Parisian Phoenix Publishing

In honor of E.H. Jacobs’ second novel, Into a Wider Sky, which launches July 1, we are presenting his list of five fiction books that explore internal psychology. Jacobs’ was a therapist by day, and his second novel explores what happens when psychology cross certain boundaries. In the case of the protagonist, he breaks the rules in a desperate attempt to help a patient. The antagonist cares only about his person gain. The story asks the question— do intentions matter? Preorder Into a Wider Sky here.

The Countdown List: 5 books That Expertly Capture Their Characters’ Internal Psychology

• Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson. These interlinked stories are really vignettes of characters’ lives in small town Ohio after the Civil War. In simple, direct and unassuming prose, which makes his portrayals that much more poignant, Anderson captures the internal longings, loneliness, isolations, dreams and frustrations that often accompany small town life in America.
• A Secret History, by Donna Tartt. Tartt captures the internal struggles of a college-aged youth who was a perpetual outsider as he tries to find a way to belong in an unfamiliar environment when he finds an eccentric group of fellow outsiders who have banded together in an insular clique of admirers of a charismatic teacher. As members of the group become more dysfunctional and their behavior more extreme, the group starts to fracture, resulting in terrible deeds that forever change their lives.
• The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt. A young boy who was with his mother when she was killed in a catastrophic terrorist bombing grows up traumatized and displaced as he struggles to form relationships, fit in with adults and peers, cope with his troubled father, establish a substitute family and learn, the hard way, whom to trust. His internal struggles are expertly rendered in Tartt’s gorgeous prose.
• The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro renders the inner life of a man whose entire life has been built around pride in his subservience to others and the repression of his inner desires in order to achieve what he considers to be excellence. The sparseness of his conscious inner life and the deep well of loneliness and isolation that underly it is portrayed with heartrending restraint.
• A Map of the World, by Jane Hamilton. As multiple tragedies upend the life of the protagonist, she questions her own value, her responsibility, guilt and shame, her and her husband’s love and commitment to each other, her friendships and her place in her community. Hamilton takes the reader along in the protagonist’s agonizing internal and external journey