In my recent post on Alan Fyfe’s novel The cross thieves I described it as a modern social realist novel and tagged it as a social problem novel. Wikipedia calls these novels Social novels (defining social realism as primarily an art movement). Whatever we call them, I think you know what I mean. However, for clarity’s sake, I’ll just share the Encyclopedia Britannica’s (EB) definition from Wikipedia that the social novel is a “work of fiction in which a prevailing social problem, such as gender, race, or class prejudice, is dramatized through its effect on the characters of a novel”. In my experience of these novels – looking at, say, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell – I would see poverty and labour exploitation or oppression as common prevailing social problems, in addition to those the EB identifies.

These sorts of novels are among my favourite, because they address the way we live, focusing particularly on everyday working life (especially as experienced by working classes), economic hardship, and social pressures, the things that can be fixed if we – politicians and voters – cared enough. In other words, these are books that tend to be politically driven by writers who would like to see change. This means for me that they are stories where the personal is severely impacted and the main solution – rarely achieved in the books themselves – is political.

For this post, I’m focussing on the 21st Century. The issues tend to be socioeconomically driven, with race and class being significant factors. I am not including issues like climate change. You could argue they are related, and thus come under the modern “social novel” banner but I want to keep this tightly focused on the personal impact, on people who have little agency in their lives. Many climate change novels, like Donna Cameron’s The rewilding (my review), for example, feature activists who have agency. Likewise, in Heather Rose’s Bruny (my review), about corporate greed and late capitalism, the protagonists have the ability to choose their paths.

Another book that came up in my research was Charlotte Wood’s The natural way of things (my review), but it is dystopian than realistic, and I see realism is an essential part of social problem novels. I’d love to include Wood’s novel though because it draws from the real stories of women who were scapegoated in a range of sexual scandals involving powerful men. It consequently exposes misogyny, which is an ongoing social problem.

Some modern Australian examples

My focus here then is the sort of socioeconomic oppression that means people are unfairly treated – and marginalised – on the basis of their class or wealth, their race, or other aspects of their lives which effectively “others” them, thereby reducing their agency. This sort of marginalisation takes many forms, but the Social Novel tends to focus on that which is systemic, which traps people in ways that are hard to escape.

I thought about breaking them down in some way – First Nations oppression, drug culture, urban poverty, rural decay – but there are so many crossovers that this felt a bit forced. So, I’m just going to share a small selection, in alphabetical order by author.

• Shankari Chandran, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens (2022, my review): I tagged this suburban Sydney-set novel as migrant literature, but it is also a social novel in its exploration of the dark-side of multicultural Australia – an issue very much in the news now – and the disastrous consequences of racism.
• Alan Fyfe’s The cross thieves (2026, my review): the story of two starving brothers in Mandurah, south of Perth, focusing on homelessness and food insecurity, on the fight for survival in a community where the methamphetamine drug trade and capitalist exploitation create desperate people who act desperately.
• Melissa Lucashenko’s Too much lip (2018, my review): the story of a marginalised Bundjalung family, which is trying to survive in a dying regional town in northern New South Wales. It shows how what colonial settler societies have done to First Nations Australians reverberates through the generations, in the form of constant poverty, violence and dysfunction, while developers want to take over yet another piece of First Nations land, a sacred island.
• Paddy O’Reilly’s Other houses (2022, my review): about a working class couple who struggle payday to payday, but want more for their now 15-year-old daughter, who had started to run wild, so they move to a “better” suburb. It questions the idea that upward social mobility is the answer to the problems posed by socioeconomic inequity.
• Stephen Orr’s Shining like the sun (2024, my review): set in a dying town in South Australia, it explores the socio-economic challenges facing small towns which are being allowed to die through neglect and poor policy. Farms are not supported, rural jobs are not supported, so poverty increases and power gets a foothold.

Other books were suggested when I did internet searches but I can’t possibly be comprehensive. Instead I aimed to represent at least some of the wide range of issues and locations, and I think I’ve achieved this with my five books. They cover urban and rural settings, and include issues like poverty, precarity, and social mobility; racism (against First Nations people and migrant people of colour); oppression, drugs, violence and family dysfunction. Most books encompass more than one of these issues because they are often interrelated, and most know the solutions – but there is no naive assumption that they will be achieved.

So, over to you. Have you read modern “social novels”? And if so, I’d truly love to hear about them.

Related, somewhat overlapping, Monday Musings posts: Realism and Modernism, Factory Novels, Precarity and Late Capitalism