T he pressure to write a second novel after a glittering debut can leave an author in total panic or full of confidence. The blank computer screen awaits, and the sense that the writer is expected to impress again, which is why Second Novel Syndrome is something that most authors identify with.

This is of particular relevance this week, as the winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize, the UK’s most prestigious award for first-time novelists, was announced, with a prize of £10,000 and the expectation that its recipient will sit down and write another book.

“They are not under any contractual obligation to write another word, but the hope is that the prize will encourage them to work on a second novel – and reassure them that it will have a ready readership,” says Alan Hollinghurst, who won the Man Booker Prize in 2004 for The Line of Beauty, and is head of the Desmond Elliott Prize’s judging panel.

“I was very lucky, in that my first novel [The Swimming Pool Library in 1988] had been a bestseller in both Britain and the US. I think the sense of encouragement probably outweighed the usual doubts when it came to writing a second novel, which I knew I wanted to be different, in setting and mood. I recall it was a difficult beginning, but once I’d got started I wrote it with a kind of pleasure and absorption that I envy today.”

Claire Adam has won the 2019 Desmond Elliott Prize for first-time novelists with her book ‘Golden Child’

Famous past successes include Irish novelist Eimear McBride, who won in 2014 for A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, which also took the Women’s Prize for Fiction and went on to become a major commercial and critical success. All of the winners, since the prize was launched in 2007 for debut books published in the UK, have written subsequent novels, except for Francis Spufford, who won in 2017 for his book Golden Hill, which also earned the 2016 Costa First Novel Award – although he is currently working on a new novel (and has completed an unauthorised, unpublished addition to CS Lewis’s Narnia series).

And this year’s winner is Claire Adam for her book Golden Child – a family drama set in the “colourful and dangerous world of her childhood”, Trinidad. According to Hollinghurst, the book is “a superbly controlled narrative of a family cracking under unbearable pressures, and a remarkable study in violence, always latent, sometimes horrifically real”. But will these winners go on to write great books or find it’s just been a matter of first-time luck?

Peter Straus, MD of Rogers, Coleridge and White, who worked on the Man Booker Prize for years, points out: “I think to write one extraordinary fiction is remarkable in itself and rather than bemoan a lack of a second novel, one should celebrate the first.”

