It’s a strange and sad time. We want to feel solidarity with other people, but what the moment calls for (and longer than a moment, unfortunately) is solitude. So let’s withdraw, even if it’s against our nature, and let’s talk about important books. This is historical fiction, sweeping series that make you feel part of something. These novels connect you to the culture. You might have been avoiding them, you might be intimidated, you might think you’re not ready to step into the deep end. Oh, but you are.

WAR AND PEACE. Leo Tolstoy. The big one. Yes, you’re holding 1296 pages in your hand, like a cement brick. But don’t be alarmed, but that brick of a book is immediately absorbing and even reassuring, like a great historical painting. The most sweeping novel ever written and possibly the best. The 2007 translation is clear, direct and celebrated in a wonderful James Wood piece in the New Yorker. You can do this!

A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME. Anthony Powell. A series of twelve novels detailing the world’s of media, art and politics in England. Perhaps the most carefully socially observed novels of the twentieth century. Our narrator Nicholas Jenkins brings us from his school days to serving in World War II, with stops in country houses, literary journals and the Soho art scene, all with a sense of wry detachment. There are unexpected coincidences, wild swings in fortune, mundane tragedy. This isn’t for everybody—it’s very close to being boring. But, like Eric Rohmer’s films, if they connect with you you’ll know it right away. If you’re turned off by the American collections of three novels in a single volume then track down old orange Penguin editions of individual novels with famous cover illustrations by Mark Boxer. It’s time to meet Kenneth Widmerpool.

THE NEAPOLITAN QUARTET. Elena Ferrante. A great modern melodrama and an extraordinary portrait of friendship. It can be hard to explain the transfixing quality of these books, but once we know them then the lives of Lenu and Lila just don’t let us go. Occasionally and absurdly criticized as women’s novels (the saccharin covers don’t help), but these are books for anybody who cares about the intensity of human emotion.

THE SWORD OF HONOUR TRILOGY. Evelyn Waugh. For me these mature books are better than Waugh’s earlier novels (with the exception of everybody’s favorite, Brideshead Revisited). Our hero is the variously lucky and unlucky Guy Crouchback, who we follow through the absurdity of military life during World War II. There’s the driest, darkest sense of humor underpinning this work, which is what you would expect from the driest and darkest comic writer in English.

WOLF HALL TRILOGY. Hilary Mantel. What perverse good fortune that the final book of this trilogy was released last week. The first two dense and brilliant novels trace the life of Thomas Cromwell as he rises to become the right hand man of Henry VIII, and responsible for exercising his whims and wrath. Both won the Booker Prize, and I’m thrilled to be working through the latest, The Mirror and the Light, right now.

THE REGENERATION TRILOGY. Pat Barker. These elegant novels are set during World War I, predominantly in a mental hospital where the incredibly humane doctor William Rivers treats soldiers traumatized in the trenches. His brilliance, self-awareness and sense of decency (he was an actual person), is a recurring theme here as he helps soldiers deal with the devastation they suffered. Sad and wonderful.