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Imagine the history of the twentieth-century novel recounted with the urgency and intimacy of a novel. With penetrating insight and originality, Frank introduces us to books, some famous, some little-known, from the whole course of the century and from around the world.  Starting with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground of 1864, Frank shows how its twitchy, self-undermining, and never-satisfied narrator established a voice that would echo through the coming century.  He illuminates the political vision of H. G. Wells’s science fiction, Colette and Andre Gide’s subversions of traditional gender roles, and Gertrude Stein’s untethering of the American sentence.  He describes the monumental ambition of books such as Mrs. Dalloway, The Magic Mountain, and The Man Without Qualities to rebuild a world of human possibility upon the ruins of World War I and explores how Japan’s Natsume Sōseki and Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe broke open European models to reflect their own, distinct histories and experience. Here too are Vasily Grossman, Anna Banti, and Elsa Morante reckoning in specific ways with the traumas of World War II, while later chapters range from Marguerite Yourcenar and V. S. Naipaul to Gabriel García Márquez and W. G. Sebald.

(One of the Washington Post’s 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 | A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice | A Boston Globe Best Book of 2024)

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