Debuts hog the publishing limelight, but a glance back at some great books, from Jane Austen to James Joyce, shows that we shouldn’t neglect sophomores

Pride and Prejudice and progress: the best second novels of all time

A lifetime goes into your first novel. A deadline fuels your second. Much as the “difficult second album” is a product of the modern music industry, the “difficult second novel” results from the pressures in modern publishing. If you have a hit, they’ll want another. Pronto.

Ian McGuire may have missed out on last year’s Man Booker with his novel The North Water, but on Wednesday it scooped the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore award, given out to recognise the challenges of writing second novels. While McGuire’s debut Incredible Bodies was a satire, The North Water is a harsh, realistic book about whaling in 1850.

The North Water by Ian McGuire review – a voyage into the heart of darkness Read more

While some authors have thrived on speed, or arbitrary deadlines, some of the best second novels include work by authors who never had a hit while they were alive and took their damn time. To both inspire and intimidate, here are some of the greatest second novels ever written.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The source of everyone’s favourite costume drama (and some of the finest prose in the English tongue) was Austen’s second outing. It is also “the Nation’s Favourite Second Novel”, according to the Royal Society of Literature. But the Austen example raises a question: is “the second novel” the second to be published, or do we include unpublished attempts, too? Her gothic satire Northanger Abbey was written long before Sense and Sensibility.



Ulysses by James Joyce

The jester of high modernism’s ambitious, avant-garde comedy – which squashes the plot of Homer’s Odyssey into a single Dublin day, 16 June 1904 – was also his second novel. And it took him a while: Ulysses came out six years after Joyce’s debut, the highly regarded bildungsroman Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Joyce followed the age-old trick of publishing an interlinked short-story collection, Dubliners, before tackling a novel (so it’s really his third book, if that makes you feel any better). Crucially, Ulysses builds on his debut. While Portrait of the Artist adopted a different style in each chapter, to reflect the age of the protagonist, Ulysses adopts many different styles: but precisely what for is something you could spend a lifetime deliberating.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Lord! what is all this story about?’ ... An engraving from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. Photograph: Alamy

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

A book that challenged the very foundations of the novel, while those foundations were still setting. Sterne had previously written A Political Romance, a mock-epic, allegorical roman à clef, which sounds just as confused as any well-meaning debut. But through this book, at the age of 46, he discovered he could write.

The 100 best novels: No 6 – The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759) Read more

Then came Tristram Shandy. If his first sounds like an unintentional mess, the followup was an intentional one. An endless game of biographical digression, in which everyone is talked around and everything is complicated. Full of freewheeling experimentation, this is innovation at its most playful. And it’s still weird, even today.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

The don of magical realism (otherwise known as “fantasy, but not too much fantasy”), Márquez challenges the idea of the first-novel wonder. His debut, Leaf Storm, is good. Very good. But Márquez builds upon it, both in terms of setting (they both take place in the same village) and style.

One Hundred Years of Solitude beats its predecessor by being even more Leaf Storm than Leaf Storm was. It’s a wonderful example of how a second novel can grow, organically, out of an author’s first.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

Another example of building on a theme. Haldeman’s first book, War Year, is a Vietnam tale, drawing on Haldeman’s experiences in that war. With his followup, he took those same experiences and set them in space.

Back to the Hugos: The Forever War by Joe Haldeman Read more

Removed from the real-world political baggage of a very recent, very painful conflict, Haldeman’s second book used sci-fi as a metaphor. A quirk of light-speed travel means that, despite feeling like they’ve been away for a matter of months, centuries have passed for a group of returning soldiers. The world has changed, just as the world seemed very different to returning Vietnam veterans. By setting a familiar conflict in an unfamiliar setting, Haldeman made his readers experience the horrors of conflict afresh.

Some second novels build upon their predecessors. Others deviate utterly. These are hardly revelations, but they are certainly alternative cliches to the gushing praise routinely heaped on debuts (an “outpouring of genius!” “a tremendous talent!” “the next Girl on the Train!”). And if you don’t like my list, remember this is a debut. My second list of second novels might be even better.

