Joanna Rakoff's Desert Island Books

Featuring the classic that makes Joanna's heart race with recognition, and a sprawling, Victorian-style novel that she loves...

Of all the authors I’ve met via social media, Joanna Rakoff is probably my favourite. I loved her debut novel, A Fortunate Age - the story of six Oberlin College graduates living their post-collegiate lives in New York, and adored her memoir, My Salinger Year even more. A quintessential coming-of-age, it’s the perfect book about publishing, and one that I return to every couple of years.

Her essays are also rich with intimacy and heart. Last year, one of them went viral after being published on Oprah Daily, and it’s easy to see why. A homage to living a life true to yourself, it’s one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I’ve ever read, and one that I’ve revisited many times.

If that wasn’t enough, Joanna is also my absolute go-to for good books. I read almost everything she recommends - and every time she raves about a book, she does so with a huge amount of thought and consideration. She’s recently started writing a guest column for the hugely popular Substack Beyond by

Jane Ratcliffe

- in which she shares some of her favourite books. I highly recommend you subscribe, and can almost guarantee that if you do, you’ll never read a bad book again.

To celebrate ten years since its publication, Slightly Foxed have released a deliciously collectable edition of My Salinger Year. And if you fancy getting your hands on a copy signed by Joanna herself, why not consider becoming a paid subscriber of my Substack? Each week, you’ll be automatically entered into a draw to win a signed book by the guest from my Desert Island Books series.

Now, without further ado, read on for Joanna' Rakoff’s Desert Island Books…

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

I love all of Wharton’s novels but this one has special resonance for me because I, like Newland Archer, found myself in a perfectly okay but bloodless marriage, longing for a person I’d long known, for whom I felt a passionate connection. Over the long years of my marriage–in which I felt trapped, certain I would incur the wrath of society at large and, of course, my conservative parents, if I left it–I read and re-read The Age of Innocence countless times, my heart racing with recognition.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith + Howards End by E.M. Forster

I’m cheating a little here, but bear with me: Zadie Smith’s magnificent third novel, On Beauty–which takes place in a fictional version of my city, Cambridge, Massachusetts–is, famously, a modern gloss on Forster’s elegiac comedy of manners. Both novels are about the freedoms and constraints and delusions of the educated upper middle classes, a constant subject of mine, and about the ways in which our ideals can both liberate and destroy us. And both are wonderful on their own, but read best as a pair.

Sense & Sensibility by Jane Austen

Like everyone else on the planet, I love all of Jane Austen’s novels. In my twenties, I favored Persuasion; in my thirties, Emma; and in my forties, Sense and Sensibility, which so gorgeously gets at the ways in which women define themselves, try to carve out lives and identities for themselves, within the structures and confines of their times.

Passing by Nella Larsen

This gorgeous, heartbreaking novel, published in 1929, was a revelation for me when I first read it, at 22, in that Larsen–like Jean Rhys, whom I also first read around that time–portrays, in the most unvarnished way, the perils for women who don’t play by society’s rules. Set in Harlem and Chicago, the novel follows a pair of friends–Clare and Irene, both black women–who make rather different choices about how to navigate a fundamentally racist world. Clare moves to Europe and passes as white, a choice that leads to material comfort, but causes her much loneliness and pain. Irene, through whom the story is told, watches as her friend’s life spirals out of control, simultaneously envious and appalled. There is, of course, much more to it, and the glory of this book lies, so much, in Larsen’s precise and moving prose.

Le Divorce by Diane Johnson

Possibly my all-time favorite novel. I’ve read it a dozen times or so. Diane Johnson, an American who lives in Paris, primarily writes novels about cross-cultural connections, relationships, and misunderstandings; and this novel is, I think, her best. Narrated with deadpan aplomb, Le Divorce follows Izzy–the aimless child in a family of ambitious go-getters–as she travels from California to Paris, to help her sister, Roxeanne, in the final stages of her second pregnancy. Only to find that Roxeanne’s seemingly perfect life is a shambles: Her French husband has run off, to the horror of his very proper family. As Izzy tends to the distraught Roxeanne, she gets drawn into both the world of American expats and that of her brother-in-law’s wealthy family. I could go on and on, but you just have to read it!

Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie

I first read Foreign Affairs as a grad student at University College, London, in a class on contemporary literature about Anglo-American relations, and it was a revelation to me. An American novel from the 1980s–it won the Pulitzer in 1985–that has the wit and verve and structural precision of Wharton and Austen. And that captured the particular loneliness I felt as an American in London. The novel concerns two Cornell professors on sabbatical in London, an older, single woman who feels herself to be English at heart and more at home in London than anywhere in the U.S., and a young, newly married man, having troubles with his artist wife. Many reversals and revelations occur. This novel is a true joy.

Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee

There is little I love more than a huge, sprawling, Victorian-style novel, and Min Jin Lee’s brilliant, absorbing, magnificently ambitious debut is exactly that. Set against the backdrop of the vast economic shifts of the 1990s, the novel largely chronicles the growing pains of Casey Han, a first generation American, whose parents run a Queens dry cleaning shop. Brilliant, if rebellious, Casey embodies the American dream–all that her parents wanted for their children–winning a scholarship to Princeton, entry into the rarified worlds of Manhattan fashion and finance, but the ways in which she straddles multiple worlds–and many sets of values–cause her endless confusion and pain. This reminded me, so much, of another favorite: The Forsyte Saga.

Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin

During the year chronicled in My Salinger Year, I discovered Laurie Colwin, whose charming, hilarious novels and stories chronicle a world much like the one in which I grew up: New York, Jewish (but not religious), in which food holds supreme importance, and feelings are kept decidedly in check. There are many more famous American Jewish writers–Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow–but none whose work spoke directly to my own experience. This is my favorite of her novels and, I believe, a truly perfect novel. It centers on a wealthy, seemingly happy, successful wife and mother, whose happiness–and that of her family–ultimately hinges on her…long-running affair with a downtown painter. Did I mention that it’s also highly feminist and deeply subversive?

If you’d like to buy any of Joanna Rakoff’s Desert Island Books please consider doing so from Bookshop.org (US) here, and Bookshop.org (UK) here. If you’re in Australia, please consider buying them from my favourite independent bookshop, Gertrude & Alice.