Best Literary Fiction Books

Galip's wife Rüya disappears, along with her half-brother Celâl—Istanbul's most famous newspaper columnist. As Galip searches for them through the city's streets, tekkes, and archives, reading Celâl's old columns for clues, the line between searcher and searched-for begins to dissolve. Pamuk's most labyrinthine novel.

An elderly Briton couple journey across post-Arthurian Britain to find their son in a land afflicted by a strange mist of collective forgetfulness, eventually uncovering a buried atrocity that the forgetfulness was designed to conceal.

Harriet and David Lovatt build a perfect large family in the 1960s English countryside, filling their house with children and relatives. Then their fifth child, Ben, is born: strange, immensely strong, and not quite human. The novel tracks what happens to a family—and a marriage—when one member refuses all social and emotional norms.

Chinese peasant farmers are ordered to plant garlic by the local government, producing a glut that the government then refuses to buy. When the farmers take their protest to the county seat, the response is brutal. Told in three voices—a blind street musician, a villager in prison, and a young woman—Mo Yan's most overtly political novel.

1980s London: Alice Mellings lives in a squat with a group of leftist radicals, cleaning up after them, cooking, begging money from her bourgeois parents, keeping the house. The group is drifting toward terrorism. Lessing's most explicitly political late novel—and a devastating portrait of idealism in decay.

Lila Mae Watson is the first Black female elevator inspector in a segregated American city. When an elevator she has certified in good order falls in free-fall, she becomes a suspect in a larger conspiracy involving the city's two warring schools of elevator inspection: the Empiricists and the Intuitionists.

A group of Romanian-German university students live under the suffocating surveillance of Ceaușescu's secret police, the Securitate. As friends disappear, are recruited as informers, or die in circumstances ruled suicide, the narrator—like Müller herself—survives by clinging to language, loyalty, and an almost ferocious attention to the physical world.

Abbas, a Zanzibari man who came to England decades ago and built a family in Norwich, suffers a stroke and in its aftermath his children begin to discover that their father has been hiding a past he has never shared—a first family, an earlier life, a silence that was also a form of protection.

Bobby Western, a salvage diver in 1980s New Orleans, investigates a sunken plane where a passenger is missing from the manifest — and finds himself pursued. Alternating with Bobby's story are his dead sister Alicia's hallucinatory visions.

A special investigator is sent to a coal-mining region where there are rumours that officials are eating babies prepared as delicacies. His investigation collapses into drunkenness and corruption. Interpolated throughout are letters between 'Mo Yan' and an aspiring writer named Li Yidou, whose own stories appear in the novel. One of the most formally experimental works of Chinese fiction.

Briseis, the enslaved queen who becomes Achilles's war-prize, narrates the Trojan War from the ground level of the Greek camp, where women survive at the mercy of the men who own them.

The Pyrenees crack and the entire Iberian peninsula breaks off from Europe, drifting into the Atlantic. Five Portuguese and Spanish strangers—who each experienced a mysterious personal event just before the detachment—are drawn together as the peninsula sails toward an unknown destination. Saramago's most playful and politically charged novel.

Mary, mother of Jesus, is old and living in Ephesus, watched over by two men who want her testimony. She tells them what she saw — the wedding at Cana, the raising of Lazarus, the crucifixion — without consolation, without miracles, without the story they want. She fled the crucifixion. She does not believe her son was the son of God.

A Venetian scholar is captured by Ottoman forces in the seventeenth century and given as a slave to a Turkish man of learning who looks exactly like him. Over years of intellectual collaboration and obsessive mutual study, the two men—master and slave, East and West—begin to exchange identities.

Vietnam, 1963 to 1983. Skip Sands is a CIA officer working for his uncle, a legendary colonel running a psychological operations program called Tree of Smoke. Around him: two brothers from Arizona, a Canadian missionary, a double agent. Johnson's National Book Award winner is the major American novel about the Vietnam War.

Written in 1920–21, We follows D-503, a mathematician-engineer of the One State's Glass City where citizens are reduced to numbered ciphers under total surveillance — the novel that invented modern dystopia and quietly handed its blueprints to Orwell and Huxley.

Christopher Banks, London's most celebrated detective in the 1930s, returns to Shanghai where his parents disappeared when he was a child. As the Sino-Japanese War rages around him, his investigation into his parents' fate reveals that his entire understanding of his childhood was a kind construction rather than reality.

Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies at a Midwestern college, faces a toxic chemical disaster and an existential terror of death. DeLillo's National Book Award winner and a defining postmodern American novel.

A Swiss teacher abandons his life on impulse to follow a Portuguese philosopher's book to Lisbon, where he tries to reconstruct a life lived in the resistance against Salazar's dictatorship.

Seven short stories set across contemporary Thailand — a beach resort, a Bangkok suburb, a provincial festival, a military barracks — told from the perspectives of Thai characters navigating the friction between their country's traditions and its tourist economy.

On a Friday noon in July 1714, the finest bridge in Peru collapses and sends five travellers to their deaths. Brother Juniper, who witnesses the accident, spends the next six years investigating their lives to determine whether their deaths were divine plan or pure accident.

Three American expatriates travel through North Africa after World War II — and the desert progressively unmakes them, exposing what lies beneath their identity, their marriage, and their sense of self.

Ryder, a famous pianist, arrives in a Central European city for a concert. But the city's problems keep expanding to include him, his errands take impossible amounts of time, the streets rearrange themselves, and the people he meets keep revealing connections to his own forgotten past. Ishiguro's most formally radical novel, operating entirely in dream logic.

A five-year-old girl's-eye view of Marrakech in the early 1970s, as her unconventional mother pursues Sufi mysticism while her daughters navigate a world of souks, street life, and Moroccan school.