40 books to read while self-isolating Show all 40 1 /40 40 books to read while self-isolating 40 books to read while self-isolating Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen It is a fact universally acknowledged that every list of great books must include Pride and Prejudice. Don’t be fooled by the bonnets and balls: beneath the sugary surface is a tart exposé of the marriage market in Georgian England. For every lucky Elizabeth, who tames the haughty, handsome Mr. Darcy and learns to know herself in the process, there’s a Charlotte, resigned to life with a driveling buffoon for want of a pretty face. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾, Sue Townsend Read this one when you’re decrepit enough, and chances are you’ll die laughing. No-one has lampooned the self-absorption, delusions of grandeur and sexual frustration of adolescence as brilliantly as Susan Townsend, and no one ever will. Beyond the majestically majestic poetry and the pimples, there’s also a sharp satire of Thatcherist Britain. 40 books to read while self-isolating Catch 22, Joseph Heller It’s not often an idiom coined in a novel becomes a catch-phrase, but Joseph Heller managed it with his madcap, savage and hilarious tour de force. War is the ultimate dead-end for logic, and this novel explores all its absurdities as we follow US bombardier pilot Captain John Yossarian. While Heller drew on his own experience as a WWII pilot, it was the McCarthyism of the fifties that fueled the book’s glorious rage. 40 books to read while self-isolating Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy A good 125 years before #metoo, Thomas Hardy skewered the sexual hypocrisy of the Victorian age in this melodramatic but immensely moving novel. Tess is a naïve girl from a poor family who is raped by a wealthy land-owner. After the death of her baby, she tries to build a new life, but the “shame” of her past casts a long shadow. Read this if you want to understand the rotten culture at the root of victim-blaming. 40 books to read while self-isolating Things fall apart, Chinua Achebe A classic exposé of colonialism, Achebe’s novel explores what happens to a Nigerian village when European missionaries arrive. The main character, warrior-like Okonkwo, embodies the traditional values that are ultimately doomed. By the time Achebe was born in 1930, missionaries had been settled in his village for decades. He wrote in English and took the title of his novel from a Yeats poem, but wove Igbo proverbs throughout this lyrical work. 40 books to read while self-isolating 1984, George Orwell The ultimate piece of dystopian fiction, 1984 was so prescient that it’s become a cliché. But forget TV’s Big Brother or the trite travesty of Room 101: the original has lost none of its furious force. Orwell was interested in the mechanics of totalitarianism, imagining a society that took the paranoid surveillance of the Soviets to chilling conclusions. Our hero, Winston, tries to resist a grey world where a screen watches your every move, but bravery is ultimately futile when the state worms its way inside your mind. 40 books to read while self-isolating To kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee A timeless plea for justice in the setting of America’s racist South during the depression years, Lee’s novel caused a sensation. Her device was simple but incendiary: look at the world through the eyes of a six-year-old, in this case, Jean Louise Finch, whose father is a lawyer defending a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Lee hoped for nothing but “a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers”: she won the Pulitzer and a place on the curriculum. 40 books to read while self-isolating Great Expectations, Charles Dickens Dickens was the social conscience of the Victorian age, but don’t let that put you off. Great Expectations is the roiling tale of the orphaned Pip, the lovely Estella, and the thwarted Miss Havisham. First written in serial form, you barely have time to recover from one cliffhanger before the next one beckons, all told in Dickens’ luxuriant, humorous, heartfelt prose. 40 books to read while self-isolating The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy Roy won the 1997 Booker Prize with her debut novel, a powerful intergenerational tale of love that crosses caste lines in southern India, and the appalling consequences for those who break the taboos dictating “who should be loved, and how. And how much”. Sex, death, religion, the ambivalent pull of motherhood: it’s all there in this beautiful and haunting book. 40 books to read while self-isolating Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel In an astonishing act of literary ventriloquism, Mantel inhabits a fictionalised version of Thomas Cromwell, a working-class boy who rose through his own fierce intelligence to be a key player in the treacherous world of Tudor politics. Historical fiction so immersive you can smell the fear and ambition. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse If you haven’t read PG Wodehouse in a hot bath with a snifter of whisky and ideally a rubber duck for company, you haven’t lived. Wallow in this sublimely silly tale of the ultimate comic double act: bumbling aristocrat Bertie Wooster and his omniscient butler, Jeeves. A sheer joy to read that also manages to satirise British fascist leader Oswald Mosley as a querulous grump in black shorts. 40 books to read while self-isolating Frankenstein, Mary Shelley Shelley was just 18 when she wrote Frankenstein as part of a challenge with her future husband, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron, to concoct the best horror story. Put down the green face paint: Frankenstein’s monster is a complex creation who yearns for sympathy and companionship. Some 200 years after it was first published, the gothic tale feels more relevant than ever as genetic science pushes the boundaries of what it means to create life. 40 books to read while self-isolating Lord of the Flies, William Golding Anyone who has ever suspected that children are primitive little beasties will nod sagely as they read Golding’s classic. His theory is this: maroon a bunch of schoolboys on an island, and watch how quickly the trappings of decent behaviour fall away. Never has a broken pair of spectacles seemed so sinister, or civilisation so fragile. 40 books to read while self-isolating Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie The protagonist of Rushdie’s most celebrated novel is born at the exact moment India gains independence. He’s also born with superpowers, and he’s not the only one. In an audacious and poetic piece of magical realism, Rushdie tells the story of India’s blood-soaked resurgence via a swathe of children born at midnight with uncanny abilities. 