · Alfred A. Knopf
Her first novel after the 1993 Nobel. Oprah announced it on 16 January 1998.
A Man in Full
Tom Wolfe · Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November
Over 750,000 copies by December, and a public quarrel with Updike, Mailer and Irving.
About a Boy
Nick Hornby · Gollancz, May
Hardback and paperback together sold more than a million.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
J. K. Rowling · Bloomsbury, July
Straight to number one in Britain. America did not get it until June 1999.
Les Particules élémentaires
Michel Houellebecq · Flammarion
The last book ever to win the Prix Novembre: its founder resigned in protest and the prize was renamed the Prix Décembre.
Tipping the Velvet
Debut
Sarah Waters · Virago
Her first book, written while she finished a PhD on lesbian historical fiction.
The Restraint of Beasts
Debut · Booker shortlist
Magnus Mills · Flamingo
A debut on the Booker shortlist, by a bus driver.
The Last King of Scotland
Debut
Giles Foden · Faber and Faber
His first novel, and the Whitbread First Novel Award.
Another World
Pat Barker · Viking, October
A hundred-and-one-year-old Somme veteran in the last days of his life.
The Street Lawyer
Best seller
John Grisham · Doubleday, February
The best-selling novel in America that year.
First books published in 1998
Six writers whose first book came out in 1998 — an unusually strong year for debuts. Every one of the six won something with it, and two went straight onto a major prize list.
Tipping the Velvet
Sarah Waters
Her first book. It won a Betty Trask Award, and both the New York Times and Library Journal named it one of the best books of the year.
The Restraint of Beasts
Magnus Mills
His first novel, and it went straight onto the Booker shortlist.
The Last King of Scotland
Giles Foden
His first novel, and it won the Whitbread First Novel Award for 1998.
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
Kiran Desai
Her first novel, and a Betty Trask Prize. She won the Booker eight years later, and her next novel after that took until 2025.
My Year of Meats
Ruth Ozeki
Her first novel, published by Viking, and it won the Kiriyama Prize.
Caucasia
Danzy Senna
Her first novel, from Riverhead in February, and it won the Stephen Crane Award for Best New Fiction.
1998 in books, in short
- Nobel Prize
- José Saramago, “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality”. The official word is elusory, not elusive, which is what almost everyone quotes. See every Nobel winner
- Booker Prize
- Amsterdam, Ian McEwan — a 1998 book. The shortlist also held Master Georgie (Beryl Bainbridge), England, England (Julian Barnes), The Industry of Souls (Martin Booth), Breakfast on Pluto (Patrick McCabe) and The Restraint of Beasts (Magnus Mills)
- Pulitzer, fiction
- American Pastoral, Philip Roth — awarded in 1998 for a book published in 1997. See every Pulitzer winner since 1980
- National Book Award
- Charming Billy, Alice McDermott — a 1998 book, winning in 1998
- Orange Prize
- Larry’s Party, Carol Shields — awarded in May 1998 for a 1997 book
- Whitbread
- Birthday Letters took Book of the Year, announced on 26 January 1999 for the 1998 book year. Hughes became the first writer to win it twice, and in successive years. The category winners were Hughes himself for poetry, Justin Cartwright for the novel, Giles Foden for a first novel, Amanda Foreman for biography and David Almond for the children’s book
- Poetry prizes
- Birthday Letters again: the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T. S. Eliot Prize, both for 1998
- Prix Goncourt
- Confidence pour confidence, Paule Constant
- Best sellers
- The Street Lawyer by John Grisham topped the Publishers Weekly list of novels in America, with The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom by Suze Orman the top nonfiction title. In Britain the best-selling book first published that year was Delia’s How To Cook Book One
Two of the prizes above went to books published in 1997 — Roth’s Pulitzer and Shields’s Orange — which is the trap in every list of “1998 books” assembled from prize records. The other way round is worth noticing too: three of the six books on this page, The Hours, Cloudsplitter and The Poisonwood Bible, were finalists for the same two American prizes the following year, the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner. The Hours won both.
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 and the PEN/Faulkner Award the following year. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver became one of the most widely read American novels of the late 1990s. Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes — eighty-eight poems addressed directly to Sylvia Plath after thirty-five years of public silence — appeared nine months before his death. Ian McEwan won the Booker Prize with Amsterdam, Alice McDermott the National Book Award with Charming Billy, and Toni Morrison published Paradise, her first novel after the Nobel. Irvine Welsh published Filth, Russell Banks Cloudsplitter and Richard Powers Gain. Further down this page there is a longer list of the books first published in 1998.
What is the best book from 1998?
