Reading List · Lisanne Swart
The Best Books of 2007
2007 was the year Anne Enright won the Booker Prize for a novel that many judges found too dark and most readers found unforgettable. It was the year Ian McEwan published his most compressed work, Denis Johnson won the National Book Award for the novel he had spent decades trying to write, and Junot Díaz published the book that would win the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Tom McCarthy’s Remainder reached American readers in its first wide-release English edition and began a conversation about what a novel was allowed to be interested in that has not ended. It was a year when literary fiction was, by any measure, doing serious work.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · Fiction · Published 2007
The Gathering
Veronica Hegarty is one of twelve children, flying home to Dublin for her brother Liam’s funeral. He drowned himself in Brighton. As she sits with the body and prepares for the wake, she begins to reconstruct a memory — or what she believes is a memory — of something that happened to Liam as a child in their grandmother’s house. The novel moves between the present and the past, between what Veronica knows and what she suspects and what she has chosen not to know. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2007 and was described by Enright herself as the book she had been trying to write for twenty years.
Enright’s prose is among the most distinctive in contemporary Irish fiction — it moves with a controlled fury that never tips into melodrama, and her narrator’s intelligence is matched by her unreliability. The Gathering is a book about what families do not say, about the specific silence around abuse and its long aftermath, and about the grief that does not resolve. It is not a comfortable novel. It is an honest one, which is more important.
On Chesil Beach
Edward and Florence are newlyweds in 1962, sitting down to dinner in a hotel room on the Dorset coast on their wedding night. Florence is a classical musician from a prosperous family. Edward is a historian from a more modest background. They love each other. The night goes catastrophically wrong, and the novel follows what happens next — in the next few hours, and then across a lifetime. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. At under 200 pages it is one of McEwan’s most concentrated works, and arguably his most devastating.
McEwan is at his finest when he is working in a very small space — a single event, a few hours, the gap between what two people feel and what they are capable of saying. On Chesil Beach is essentially a study of a single failure of communication and the lifetime of regret it produces. It is set in 1962 precisely because the cultural moment matters: a few years later, the same conversation might have been possible. The specificity of the period is not decoration; it is the argument.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Oscar de León is a fat Dominican-American kid from New Jersey who loves science fiction and fantasy and has never had a girlfriend. The novel follows his life and, through him, the history of his family in the Dominican Republic under the Trujillo dictatorship — all of it held together by the concept of the fukú, a generational curse that Díaz’s narrator Yunior describes in footnotes and digressions and asides. Díaz narrates in a voice that mixes English and Spanish, academic register and street slang, comic-book reference and historical documentation. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008.
The formal achievement of this novel is that its apparent looseness is entirely controlled. The footnotes are not digressions — they are the place where the political history lives, which is Díaz’s argument: that the history of dictatorship exists in the margins of ordinary lives, informing everything without being acknowledged. Oscar’s inability to connect with women is funny and then sad and then something more serious than either. Díaz is writing about the cost of diaspora — what is lost in the crossing and what cannot be recovered.
Tree of Smoke
Skip Sands is a CIA officer in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s, working under his uncle, a legendary colonel with an increasingly unclear relationship to the war he is fighting. The novel follows Skip, two American brothers, a Vietnamese double agent, and several other characters across decades and multiple countries, building a portrait of the Vietnam War as a vast, self-sustaining hallucination in which everyone has a reason to believe in what they are doing and none of those reasons are adequate. Johnson spent twenty years working on it. It won the National Book Award in 2007.
Johnson writes about the damaged and the devoted — people who have organised themselves entirely around something that cannot hold — and Vietnam gives him the largest possible canvas for that subject. Tree of Smoke is not a novel that makes the war comprehensible. It is a novel that makes it comprehensibly incomprehensible — that shows how the systems of belief that sustain it work from inside, why people committed to them, and what it costs when those systems collapse. It is the most ambitious American novel of the decade.
Remainder
A man receives a large financial settlement after an accident he cannot remember and uses the money to stage obsessive, meticulously detailed reconstructions of scenes from ordinary life — a building with residents moving through their routines, a liver being cooked, a shooting on a street — hiring actors to repeat them endlessly until they feel real. The novel was first published in France in 2001 and in the UK in 2005. Its first wide US release came in 2007, when it reached the larger English-language audience it had been building toward. It is one of the most formally provocative novels of its era.
McCarthy is asking a question that no other novelist of his generation was asking as directly: what is the relationship between experience and authenticity, and can the mechanical reproduction of life ever produce something genuine? The narrator’s obsessive restaging of reality starts as a character study and becomes something more disturbing — a portrait of a man who has discovered that the only way he can feel present is to manufacture presence artificially. It is a very short novel that takes a very long time to leave you.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Changez is a Pakistani man sitting in a Lahore café, telling his story to an American stranger across a table. He describes his years in New York — Princeton, a prestigious valuation firm, a relationship with an American woman — and his gradual disillusionment with America after September 11. The American stranger says almost nothing throughout. The novel is structured as a monologue, and the reader is left to decide what kind of encounter this actually is and what the American is there for. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007.
The formal choice — the silent interlocutor, the single voice, the café in Lahore — is not a trick. It puts the reader in the position of the American: listening to a story being told to them by someone whose motives they cannot fully assess, in a place where the power dynamics are no longer what they were. Hamid is writing about how the same events look different depending on where you are standing, and the novel’s structure enacts that argument rather than simply stating it.
How to navigate this list
If you want the shortest and most precise read
→ On Chesil Beach by McEwan. Under 200 pages. A single failure of communication and a lifetime of consequences.
If you want the most formally inventive novel
→ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao — the footnotes are not digressions, they are where the political history lives.
If you want the most emotionally challenging read
→ The Gathering by Anne Enright. Dark, controlled, and honest in ways that most fiction avoids.
If you want the most ambitious war novel on the list
→ Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson — the Vietnam War as a vast, self-sustaining hallucination.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 2007
What were the best books published in 2007?
The most acclaimed books of 2007 include The Gathering by Anne Enright (Booker Prize winner), On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Booker shortlist), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (Pulitzer Prize 2008), Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (National Book Award), and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Booker shortlist). It was a strong year across multiple national literary traditions.
What book won the Booker Prize in 2007?
The Gathering by Anne Enright won the Man Booker Prize in 2007. It was a somewhat controversial choice at the time — some critics found it relentlessly bleak — but it has since been recognised as one of the finest Irish novels of the twenty-first century and one of the most honest accounts of family silence and its consequences in contemporary fiction.
Is On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan worth reading?
Yes — it is one of McEwan’s most concentrated and most devastating works. Under 200 pages, it describes a wedding night in 1962 that goes catastrophically wrong due to a single failure of communication, and then follows the lifetime of consequences. The period setting matters: McEwan is arguing that a few years later, the same conversation might have been possible. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007.
What is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao about?
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao follows Oscar de León, a Dominican-American nerd in New Jersey, alongside his family’s history under the Trujillo dictatorship. Díaz narrates in a voice mixing English and Spanish, using footnotes to carry the political history and comic-book references to carry the emotional register. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008 and is widely regarded as one of the defining American novels of its decade.
What is Remainder by Tom McCarthy about?
Remainder follows an unnamed man who receives a large financial settlement after an accident and uses the money to stage obsessive, repetitive reconstructions of scenes from ordinary life. It was first published in France in 2001 and reached wide English-language readership in 2007. It is one of the most formally provocative novels of its era, asking what it means to manufacture experience and whether mechanical repetition can produce something genuine.
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