40 books to read while self-isolating Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte You will need a cold, dead heart not to be moved by one of literature’s steeliest heroines. From the institutional cruelty of her boarding school, the “small, plain” Jane Eyre becomes a governess who demands a right to think and feel. Not many love stories take in a mad woman in the attic and a spot of therapeutic disfigurement, but this one somehow carries it off with mythic aplomb 40 books to read while self-isolating Middlemarch, George Eliot This is a richly satisfying slow burn of a novel that follows the lives and loves of the inhabitants of a small town in England through the years 1829–32. The acerbic wit and timeless truth of its observations mark this out as a work of genius; but at the time the author, Mary Anne Evans, had to turn to a male pen name to be taken seriously. 40 books to read while self-isolating Secret History, Donna Tartt Stick another log on the fire and curl up with this dark, peculiar and quite brilliant literary murder tale. A group of classics students become entranced by Greek mythology - and then take it up a level. Remember, kids: never try your own delirious Dionysian ritual at home. 40 books to read while self-isolating Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie A subtle and engrossing look at racial identity, through the story of a charismatic young Nigerian woman who leaves her comfortable Lagos home for a world of struggles in the United States. Capturing both the hard-scrabble life of US immigrants and the brash divisions of a rising Nigeria, Adichie crosses continents with all her usual depth of feeling and lightness of touch. 40 books to read while self-isolating Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons An absolute unadulterated comic joy of a novel. Stella Gibbons neatly pokes fun at sentimental navel-gazing with her zesty heroine Flora, who is more interested in basic hygiene than histrionics. In other words, if you’ve “seen something nasty in the woodshed,” just shut the door. 40 books to read while self-isolating Beloved, Toni Morrison Dedicated to the “Sixty Million and more” Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the slave trade, this is a cultural milestone and a Pulitzer-winning tour de force. Morrison was inspired by the real-life story of an enslaved woman who killed her own daughter rather than see her return to slavery. In her plot, the murdered child returns to haunt a black community, suggesting the inescapable taint of America’s history. 40 books to read while self-isolating Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh Evelyn Waugh bottles the intoxicating vapour of a vanished era in this novel about middle-class Charles Ryder, who meets upper-class Sebastian Flyte at Oxford University in the 1920s. Scrap the wartime prologue, and Charles’s entire relationship with Sebastian’s sister Julia (Dear Evelyn, thank you for your latest manuscript, a few suggested cuts…) and you’re looking at one of the most affecting love affairs in the English language. 40 books to read while self-isolating Dune, Frank Herbert You can almost feel your mouth dry with thirst as you enter the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune and encounter the desert planet of Arrakis, with its giant sandworms and mind-altering spice. It’s the setting for an epic saga of warring feudal houses, but it’s as much eco-parable as thrilling adventure story. Rarely has a fictional world been so completely realised. 40 books to read while self-isolating Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte Will there ever be a novel that burns with more passionate intensity than Wuthering Heights? The forces that bring together its fierce heroine Catherine Earnshaw and cruel hero Heathcliff are violent and untameable, yet rooted in a childhood devotion to one another, when Heathcliff obeyed Cathy’s every command. It’s impossible to imagine this novel ever provoking quiet slumbers; Emily Bronte’s vision of nature blazes with poetry. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald The savage reviews that greeted F Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel – “no more than a glorified anecdote”; “for the season only” – failed to recognise something truly great; a near-perfect distillation of the hope, ambition, cynicism and desire at the heart of the American Dream. Other novels capture the allure of the invented self, from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black to Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, but Fitzgerald’s enigmatic Jay Gatsby casts a shadow that reaches to Mad Men’s Don Draper and beyond. 40 books to read while self-isolating A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess From the moment we meet Alex and his three droogs in the Korova milkbar, drinking moloko with vellocet or synthemesc and wondering whether to chat up the devotchkas at the counter or tolchock some old veck in an alley, it’s clear that normal novelistic conventions do not apply. Anthony Burgess’s slim volume about a violent near-future where aversion therapy is used on feral youth who speak Nadsat and commit rape and murder, is a dystopian masterpiece. 40 books to read while self-isolating Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov Banned from entering the UK in its year of publication, 1955, Vladimir Nabokov’s astonishingly skilful and enduringly controversial work of fiction introduces us to literary professor and self-confessed hebephile Humbert Humbert, the perhaps unreliable narrator of the novel. He marries widow Charlotte Haze only to get access to her daughter, 12-year-old Dolores, nicknamed Lo by her mother, or as Humbert calls her “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” Cloaking his abuse in the allusive language of idealised love does not lessen Humbert’s crimes, but allows Nabokov to skewer him where he hides. 40 books to read while self-isolating Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K Dick Here be Roy Baty, Rick Deckard and Rachael Rosen – the novel that inspired Blade Runner is stranger even than the film it became. Back in an age before artificial intelligence could teach itself to play chess in a few hours better than any grandmaster that ever lived, Philip K Dick was using the concept of android life to explore what it meant to be human, and what it is to be left behind on a compromised planet. That he could do it in 250 pages that set the mind spinning and engage the emotions with every page-turn make this a rare science-fiction indeed. 