The New Literary Canon: Reading Historically and Globally

Image courtesy of Iñaki del Olmo for Unsplash

I know I’m a little late to the game for 2026 reading suggestions, but I hope I’m not alone in feeling a post-Goodreads challenge burnout in February, especially amidst the assessment period cram. Anyhow, I was inspired by this burnout to help curate Goodreads to-be-read-piles this year to fight the post-challenge blues. 

The ‘new literary canon’ would seem like contradictory wording when the modern literary world has been so intent on opening up the publishing industry. High schools are beginning to understand that not everyone wants to read The Great Gatsby, and people have grown more dubious of a supposed literary ‘canon’ – who makes up this canon? Is the word ‘canon’ not inherently exclusive, if it means putting certain works on pedestals, propped up by other dusty, forgotten works? As someone who will read just about anything (from Euripides to Ali Smith, to the Fourth Wing series to my brother’s unpublished novella), I can acknowledge that the concept of ‘the literary canon’ has been used to deride the casual Romance reader (often a woman) and prop up the male, white Author. ‘Canon’ is a loaded word. 

I therefore propose a ‘modern canon’, not with any intention of giving arbitrary narrative primacy to these works over others, but to encourage readership across national and cultural boundaries and celebrate those works that exceed our expectation of what literature can do. We read to be surprised, to go on adventures, to learn about ourselves but, above all, to learn about others. We read because we are, as humans, filled with curiosity and care for others. You will have heard this one particularly over-quoted line from Dead Poets Society (N.H. Kleinbaum), referencing Whitman: “...what good amid these, O me, O life?” Answer. That you are here – that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.” Everyone may contribute a verse, and these are just some of the many beautiful, beautiful verses that keep reverberating in the shallows of my mind:

1. Burnt Shadows - Kamila Shamsie

“How to explain to the earth that it was more functional as a vegetable patch than a flower garden, just as factories were more functional than schools and boys were more functional as weapons than as humans.” 

This novel spans over half a century (1945 to the aftermath of 9/11) and five places split across various continents (Nagasaki, Delhi, Karachi, New York, and by the Pakistani-Afghan frontier). As you will have noticed in the quote above, this book is language-rich. It explores translation as a reparative tool against dispersal and colonialism, the interconnectedness of a world taking strides towards globality and the adverse effects of globalization on non-Western peripheries. There truly is something in it for everyone because it spans so long a period and explores so vast a world, and it also happens to be one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. 

(Worth mentioning that this book came to my attention thanks to the English BA module ‘The Contemporary Global Novel’, a great module to take at King’s!)

2. The Safekeep - Yael van der Wouden

“What was joy, anyway. What was the worth of happiness that left behind a crater thrice the size of its impact.”

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction, this is one of the books I read simply because my brother had a copy from his book club, and I’ve since decided to read every monthly pick because this book shook me. Fifteen years after the Second World War, Isabel lives a life of solitude and discipline in her late mother’s country home in the Netherlands until it is all turned upside down when her brother Louis invites his new girlfriend, Eva, to stay for the summer. This book touches on grief, shared history, love, denial, desire, and family. It is relentlessly surprising and lingers with you. Not only is it gripping, but it is deeply important and stays relevant in our contemporary world with its exploration of the past as unavoidable and always, inevitably reaching back out into the present moment.  I couldn’t decide on a quote, so have this snippet too: “She thought: I can hold you and find that I still miss your body. She thought: I can listen to you speak and still miss the sound of your voice.”

