Best Literary Fiction Books

A novelist travels to Kyoto to hear the New Year's bell and reconnect with his former lover, now a celebrated painter. But she has sent her young student in her place—and the student has her own agenda. The novel becomes a story of obsession, revenge, and the destruction that art can carry. Kawabata's darkest novel.

Nathan Glass, a retired insurance salesman who has moved to Brooklyn to die in peace, gradually finds himself drawn back into life through his nephew Tom, a failed academic working in a bookshop, and a series of warm, eccentric characters who make Brooklyn feel like the best possible place to rediscover the will to live.

An Andean village where three people have disappeared. A corporal and his assistant investigate: the suspects are Shining Path guerrillas, but the mystery deepens into something older and stranger—the Andean world of pishtacos (fat-extracting demons) and ancient violence. Vargas Llosa's novel about Peru's civil conflict as seen from the highlands.

In a small unnamed country, death simply stops. No one dies. The immediate consequences—the chaos for funeral homes, hospitals, insurance companies, and the Church—are comedic and precise. Then death resumes, but only announces her arrivals by violet letter seven days in advance. In the second half, death falls in love with a cellist who refuses to die.

Edith Howland keeps a diary. In it, her son Cliffie is successful, married, fulfilling his potential. In reality, Cliffie is a parasitic failure who has moved back into her house and contributes nothing. Her husband has left her. Her diary diverges from reality and then departs from it altogether — becoming not delusion but an act of private creation, a novel within the novel. Highsmith's most feminist work and one of her most devastating.

Elizabeth Costello is an elderly Australian novelist who travels to give lectures—on animal rights, on evil, on the existence of the good—and returns home to her son's discomfort. The novel is a series of lectures that Coetzee himself gave, presented as fiction; the distinction between author and character is deliberately uncertain.

An unnamed man is buried. The novel is the story of his life told backward from that grave — marriages, affairs, children, his body's progressive failures, the operations that punctuate his later years. Roth's meditation on mortality is his most compressed and perhaps most personal later novel.

Millions of monarch butterflies, blown off their migration route by climate disruption, settle in a Tennessee sheep farmer's pasture — and Dellarobia Turnbow, trapped in a stalled life, finds her world transformed.

Set in Crete during the late 19th-century struggle for independence from Ottoman rule, the novel follows Captain Michalis — a man of elemental passions — as he leads his people in revolt.

Eugene Henderson — a huge, rich, impossible Connecticut pig farmer with a voice in his head that insists 'I want, I want' — abandons everything and travels to Africa, where he becomes entangled with two tribes and discovers something about what he wants.

Nathan Zuckerman hears the story of Ira Ringold — a Newark ironworker turned radio actor who became a Communist in the 1940s and was destroyed by McCarthyism, betrayed by his wife, the actress Eve Frame, who wrote a memoir exposing him. The second novel of Roth's American Trilogy.

Adam Walker, a Columbia student in 1967, meets the charismatic Rudolf Born at a party — and a single violent act, witnessed and then reported with growing unreliability across four different narrative perspectives, shapes the rest of his life.

In 1914, a Suffolk fishing village. Thomas Maggs, thirteen, befriends an artist named Mr Mac — the Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who spent his final years painting in the Suffolk village of Walberswick.

Walt, a nine-year-old orphan on the streets of St. Louis in 1927, is taken in by the mysterious Master Yehudi who spends two years teaching him to levitate — and the novel follows Walt's career as a performer across the turbulent American decades from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Bri, sixteen, is the daughter of a legendary rapper who died before he made it. She wants to be the greatest rapper of all time — and writes a song that goes viral for all the wrong reasons.

Sidney Orr, recovering from a serious illness, buys a blue Portuguese notebook in Brooklyn and begins writing a story inside it — a story that begins to take on its own momentum, drawing him into questions about fate, authorship, and the reality of the fictional worlds writers create.

Philip Perlmann, a celebrated linguist, arrives at a conference in a Ligurian village to deliver a paper — but has nothing to say. As the deadline approaches, his paralysis deepens into a desperate plan that puts everything at risk.

The second South American novel — a professor of philosophy in a Colombian city writes letters to the newspaper denouncing the drug cartels, and falls in love, as the coca lords begin to notice him.

A young woman from rural Iceland comes to Reykjavik to work as a maid and learn to play the harmonium. She discovers that Iceland is selling its sovereignty to NATO—her employer is among the politicians profiting from the deal. Laxness's most politically direct novel, written in 1948 as a protest against Iceland's military agreements.

Olive Chancellor, a Boston reformer and feminist, discovers the young Verena Tarrant, whose natural gift for public speaking makes her ideal for the women's suffrage cause. Olive's relationship with Verena is complicated by the arrival of her Southern cousin Basil Ransom, who wants to marry Verena and remove her from public life.

In early 20th-century Illinois, a man named John Ashley is convicted of murder and escapes, leaving his family behind. A multigenerational saga about two American families and the question of what it means to be a good person.

A magical flounder advises men throughout German history—from the Neolithic to the 1970s. Now the flounder has been caught and is being tried by a feminist tribunal. Meanwhile, a narrator who has been alive throughout all of human history recounts his relationship with nine cooks across three millennia. Grass's most formally extravagant novel.

Josef Bloch, a former goalkeeper, wanders Vienna after being fired. He picks up a woman and, for no reason he can articulate, kills her. Then he flees to a border town and watches a football match. Handke's first novel—and Wim Wenders made it into a film—is an existential thriller about the breakdown of linguistic meaning.

A novel in documents — letters, journals, and dispatches — reconstructing the final months of Julius Caesar's life, from his point of view and those of everyone around him.