Best Literary Fiction Books

In a Parisian boarding house, the ambitious young Eugène de Rastignac encounters two extremes: old Goriot, who has sacrificed everything for daughters who abandon him, and the criminal Vautrin, who offers a ruthless shortcut to success. The central novel of the Comédie humaine and Balzac's most concentrated study of money and society.

A wealthy dilettante travels periodically to a hot-spring resort in snow country and carries on an affair with Komako, a young geisha. The novel accumulates in vignettes rather than plot, capturing the quality of light on snow, the sound of a shamisen, the impossibility of knowing another person. Kawabata's most celebrated work.

A group of pilgrims travelling to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury agree to tell stories to pass the time. Each tale reflects its teller — the Knight's romance, the Miller's bawdy fabliau, the Wife of Bath's self-portrait, the Pardoner's moral tale told by an immoral man. The foundational work of English literature.

London, the Blitz. Writer Maurice Bendrix begins an affair with Sarah Miles, wife of a civil servant. When Sarah suddenly ends the affair without explanation, Bendrix's jealousy drives him to hire a detective. What he discovers is not another lover but a bargain Sarah made with God. Greene's most personal novel: faith, jealousy, and the possibility of grace.

1949. A group of Soviet scientists and engineers—political prisoners with special technical skills—are housed in a sharashka (a prison research institute), the first circle of Dante's Inferno where the least tortured souls reside. Stalin wants them to build a voice-recognition device to identify phone calls. Three days over Christmas. Solzhenitsyn's most politically comprehensive novel.

Found in the wreckage of the car that killed Camus in 1960, this unfinished novel is his most personal: the story of Jacques Cormery (Camus himself) growing up in poverty in Algeria, with a deaf illiterate mother, searching for his father who died in WWI before Jacques was one year old. Camus's lost masterpiece.

Nick Guest, a gay Oxford graduate, lodges with the politically connected Fedden family in Notting Hill from 1983 to 1987 — the years of Thatcher's ascendancy, the AIDS crisis, and the cocaine boom. The novel is about beauty, class, and the illusion of belonging.

Katharina Blum spends one night with a man who turns out to be wanted by police. A tabloid newspaper begins destroying her reputation. At the end of the week, she shoots the journalist responsible. Böll's most pointed political satire—and a story of a woman driven to murder by systematic character assassination.

Five years in the life of Henry James, 1895 to 1900 — following the public failure of his play Guy Domville, his retreat to Lamb House in Rye, and his composition of the late novels. His suppressed homosexuality, his relationships with his family, his aesthetic choices, and the specific quality of his loneliness.

The only complete ancient Greek trilogy to survive — Agamemnon returns from Troy to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra; their son Orestes kills Clytemnestra in revenge; the Furies pursue Orestes until Athena establishes a jury court to try him. The founding myth of justice.

A Nobel-winning scientist convicted of sexual abuse writes his memoir from prison, describing the 1950 expedition that discovered a remote jungle tribe — and a population of apparently immortal humans.

Alternative history: Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in the 1940 presidential election and signs a neutrality pact with Hitler. Told from the perspective of young Philip Roth's Jewish family in Newark as antisemitism becomes state-adjacent policy in America.

Miss Jean Brodie, teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh in the 1930s, dedicates herself to educating her chosen set of girls for life rather than for exams. She is charismatic, dangerous, and will be betrayed. Spark's masterpiece in 137 pages.

Julien Sorel, brilliant son of a provincial carpenter, rises through seduction, hypocrisy, and calculation — as tutor in the Rênal household, then as secretary to a Parisian aristocrat. His relationship with two women (Mme de Rênal and the volatile Mathilde de la Mole) ultimately destroys him.

In 1921, Protestant Anglo-Irish landowners prepare to leave Ireland for England. Eight-year-old Lucy Gault runs away to prevent them leaving; she is assumed drowned; her parents depart in grief. She grows up alone in the empty house. The novel follows the consequences across sixty years.

Five Lisbon sisters in a Michigan suburb in the 1970s. Told from the collective perspective of neighbourhood boys who were obsessed with the sisters — narrated twenty years after the girls all killed themselves in one calendar year. A mystery about the inner lives of girls the boys never understood and never will.

The Mulvaney family of upstate New York — prosperous, beloved, the kind of family other families point to — disintegrates after Marianne, the eldest daughter, is raped at her high school prom. Her rapist faces no consequences. Her family falls apart.

Mungo Hamilton, fifteen, grows up in a Glasgow housing estate in the early 1990s — caught between his Protestant gang community and a secret relationship with a Catholic boy named James.

An intellectual writer goes to Crete to manage a mine and encounters Zorba — a broad-chested, life-devouring man who teaches him what it means to live fully and without fear.

Marian Forrester, wife of a retired railroad pioneer in Nebraska, is observed across years by Niel Herbert — first as a boy who worships her, later as a young man who watches her adapt to reduced circumstances after her husband's financial ruin. A novel about idealism and its loss.

A man walks into the forest and loses his way — a short prose work that moves between the literal and the spiritual as he encounters a presence in the darkness and finds his way back.

An American photographer in France narrates — and partly invents — the affair between Philip Dean, a young American, and Anne-Marie Costallat, a French shop girl. The narrator is unreliable; the affair may be partly or wholly imagined. The prose is among the most beautiful in American fiction.

Brighton, the 1930s. Pinkie Brown is a seventeen-year-old gang leader, a Catholic who believes in damnation and acts accordingly. After a murder, he marries Rose, a waitress who could testify against him, intending to kill her after she can no longer be called as a witness. Ida Arnold, a cheerful hedonist, pursues him. Greene's darkest and most theologically exact novel.

Rosa Burger is the daughter of Lionel Burger, a white South African Communist who died in prison for the anti-apartheid cause. What does it mean to be a martyr's daughter? To inherit a political identity you did not choose? To leave, as Rosa does, for Europe? Gordimer's most personal and most psychological novel, banned in South Africa upon publication.