Recommended Award Winning Retro Reads From 2025
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You could read every new release book you spot online or in stores - but if you're only looking at new titles, you're honestly missing out on on so many great books. Older books can offer a different perspective, timeless tales of human experience and an understanding of history and the world around us. All while telling a great story.
If you're looking for some older books to add to your To Be Read pile, then you may like these five picks, all award winners from times past. I loved these books when I stumbled across them last year and I haven't been able to stop going on about them.
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley - Set in Iowa this Pulitzer winning novel tells the story of Larry Cook who hands over his farm to his three daughters - Ginny, Rose and Caroline. He has spent his life building up the farm and working the land in Zebulon County, where "acreage and financing were facts as basic as name and gender". But as the two elder daughters and their partners take over the running of it, they start to confront difficult memories and realities. It's a wonderful story, beautifully written and is a modern re-telling of King Lear. If that sounds a bit too heavy, don't let it put you off. This is a superb novel that will leave you thinking long after you turn the last page.
Originally published in 1991, I can't believe I have only just discovered the writing of Jane Smiley.
White Tiger by Aravind Adiga - The White Tiger of the title is narrator, Balram Halwai. Born in abject poverty in a village by the Ganges, he is the son of a rickshaw puller and from a young age he works crushing coal and wiping tables in a local cafe. But he hears that a rich village landlord needs a chauffeur and seizes his opportunity, heading to the city of Delhi and a new life, of sorts, amid cockroaches, call centres, 36 million gods, traffic jams, slums and shopping malls. This was the Booker Prize winner back in 2008. A long time ago, but still well worth the read now.
When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant
It's 1946 and Evelyn Sert is alone in post war London, with no parents and no family to turn to. Advice and encouragement from her mother's friend, sees her heading to Tel Aviv.
"When I look back I see myself at twenty. I was at an age when anything seemed possible, at the beginning of times when anything was possible."
Evelyn, with no roots or anchor, reinvents herself in this new land.
Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000. It was a British award open to female authors.
David Lurie, is a fictional middle-aged, divorced professor of poetry at the University of Cape Town. He embarks on an ill-advised affair with a student and as his life starts to unravel retreats to his daughter's small rural homestead. But a violent attack and disturbing attack disturbs the rural life. A wonderful, thoughtful novel of time, place and human appetites.
JM Coetzee (John Maxwell in case you're wondering) won the Booker prize for this in 1999. Not the first award he won and certainly not the last - he is a fantastic writer. Disgrace is a great place to start if you want to explore his writing.
Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
"Maggie and Ira Moran had to go to a funeral in Deer Lick, Pennsylvania. Maggie's girlhood friend had lost her husband. Deer Lick lay on a narrow country road some ninety miles north of Baltimore and the funeral was scheduled for ten-thirty Saturday morning." So begins this novel of a day in the life of Maggie - wife, mother, nearly 50 - as she drives to the funeral with her husband, talking about life, children, friends and everything in between.
This is so easy to read and at the same time full of insights. A lovely book. So lovely it won the Pulitzer in 1989.