40 books to read while self-isolating Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad Inspired by Conrad’s own experiences of captaining a trading steamer up the Congo River, Heart of Darkness is part adventure, part psychological voyage into the unknown, as the narrator Marlow relays the story of his journey into the jungle to meet the mysterious ivory trader Mr Kurtz. Although debate continues to rage about whether the novel and its attitude to Africa and colonialism is racist, it’s deeply involving and demands to be read. 40 books to read while self-isolating Dracula, Bram Stoker Whatever passed between Irish theatre manager Bram Stoker and the Hungarian traveller and writer Ármin Vámbéry when they met in London and talked of the Carpathian Mountains, it incubated in the Gothic imagination of Stoker into a work that has had an incalculable influence on Western culture. It’s not hard to read the Count as a shadowy sexual figure surprising straitlaced Victorian England in their beds, but in Stoker’s hands he’s also bloody creepy. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger It only takes one sentence, written in the first person, for Salinger’s Holden Caulfield to announce himself in all his teenage nihilism, sneering at you for wanting to know his biographical details “and all that David Copperfield kind of crap”. The Catcher in the Rye is the quintessential novel of the adolescent experience, captured in deathless prose. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler Dashiel Hammett may have been harder boiled, his plots more intricate but, wow, does Raymond Chandler have style. The push and pull at the start of The Big Sleep between private detective Philip Marlowe, in his powder-blue suit and dark blue shirt, and Miss Carmen Sternwood, with her “little sharp predatory teeth” and lashes that she lowers and raises like a theatre curtain, sets the tone for a story of bad girls and bad men. 40 books to read while self-isolating Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray All the teeming life of 19th century London is here in Thackeray’s masterpiece, right down to the curry houses frequented by Jos Sedley, who has gained a taste for the hot stuff as an officer in the East India Trading Company. But it is Becky Sharp, one of literature’s great characters, who gives this novel its enduring fascination. As a woman on the make, Becky is the perfect blend of wit, cunning and cold-hearted ruthlessness. Try as film and TV might to humanise and make excuses for her, Becky needs victims to thrive! And she’s all the more compelling for that. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath The only novel written by the poet Sylvia Plath is a semi-autobiographical account of a descent into depression that the book’s narrator Esther Greenwood describes as like being trapped under a bell jar – used to create a vacuum in scientific experiments – struggling to breathe. Almost every word is arresting, and the way that Plath captures the vivid life happening around Esther, news events, magazine parties, accentuates the deadening illness that drives her towards suicidal feelings. Plath herself would commit suicide one month after the novel’s publication in 1963. 40 books to read while self-isolating Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl Harry Potter may be more popular, but Willy Wonka is altogether weirder. From the overwhelming poverty experienced by Charlie Bucket and his family, to the spoilt, greedy, brattish children who join Charlie on his trip to Willy Wonka’s phantasmagorical sweet factory there is nothing artificially sweetened in Roald Dahl’s startling work of fantasy. 40 books to read while self-isolating Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy Andrew Davies’s recent TV adaptation of War and Peace reminded those of us who can’t quite face returning to the novel’s monstrous demands just how brilliantly Tolstoy delineates affairs of the heart, even if the war passages will always be a struggle. In Anna Karenina – enormous, too! –the great Russian novelist captures the erotic charge between the married Anna and the bachelor Vronsky, then drags his heroine through society’s scorn as their affair takes shape, without ever suggesting we move from her side. 40 books to read while self-isolating Dangerous Liaisons, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos The most deliciously wicked experience in literature, this epistolary novel introduces us to the Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, who play cruel games of sexual conquest on their unwitting victims. The Marquise’s justification for her behaviour – “I, who was born to revenge my sex and master yours” – will strike a chord in the #metoo era, but emotions, even love, intrude, to the point where Laclos’s amorality becomes untenable. Sexy but very, very bad. 40 books to read while self-isolating 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez The energy and enchantment of Garcia Marquez’s story of seven generations of the Buendia family in a small town in Colombia continue to enthrall half a century on. Hauntings and premonitions allied to a journalistic eye for detail and a poetic sensibility make Marquez’s magical realism unique. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Trial, Frank Kafka “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K…” So begins Kafka’s nightmarish tale of a man trapped in an unfathomable bureaucratic process after being arrested by two agents from an unidentified office for a crime they’re not allowed to tell him about. Foreshadowing the antisemitism of Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as the methods of the Stasi, KGB, and StB, it’s an unsettling, at times bewildering, tale with chilling resonance. 40 books to read while self-isolating Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier The second Mrs de Winter is the narrator of Du Maurier’s marvellously gothic tale about a young woman who replaces the deceased Rebecca as wife to the wealthy Maxim de Winter and mistress of the Manderley estate. There she meets the housekeeper Mrs Danvers, formerly devoted to Rebecca, who proceeds to torment her. As atmospheric, psychological horror it just gets darker and darker. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Published posthumously in 1958, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel is set in 19th century Sicily, where revolution is in the air. The imposing Prince Don Fabrizio presides over a town close to Palermo during the last days of an old world in which class stratifications are stable and understood. Garibaldi’s forces have taken the island and a new world will follow. It’s a deep and poetic meditation on political change and the characters that it produces.