3. Beautiful World, Where Are You - Sally Rooney
   

Sally Rooney has become a household name in the literary market, synonymous with popular culture, performativity, and consumerism. Certainly, this notoriety roots from her first novel Normal People’s success and the BBC series that produced the ever-popular actors who portrayed the beloved Marianne and Connell: Daisy Edgar Jones and Paul Mescal. It seems we’ve almost forgotten why Normal People was as successful as it was. To make matters simple: Sally Rooney is a genius. This Irish bildungsroman in particular explores existentialism, class relations, politics and capitalism, friendship and sex, and as with Rooney’s other books, has been shelved as a ‘smart beach read’. People hate Rooney’s characters and they hate Rooney as the author of such unlikable characters, but therein lies Rooney’s genius. I’ll admit, I begin to hate her when I read her because she does something intentionally provoking: she’s honest. Sally Rooney expands the conscious and philosophical novel, opening up a new genre in itself by giving us honesty as we’ve never encountered it. Beautiful World, Where Are You grapples with how we can make do in the world we’ve inherited and whether it’s worth the effort: “So of course in the midst of everything, the state of the world being what it is, humanity on the cusp of extinction, here I am writing another email about sex and friendship. What else is there to live for?”

4. Young Mungo - Douglas Stuart

This book is alive, writhing in your hands as you read it. The story follows the fifteen year old son of an alcoholic single-mother, Mungo, brought up largely by his sister Jodie in a Glasgow housing scheme. Mungo and Jodie’s older brother is head of a Protestant group of Billy Boys fighting with the neighboring Catholic gang, often endangering Mungo, who begins to grapple with his difficulty in conforming to the expectations of a violently heteronormative and masculine world responding to emasculating Thatcher-era cuts. Scottish-American Douglas Stuart delivers a heart-wrenching narrative by placing Mungo, vulnerable and full of love, in the shadow of economic ruin and what follows, interrogating the violence of societally incensed masculinity and treating the victims of the latter with indiscriminate gentleness. Young Mungo is, above all, a story which grapples with the tender heart of family and how easily punctured that organ is: 

“Mungo’s capacity for love frustrated her. His loving wasn’t selflessness; he simply couldn’t help it. Mo-Maw needed so little and he produced too much, so that it all seemed a horrible waste. It was a harvest no one had seeded, and it blossomed from a vine no one had tended. It should have withered years ago, like hers had, like Hamish’s had. Yet Mungo had all this love to give and it lay about him like ripened fruit and nobody bothered to gather it up.”

5. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong

A letter from a son to a mother who cannot read, this book explores a family’s story which began in Vietnam and continues in an American moment which prompts the speaker, Little Dog, to question how we might heal and help one another, without losing ourselves in the process. If you study English at university, you’ll get used to hearing just about everyone mention this one. It’s already a modern classic, by publishing industry standards. However, this book deserves all the clamor it gets– Vietnamese-American author Ocean Vuong is one of the greatest writers of our time. I mention this book specifically because, after having read his poetry and his recently published The Emperor of Gladness, this book still sticks out to me as completely out-of-this-world. Ocean Vuong does not cease to excel, but On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous will be read and re-read by vast, diverse audiences across national and cultural boundaries, because it seems to invent a new literary form, like Rooney’s Beautiful World, in its uninhibited honesty. It shares universal truths and intimate, unshareable ones in a lyrical prose which sets this book apart from most others:

“It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus— that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying with our entire curved and silenced selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?”

Shortlisted: Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet

Ali Smith invents language anew and brings to light vitally important issues with her seasonal quartet (the novels Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer, and their Companion Piece), encompassing all that the seasons of life can encompass: family, degeneration of society, lies, honesty, fear, love, inertia, anger, Brexit, survival, art, evolution and nature. I imagine Ali Smith’s books might do well in the contemporary art and language classroom:

“..even language is a kind of muteness, that everything is at an irrevocable distance; it made him wish to cross incomprehensible farnesses and yet simultaneously know he couldn’t, he was hobbled, shackled. It was the nature of things, we are all shackled, hobbled.”

Though the list could go endlessly on, the books above represent to me a new kind of brilliance, a literary scope that I didn’t imagine possible until I read them, a beauty which has sprouted from the ugly and made sense of our world in its present state. These books are a mix of historical and contemporary narratives offering societal commentary, speaking the universal and global, as well as laying the scorched human heart bare for all to see, and I recommend them to everyone.

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Edited by Dan Ramos Lay, Literature Editor