The Best Nobel Prize Novels to Start With

The Nobel Prize in Literature is about the closest thing the whole reading world has to a lifetime achievement award, and its long list of past laureates reads, year by year, like a detailed map of the last century's very greatest literary minds. It can also, quite understandably, feel deeply intimidating from the outside looking in: a towering wall of unfamiliar foreign names and forbidding, difficult reputations that seems almost deliberately designed to make an ordinary, curious reader feel unqualified and unwelcome before they have even begun. That off-putting reputation, though, is very largely unearned and unfair, and it keeps far too many good books on the shelf.

Behind the gold medal and all its solemn Scandinavian gravity stand storytellers of enormous human warmth and genuine readability, writers who simply happen to be brilliant but who never once forgot how to grab and hold an ordinary audience by the collar. The single real secret to enjoying them is knowing which particular book to open first, before all the others. Here, then, is a friendly, unpretentious starting map to some of the most rewarding laureates of them all, chosen deliberately not for their prestige or their difficulty but purely for how much sheer pleasure you are likely to take in actually reading them. Follow it, and the intimidating wall quietly becomes an open door.

Prestige is not the same as difficulty

It is dangerously easy to assume that a Nobel Prize automatically signals a hard, joyless, faintly punishing sort of read, all suffering and no story, but a great many of the laureates are in fact outright page-turners. Kazuo Ishiguro won the prize on the strength of novels every bit as gripping and propulsive as any airport thriller; Ernest Hemingway wrote in prose so famously clean and clear that a bright child could follow every single line of it; Gabriel Garcia Marquez spins pure, intoxicating enchantment seemingly out of thin air. The medal is awarded for a whole body of work built patiently across a lifetime, not for some imagined reading-difficulty score, and plenty of these writers are just as much sheer fun as they are undeniably profound. Simply start with the accessible ones, the welcoming ones, and all the daunting prestige will quietly take care of itself in time. The medal, after all, is a reward for a whole lifetime of work, not a warning label stamped on the cover about difficulty. Treat it instead as a curated recommendation from the most serious readers alive, and it becomes a gift rather than a hurdle.

Nobel laureates to begin with

• Kazuo Ishiguro: begin with Never Let Me Go or The Remains of the Day, two quietly devastating novels that are also, crucially, completely effortless and compulsive to read from the very first page.
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez: begin with the towering One Hundred Years of Solitude if you feel bold, or with the shorter, sharper, and utterly gripping Chronicle of a Death Foretold if you would rather ease your way in.
• Toni Morrison: begin with the searing Beloved, or with the slimmer and more approachable The Bluest Eye. Essential, unforgettable, and among the most important writers America has ever produced.
• Ernest Hemingway: begin with The Old Man and the Sea, barely a hundred perfect and deeply moving pages, and then graduate to the slow heartbreak of A Farewell to Arms.
• Albert Camus: begin with The Stranger, a novel that is short, cold, strange, and quietly life-altering for a great many of the readers who happen to encounter it at just the right moment.
• John Steinbeck: begin with the brief and shattering Of Mice and Men, then work your way steadily up to the towering, furious, big-hearted The Grapes of Wrath.
• Olga Tokarczuk: begin with the propulsive eco-thriller Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, or with the dazzling, fragmentary mosaic novel Flights. A thrilling and very readable recent laureate.
• Jose Saramago: for a slightly bolder step, try Blindness, a gripping, unpunctuated, unforgettable parable of an entire society collapsing when a strange epidemic suddenly strikes it blind.

Match a laureate to what you already love

The single best and least intimidating way into the whole Nobel list is simply to follow your own existing reading tastes, exactly as you already would in any ordinary bookshop on a quiet afternoon. If you love a book that makes you cry openly, then Kazuo Ishiguro and Toni Morrison are both waiting patiently for you with open arms. If instead you love lean, muscular, stripped-down prose with not one wasted word, then Ernest Hemingway is unmistakably your writer. And if what you crave above all else is magic, sweep, and grand old-fashioned storytelling, then Gabriel Garcia Marquez delivers exactly that, by the generous armful. There is, genuinely, a Nobel laureate out there for every conceivable kind of reader, and the small task of finding the one who happens to match your particular appetite is far more useful, and far more fun, than grimly starting with whichever name simply sounds the most impressive at a dinner party.

How to read a laureate without pressure

Whatever else you do, do not fall into the common trap of treating these books as some kind of solemn examination you must sit and pass. You are entirely and completely allowed to start one of them, decide after fifty honest pages that it is simply not for you right now, and move calmly on to a totally different laureate instead; the prize is meant to be a generous starting point for a lifetime of happy exploration, not a rigid syllabus you are somehow obliged to complete in strict order. Read the shorter works first, the ones that actively welcome you in, The Old Man and the Sea, The Stranger, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and then let a single writer you have genuinely come to love lead you naturally onward toward their longer, richer, more demanding books. Sheer enjoyment, and nothing sterner or nobler than that, is the only real qualification that matters here at all. Nobody anywhere is grading you, and the laureates themselves would almost certainly rather be read for pleasure than admired politely from a safe distance. Pick the one that simply sounds like the most fun and begin there, today.

“The Nobel does not certify difficulty. It certifies that a writer had something the whole world needed to hear.”

Build your own tour

Reading your way through the laureates, even in the loosest and most unsystematic manner you can imagine, quietly becomes one of the great self-guided courses in all of world literature, and one that costs nothing at all but curiosity. You end up travelling the entire globe and the whole turbulent century almost at once, from small-town rural America to the villages of Latin America to postwar Japan to the endlessly shifting borders of Eastern Europe, and along the way you watch the same deep questions that forever obsess humanity rise, shift, fade, and then return once more in a new and unfamiliar voice. Simply pick one single writer from the list above, allow yourself to fall properly and helplessly in love with their work, and then let plain curiosity carry you onward to the next one, and the one after that. There is genuinely no finer or more generous map of everything that fiction is truly capable of doing.