If you read one 1998 book, read The Hours. It is the shortest novel on this page and the one that does the most with its length: three women, three days, one novel passing between them. It won both of the big American fiction prizes the year after it came out. If you want something longer and heavier, read The Poisonwood Bible. If you want poetry, read Birthday Letters, and read it knowing what it is: a man in the last year of his life accounting to a woman who died thirty-five years earlier.
Which novels were published in 1998?
Among the novels first published in 1998: Amsterdam (Ian McEwan), The Hours (Michael Cunningham), The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver), Paradise (Toni Morrison), A Man in Full (Tom Wolfe), Charming Billy (Alice McDermott), Cloudsplitter (Russell Banks), Gain (Richard Powers), Filth (Irvine Welsh), About a Boy (Nick Hornby), Tipping the Velvet (Sarah Waters), Another World (Pat Barker) and Les Particules élémentaires (Michel Houellebecq). Three books often filed under 1998 are not: Underworld and Memoirs of a Geisha are 1997, and Ghostwritten is 1999.
Who won the Booker Prize in 1998?
Ian McEwan won the Booker Prize 1998 for Amsterdam, a short novel about two old friends, a dead woman they both loved, and a pact that goes wrong. The shortlist also held Master Georgie (Beryl Bainbridge), England, England (Julian Barnes), The Industry of Souls (Martin Booth), Breakfast on Pluto (Patrick McCabe) and The Restraint of Beasts (Magnus Mills) — the last of those a first novel.
Who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998?
José Saramago, the Portuguese novelist, “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality”. The official citation says elusory. Almost every quotation of it online says elusive, which is not what the Swedish Academy wrote.
What is The Hours about?
The Hours by Michael Cunningham weaves together three women in three different times: Virginia Woolf in Richmond in 1923, beginning Mrs Dalloway; Laura Brown, a housewife in Los Angeles in 1949, reading Mrs Dalloway on her husband’s birthday while contemplating whether to leave her life; and Clarissa Vaughan, a New York publisher at the end of the century, organising a party for her friend Richard, a poet dying of AIDS who calls her Mrs Dalloway. The novel takes its title from Woolf’s own working title for Mrs Dalloway. It won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999, and Stephen Daldry filmed it in 2002 with 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. He is a veteran of the Second World War who survived the Philippines while his regiment did not, and the guilt of it drives everything he does. The novel is narrated by five voices — Orleanna and each of the four daughters — and follows the family’s dispersal after things go catastrophically wrong. Kingsolver uses their experience as a lens on American involvement in Africa, the independence movements of the 1960s, and the long aftermath of colonialism. The title comes from a mispronunciation: the same Kikongo word, said with a different tone, turns “Jesus is most precious” into “Jesus is poisonwood”.
What is Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes?
Birthday Letters is a collection of eighty-eight poems by Ted Hughes, all addressed directly to Sylvia Plath. Faber published it in January 1998, nine months before Hughes died of cancer on 28 October that year. It was his first sustained public response to Plath and their marriage after thirty-five years of near-total silence. The cover painting is by their daughter Frieda. It won the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T. S. Eliot Prize for 1998, and then the Whitbread Book of the Year, announced in January 1999 — making Hughes the first writer to win the Whitbread twice, and in successive years. It went straight to the top of the bestseller lists, which almost no poetry collection does.
What is Gain by Richard Powers about?
Gain tells two stories side by side. One is the rise of Clare Soap and Chemical, a fictional American company that begins as a candle and soap business run by three brothers in early nineteenth-century Boston and ends as a global conglomerate. The other is Laura Bodey, a divorced real estate agent in Lacewood, Illinois, who is diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The two narratives never share a scene — but Clare put its agricultural products division in Lacewood, and Laura’s illness most likely comes from it. That is the point: the company’s century and a half of growth and one woman’s dying are the same story, told from two ends.
Which writers published their first book in 1998?
Sarah Waters published Tipping the Velvet, her first book, while finishing a PhD on lesbian historical fiction. Magnus Mills published The Restraint of Beasts and went straight onto the Booker shortlist with it. Giles Foden published The Last King of Scotland and won the Whitbread First Novel Award. Kiran Desai published Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, eight years before she won the Booker. Ruth Ozeki published My Year of Meats and Danzy Senna Caucasia. It was an unusually strong year for first books.
Footnotes
The Hours 5 facts
Farrar, Straus and Giroux published The Hours on 11 November 1998.correction
It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. The Pulitzer board publishes no work-specific citation for this award, so none is quoted on this page.
It also won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999, with Cloudsplitter and The Poisonwood Bible among the finalists for both prizes.correction
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Past Winners and Finalists 1981–2015
The novel itself names no year for the Clarissa strand. Her British publisher calls it “1990s New York”; Wikipedia says 1999. This page said 1999 flatly, so it now says only that the strand is set at the end of the century.correction
The title is Virginia Woolf’s own working title for Mrs Dalloway.
