The best final novels: great final books by the best authors

published 9 December 2022

The best final books are those that were written and published before the author passed away.

There's been a blooming sack-load of superb posthumous works of literature. We know because we wrote a best posthumous novels list on exactly that - fine novels that the authors, cruelly, never got to hold, never got to flick through, never got to satisfyingly add to their own personal bookcases.

Less common are books of blinding brilliance that were penned and published while the author was still alive, but signalled their swan song from the literary world.

Here's our choice of 18 of the finest final novels ever written.

Best final novels

A first and last novel from a literary genius, if you haven't read it go and sit on the naughty step, immediately. It first appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine and reviewers were quick to condemn the novel’s immorality. The Scots Observer reviewer asked, “Why must Oscar Wilde ‘go grubbing in muck-heaps?" and The Daily Chronicle said it would "taint every young mind that comes in contact with it.” So vitriolic was the reaction that W H Smith withdrew every copy. Wilde revised it for the final novel to try and ease the backlash, but it still took something of a pounding from the prudes. If that's not reason enough to buy the uncensored version, which Harvard University Press published in 2011, we don't know what is.

Steinbeck’s last work published in his lifetime came out to mixed reviews in 1961 but is, for our money, a wonderful read. Atlantic Monthly reviewed it as a Steinbeck classic: "The morality in this novel marks Mr. Steinbeck's return to the mood and the concern with which he wrote The Grapes of Wrath" they gushed and the Swedish Academy agreed, awarding Steinbeck the Nobel Prize for Literature. He wrote the novel to address the moral degeneration of American culture during the 1950s and 1960s and when it first came out US reviews were, on the whole, negative. Post-Watergate it resonated rather more with many a critic rapidly backpedaling.

If the Confidence Man were an angst teenager you'd often catch it bleating on about being so misunderstood. It portrays a Canterbury Tales–esque group of steamboat passengers whose interlocking stories are told as they travel down the Mississippi. "Long mistaken for a flawed novel," said scholar Robert Milder "The book is now admired as a masterpiece of irony and control, though it continues to resist interpretive consensus."The novel includes several satires of 19th century literary figures with characters representing Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Edgar Allan Poe inspired a beggar in the story.Interesting aside: The book came out on April Fool's Day 1857, the exact day on which the story begins.

Okay Trivial Pursuit fans, okay. We know. She only wrote one novel so we've hardly had to break a sweat with this one, but having hit perfection on the first attempt Emily passed away just a year after it was published. Although Wuthering Heights is now widely regarded as a classic of English literature, it received mixed reviews when released in 1847. In the second half of the 19th century, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre was considered the best of the Brontë sisters' works, but following later re-evaluation, critics began to argue Wuthering Heights was superior.

Famed for its free-thinking leading lady who refuses to be chained by the expectations of society, The Awakening is a milestone in feminist philosophy which was condemned by most male reviewers the moment it was published. While Chopin did not completely abandon her writing career in the wake of The Awakening's harsh reception, she was crestfallen and her literary output dwindled from then on. She died five years later of a cerebral hemorrhage. The Awakening sold poorly and was largely ignored until the mid-twentieth century, when it was recognised as a masterpiece.

James Joyce spent 17 years writing Finnegans Wake and once said he expected people to spend 17 years reading it. It sure is a battle - perhaps the most difficult book you will ever read - but it's a fight that's ultimately worth having, for this is the apex of Joyce's art. The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, consisting of a mixture of standard English and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau, which critics believe were attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. Like we said a battle, so get your warface on. And your specs.

George Orwell praised Smollett as "Scotland's best novelist" while Charles Dickens was also known to be a great admirer. The Expedition was the last of the great man's "picaresque" comedies and is considered by most to be his best and funniest work. Presented in the form of letters written by six characters, the comedy arises from differences in the descriptions of the same events by the participants which vary wildly, revealing amusing characteristics of the teller.

Having written a Brave New World in 1931 it took Huxley three decades to pen his utopian counterpart: Island. For us it was worth the wait. Granted we weren't alive, but you know what we mean. Huxley himself saw Island as one of his most provocative works and so taken by the book was the Maharaja of Kashmir that he wrote Aldous asking where he might get some of the psychedelic drugs that feature prominently. Aldous, so the story goes, gave him Timothy Leary's address.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Optimist's Daughter (1972) is believed by most to be Welty's best novel. Written after a lengthy hiatus from the typewriter poet Howard Moss wrote in The New York Times, that it was "a miracle of compression, the kind of book, small in scope but profound in its implications, that rewards a lifetime of work". The plot focuses on family struggles when the daughter and the second wife of a judge confront each other in the limited confines of a hospital room while the judge undergoes eye surgery. A quote from the book: "For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love." is on Eudora's headstone.

Despite selling well, Atlas Shrugged was generally disliked by critics. Rand scholar Mimi Reisel Gladstein later wrote that when the novel was released, "reviewers seemed to vie with each other [for] the cleverest put-downs". The winner of that particular competition was probably the reviewer for Time magazine who asked: "Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare? Is it Superman?"But what do critics know? Not a lot, it seems. According to a 1991 survey done for the Library of Congress, Atlas Shrugged was situated between the Bible and M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled as the book that made the most difference in the lives of 5,000 Book-of-the-Month club members and Modern Library's 1998 online poll of the 100 best novels of the 20th century found Atlas rated number one.

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As Content Director of Shortlist, Marc likes nothing more than to compile endless lists of an evening by candlelight. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.