Best Fiction Books

Istanbul, 1591. A master miniaturist has been murdered, and his killer remains hidden among the sultan's circle of illuminators. Told through multiple voices—including a corpse, a dog, a gold coin, and the color red itself—Pamuk's novel is simultaneously a murder mystery, a meditation on art and perspective, and a portrait of the Ottoman world at the threshold of modernity.

An escaped Australian convict arrives in Bombay with a false passport, becomes a slum doctor, makes friends and enemies among the city's criminals, and discovers a city that unmakes and remakes him completely.

Augie March grows up poor and Jewish in Depression-era Chicago and refuses to be defined by it. Picaresque, exuberant, and crammed with characters from every class and corner of American life, this is Bellow's most ebullient novel—the one that announced an entirely new way of writing American English.

In an Italian villa at the end of World War II, a burned and dying man is cared for by a Canadian nurse, visited by a Sikh sapper and a former thief; the mystery of the patient's identity, and what the North African desert did to him, forms the novel's slow-burning centre.

A young British woman visits Crete and discovers her family's connection to Spinalonga — the island across the bay that served as Greece's last functioning leper colony until 1957 — uncovering four generations of love, stigma, and survival.

Balram Halwai, born into poverty in a Bihar village, writes a series of letters to the Chinese premier explaining how he became a successful entrepreneur — by murdering his employer. Adiga's debut is a savage, blackly comic account of what it actually takes to escape India's 'Rooster Coop.'

Emil Sinclair grows up in two worlds: the 'bright' world of his bourgeois family and the 'dark' world he senses underneath. Max Demian—strange, self-possessed, seemingly ageless—appears as his guide, leading him through Jungian psychology, Gnostic Christianity, and Nietzsche toward his own self-realization. Written in 1917, published in 1919.

David Lurie, a twice-divorced Cape Town professor, has an affair with a student, loses his position, and retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding in the Eastern Cape, where an attack changes both their lives irrevocably and forces a reckoning with what white South Africans are owed and owe.

The fictional autobiography of Sayuri, a geisha in the Gion district of Kyoto, from the 1920s through post-war Japan — a world of rigorous training, patron rivalries, and hidden lives.

A melancholy, deeply personal novel set in 1960s Tokyo: Toru Watanabe looks back on his student years, his relationships with two very different women, and the losses that shaped him.

Two contemporary academics discover evidence of a secret love affair between two Victorian poets — the eminent Randolph Henry Ash and the lesser-known Christabel LaMotte — and the double narrative that follows, moving between the Victorian and contemporary stories, is a meditation on love, scholarship, and possession in all its senses.

Anna Wulf, a blocked writer and communist, keeps four notebooks — black for her African novel, red for politics, yellow for fiction, blue for her diary — and a fifth golden notebook in which she attempts to bring them together: a formally radical portrait of a woman trying to hold her fractured self in one place.

Istanbul, 1975. Kemal, a wealthy man engaged to a suitable woman, falls obsessively in love with his poor distant cousin Füsun. Their affair ends; she marries another; he spends eight years visiting her family's apartment, collecting objects she has touched. He eventually builds a museum to house these objects. Pamuk has also built the actual museum in Istanbul.

Tom Ripley, a charming and resourceful small-time fraudster, is sent to Italy to retrieve a wealthy young American from his life of idleness — and finds it far easier to become his target than to bring him home.

On the Greek island of Kefalonia during the Italian and German occupation of World War II, a young woman falls in love with an Italian officer while her fiancé fights with the partisans in the mountains.

An unnamed young woman in an unnamed city during the Troubles is subjected to the unwanted attentions of a senior paramilitary figure known only as Milkman — and finds that the community, the paramilitaries, and even her family interpret this attention as complicity.

Katey Kontent, a secretary from Brooklyn, begins 1938 in New York City with ambition, wit, and $100 in savings. A chance encounter with Tinker Grey sets her on a course through the social strata of Manhattan.

A mysterious death, a missing fortune, and a damaged woman bring twelve men together in a Hokitika hotel on the New Zealand West Coast in 1866. Catton's structurally extraordinary novel uses astrological charts to determine its form, with each section exactly half the length of the previous one.

Kino, a poor pearl diver in Mexico, finds the Pearl of the World—and everything unravels. A fable in the tradition of the Bible and La Fontaine, The Pearl is Steinbeck's most concentrated exploration of how the dream of wealth destroys those who have nothing.

Women develop the ability to electrocute at will, and within a generation the global order inverts — a speculative inversion that asks not whether women would govern better but whether power itself is the problem.

Tony Webster, a comfortably divorced man in late middle age, receives a small bequest from the mother of his first serious girlfriend that forces him to re-examine the version of his youth he has been living with for forty years — and to confront the gap between what he remembers and what he actually did.

A young British backpacker follows a hand-drawn map to a secret beach in Thailand, joining an isolated community of travellers who believe they have found paradise — before the illusions begin to crack.

A sweeping portrait of English provincial society in the 1830s, centering on the idealistic Dorothea Brooke and the ambitious Dr. Lydgate as they pursue their aspirations and confront their disappointments.

A spectral hound haunts the Baskerville family across the Dartmoor moors, and when the new baronet arrives to claim his inheritance, Holmes sends Watson ahead while working in secret. Conan Doyle's masterpiece fuses gothic atmosphere with rigorous detective logic into the most complete and satisfying Holmes story.