The Newcomes vs The Shipping News: Which Should You Read?

The Newcomes William Makepeace Thackeray · 1853 ★★★★☆ 3.7 801 pages · ≈ 14 h 50 m · Demanding

“A CROW, who had flown away with a cheese from a diary window, sate perched on a tree looking down at a great big frog in a pool underneath him.”

The Newcomes is Thackeray's most essentially 'Victorian' novel, generous in its proportions, sharp in its criticism of the moral convolutions of the age, and encyclopaedic in its reference. Set in the 1830s and 1840s, a…

The Shipping News Annie Proulx · 1993 ★★★★☆ 3.9 348 pages · ≈ 6 h 27 m · Moderate

“Here is an account of a few years in the life of Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns.”

At thirty-six, Quoyle, a third-rate newspaperman, is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just deserts. He retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly…