Six Long Contemporary Novels to Sink Into

The Bossy Bookworm
Aug 22
6 min read

I Like Big Books and I Cannot Lie

When I was compiling this list and double-checking page counts, I kept surprising myself with my own disconnect--some of the books I was sure were epic were only sort of long, and I didn't initially realize that some of the books on this list were quite so lengthy.

As I greedily peer toward fall and cooler weather, I love the idea of settling in with some longer books. All but one of these wonderful titles (Demon Copperhead, at 560) comes in at over 600 pages, so they're perfect reads to cozy up with for an extended reading session.

What are some of your favorite long novels?

01 Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Kingsolver offers an epic story of a faulted, unlikely hero in danger of being crushed by exceptionally difficult circumstances. His golden heart and grit allow him to keep fighting through brokenness, pain, and disappointment in rural Virginia.

Demon Copperhead, a sort of Appalachian David Copperfield, is epic. It's 560 pages and driven by the unique voice and gritty, heartbreakingly hopeful, broken voice of Demon (born Damon, and ultimately a redhead, hence the "Copperhead").

Charles Dickens's experience with extreme poverty in Victorian England inspired him to highlight its cruel impacts on children in his story David Copperfield. That book inspired Demon Copperhead, in which Kingsolver showcases the invisibility of the rural poor in Appalachia as well as a tragic cycle of poverty, drug dependence, and death--with signature Kingsolver characters who have unique voices and are complex, flawed, and irresistible.

The downward spiral of the story kept going and going, and its grimness took my breath away. Yet Kingsolver keeps Demon's voice strong even as he falters and as everything he has counted on seems swept away. His rock-bottom--it isn't a moment; it feels as though he drags the bottom for years--sets up a situation in which he seems washed clean for some version of a new beginning.

The prospects for Demon's future seem far from neat and perfect, but by the end of the book there are glimmers of hope for our faulted hero.

Click here for my full review of Demon Copperhead. This was one of my favorite books of the year when I read it.

02 The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

This gem from Mitchell is a set of six intriguing tracks through time that are full of surprises.

You only value something if you know it’ll end.

Teenager Holly Sykes is suddenly drawn into the world of “the radio people,” whose voices she heard as a child. She disappears from her family and leaves behind a tragic mystery, while in her forays through new worlds she attracts dangerous powers to her.

David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks is a set of six intriguing tracks through time that are full of surprises and interconnected through Holly and her various threads of reality. There are links to other Mitchell books and characters if you're paying attention, but the book can stand alone.

I've never read a book quite like this before. A full genre shift around page 400 would normally make me want to throw a book through the window. But here it works somehow. This was strange and compelling.

Mitchell is one of a kind, and I love it. Another book I loved of his was Utopia Avenue, and it was completely different in tone but also wonderfully David Mitchell-level intriguing.

This book is part of my Greedy Reading List Six Riveting Time-Travel Stories to Explore.

For my full review, please check out The Bone Clocks.

03 The Gilded Hour by Sara Donati

I loved digging into this 750-page historical fiction wonder. It ticked many of my boxes: a woman in a conventionally male role, richly wrought characters, and a vivid setting.

In The Gilded Hour, Sara Donati shapes a historical fiction story about an eccentric family and a broad surrounding cast of characters--and it's all centered around independent women with unconventional women's roles in society in nineteenth century New York City.

The Gilded Hour explores how these women's abilities and constraints intersect with women's rights of the time period, social responsibility, and conventions, all in an immensely readable book rich in period detail, with great dialogue and satisfying elements of love, mystery, and searches for justice.

I felt that a couple of important underlying plot lines remained oddly unresolved at the end--even keeping in mind that there's a second book in Donati's Waverly Place series, Where the Light Enters. However, I just loved this story and Donati's storytelling too much to let it cloud my gleeful reading experience.

For my full review, please check out The Gilded Hour. The Gilded Hour is part of the Greedy Reading List Thankful for Five-Star Bossy Reads.

04 The Rose Code by Kate Quinn

Kate Quinn makes the urgency of World War II code breaking come alive through the stories of three young women and their interconnected destinies in The Rose Code.

The Rose Code is a wonderfully spun historical fiction story of three very different women who answer the wartime call to England's top-secret Bletchley Park in order to break the military codes of the Axis powers.

I love a World War II story about strong women making a difference, but I admit that I was curious about how even a historical fiction storytelling master like Kate Quinn could craft a compelling novel around the potential tedium at the heart of code breaking.

Quinn offers plenty of interpersonal conflict, romance, suspected double-crossing, and details of life within both timelines, and in her hands, the descriptions of code-breaking mechanisms and the detailed, complicated, elusive process of figuring out messages were captivating.

For my full review, check out The Rose Code. This title is part of the Greedy Reading List Six More Books about Brave Female Spies.

Kate Quinn is also the author of The Diamond Eye, The Huntress, The Rose Code, The Alice Network, and, with Janie Chang, The Phoenix Crown.

05 Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land was a complex, heartbreaking, hope-filled, surprising, fascinating read.

Young Anna lives in fifteenth-century Constantinople with her sickly sister, frustrated with endlessly stitching priests' robes--and secretly learning to read stories from the past.

In twentieth-century Idaho, Zeno has lived a long life filled with yearning, war, and unexpected late-in-life academic satisfaction. He is directing a precious group of children in a farcical, heartbreaking play based on the stories Anna read five centuries earlier.

And far in the future, Konstance is in a vault on the spaceship Argos, destined for a distant planet. She largely lives in a vivid virtual world but leaves to scribble scraps of information about the same ancient stories that touched the lives of Anna and Zeno.

The stories in Cloud Cuckoo Land (which is the name of the book-within-a-book) connect these characters across space and time.

Cloud Cuckoo Land was consistently beautiful, always interesting, and sometimes heartbreaking.

Check out my full review of Cloud Cuckoo Land here.

06 Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

Shipstead has created two independent, defiant, appealingly strong young women split by time. I was hooked on both story lines and loved this.

Great Circle spans the wilds of Prohibition-era Montana, the blustery Pacific Northwest, the unforgiving chill of Alaska, the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and the movie-making business, and the stark, brutal dangers of Antarctica, from the early twentieth century to modern day.

Great Circle traces events starting with a sinking ocean liner in 1914 and the introduction of Marian and James, twin babies rescued from that tragedy; it follows the paths of the twins' lives as they grow up; the story tracks young Marian's ignited passion for aviation and her adventures; and the book injects a modern-day story line in which a famous young actress takes on the role of Marian for a film.

In interconnected stories--which felt equally compelling to me--Shipstead brings to life these disparate places and times and focuses on various colorful characters within them.

Shipstead is a wonderful writer, and I loved every word of this. Both of the timelines had me hooked.

For my full review, please see Great Circle.