The best literature to keep you occupied this season.

As you settle into the January doldrums, your bank account and your drinks cupboard empty and the strong likelihood that foul weather will confine you to your home, you’re presented with a rare chance to settle into a really, really long book: probably the most cost-effective and healthful form of winter entertainment, hour-for-hour, that life has to offer. Here are five of the best.

Infinite Jest by Mr David Foster Wallace (1996)

Mr David Foster Wallace’s suicide in 2008 was a dreadful loss to the American letters. But in Infinite Jest he left us a dazzling entertainment: labyrinthine, brilliantly clever, wildly funny and deeply moving. It concerns drug and alcohol addiction, high-level competitive tennis, Québécois separatist wheelchair assassins and radioactive hamsters, among other things. At the heart of it is the search for The Entertainment, a film so ridiculously enjoyable that anyone who sees it will do nothing but rewatch it until they die of dehydration right there on the sofa. Essentially, some argue, Mr Wallace foresaw the existence of Furious 7.

Clarissa by Mr Samuel Richardson (1748)

If you like a long book to settle into, Mr Richardson is your man. Before the novel form was more than half-invented, in 1748, Mr Richardson produced this stonking 1,500-pager. It’s an epistolary novel (in the form of letters) about the comely but virtuous Clarissa Harlowe being pursued by the moustache-twirling villain Mr Lovelace – a figure with all the morals of Mr Harvey Weinstein. It’s truly gripping – and, as letters are intercepted, faked and annotated, rather postmodern in its way. It also occasioned Mr Terry Eagleton’s best joke, when he asked: “What is the last thing in Clarissa Harlowe’s hand? A pen is.”

Middlemarch by Ms George Eliot (1871)

Why wouldn’t you spend a few – OK, several – hours in the company of what is widely agreed to be the best, and certainly most grown-up, novel in the English language? Middlemarch – telling the story of the life of an English country town over several years – is Ms Eliot’s masterpiece, and brought new standards of realism and moral complexity to the English novel. Also, when you finally get there, it has one of the great last sentences of all time. No peeking! It doesn’t work if you haven’t read the previous 900 pages – but if you have, it will bring tears to your eyes.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Mr Marlon James (2015)

Mr James’s third novel was a deserving winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize. The first half of it is about political gangsterism and CIA intrigue in 1970s Jamaica, and the second half spirals off into the drug wars in 1980s America. At the heart of it is the assassination attempt on Mr Bob Marley, referred to in the book just as The Singer. The multiple narrators and Jamaican patois take a bit of getting used to, but stick with it. Your reward is a literary thriller with a kick like that of Mr James Ellroy, passages of amazing lyrical beauty, and one of the great villains of our age.

A Dance to the Music of Time by Mr Anthony Powell (1951-1975)

It’s pronounced “pole”, of course. Few of his characters would forgive you for getting that wrong. But the so-called English Proust is far easier-going than the Frenchman himself. And to the long-book-averse, Dance is a gift: a giant story in 12 bite-sized instalments. As a portrait of the texture of a particular era in 20th-century English life, it’s unrivalled – funny, sharp and with the unexpectedness of real life. Plus, in the egregious Mr Widmerpool, Mr Powell created a character to live for all time.

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