The assumption that "page-turner" and "literary" are opposites is wrong. Narrative grip — the quality of a book that makes it difficult to stop reading — doesn't require simplified prose, predictable structure, or the sacrifice of ideas for plot. Several of the most formally serious books in the canon are also genuinely hard to put down, for reasons that have nothing to do with commercial formula and everything to do with stakes, specificity, and the sense that something irreversible is approaching.
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe is the clearest example of this intersection. It's narrative journalism about the Troubles in Northern Ireland — specifically about the murder of Jean McConville, a Belfast mother of ten taken from her home by the IRA in 1972, and the decades of denial, prosecution, and revelation that followed. Keefe's prose is precise and the story moves chronologically enough that the reader always knows where they are, but the pacing is genuinely thriller-like: each chapter ends at a point where the next chapter seems immediately necessary. That the events are historical and documented doesn't diminish the tension; in some ways it intensifies it, because you know the people are real and the consequences were permanent. It belongs to the narrative history shelf.
Endurance by Alfred Lansing tells the story of Ernest Shackleton's 1914 Antarctic expedition, in which his ship became trapped and eventually crushed by pack ice and his crew of twenty-eight survived nearly two years before reaching safety. Even knowing the outcome — every man survived, which is among the more improbable facts in the history of exploration — the daily survival narrative is relentless. Lansing's structure mirrors the diary entries of the crew: day by day, crisis by crisis, each development arriving without the benefit of hindsight that a more literary treatment might impose. The book reads in two or three sessions and leaves readers describing it as the most gripping thing they've read in years.
Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne follows the Comanche people and specifically Quanah Parker, the son of a Comanche chief and a white woman who was taken captive as a child. The book covers forty years of warfare on the Southern Plains, the systematic destruction of the Comanche way of life, and Parker's eventual role as a leader in the reservation period. Gwynne writes with obvious sympathy for both the Comanche warriors and the white settlers on the frontier, and the narrative grip comes from the scale of what is at stake — an entire civilization — and from Parker's particular story, which spans both worlds. It's 371 pages and most readers report finishing it in two or three sittings.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is 768 pages and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. The book follows the development of the atomic bomb from the theoretical physics of the late 19th century through the Trinity test in 1945, and Rhodes interweaves the scientific history with the personal histories of the physicists in a way that makes both comprehensible. The narrative structure is chronological and builds toward Trinity the way a thriller builds toward its climax. Reading the final chapters — the assembly of the device, the countdown, the detonation — is an experience that the page count should not be allowed to discourage. It belongs to the narrative history shelf.
The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman is a history of the first month of the First World War — the decisions and miscalculations that led from the assassination of Franz Ferdinand to the largest conflict in human history to that point. Tuchman's thesis is that the war was not inevitable but was the product of specific choices made by specific people under specific constraints, and her account of those choices has the quality of watching a tragedy in real time — you can see the catastrophe coming and the actors cannot. The narrative momentum is derived not from suspense (the outcome is known) but from the compression of consequences: each chapter makes the disaster more certain, more immediate, more costly.
What creates narrative pull in serious literary work is not the same as what creates it in commercial fiction. In commercial fiction, pull comes from withheld information (what happens next?). In the books above, it comes from stakes large enough that the reader needs to see what happens even when they already know, and from specificity precise enough that each page feels consequential. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson — 600 pages of narrative journalism about the Great Migration — creates the same quality of pull through three individual stories followed over decades: you stay not because you don't know how it ends but because you've been made to care about specific people navigating specific decisions under impossible constraints.