Best Literary Fiction Books

Ricardo Somocurcio, a Peruvian exile in Paris, has loved the same woman since he was fifteen—a woman who appears and disappears, reinventing herself as a Peruvian guerrilla, a Cuban revolutionary, a diplomat's wife, a gangster's moll. Each time she returns she uses him and leaves. Vargas Llosa's most Flaubert-influenced novel.

Taylor Greer leaves rural Kentucky driving west, and ends up in Tucson, Arizona, unexpectedly with a Native American toddler left in her care. She makes a life with the child, forms a family with her neighbour Mattie and Guatemalan refugee Lou Ann, and confronts what it means to be responsible for another person.

David Zimmer loses his wife and sons in a plane crash and, through grief, becomes obsessed with the silent films of Hector Mann, a forgotten comedian from the 1920s — until a letter arrives claiming that Mann is still alive.

Fiona Maye, a High Court judge in London, must rule on whether a seventeen-year-old Jehovah's Witness may refuse a life-saving blood transfusion on religious grounds. The case intersects with the collapse of her marriage.

Bowles's first and most celebrated short story collection — tales of North Africa, Central America, and the American South that share a preoccupation with violence, dissolution, and the encounter between Western consciousness and alien cultures.

Seventeen short stories ranging from the title piece — in which a municipal elephant and its elderly keeper vanish without trace — to encounters with sleeping women, disintegrating marriages, and the surreal textures of ordinary Japanese life. The best single collection for encountering Murakami in concentrated form: all the themes, all the tonal shifts, all the American music, in pieces that can be read in a sitting.

Elizabeth Hunter, a dying Sydney matriarch, has had a mystical experience at the eye of a cyclone. Now her children have gathered, expecting an inheritance. The novel moves between Mrs. Hunter's deathbed present and the cyclone experience that changed her—White's meditation on revelation, mortality, and the family as a system of mutual incomprehension.

In a Greek village under Turkish occupation, villagers chosen to play Christ and the apostles in a Passion play find themselves transformed by their roles — as a group of real refugees arrives seeking help and the village is forced to choose.

Two teenagers in a close-knit Black Southern California church community make a decision that will follow them — and the women who witness it — for decades.

Chieko, a merchant's daughter in Kyoto, discovers she has a twin sister—Naeko, who was given away and grew up in poverty in the mountains. The seasons of Kyoto (cherry blossoms, gion festival, autumn maples, winter snow) structure the novel as the two sisters negotiate whether to acknowledge each other. Kawabata's most accessible work.

On Egdon Heath, Clym Yeobright returns from Paris to improve the lives of the local people through education. His plans collide with the ambitions of Eustacia Vye, who yearns to escape the heath, and with the web of desire and disappointment that connects them both to others.

A selection of Pessoa's critical essays, philosophical reflections, and shorter prose — including pieces by both Pessoa and his heteronyms, showing the full range of his intellectual world.

Tookie, a Native American woman who works at a Minneapolis independent bookshop (based on Erdrich's own Birchbark Books), is haunted by the ghost of the most annoying customer who ever died. Set during 2020 — the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the uprising that followed in the city where Erdrich lives.

A graduate student discovers a mysterious book in his university library that contains a story about his own childhood — and is drawn through it into an underground world of stories, doors, and a sea that smells of honey and blood.

Thessaloniki (Salonika) in the early twentieth century: a city of Greeks, Jews, Turks, and refugees, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Mediterranean. The Thread follows two families — one Greek Orthodox, one from the city's ancient Jewish community — across eight decades of fire, war, occupation, and transformation, as the city loses its plurality and becomes something more singular. Hislop's most historically ambitious novel.

Lima's Leoncio Prado Military Academy: the cadets live under brutal hierarchy, organize theft rings, and maintain codes of silence. When a cadet is killed, someone informs. The search for the informer consumes the novel. Vargas Llosa's debut—written at twenty-six—was burned publicly in Peru and made him internationally famous.

Athens, 1941. The German occupation begins, and with it the great famine in which hundreds of thousands of Greeks die. Themis, a young woman from a divided Athens family — some Communist, some right-wing, all suffering — lives through the occupation, the resistance, the civil war that follows, and the decades of political fracture that define 20th-century Greek history. Hislop's most politically complex novel, spanning sixty years of Greek history.

Tom Jones, a foundling of unknown parentage raised by the good-natured Squire Allworthy, is in love with the beautiful Sophia Western. Expelled from the estate, he travels toward London through a comic series of adventures, misidentifications, and encounters with English society at every level. Fielding's masterpiece and the most important comic novel in English before Dickens.

Danny and his friends—the paisanos of Monterey's Tortilla Flat district—live outside the conventional economy, drinking wine, pursuing women, and avoiding work. Steinbeck's first commercial success structures their adventures as a mock-Arthurian legend, with Danny's house as Camelot and the paisanos as his errant knights.

A young man calling himself Victor Chmara has fled Paris to a lake town near the Swiss border, avoiding a danger he can't quite name. He falls in with a beautiful actress and her circle of summer people. Twenty years later, he reconstructs what happened that summer—and what he lost when it ended. Modiano's most romantic novel.

Vienna in the late 1950s: four young people from different classes terrorise random strangers in a park, acting out their rage against an Austria that refuses to acknowledge its Nazi past.

In Tokyo in 1984, a fitness instructor named Aomame and a maths teacher and aspiring novelist named Tengo are on parallel tracks that gradually converge. Aomame assassinates abusive men; Tengo ghost-writes a novel about a world with two moons. Both become entangled with a sinister religious cult. Murakami's most ambitious novel — nearly a thousand pages, three books, a full reimagining of what a Murakami novel can hold.

James Bray, a British colonial official who was expelled from a newly independent African country for supporting the independence movement, is invited back ten years later to advise the government. He discovers the revolutionary leaders have become the new oppressors. Gordimer's most geopolitically ambitious novel.

Sy Baumgartner, a 71-year-old philosophy professor, has spent nine years living in the aftermath of his wife Anna's death in a swimming accident — still surrounded by her manuscripts, her presence in every corner of the house, and the ongoing conversation with her that he cannot stop having.