Best Fiction Books

The final volume of the Fitz and the Fool trilogy — and the conclusion of the entire Realm of the Elderlings sequence — takes Fitz on a journey to the city of Clerres to save the Fool and confront the Servants of the Pale Woman. A conclusion twenty years in the making, delivering one of fantasy's most emotionally complete endings.

Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece about a former slave haunted by the ghost of her murdered daughter — and the legacy of slavery on the body, memory, and soul.

A crew of cognitively modified humans — including a man with half his brain removed and a vampire revived from extinction — is sent to make first contact with an alien presence on the edge of the solar system, and finds something that profoundly challenges the assumption that consciousness is adaptive.

In the World State of 632 AF (After Ford), human beings are hatched in hatcheries, conditioned from birth for their social function, and kept content by the pleasure drug Soma. There is no disease, no war, no poverty — and no freedom, no art, no genuine love. Bernard Marx begins to question whether happiness without meaning is worth having.

Joseph Heller's darkly comic masterpiece follows bombardier Yossarian through the absurdist bureaucracy of World War II, inventing the most important logical paradox of modern language.

The last remnants of humanity race across the stars toward a terraformed world, only to find it already claimed by a civilization of intelligent spiders uplifted across millennia by a nanovirus meant for monkeys.

The adventures of the deluded knight Alonso Quijano — who believes himself to be the knight-errant Don Quixote — and his earthy squire Sancho Panza across the plains of La Mancha.

Fifteen years after the events of the Farseer trilogy, Fitz lives in quiet isolation with Nighteyes. When the Fool arrives to draw him back into court politics — the young Prince Dutiful has gone missing — Fitz must choose between the solitude he has built and the duty he has never fully escaped. The first volume of the Tawny Man trilogy.

Bjartur of Summerhouses has spent eighteen years in bondage to pay for his croft. Now free, he will be independent or die. Through drought, famine, debt, and the deaths of those he might have loved, Bjartur's stubbornness is heroic and catastrophic in equal measure. Laxness's masterpiece—the great Icelandic novel, and the reason he won the Nobel Prize.

The First Law trilogy's conclusion delivers one of fantasy literature's most ruthless and genuinely surprising endings — a masterwork of subverted expectations that recontextualises the entire trilogy.

Humbert Humbert's confession of his obsession with and abuse of twelve-year-old Dolores Haze — told in prose of devastating beauty by a narrator who is both brilliant and monstrous.

Born at the exact moment of Indian independence, Saleem Sinai discovers he is telepathically connected to the 1,001 children born in the first hour of a free India — and that his own life is fatally, inextricably entwined with the history of his nation.

Todd, Viola, and the Spackle leader 1017 navigate three-way war on New World, with arrival of the Answer's ship adding a fourth power. The Carnegie Medal-winning conclusion to Chaos Walking is one of the great YA trilogy endings — costly, honest, and earned.

A single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, preparing a party in postwar London — intercut with the experiences of Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran she will never meet.

Bertie Wooster decides to handle matters himself for once, without Jeeves. He will sort out Gussie Fink-Nottle's love life and Tuppy Glossop's engagement without the butler's assistance. The resulting catastrophe — culminating in a prize-giving speech at Market Snodsbury Grammar School — is the funniest extended sequence in English comic fiction.

Kurt Vonnegut's anti-war masterpiece follows Billy Pilgrim, who has become 'unstuck in time' and moves non-linearly through his experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden and his later suburban American life.

A great god is reduced to living in the body of a small tortoise because no one truly believes in him anymore — only one novice monk does — and together they must reckon with what faith really means in a world dominated by the institution built in his name.

Severian, a torturer's apprentice exiled from his guild for showing mercy to a condemned prisoner, narrates his journey across a dying far-future Earth in a memoir he claims is perfectly remembered but which the careful reader will find riddled with unreliable omissions.

In Leningrad on the eve of the German invasion in 1941, nineteen-year-old Tatiana falls in love with Alexander — a Red Army officer carrying dangerous secrets — as the 872-day siege closes around the city and its inhabitants.

Bertie Wooster is dispatched to Totleigh Towers, home of the terrifying Roderick Spode and the magistrate Sir Watkyn Bassett, to steal a silver cow creamer and assist various friends with their tangled romantic lives. Only Jeeves can navigate the catastrophe that follows.

Todd Hewitt is the last boy in Prentisstown — a colony world where a germ has made everyone's thoughts audible as constant Noise — until he discovers a pocket of silence in the swamp and finds Viola, the first girl he has ever seen, whose ship crashed nearby.

Ernest Hemingway's Nobel Prize-winning novella about an aging Cuban fisherman's epic struggle with a great marlin in the waters of the Gulf Stream.

Three timelines converge as Essun and her daughter Nassun race toward opposite ends — one to save humanity, one to end it — in the Hugo Award-winning conclusion to the Broken Earth trilogy.

The final volume: Elena and Lila return to Naples in middle age, their friendship tested by a final, devastating loss as the neighbourhood that made them both begins to dissolve.