Best Literary Fiction Books

A German shepherd dog—passing from a miller's family to a German boy to Hitler himself—becomes the thread connecting three narrators' accounts of Danzig, the Nazi period, and postwar West Germany. The third and most complex volume of the Danzig Trilogy.

Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired English doctor, is obsessed with Gustave Flaubert — particularly with establishing which of the two stuffed parrots in French museums was actually the one that sat on his desk while he wrote Un Coeur Simple. What follows is a novel about scholarship, obsession, and the impossibility of knowing anything.

Susan Barton is a castaway who finds herself on Cruso's island (Cruso, not Crusoe). There is also Friday, whose tongue has been cut out. When rescued and returned to England, she seeks out the writer Daniel Foe (Defoe) to tell the story—but whose story is it, and can the story of Friday be told by anyone who is not Friday? Coetzee's reply to Robinson Crusoe.

Moses E. Herzog, a twice-divorced intellectual in a Chicago-adjacent breakdown, writes unsent letters to everyone — living and dead, famous and unknown — trying to make sense of what has happened to him and whether it matters.

Charlie Citrine is a successful Chicago playwright haunted by the memory of Von Humboldt Fleisher, the brilliant, doomed poet who was his mentor. While Humboldt died broke and mad in New York, Charlie faces alimony, a gangster creditor, and a beautiful younger woman—and discovers that Humboldt left him a gift from beyond the grave.

Winner of the 1971 Booker Prize, this composite novel contains three stories of displacement and freedom—a West Indian in Washington, an Indian in London, and two English expatriates driving through a newly independent African country—framed by journal entries from Naipaul's own travels. Five pieces, one argument: the freedom of displacement is always partly illusion.

Louki is a young woman who appears at the Condé, a Paris café on the Left Bank, and is loved by its regulars without being known by any of them. Four narrators attempt to reconstruct who she was after her disappearance. Modiano's most formally elegant novel—four incomplete accounts of an absence.

Toronto in the 1920s and 30s: immigrant workers build the bridges, waterworks, and tunnels of a city that will barely remember them. Patrick Lewis, a searcher who drifts between the city's construction projects and its underclass, is the novel's haunted centre.

Frank Bascombe, divorced sports journalist turned New Jersey real estate agent, spends the 4th of July weekend driving through New England with his troubled teenage son Paul. The novel is an account of middle-aged American life — its compromises, its small satisfactions, its persistent loneliness — rendered in Ford's long, meditative prose.

A civil war has ended apartheid. A white South African couple (the Smales) and their children flee Johannesburg with their Black servant July to his rural village. Now they live in his world, dependent on him, subject to his authority. Gordimer's most formally precise novel—the revolution imagined as a reversal of domestic power.

London, 1999. Nicola Six knows she is going to be murdered. She has always known it, the way she knows other things: as fact. She chooses her murderer from among the men in her orbit — Keith Talent, a professional darts player and petty criminal; Guy Clinch, a wealthy innocent. Sam Young, an American writer, narrates what he witnesses. Amis's most formally ambitious novel — noir, apocalypse, postmodernism.

A crippled man named Molloy makes his way toward his mother's house, then a detective named Moran is sent to find him — two impossible journeys narrated in prose that questions at every step whether anything it says is true.

Two sections, one life: the morning of Johannes's birth witnessed by his father Olai, and the morning of Johannes's death as he wanders his Norwegian fishing village, noticing things with preternatural clarity, not yet understanding he has died. A novella of pure presence.

Barrington Jedidiah Walker, a seventy-four-year-old Antiguan-born Hackney councillor, has been secretly in love with his lifelong best friend Morris for sixty years — a secret maintained through a performance of Caribbean patriarch masculinity and a marriage that has made his wife Carmel miserable for decades.

A group of reformatory boys is evacuated to a remote mountain village during World War II. When plague breaks out, the villagers flee and lock the boys in, leaving them to survive alone. A brief, violent, and exhilarating novel about what happens when the social order abandons the already-abandoned.

Ilya Ilyich Oblomov has not left his sofa in years. The famous first chapter follows him through the course of a single morning — visitors come, he considers getting up, does not get up. The novel follows his late attempt, under the influence of a love affair, to change, and his return to inertia.

Oscar Hopkins, a devout Anglican clergyman from Devon, and Lucinda Leplastrier, an heiress who owns a glassworks in Sydney, share a compulsive gambling habit that brings them together and ultimately drives them to bet a glass church against each other's soul on an impossible voyage through the Australian interior.

Faye travels to Athens to teach a creative writing course. She has a series of conversations — on the plane, with students, with a man she meets for dinner twice. She tells the reader almost nothing about herself directly. What emerges is a portrait in negative space: we understand who Faye is from the lives she encounters and the questions she asks.

Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, 26, was a high school basketball star in Mount Judge, Pennsylvania. Now he works demonstrating a kitchen gadget and goes home to a pregnant, alcoholic wife. One spring afternoon he gets in the car and drives south, not quite sure why. Updike's first Rabbit novel and one of the founding documents of postwar American restlessness.

Bellow's last novel is a portrait of his friend Allan Bloom (renamed Ravelstein)—a philosopher who wrote a bestseller, spent the money lavishly, and then died of AIDS. Chick, the narrator, is clearly Bellow himself. A meditation on friendship, mortality, and the specific kind of love that can exist between two men whose wives and students cannot entirely share.

In 1930s Shandong Province, a fierce and beautiful woman is taken in a palanquin to marry a leper she has never met, falls in love with her palanquin bearer, and helps lead resistance against the Japanese invasion — narrated by her grandson from a perspective that includes the dead and the supernatural.

Tommy Wilhelm, a middle-aged failure in New York, spends a single catastrophic day facing his estranged father, his failed marriage, his worthless investments, and the fraudulent Dr. Tamkin—a day that ends in one of the most devastating final scenes in American fiction.

Fragments from the private diary of Bernardo Soares, a bookkeeper in Lisbon who records his philosophical observations, his dreams, and his precise attention to the city's streets and light — assembled posthumously from Pessoa's trunk of manuscripts.

Cipriano Algor, an elderly potter, and his son-in-law discover that the vast commercial Center that dominates their world no longer wants pottery—it wants plastic replicas. As Cipriano's craft becomes obsolete, the family moves to live inside the Center, where beneath the shopping mall they discover something that rewrites everything they thought they knew about the world they inhabit.