Best Literary Fiction Books

Twelve interconnected characters — most of them Black British women — navigate love, work, identity, and belonging across several decades and social positions, from a theatre director's opening night to a ninety-three-year-old farmer in County Durham, in Evaristo's signature flowing prose-poetry.

Lemuel Gulliver travels to four extraordinary lands — Lilliput (tiny people), Brobdingnag (giants), Laputa (flying island of abstracted philosophers), and the country of the Houyhnhnms (rational horses served by bestial humans). Each voyage is a systematic satirical assault on something Swift found contemptible in early eighteenth-century Europe.

Rob Fleming owns Championship Vinyl, a record shop in Holloway, North London. His girlfriend Laura has just left him. He compiles top five lists compulsively — top five break-ups, top five records to play on a Monday morning — and eventually decides to investigate his past relationships to understand what is wrong with him. Hornby's debut novel and the defining book about men who use pop culture to avoid growing up.

Albany, 1938. Francis Phelan is a bum, an alcoholic, a man who dropped his infant son on the kitchen floor and could not live with it. He was also a professional baseball player and is haunted, literally, by the people he has killed. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize winner is the third of the Albany Cycle — a hallucinatory, lyrical, deeply American novel about guilt, grace, and the impossibility of going home.

Del Jordan grows up in the small Ontario town of Jubilee—between the respectable town and the rougher country her family comes from—discovering sex, religion, ambition, and the limits of small-town life in a linked series of stories that constitute Munro's only novel. The essential Munro.

A medieval monastery: Narcissus the ascetic scholar and Goldmund the passionate wanderer are the closest of friends. Goldmund leaves the cloister to seek the Mother, art, love, and experience. Narcissus stays and seeks God through the mind. When they meet again, each has found what the other never will—and both understand what they sacrificed.

Frank and April Wheeler have convinced themselves they are different from their suburban Connecticut neighbours — more intelligent, more alive, too good for the lives they are living. April proposes they move to Paris. Frank agrees. The plan unravels. Yates's debut novel is the most precise and merciless portrait of postwar American suburban conformity ever written.

Eight stories — three of them following the same woman across decades — about women who attempt to escape: from marriages, from pasts, from the limitations of the lives available to them in rural Ontario, and the unexpected ways those attempts succeed and fail.

Seventeen minimalist short stories of working-class American life: waitresses, mechanics, salesmen, the recently divorced and the chronically unemployed. Carver's people drink too much, talk around what they mean, and find that love and damage are often the same thing. The landmark collection that defined American minimalism and influenced a generation of writers.

Salim, a Muslim of Indian descent from the East African coast, moves inland to run a shop at a bend in a great river in an unnamed post-independence African country. As the Big Man's regime lurches between modernization and authoritarianism, between ideology and violence, Salim's world becomes a study in the instability of everything—business, friendship, love, and selfhood—in a postcolonial state.

The attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Kingston, Jamaica in December 1976 is the still point around which this vast, polyphonic novel turns — following gang members, CIA operatives, journalists, and ghosts across three decades and multiple continents in dense, overlapping Jamaican voices.

Will Freeman is 36, wealthy from his father's royalties, and has constructed a life entirely free of obligation or development. He invents a fictional son, Ned, in order to meet single mothers at SPAT (Single Parents Alone Together). Through this deception he meets Marcus, a twelve-year-old who is relentlessly uncool and whose mother is suicidally depressed. Their unlikely friendship changes both of them.

An older Polish woman who teaches English, translates Blake, and keeps astrological charts becomes the prime suspect when hunters in her village start dying in mysterious circumstances. A murder mystery narrated by a woman who believes animals are taking revenge. One of the most surprising and original novels of recent decades.

Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is 46, co-owner of a Toyota dealership, a member of the country club, comfortable and bored in the Pennsylvania suburb he once tried to escape. It is 1979: the gas crisis, Carter's malaise speech, Iran. His son Nelson has come back with a pregnant girlfriend. Updike's Pulitzer Prize winner — middle-class American contentment as its own form of dissatisfaction.

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.

Macon Leary writes travel guides for people who hate to travel — guides on how to find the familiar in the foreign, how to minimise the discomfort of being elsewhere. After his son is murdered and his wife leaves, he moves back in with his eccentric siblings and their dog. The dog trainer, Muriel Pritchett, enters his life uninvited and changes it. Tyler's most beloved novel.

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.

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.'

Maggie and Ira Moran have been married for twenty-eight years. On a single day in 1988 they drive from Baltimore to a friend's funeral in Pennsylvania and back. What happens in the car, at the funeral, at an old friend's house along the way, illuminates the whole shape of their marriage — its compromises, its small deceptions, its persistent stubbornness of love. Tyler's Pulitzer Prize winner.

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.

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.