Stoner
John Williams
The bestselling classic is the life story of William Stoner, who enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father’s farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death his colleagues remember him rarely. A reading experience like no other, itself a paean to the power of literature, it is a novel to be savoured – so much so that the team behind S-Town told the Guardian that they had the book in their minds while producing the podcast.