In some cases, finishing a first novel can be such a gut-wrenching ordeal that the second book pales in comparison, although few instances are as extreme as that of the American writer Harold Brodkey, who is famous for taking 27 years to produce his long first novel The Runaway Soul (835 pages) in 1991 – having been commissioned to write it in 1961. He followed it up with a second novel, Profane Friendship, in 1994.

Then there are the authors who are one-hit wonders, publishing only one bestselling novel: J D Salinger followed Catcher in the Rye in 1951 with only short stories and novellas, and after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, there was nothing from her – but when you write a classic, as Emily Bronte did with Wuthering Heights in 1847, its enduring appeal begs the question: does it matter if there’s another novel after it?

The prolific poet Sylvia Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar (1963), which was largely an autobiographical story about her mental illness and written under a pseudonym, Victoria Lucas, was rejected several times by British and American publishers, before finding its way into the psyche of every teenager, trying to fit into the world.

J D Salinger’s only best-selling novel was ‘Catcher in the Rye’ in 1951 (Rex)

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which was her one and only novel, published in 1960, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, before her estate discovered Go Set a Watchman. It was written in the mid-Fifties, and published in 2015 as a sequel, but although it worked as a standalone novel, it was part of the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha (1997) was his only book, written over six years as he rewrote the novel three times, settling at last on its first-person viewpoint. It was turned into a feature film in 2005, and has sold more than four million copies.