The Poisonwood Bible 8 facts
Nathan Price is a veteran of the Second World War, not of Vietnam — which the novel’s own timeline rules out, since it opens in 1959. He was wounded on Luzon and evacuated; his regiment was captured and died on the Bataan Death March, and he has believed ever since that he survived as a coward.correction
Barbara Kingsolver was seven when her father, a physician, took the family to the Congo for medical work. They were not missionaries and not Peace Corps volunteers — and a child could not be a Peace Corps volunteer in any case. She has said the novel is not autobiographical.correction
13 Things You May Not Know About The Poisonwood Bible — Mental Floss
HarperFlamingo published the book in the autumn of 1998.
It was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The title comes from a mispronunciation. Nathan Price ends his sermons with the Kikongo phrase “Tata Jesus is bängala”, meaning to say that Jesus is most precious; said the way he says it, it means that Jesus is poisonwood.
It was an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 1999 and won the Boeke Prize in 2000.
Nathan Price’s wound is taken on Luzon. The SparkNotes account cited above supports the wound, the regiment, Bataan and the survivor’s guilt but does not name the island.correction
This page said the novel follows the family “across thirty years”. No source states a span, so it now says only that it runs from 1959 across the decades that come after.correction
Birthday Letters 8 facts
The collection holds eighty-eight poems, and Faber published it in January 1998.
Ted Hughes died of cancer on 28 October 1998. That is nine months after publication, not six, which is what this page said before.correction
It won the T. S. Eliot Prize 1998.
It won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 1998.
It won the Whitbread Book of the Year for 1998, announced on 26 January 1999, making Hughes the first writer to win it twice and in successive years after Tales from Ovid took the 1997 award.correction
Final work by poet Ted Hughes wins Whitbread Book of the Year — The Irish Times
The Irish Times wrote that it was “the fastest-selling collection of poetry this century”. This page previously said it spent months on the Sunday Times bestseller list; I found no source for that, so it is gone.correction
Final work by poet Ted Hughes wins Whitbread Book of the Year — The Irish Times
“Red” is the last poem in the collection. This page said it was “written after her death and left with her papers”. The whole book was written after her death, and nothing in it was left with her papers. The confusion is probably with “Last Letter”, an unfinished poem found in Hughes’s own archive and first published in the New Statesman on 11 October 2010.correction
Sylvia Plath died on 11 February 1963.
Filth 3 facts
Jonathan Cape published Filth in 1998, and W. W. Norton in the United States the same year.
Filth is Welsh’s third novel but his fifth book: the story collection The Acid House came in 1994, between Trainspotting and Marabou Stork Nightmares, and the three novellas of Ecstasy in 1996, after them. That is why the book count and the novel count differ.correction
Bruce Robertson is a Detective Sergeant with Edinburgh’s Lothian Constabulary, and the tapeworm is self-aware: it calls itself The Self, and its interruptions supply the backstory Robertson will not.
Cloudsplitter 8 facts
Owen Brown was the last surviving member of the Harpers Ferry raiding party, not the last surviving son of John Brown. He died on 9 January 1889 and three brothers outlived him: John Brown Jr. (1895), Jason (1912) and Salmon (1919).correction
Miss Katherine Mayo, assistant to the biographer Oswald Garrison Villard, comes to Owen’s hermitage in the San Gabriel Mountains in 1899. He chases her off, changes his mind, and writes her a series of very long letters. This page first said a researcher came to ask him in person, which skipped the refusal; an earlier version of this correction said she only wrote, which skipped the visit. This is what the novel does.correction
Banks says in his preface that the book is fiction and not to be read as biography or history, and he takes considerable liberties with the historical figures. The frame is one of them: the real Owen Brown died in 1889, ten years before the novel has him writing.correction
Cloudsplitter won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction in 1999.
HarperFlamingo published Cloudsplitter in March 1998, at 768 pages — nearly eight hundred, not nearly seven hundred as this page said.correction
It was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The raid on Harpers Ferry ran from 16 to 18 October 1859, and John Brown was executed on 2 December 1859.
At Pottawatomie Creek on 24 May 1856, John Brown led four of his sons and three other men in killing five pro-slavery settlers with broadswords.
Gain 4 facts
Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Gain on 1 June 1998, at 356 pages.
The firm begins as a candle and soap business run by three brothers out of their father’s shipping company in Boston, and takes the name Clare Soap and Chemical on incorporation. Kirkus dates the start to the 1830s and Publishers Weekly to the 1820s, so this page says only early nineteenth century.correction
The two narratives never share a scene, but they are not unconnected: Clare sites its agricultural products division in Lacewood, and Laura’s ovarian cancer is most likely caused by it. This page said flatly that the two stories never intersect, which gives away the novel’s whole argument.correction
Gain won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction, awarded in 1999 for the 1998 novel.
