When you suddenly have long evenings at home, whether because of illness, winter, a quiet stretch between jobs or a lockdown, it is the perfect moment for the big books most of us keep postponing. The fifteen classics below are long, but they repay every hour: Tolstoy's two masterpieces, Dostoevsky's darkest and richest novels, Dickens and Brontë, Dumas and Hugo, Mitchell and Steinbeck, Pasternak, Eco and Musil, and two foundations of Western literature, Cervantes and Dante.
Long novels give you something short ones cannot. You live alongside characters for weeks, watch them change, and come back to them like friends. They also show whole societies at a turning point: Russia before the revolution, Paris in the uprising of 1832, the American South after the Civil War, Oklahoma families driven out by the Dust Bowl. For each book you will find what it is about, when it appeared, and why it is still worth your time. They are grouped loosely by place and period, so you can follow a thread you enjoy, and at the end there are a few tips for actually finishing a doorstopper.
The Russian giants
1. Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy's novel follows Anna, a married St Petersburg society woman whose affair with the cavalry officer Vronsky leads to social exile, jealousy and despair, alongside the landowner Levin's search for meaning through work, marriage and faith. It ran in the magazine The Russian Messenger from 1875 to 1877 and appeared as a book in 1878. Its opening line is one of the most quoted in literature: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Expect around 900 pages of sharp psychology and unforgettable set pieces, from a ball to a horse race.
2. War and Peace
Tolstoy's other giant spans 1805 to 1820 and builds to Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812, following the Rostov, Bolkonsky, Bezukhov and Kuragin families through war, love and ruin. An early version was serialised from 1865 under the title 1805; the full, heavily rewritten novel came out in 1869. Around 160 real historical figures appear beside its fictional cast. Readers often fear the battle chapters, but it is Pierre, Andrei and Natasha's very human search for purpose that keeps people turning more than a thousand pages.
3. Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1866 novel, serialised in twelve monthly parts, follows Raskolnikov, a poor former law student in St Petersburg who murders a pawnbroker, convinced that exceptional people may step over moral lines. What follows is less a detective story than a fever of guilt, as the investigator Porfiry closes in and Sonya, a young woman forced into poverty's harshest choices, offers him a path to redemption. Svidrigailov, Dunya and the drunken Marmeladov complete a cast that still feels startlingly modern.
4. The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky's final novel ran in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880, and he died early in 1881, only months later. It centres on the murder of the dissolute Fyodor Karamazov and on his sons: passionate Dmitri, intellectual Ivan and gentle Alyosha. Ivan's chapter "The Grand Inquisitor" is one of the most famous debates on faith and freedom ever written. Dostoevsky planned a sequel following Alyosha, and the book also draws on an earlier unrealised project he called "The Life of a Great Sinner".
5. Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak's sweeping novel follows the physician and poet Yuri Zhivago and his love for Lara from the early 1900s through revolution, civil war and beyond. Soviet editors refused it, partly for its critical view of the revolution, so the manuscript was smuggled out and first published in Italy by Feltrinelli in 1957. Pasternak won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature and, under heavy official pressure, declined it days later. The book is both a great love story and a portrait of individuals swept up by history.
Britain and France in the nineteenth century
6. Great Expectations
Charles Dickens published this coming-of-age story weekly in his magazine All the Year Round from December 1860 to August 1861. The orphan Pip, raised on the Kent marshes, meets an escaped convict in a churchyard, visits the jilted Miss Havisham in her decaying house, falls for the cold Estella, and is suddenly told that a mystery benefactor will make him a gentleman in London. Dickens rewrote the ending after advice from the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and readers still argue over whether Pip and Estella end up together.
7. Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë published her novel in 1847 under the pen name Currer Bell. Orphaned Jane survives a cruel aunt at Gateshead and a harsh charity school at Lowood, becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall, and falls in love with its brooding master, Mr Rochester, who is hiding a terrible secret in the attic. It is a Gothic romance, but above all the story of a poor young woman who insists on her own conscience and independence, which is why it still reads as remarkably bold.
8. The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas, working with his collaborator Auguste Maquet, serialised this adventure in the Journal des Débats from 1844 to 1846. The young sailor Edmond Dantès is betrayed and locked in the island fortress of the Château d'If, where a fellow prisoner, the Abbé Faria, educates him and reveals a hidden treasure. Escaped and enormously rich, Dantès returns as the mysterious Count to repay those who ruined him. The novel closes on the lesson that all human wisdom lies in two words: "wait and hope".
