Upbeat Literary Novels: Positively Good Reads
Discover the best upbeat literary novels that leave you feeling uplifted. From Barbara Pym's Excellent Women and Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes to Jane Austen's Persuasion, these positively good reads offer heartwarming, feel-good stories perfect for your next book list.
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon
NATIONAL BESTSELLER ⢠A modern classicâboth poignant and funnyâabout a boy with autism who sets out to solve the murder of a neighbor's dog and discovers unexpected truths about himself and the world. âDisorienting and reorienting the reader to devastating effect.... Suspenseful and harrowing.â âThe New York Times Book Review Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow. This improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years.
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Excellent Women
by Barbara Pym
âThe finest introduction to Barbara Pymâ (The New York Times): a hilarious comedy of manners by the shrewdly observant British novelist often compared to Jane Austen One of Barbara Pymâs richest and most amusing high comedies, Excellent Women has at its center Mildred Lathbury, a clergymanâs daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those âexcellent women,â the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighborsâanthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next doorâthe novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.
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Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
by Fannie Flagg
Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a now-classic novel about two women: Evelyn, whoâs in the sad slump of middle age, and gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode, whoâs telling her life story. Her tale includes two more womenâthe irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruthâwho back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, offering good coffee, southern barbecue, and all kinds of love and laughterâeven an occasional murder. And as the past unfolds, the present will never be quite the same again. Praise for Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe âA real novel and a good one [from] the busy brain of a born storyteller.ââThe New York Times âHappily for us, Fannie Flagg has preserved [the Threadgoodes] in a richly comic, poignant narrative that records the exuberance of their lives, the sadness of their departure.ââHarper Lee âThis whole literary enterprise shines with honesty, gallantry, and love of perfect details that might otherwise be forgotten.ââLos Angeles Times âFunny and macabre.ââThe Washington Post âCourageous and wise.ââHouston Chronicle
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Persuasion
by Jane Austen
Jane Austen's beloved and subtly subversive final novel of romantic tension and second chances. Now a motion picture from Netflix starring Dakota Johnson and Henry Golding, and a TikTok Book Club Pick. At twenty-Âseven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen's last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, but, above all, it is a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