Society of American Historians Prize for Historical Fiction — Society of American Historians
1998 in books 20 facts
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1998 went to José Saramago, with the citation quoted on this page. The official word is elusory, not elusive.correction
Ian McEwan won the Booker Prize 1998 for Amsterdam; the shortlist is as listed on this page.
The 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to American Pastoral by Philip Roth, a book published in 1997.correction
Alice McDermott won the 1998 National Book Award for Fiction with Charming Billy, published that January.
Carol Shields won the Orange Prize for Fiction in May 1998 for Larry’s Party, a 1997 book.correction
The Whitbread category winners for 1998 were Hughes himself for poetry, Justin Cartwright for Leading the Cheers (Novel), Giles Foden for The Last King of Scotland (First Novel), Amanda Foreman for Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (Biography) and David Almond for Skellig (Children’s Book).
Final work by poet Ted Hughes wins Whitbread Book of the Year — The Irish Times
Paule Constant won the Prix Goncourt 1998 for Confidence pour confidence.
The Street Lawyer by John Grisham was the best-selling novel in the United States in 1998, and The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom by Suze Orman the top nonfiction title. Toni Morrison’s Paradise came ninth.
Bestselling Books of the Year, 1996–2007 — Publishers Weekly
Delia’s How To Cook Book One was the highest-selling book first published in the United Kingdom in 1998, on NielsenIQ BookScan’s lifetime figures. BookScan’s UK record begins that year.
Looking back over the lifetime of BookScan — Nielsen Book UK
Amsterdam was published by Jonathan Cape in 1998 and won the Booker that October.
Paradise was Toni Morrison’s first novel after the 1993 Nobel, and Oprah announced it as a book club pick on 16 January 1998. Wikipedia calls it a 1997 novel; the first edition is Knopf, 1998.correction
A Man in Full was published on 12 November 1998 and had sold over 750,000 copies by December.
About a Boy was published on 4 May 1998 by Gollancz.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was published by Bloomsbury on 2 July 1998 and went straight to number one in Britain. The American edition did not appear until 2 June 1999.
Les Particules élémentaires was published by Flammarion in 1998 and won the Prix Novembre — the last book to do so, as the prize’s founder resigned in protest and it was renamed the Prix Décembre.
Another World was published by Viking on 29 October 1998.
Underworld is from October 1997, not 1998. It is often filed under 1998 because it was a 1998 Pulitzer finalist.correction
Memoirs of a Geisha is from 1997, and is on the New York Public Library’s list of books to remember from that year.correction
25 Books to Remember from 1997 — The New York Public Library
Ghostwritten, David Mitchell’s debut, is from 1999.correction
In March 1998 Bertelsmann acquired Random House and merged it with Bantam Doubleday Dell.
First books of 1998 6 facts
Tipping the Velvet was Sarah Waters’s debut, written while she finished a PhD on gay and lesbian historical fiction, and it won a Betty Trask Award.
The Restraint of Beasts was Magnus Mills’s debut novel and was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize.
The Last King of Scotland was Giles Foden’s first novel and won the 1998 Whitbread First Novel Award.
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard was Kiran Desai’s first novel and won a Betty Trask Prize.
My Year of Meats was Ruth Ozeki’s debut novel, published by Viking, and won the Kiriyama Prize.
Caucasia was Danzy Senna’s first novel, from Riverhead in February 1998, and won the Stephen Crane Award for Best New Fiction.
Last verified 24 September 2026. Everything marked “correction” above is a place where this page said something different before. Six of them were outright errors: Nathan Price is a veteran of the Second World War and not of Vietnam; Barbara Kingsolver was in the Congo as a doctor’s daughter and not in the Peace Corps; Ted Hughes died nine months after publication, not six; “Red” was not left with Sylvia Plath’s papers; Owen Brown was the last surviving Harpers Ferry raider and not the last surviving son; and Laura Brown is reading on her husband’s birthday, not her son’s. The rest are dates, publishers, page counts and sources made exact. Where a source contradicts the version that circulates, the source wins. Anything I could not source to a named publisher, prize body, library record, archive or newspaper is not on this page.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.
Where to go next
Pages on this site that pick up where 1998 leaves off.
Overview
Best Books by Year
Every reading list on this site, organised by year.
By year
Best Books of 1999
Disgrace, Interpreter of Maladies, Atomised — the year after.
Genre
Best Fiction Books of All Time
The novels that changed what fiction could do.
By author
Best Authors to Read
Browse all author guides on the shelf.
From the bookshelf
Six books from a quiet year, and the one I would hand you first
More hand-picked recommendations on my personal bookshelf — books from every year that stay with you long after the last page.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendationsMore to read
