The Folded Page
Staff Picks
What we're reading, recommending, and pressing into the hands of strangers.
- Literary Fiction
Austerlitz
Picked by Nora Sutherland
There is no novel quite like this one. Sebald moves between architecture, memory, and the Holocaust with a prose style so measured it feels almost geological — and yet it devastates. If you've been meaning to read Sebald, start here. If you've already read it, read it again.
- Literary Fiction
The Books of Jacob
Picked by Marta Kowalczyk
Tokarczuk's masterwork: a thousand-page novel about Jacob Frank, the eighteenth-century Jewish mystic who led his followers through mass conversion and across half of Europe. It is enormous in every sense — in scope, in ambition, in the sheer density of its ideas. And yet it moves.
- Memoir
The Cost of Living
Picked by Marta Kowalczyk
The second volume of Levy's 'living autobiography': she has left her marriage, moved into a flat above a pharmacy, and is trying to work out what a life on her own terms looks like. It is funny, precise, and quietly radical. Levy writes about freedom the way other writers write about love — as something that costs you everything and is still worth it.
- Literary Fiction
Demon Copperhead
Picked by Nora Sutherland
Kingsolver takes David Copperfield and sets it in the opioid crisis in rural Appalachia. It sounds like a literary exercise. It is not. Demon is one of the most vivid, furious, and heartbreaking narrators in recent fiction — and the novel earns every one of its 560 pages.
- Literary Fiction
The Dispossessed
Picked by Alasdair Finlay
Le Guin builds two worlds — one anarchist, one capitalist — and sends a physicist between them. The Dispossessed is science fiction in the way that Orwell is science fiction: the speculative elements are a vehicle for thinking seriously about how we organise ourselves, and what we lose in the process.
- Literary Fiction
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Picked by Marta Kowalczyk
An elderly woman in a remote Polish village becomes convinced that the local hunters are being killed by the animals they have hunted. Part murder mystery, part philosophical novel, entirely Tokarczuk. The narrator, Janina, is one of the great eccentric voices in contemporary fiction — furious, tender, and completely her own.
- Memoir
Educated
Picked by Alasdair Finlay
Westover grew up in rural Idaho, never went to school, and eventually made it to Cambridge. The memoir is not a triumph-over-adversity story, though it contains triumph. It is a book about the difficulty of knowing what is true when the people who raised you insist on a different version of events.
- Translated Fiction
Flights
Picked by Marta Kowalczyk
Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize, and Flights is the book that shows you why. It's a novel about travel, the body, and what it means to be in motion — told in fragments, digressions, and stories that circle back on each other. Jennifer Croft's translation is extraordinary. This is the kind of book that makes you want to read everything else the author has written.
- Poetry
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
Picked by Nora Sutherland
A man and his two sons are visited by Crow after the death of their mother. Porter writes in fragments — prose poems, monologues, shards of dialogue — and the form is inseparable from the content. Grief does not arrive in complete sentences. This book knows that.
- Nature Writing
H is for Hawk
Picked by Alasdair Finlay
Macdonald trains a goshawk in the aftermath of her father's death. That description makes it sound like a grief memoir with a bird in it. It is not. It is a book about wildness — in the hawk, in the landscape, in the self — and it is one of the finest pieces of nature writing produced in this country in decades.
- Literary Fiction
Outline
Picked by Nora Sutherland
Cusk's narrator goes to Athens to teach a writing course and mostly listens. The novel is built from conversations — with strangers on planes, with students, with an ex-husband — and what emerges is a portrait of a person assembled entirely from the edges of other people's stories. It is formally radical and completely absorbing.
- Literary Fiction
Minor Detail
Picked by Marta Kowalczyk
Two narratives, fifty years apart, both circling a single act of violence in the Negev desert. Shibli writes with a clinical precision that makes the horror more present, not less. This is a short novel that does not let go. Elisabeth Jaquette's translation is immaculate.
- Literary Fiction
The Overstory
Picked by Nora Sutherland
Nine characters, each with a different relationship to trees, whose stories gradually converge around the fight to save old-growth forests. Powers writes about the natural world with a rigour that most novelists reserve for human psychology — and the effect is to make you see trees differently for weeks afterwards.
- Literary Fiction
Pachinko
Picked by Nora Sutherland
Four generations of a Korean family in Japan, from 1910 to 1989. Lee writes with the sweep of a nineteenth-century novelist and the moral seriousness of someone who has thought hard about what history does to ordinary people. This is the kind of novel that makes you want to press it into the hands of everyone you know.
- Essays
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
Picked by Alasdair Finlay
Saunders teaches a course on Russian short fiction at Syracuse, and this book is essentially that course — Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gogol — with his commentary woven through. It is the best book about how fiction works that I have ever read. You don't need to be a writer to love it.
- Literary Fantasy
Piranesi
Picked by Marta Kowalczyk
Piranesi lives in a House that contains the entire world — infinite halls, tidal statues, and a sky full of clouds. He keeps meticulous journals. He is not sure how long he has been there. This is one of the most purely pleasurable reading experiences I've had in years: strange, tender, and completely unlike anything else.
- Narrative Non-Fiction
The Way to the Spring
Picked by Alasdair Finlay
Ehrenreich spent years in the West Bank reporting on Palestinian life under occupation — not the politics, or not only the politics, but the texture of daily existence: the checkpoints, the demolished houses, the olive harvests, the waiting. This is the most important piece of long-form journalism I have read in years.
- Literary Fiction
When We Cease to Understand the World
Picked by Marta Kowalczyk
Labatut takes real scientists — Schwarzschild, Heisenberg, Schrödinger — and follows them to the edge of what they discovered, and what it cost them. The line between fact and fiction is deliberately blurred. It reads like a thriller about the nature of reality, which is more or less what it is.