True Crime
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote4.6
328 reviewsThe reporting of a Kansas murder, written with the pacing and interiority of a novel and the discipline of journalism.
Literary Fiction
Crossing to Safety
by Wallace Stegner4.7
211 reviews341 pages · Random House · 1987 · ISBN 978-0-679-76019-8Two couples, four decades, and a friendship that carries more weight than any of the marriages inside it.
Synopsis
Larry and Sally Morgan meet Sid and Charity Lang in Depression-era Wisconsin, and the novel follows the four of them through ambition, money, illness, and the negotiations that friendship survives.
Stegner writes work and loyalty with the seriousness other novelists reserve for romance.
Editorial note
Cited more often by our longtime readers than any other title on the shelf. Patient, generous, and quietly devastating in the final third.
Quotes readers kept
“It is something, it can be everything, to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters.”
Talk about this book
Open thread: what did the ending do to you?
Started by Nancy · 34 replies · spoilers must be tagged
Reader reviews
JK
Jonah K.
January 2026
“Slow, and right to be”
The first hundred pages are deliberately uneventful and I nearly stopped. I am glad I did not. By the end the ordinariness is the entire argument of the book.
Thought-provokingDifficult read
Jonah K. · January 2026
Similar books
Historical Fiction
The Help
Kathryn Stockett4.5
486 reviewsThree women in early 1960s Mississippi risk everything to write down what a town would rather leave unsaid.
Contemporary Fiction
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Anne Tyler4.4
397 reviewsA mother, three grown children, and a family meal that has never once been finished together.
