Top Ten Novels about Solitude

'This is the age of loneliness'

Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins star in a film adaptation of The Remains of the Day (1993)

Beginning with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Teju Cole suggests that solitude is a theme that has intensified in our time. 'This is the age of loneliness', he writes, listing famous literary examples of the condition: Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, Camus' The Outsider, Knut Hamsun's Hunger and Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. On The Guardian website, he lists his top ten favourite examples:

1. W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
2. Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
3. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
4. V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival
5. Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
6. Gerald Murnane, The Plains
7. Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August
8. Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male
9. Colm Tóibín, The Master
10. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• W. G. Sebald Interviewed on Bookworm
• Lydia Davis on very short stories