9. Les Miserables
Victor Hugo's 1862 epic runs from 1815 to the Paris uprising of June 1832, following the former convict Jean Valjean, the relentless police inspector Javert, the abandoned mother Fantine, her daughter Cosette and the young idealist Marius. In French it runs to roughly 655,000 words, with long digressions on Waterloo, convents and the Paris sewers. Writing to his Italian publisher, Hugo said of the book: "I don't know whether it will be read by everyone, but it is meant for everyone." That universal sympathy for the poor is why it still moves readers worldwide.
Two American epics
10. Gone With The Wind
Margaret Mitchell's only novel appeared in 1936 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. Set in Georgia during the Civil War and Reconstruction, it follows the strong-willed Scarlett O'Hara, the charming blockade runner Rhett Butler, and Ashley and Melanie Wilkes. It has sold tens of millions of copies. It is fair to read it with open eyes: historians and critics have long faulted its romanticised picture of plantation life, its portrayal of enslaved people and its softened view of the Ku Klux Klan, so it works best as a window into how the South mythologised itself.
11. The Grapes Of Wrath
John Steinbeck's 1939 novel follows the Joads, Oklahoma tenant farmers driven off their land by drought, the Dust Bowl and the banks, as they travel Route 66 toward California and find low wages and hostility instead of promised work. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was cited when Steinbeck received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its day it was banned and even burned in places, and attacked as propaganda. Today it stands as one of the great American books about dignity, solidarity and the small kindnesses that keep families alive.
European novels of ideas
12. The Name Of The Rose
Umberto Eco's first novel, published in Italian in 1980, is set in a Benedictine abbey in northern Italy in 1327. The Franciscan friar William of Baskerville and his young companion Adso investigate a series of monks' deaths that lead to the abbey's labyrinthine library and a lost book of Aristotle on comedy. It is a murder mystery, a history of medieval religious politics and a meditation on knowledge and laughter all at once, and it has sold more than 50 million copies. The idea that novels can do philosophy is often traced to a line attributed to Albert Camus, and Eco proves the point.
13. The Man Without Qualities
Robert Musil's Austrian masterpiece is set in Vienna in 1913, the last year before the First World War. Ulrich, a mathematician who feels he has no fixed qualities of his own, is drawn into the "Parallel Campaign", a committee preparing to celebrate the Emperor Franz Joseph's long reign, which slowly reveals a society drifting toward catastrophe. The first volumes appeared in 1930 and 1933, and Musil was still working on it when he died in 1942, so it is unfinished. Witty, ironic and full of ideas, it rewards slow reading.
Where it all began
14. Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes published the two parts of his novel in 1605 and 1615. Alonso Quixano, a country gentleman who has read too many tales of chivalry, renames himself Don Quixote and rides out with his down-to-earth squire Sancho Panza, mistaking windmills for giants and a peasant girl for his lady Dulcinea. It is often called the first modern novel, and a 2002 poll of writers organised by the Norwegian Nobel Institute named it the best work of fiction ever written. It is also very funny.
15. The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri wrote his poem between about 1308 and 1321, in Tuscan rather than Latin, helping to shape the Italian language. Its three parts, Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, follow Dante on a journey set at Easter 1300, guided first by the poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, through 100 cantos in interlocking terza rima. It is packed with symbols, politics and people Dante knew, and a good annotated edition makes all the difference. The cover shown uses a dramatic engraving in the style of Gustave Doré's famous illustrations.
How to finish a long classic
- Choose the translation with care. For Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hugo, Cervantes and Dante, translations vary enormously. Read a sample page of two versions before you commit.
- Read a little every day. Twenty to thirty pages a day finishes even War and Peace in about six weeks.
- Keep a character list. Russian novels use first names, patronymics and nicknames for the same person; a bookmark with names saves confusion.
- Let yourself skim digressions. Hugo's essay on the Paris sewers will still be there on a second reading.
- Pair it with a friend. A shared reading schedule and a weekly chat turns a long book into a small book club.
Pick the one whose world appeals to you most, whether it is a Russian ballroom, a medieval abbey or a dusty road west, and give it the time it asks for. These books have outlasted their authors because they keep giving readers something new.
Sources: Wikipedia articles on Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Great Expectations, Doctor Zhivago, The Count of Monte Cristo, Gone with the Wind, The Name of the Rose, The Man Without Qualities, Les Misérables, Don Quixote, The Grapes of Wrath, Jane Eyre and Divine Comedy. Cover images belong to their respective publishers.
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