In New York novels, the city often feels like a character as well as a place. Its landmark neighbourhoods, streets and buildings, combined with its heady mix of glitz and grit, both add to the atmosphere and shape the course of events.  

These Booker-nominated and NYC-set novels range from the 1800s, when pigs were still rooting around on Broadway, to the early 21^st century and the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.  

Whenever they take place, the stories here are predominantly ones of money and of migration – whether someone has moved to the big city from small-town America or the other side of the world.

The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud 

Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006, Claire Messud’s novel is a modern American classic – a sweeping portrait of one of the most fascinating cities in the world in the months just before and just after 9/11. 

In Manhattan, three 30-year-old friends – Danielle, Marina and Julius – are seeking their fortunes. But the arrival of Marina’s young cousin Bootie – fresh from the provinces and keen, too, to make his mark – forces them to confront their own desires and expectations. 

Writing in the New York Times, Meghan O’Rourke described The Emperor’s Children as ‘a formally nimble novel of formidable scale’ and ‘a masterly comedy of manners – an astute and poignant evocation of hobnobbing glitterati in the months before and immediately following Sept. 11’. 

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

In Moshin Hamid’s mesmerising novel, an idealistic young Muslim man leaves Pakistan to pursue his education in the United States. On graduation from Princeton, Changez is recruited to a top job on Wall Street, falls in love with an American woman, Erica, and seems set to climb high in elite Manhattan society.  

But post-9/11, Changez finds himself regarded with suspicion by his fellow New Yorkers and his relationship with Erica becomes overshadowed by her personal demons, as well as his own growing resentment at the country he has made home. 

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007, The Reluctant Fundamentalist takes the form of a dramatic monologue where Changez sits in a cafe in Lahore and, over the course of an evening, tells an American stranger about his life. 

In a review for the Observer, Andrew Anthony said: ‘One of the novel’s notable achievements is the seamless manner in which ideology and emotion, politics and the personal are brought together into a vivid picture of an individual’s globalised revolt.’ 

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill 

Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008, Netherland explores friendship, belonging and NYC’s immigrant cricket scene. 

The novel’s protagonist is Hans, originally from the Netherlands and now settled in London, who recalls his time living in Manhattan with his family in the years just before and after 9/11. Hans makes friends with charismatic Chuck, a Trinidadian full of dreams and schemes, and who initiates Hans into the Staten Island Cricket Club. Hans comes to share Chuck’s sense of American possibility – until he glimpses the shadier side of his new friend’s ambitions. 

In a review for The New York Times, Dwight Garner described Netherland as, ‘the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.’ 

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout 

Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, navigating life as a recent widow and parent to two adult daughters. Lucy’s glossy life in the city sits in stark contrast to her lonely and impoverished childhood in small-town Illinois. 

In the novel, a surprise encounter leads Lucy to reconnect with William, her first husband and longtime, on-again/off-again friend and confidante. Recalling their college years, the birth of their daughters, the painful dissolution of their marriage, and the lives they built with other people, Strout weaves a subtle portrait of a tender and complex partnership. 

Hillary Kelly in the Los Angeles Times said, ‘Her stories don’t need to be grand because human experience is largely not; it is lived on the level of the daily, the conversational, the gestural… Which isn’t to say Strout doesn’t have a cosmic point of view. Her novels are universal, though they aren’t big or broad or grasping.’ 

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, Oh William! is the third book in series of five featuring Lucy Barton. The first – My Name is Lucy Barton – was longlisted in 2016.

Trust by Hernan Diaz 

A literary puzzle about money, power and intimacy, Trust was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. Spanning an entire century, the book begins in the 1930s, examining the radically different worlds of Brooklyn, on one side of the river, and downtown Manhattan and the Upper East Side on the other.  

Benjamin Rask is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; Helen Rask the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top – but at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the centre of ‘Bonds’, a successful 1938 novel that all New York seems to have read. But there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. 

