Best Contemporary Fiction Books

A PhD student in biology impulsively kisses a notoriously intimidating professor to convince her friend she has moved on, and the resulting fake-dating arrangement becomes something neither of them expected.

A research scientist asks her infuriating American colleague to pose as her boyfriend at her sister's wedding in Spain — and falls for him somewhere over the Atlantic.

A sweet, optimistic photography student is placed in the care of her brother's best friend — a cold, dangerous man with secrets who finds her impossible to ignore.

A married couple whose relationship has been hollowed out by infertility struggles must decide whether their love is strong enough to survive the life they never planned.

A young woman takes a job at an artist's studio and falls for the painter, not knowing that her anonymous confessions have been inspiring his artwork all along.

A financial journalist with catastrophic spending habits attempts to manage her mounting debts while inadvertently becoming a personal finance media sensation.

An engaged couple who secretly broke up months ago must pretend to still be together during one last summer trip with their closest friends.

On a delayed flight, an ordinary woman walks the aisle and calmly tells each passenger their age and cause of death. When the predictions start coming true, a planeload of strangers must reckon with fate, free will, and fear.

A woman who remarried after her husband was presumed dead in a helicopter crash is forced to reckon with her past and future when her first husband is found alive.

A grieving widow who cleans an aquarium at night forms an unlikely friendship with Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus, as the two of them quietly unravel the thirty-year-old mystery of her missing son.

When two very different women accidentally swap gym bags, beleaguered Sam ends up with a pair of designer red crocodile heels — and a borrowed confidence that begins to change her life, while their tangled fortunes collide in surprising ways.

The only two people unaffected by food poisoning at a wedding are the maid of honor and best man — who despise each other — and they end up taking the honeymoon trip to Maui alone together.

The first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's epic six-book autobiographical cycle My Struggle. Moving between childhood, adolescence, and the bleak aftermath of his father's death, Knausgaard turns the raw material of his own ordinary life into an addictive, searingly honest meditation on memory, family, and grief.

A powerful, dual-narrated YA novel about a police beating and its aftermath. Rashad, a Black teenager, is brutalized by a white officer who wrongly assumes he is shoplifting; Quinn, a white classmate, witnesses it. Told in their alternating voices, the novel traces how one act of violence forces a community to choose where it stands.

Nariman Vakeel, an elderly Parsi professor with Parkinson's disease, is moved from his stepchildren's large apartment to his daughter's small one — a shift that tests every relationship in the family and exposes the accumulated debts and resentments of decades.

Julia Reyes is not the perfect Mexican daughter her parents wanted — she wants to go to college in New York, she reads too much, she speaks her mind. After her seemingly perfect sister Olga dies suddenly, Julia discovers secrets that upend everything she thought she knew about her family.

An Irish family — parents, teenage daughter, and young son — each narrate their version of the secrets and crises that are simultaneously destroying and revealing them.

A rebellious teenager falls for the quiet minister's daughter in a small North Carolina town — and discovers what it truly means to love someone, and what it costs.

David Winkler, a hydrologist who has prophetic dreams, flees his family to prevent a drowning he has dreamed — and spends twenty-five years unable to return. Doerr's debut novel shows the same qualities as his later work: attention to natural science, prose of careful beauty, and concern with memory and guilt.

Nic Stone's hard-hitting debut. Justyce McAllister, a top Black student bound for the Ivy League, is racially profiled and handcuffed, then later caught in a deadly confrontation with an off-duty officer. Writing letters to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he struggles to make sense of racism, justice, and his own future.

During the sweltering London summer of 1976, Robert Riordan walks out to buy a newspaper and disappears — prompting his wife and three adult children to converge on the family home and confront the secrets they have all been keeping.

August moves to New York and meets Jane on the Q train — a punk girl stuck in 1977 who should not exist in 2020. Impossible and inexplicable, Jane is somehow trapped in a moment in time, and August is the only one who can see her. A queer love story about memory, identity, and what we're willing to change to keep something worth keeping.

Ibi Zoboi's lyrical, National Book Award–finalist debut. Fabiola Toussaint arrives from Haiti to join her cousins in Detroit, only to have her mother detained by immigration. Alone in a harsh new world, and guided by the spirits of Haitian Vodou, she must navigate love, loyalty, and an impossible choice.

John Lanchester's sweeping social novel of London at the height of the financial crisis. On a single gentrifying street, Pepys Road, a banker, a Senegalese footballer, a Pakistani shopkeeper, a dying widow and others receive anonymous postcards reading 'We Want What You Have.'