Best Fiction Books

A morbidly obese lawyer accidentally kills an old Romani woman with his car and receives a single word from her ancient father — 'thinner' — triggering an unstoppable supernatural curse that begins to consume him.

Ray Garrett's wife has died — a probable suicide — and her father, Ed Coleman, blames Ray and has tried to shoot him in Rome. The novel follows the two men as they circle each other through Venice and its islands — Coleman hunting Ray, Ray unable to leave, drawn back to a man who wants to kill him in a city that seems to conspire with grief.

A group of history students and their professor are sent back to fourteenth-century France using quantum technology — arriving in the middle of the Hundred Years' War. They have six hours to find their missing colleague and return to the present. Crichton applies his techno-thriller formula to medieval history.

Harry Morgan, a boat captain in Depression-era Key West, is forced into smuggling and running rum to survive. The novel Hemingway considered his worst tracks Morgan's degradation against the backdrop of wealthy vacationers whose money insulates them from consequence.

Sonchai is sent to Dubai and beyond to investigate a human organ-trafficking operation — the harvesting and sale of kidneys, corneas, and hearts from the living poor to the wealthy dying. The fifth Sonchai novel takes the series global, from Bangkok to Shanghai to Dubai, asking what Buddhist teachings have to say about the commodification of the human body.

The two novellas that launched Murakami's career — 'Hear the Wind Sing' (1979) and 'Pinball, 1973' (1980) — published together for the first time in English. The unnamed narrator and his friend 'the Rat' move through a coastal Japanese town, listening to music, drinking beer, and circling the losses of youth. Quieter and more elliptical than Murakami's later work, these novellas show the essential qualities of his sensibility in concentrated form.

A young woman living in a converted church with her deeply dysfunctional family falls for a boy hiding his own secrets while navigating depression and family dysfunction.

A young man is found dead on a houseboat in London. Three women — each damaged, each with a connection to the dead man — become suspects in an investigation that reaches back through years of loss and resentment.

The Southern Reach trilogy concludes with three parallel timelines: Control and Ghost Bird inside Area X, the former Director on the last expedition she ever launched, and the original lighthouse keeper in the years before Area X appeared.

One night in Tokyo, told in real time and in the second person plural — 'we' observe, as if a camera, the city between midnight and dawn. Mari, a student, sits in a Denny's with a book; her sister Eri sleeps in their apartment, apparently unable to wake. The night connects them to musicians, a Chinese woman beaten in a love hotel, and the city's insomniac underside. Murakami's shortest and most experimental novel.

Danny, an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant cleaning houses in Sydney, recognises that a client of one of his regular houses may know something about a murder — and spends a single day deciding whether to go to the police, knowing that doing so will mean deportation.

Polly O'Keefe — daughter of Meg Murry — discovers a time gate near her grandparents' New England farm that opens into the world of three thousand years ago, where she becomes entangled in a conflict between two ancient peoples and a druid named Karralys.

Jazz Bashara is a porter and small-time smuggler in Artemis — humanity's first and only city on the Moon. When she's offered an opportunity to pull off a corporate heist that could solve her financial problems permanently, she discovers the job connects to a conspiracy that threatens the entire lunar colony.

Chopin's first novel follows Thérèse Lafirme, a Louisiana plantation widow whose moral convictions force a divorced man to remarry his alcoholic ex-wife, with tragic consequences that challenge her certainties.

Alice, a novelist recovering from a breakdown, and Eileen, a literary editor in Dublin, exchange long emails about love, politics, art, and how to live ethically in the present. Meanwhile, their respective relationships — Alice with Felix, Eileen with Simon — test what they believe against what they actually do.

A New Zealand guerrilla gardening collective called Birnam Wood begins farming unused land without permission; when their activities bring them into contact with a reclusive American tech billionaire with interests in the land, the collision between their idealism and his power becomes increasingly dangerous.

Brida O'Fern is a young Irish woman driven by a hunger for spiritual knowledge. She seeks out two teachers — a wise man in the forest and a witch who teaches through the Wiccan Tradition of the Sun — in search of magic, purpose, and her soulmate.

At twenty, Tsukuru Tazaki was suddenly cut off by his four closest friends without explanation. Sixteen years later, at his girlfriend's urging, he sets out to find out why. A quieter and more realist Murakami — a novel about the wounds that friendship inflicts and the years of recovery they require, structured around a pilgrimage to three countries.

Eragon travels to the elvish homeland to train with the Dragon Riders while Roran leads the villagers of Carvahall in a desperate flight from the Empire. The second Inheritance Cycle novel deepens its world's mythology and pushes Eragon's powers and understanding to new levels.

A picnic in the Chilterns is interrupted when a hot-air balloon accident brings two strangers together. One of them — Joe Rose, a science journalist — becomes the obsessive focus of the other's deranged love. McEwan's clinical thriller dissects the boundary between reason and madness.

Bruce Gold, a Jewish English professor in New York, is offered a vague but enticing position in Washington and navigates the absurdist bureaucracy of politics while colliding with his chaotic family and a government that speaks entirely in meaningless language.

The origin story of Hannibal Lecter: from his aristocratic Lithuanian childhood through the traumatic events of the Second World War that broke something fundamental, to the first murders in post-war Europe and Japan. A prequel that traces the specific losses and grievances that created the most celebrated fictional cannibal.

A factory director in rural Austria uses his wife Gerti as a sexual object, while Gerti seeks an escape through a brief affair with a student. Jelinek's most controversial novel uses pornographic imagery and flat, repetitive prose to expose the mechanics of male power over female bodies—a feminist provocation that repelled and fascinated in equal measure.

The fifth and final Ripley novel. An American couple, David and Janice Pritchard, move to the village near Ripley's Belle Ombre and begin investigating the disappearance of Dickie Greenleaf — whose killing, thirty years earlier, is the foundational crime of the entire series. Ripley must manage this threat with the same composure he has brought to every crisis, in a novel that is both a thriller and a late meditation on how long a constructed life can hold.