The 30 Best Novels About New York City

Every New Yorker has a novel that explains the city to them, and they will tell you about it whether you ask or not. The best New York fiction does two things at once. It gets the surface right, the streets and apartments and money, and it gets underneath, to what living here does to people. Ambition, loneliness, reinvention and a very specific kind of noise run through all of these books, from Henry James's Washington Square to Ottessa Moshfegh's Upper East Side.

Our rules: novels only (no memoirs, no story collections), and New York has to be more than a backdrop. It has to be the subject. We ordered the list by publication date, because reading it straight through is a history of the city. If you want a place to buy them, start with our guide to the best independent bookstores.

The nineteenth century and the Gilded Age

1. Washington Square, Henry James (1880)

A shy heiress, a charming fortune hunter and a cold, brilliant father, all in one of the red brick houses on the north side of the square. James grew up nearby, and it shows. It is short, cruel and quietly devastating.

2. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane (1893)

Crane's short, brutal first novel follows a girl from the tenements of the Bowery into ruin. It was so blunt about poverty that Crane first published it himself, under a pseudonym.

3. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton (1905)

Lily Bart has beauty, taste and no money, which in Wharton's New York is a death sentence dressed up as a social season. One of the saddest and most precise novels ever written about the price of belonging.

4. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton (1920)

Newland Archer is engaged to the right woman and in love with the wrong one, and old New York will not let him forget it. It won Wharton the Pulitzer Prize, the first awarded to a woman for fiction. Read it for the opera boxes and the unbearable dinner parties.

The Jazz Age to the Depression

5. Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos (1925)

A kaleidoscope of dozens of characters across three decades of New York, cut together like a newsreel. It is the great modernist portrait of the city as a machine that eats people.

6. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Technically set mostly on Long Island, but the city is its engine: the valley of ashes on the way in, the hot afternoon in a Plaza Hotel suite, the view from the Queensboro Bridge of the city "seen for the first time." Still the defining New York novel of money and longing.

7. Passing, Nella Larsen (1929)

Two light-skinned Black women who grew up together meet again in Harlem Renaissance New York, one living as white. Short, tense and razor sharp about race, class and desire.

8. Call It Sleep, Henry Roth (1934)

The immigrant Lower East Side through the eyes of a small Jewish boy, in prose that shifts between Yiddish-inflected English and street talk. Ignored on release and rediscovered in the 1960s as a masterpiece.

Midcentury

9. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith (1943)

Francie Nolan grows up poor in Williamsburg in the early 1900s, reading everything and noticing everything. Generations of readers have found themselves in it, and it holds up. See our Williamsburg guide for the neighborhood now.

10. The Street, Ann Petry (1946)

A single mother tries to build a decent life for her son on 116th Street in Harlem, and the city conspires against her at every turn. It was the first novel by a Black woman to sell more than a million copies, and it is furious and unforgettable.

11. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (1951)

Holden Caulfield's lost weekend in Manhattan: the hotel bar, the ice rink, the ducks in the Central Park lagoon. Whatever you think of Holden, the city in this book is perfectly observed.

12. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison (1952)

A nameless narrator moves from the South to Harlem and into politics, riot and a basement lit with 1,369 bulbs. It won the National Book Award and remains one of the great American novels, full stop.

13. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin (1953)

One day in the life of a Harlem boy and the storefront church at the center of his family, reaching back through generations. Baldwin's first novel, drawn close to his own childhood.

14. Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote (1958)

Holly Golightly in a brownstone in the East Seventies, told by the young writer upstairs. A novella, and darker and funnier than the movie.

15. Brown Girl, Brownstones, Paule Marshall (1959)

Selina Boyce comes of age among Barbadian immigrants in Bedford-Stuyvesant, as her mother schemes to buy the brownstone they rent. One of the best Brooklyn novels ever written, and undersung.

The sixties and seventies

16. Another Country, James Baldwin (1962)

Jazz musicians, writers and lovers moving between Harlem and Greenwich Village, crossing every line of race and sexuality the era drew. Baldwin at full power.

17. The Group, Mary McCarthy (1963)

Eight Vassar graduates of the class of 1933 try to build lives in Depression-era New York: jobs, marriages, apartments, contraception. Witty and frank, and a huge bestseller.

18. Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr. (1964)

A novel built from linked episodes about dockworkers, hustlers and strikers in 1950s Brooklyn near the Red Hook and Sunset Park waterfront. It was prosecuted for obscenity in Britain. It is still hard to read and impossible to forget.

19. Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow (1975)

Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Emma Goldman and a Harlem pianist named Coalhouse Walker Jr. collide in the New York of the early 1900s. A virtuoso blend of history and invention.

The eighties and nineties

20. Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney (1984)

Written in the second person, a young fact-checker at a New Yorker-like magazine spends his nights in downtown clubs and his mornings falling apart. The defining novel of cocaine-era Manhattan.

21. The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster (1987)

Three detective novels, collected in one volume, that turn the city's grid into a labyrinth of identity and chance. City of Glass, the first, is the one to start with.

22. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe (1987)

A Park Avenue bond trader takes a wrong turn into the Bronx, and the whole city (Wall Street, the courts, the tabloids, the preachers) falls on him. Savage, overstuffed and still weirdly current.

23. Jazz, Toni Morrison (1992)

A love triangle and a murder in 1926 Harlem, told in a voice that moves like the music. Morrison's portrait of the City, as her characters call it, pulling people north.

24. Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem (1999)

A detective with Tourette's syndrome tries to solve his mentor's murder, from Court Street to a Zen center on the Upper East Side. Funny, sad and deeply Brooklyn.

The new century

25. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon (2000)

Two Jewish cousins, one a refugee from Prague, invent a comic book superhero in 1939 Brooklyn and Manhattan. It won the Pulitzer Prize, and the Empire State Building gets one of the best scenes in any New York novel.

26. Bodega Dreams, Ernesto Quiñonez (2000)

A Spanish Harlem hustler with a Gatsby complex wants to rebuild the neighborhood with drug money. A love letter to East Harlem, and a sharp one.

27. Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann (2009)

The August morning in 1974 when Philippe Petit walked between the Twin Towers, and a dozen lives below it: a Bronx sex worker, a Park Avenue mother, an Irish monk. It won the National Book Award.

28. Open City, Teju Cole (2011)

A Nigerian psychiatrist walks Manhattan at night after work, thinking about history, migration and the people he passes. A quiet, haunting book about the city as a palimpsest.

29. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh (2018)

A young woman in a nice Upper East Side apartment in 2000 decides to sleep for a year with the help of a terrible psychiatrist. Bleakly hilarious, and the ending lands like a punch.

30. Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead (2021)

Ray Carney sells furniture on 125th Street and is only slightly bent, until a heist pulls him into the city's criminal and moneyed worlds in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A crime novel with a historian's eye.

How to use this list

Read them in pairs. Wharton's The Age of Innocence with Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, for the Upper East Side a century apart. Petry's The Street with Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle, for Harlem from two angles. Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn with Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn. And if you want to hear living novelists read from their work, our guide to New York's reading series has where to go.