Trust elegantly draws these competing narratives into conversation with each other – and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a provocative and propulsive novel within a novel that becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation. 

The Booker Prize judges said, ‘There is a dazzling intelligence behind this novel, which challenges us to rethink everything we know both about the institutions on which nations are built and the narratives by which stories are told. Sly, sophisticated, insistently questioning, Diaz writes with assurance, determined to rob us of every certainty.’ 

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín 

Colm Tóibín’s tender story of love and loss was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009. It explores the heartbreaking choice between personal freedom and duty.

In a small town in the south-east of Ireland in the 1950s, work is hard to find. Eilis Lacey escapes to forge a new life for herself in Brooklyn, New York. Young, homesick and alone, she gradually buries the pain of parting to find a sort of happiness. But when tragic news summons her back to Ireland, she finds herself facing a terrible choice: between love and happiness in the land where she belongs and the promises she must keep on the far side of the ocean. 

Writing in the New York Times, Liesl Schillinger said, ‘In Brooklyn, Colm Toibin quietly, modestly shows how place can assert itself, enfolding the visitor, staking its claim.’ 

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara 

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2015, Hanya Yanagihara’s novel is a gut-wrenching exploration of the limits of human endurance.  

Jude is a brilliant and successful lawyer living and working in New York City, yet he has a mysterious past that remains a secret to his friends. He suffers from chronic pain in his legs and back and struggles to overcome the psychological trauma of a childhood scarred by sexual abuse.  

The novel is deeply rooted in place, from the characters eating pho in Chinatown to Jude and Willem creating a life together in their Lispenard Street apartment. In an interview with Vulture, Yanagihara explained, ‘I wanted the narrative to have a sleight-of-hand quality: the reader would begin thinking it a fairly standard post-college New York City book (a literary subgenre I happen to love), and then, as the story progressed, would sense it was becoming something else, something unexpected.’ 

It’s a devastating book that has a lasting impact on everyone who reads it. Singer-songwriter Dua Lipa has written that, ‘it was one of the first books where I openly sobbed after reading. By the end of it I felt profoundly changed.’ 

The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith 

Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002, this wry, rite-of-passage novel is an unforgettable tale about celebrity, who we are, and what we really want to be.  

Alex-Li Tandem is a 20-something Chinese-Jewish autograph dealer turned on by sex, drugs and organised religion. Set mostly in London and partly in New York, we follow Alex as he pursues a meeting with his hero, a 1940s film actor named Kitty Alexander who now lives as a recluse in Brooklyn. Through his journey, Zadie Smith exposes our misconceptions about our idols – and about ourselves. 

Writing in the Independent, Deborah Moggach said, ‘The Autograph Man is a glorious concoction written by our most beguiling and original prose-wizard, and far from a disappointment after White Teeth. Maybe it’s all hat and no rabbit. But what a hat. And, hell, who cares about the rabbit anyway?’ 

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey 

The London Review of Books called Parrot and Olivier in America, ‘Peter Carey’s carefree novel, his couldn’t-care-less-what-the-critics-say novel, a novel written for his own delight.’ Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2010, the book is loosely based on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville, the aristocratic French author of Democracy in America.  

Carey’s novel explores the unusual relationship between a traumatised French aristocrat and an itinerant English printer. Olivier has been sent to the New World – ostensibly to study its prisons but in reality to save his neck in case of a future revolution. Parrot has been sent to protect and spy on Olivier. The narrative shifts between the perspectives of master and servant as they become unlikely friends. 

Set mostly in 19th-century America, the New York in Carey’s novel isn’t one any of us would recognise. Ursula K. Guin reviewed it for the Guardian, explaining, ‘Its picture of the coarse, young United States of Andrew Jackson… is entertaining, if predictable. Carey, who lives in New York City, has great fun with the pigs rooting on Broadway and the vast, muddy wastes around unbuilt Times Square.’