One of the bestselling books ever, Black Beauty, published in 1877, was written by the then reclusive invalid Anna Sewell, and became an instant bestseller, with Sewell dying five months after its publication.

For other authors, it may be that they have written other novels, but they’ve only had one big hit, as Margaret Mitchell did with her final work, Gone with the Wind. It was the same story with Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.

Sylvia Plath only wrote one novel, ‘The Bell Jar’ in 1963, which resonates with every teenager trying to fit into the world (Bettmann Archive)

John Kennedy Toole, who won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1981 for A Confederacy of Dunces, which was published 11 years after his suicide in 1969, had two more novels published after his death, but this was his only major hit.

Other authors have had a very long gap between their first and second novel. One of them is Arundhati Roy, who won the Man Booker Prize in 1997 with The God of Small Things, but didn’t publish another novel until 2017’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. There is an even longer wait for the second novel of New Zealand novelist, short story writer and poet Keri Hulme whose debut, The Bone People, came out in the UK in 1985 and won the Man Booker Prize. Her long-awaited second novel, Bait – which should perhaps be renamed Wait as it has taken 34 years to produce so far – is a meditation on death. But it is still not yet scheduled for publication by Picador in the UK and they are still not working with a manuscript.

Hulme, who has blamed multitasking on another book before Bait was finished and then struggling to decide between three endings, as well as other extenuating circumstances, has said: “I’m just trying to remember the name of the animal that climbs up its own tail with extreme ease, a bit like a possum – well there was that kind of effect with Bait. And – bless my publishers, they’ve been amazingly generous – I do feel derelict in my obligations. I’ve learned something not to do ever again, and that is sign contracts before you’re absolutely sure something is finished.”

Sarah Perry, who was on the Desmond Elliott Prize judging panel last year, knows only too well about writing a novel when faced with “lack of privilege and the burden of the day job”. Her first novel, After Me Comes the Flood, went somewhat under the radar before her second novel, The Essex Serpent, was a smash-hit success.

“In an industry that tends to have a bit of an obsession with debuts, anything aimed at supporting writers with developing their practice is especially welcome. I was fortunate enough to win a regional award for my debut, so I understand what a boost it is both to have the support and praise of the judges (which goes a long way towards building confidence as you work on your next book), and money to help with practical matters (in my case, replacing a broken laptop).”

Claire Fuller, who won the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2015 with Our Endless Numbered Days, has since written two other well-received novels, Swimming Lessons and Bitter Orange. She says: “I have to admit that I finished the first draft of my second novel, Swimming Lessons, before my first was even published – so I was able to avoid the pressure I might have felt in trying match its success. Any pressure I felt wasn’t so much in the writing of it, but in the reception – which luckily was good,” she says. “Having said all that, I still have to grapple with my own lack of confidence in my writing on a daily basis – I think it’s something all writers face. But reminding myself now and again that my first book won the Desmond Elliott Prize is a sure way of getting me through those slumps.”

Preti Taneja, whose 2018 winner We That Are Young is being developed for TV by the makers of Narcos, is still trying to write her second novel, and says the strain comes not from outside but within. “Pressure comes from the way characters inhabit my mind. How their voices and their ways of seeing need to find expression. It comes from the stories I want to tell, and from a sense of excitement about wanting to see what I can do with my writing. I don’t feel pressure from a market.

Hilary Mantel took decades to reach literary stardom with 2009’s ‘Wolf Hall’ (AFP/Getty) (AFP/Getty Images)

“Economic pressure is another thing – but when literary critical culture remains so elitist, when bookshops are run by international financiers but staffed with passionate, underpaid people, when the government’s austerity measures mean libraries are closing – for most writers, the sums don’t work.

“Whatever happens when I’ve finished isn’t up to me – the only thing I can control is the next word I write. We all know about the gatekeeping; the class, race and gender bias in the literary world, and I’m always glad when my work finds genuine allies.”