Best Literary Fiction Books

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced to house arrest for life in Moscow's Metropol Hotel — and over three decades, he discovers that one can build an extraordinary existence within any set of constraints.

Two Afghan women from different generations are bound together by the brutal circumstances of their marriages and the friendship that becomes their only source of survival.

A blind French girl and a German orphan boy, connected by a radio broadcast, move toward each other across the chaos of occupied France in the final days of World War II.

Two half-sisters in eighteenth-century Ghana begin lineages that diverge across two continents and three hundred years, one through slavery in America, one through colonial and postcolonial Ghana.

Following four generations of a Korean family from Japanese-occupied Korea to Osaka's Korean minority community, Pachinko is an epic about survival, identity, and the persistence of discrimination.

Set in Nazi Germany, a young girl's love of words and storytelling sustains her through air raids, poverty, and death — narrated by Death itself.

A multigenerational saga spanning seventy years of a South Indian Christian family whose members drown in every generation, told against the backdrop of colonial and postcolonial India.

Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to find he has been transformed into a giant insect — and the story focuses less on the transformation than on his family's response to it.

A plague descends on the Algerian city of Oran, and Dr. Bernard Rieux leads the medical response — in a novel that is simultaneously a chronicle of epidemic and an allegory for Nazi occupation.

In postwar Barcelona, a young boy discovers a mysterious novel by a nearly forgotten author, and his obsession with the book's creator leads him deep into a dark labyrinth of secrets, loves, and betrayals.

Frances 'Frankie' McGrath enlists as an army nurse in Vietnam after her brother deploys — and returns to an America that doesn't acknowledge what women did or suffered in the war.

A grumpy, recently widowed Swedish man who has given up on life encounters a series of intrusive neighbors who accidentally give him reasons to stay.

John Wheelwright narrates his extraordinary friendship with Owen Meany — a tiny, certain-voiced boy who believes he is God's instrument — and the event that will prove him right.

The daughter of Helios discovers within herself the power of witchcraft and spends millennia on her island exile developing her craft and encountering the heroes and monsters of Greek myth.

A reimagining of the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet and its impact on the women of his household, told through Agnes (Anne Hathaway) and the loss that may have inspired Hamlet.

A retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man, revealing what Twain's classic looks like when its silent center finally speaks.

A Black woman in 1970s California is repeatedly pulled back in time to antebellum Maryland, where she must keep a white slaveholder alive to ensure her own existence.

A brilliant chemist in 1960s California is sidelined by sexism and single motherhood until she accidentally becomes the host of a cooking show — and treats it as applied chemistry and women's liberation.

A group of British schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited island organise themselves — and gradually descend from democratic order to murderous tribalism.

In the theocratic Republic of Gilead, women have been stripped of all rights and assigned to roles based on their fertility, one of whom narrates her life as a state-assigned Handmaid.

Four generations of the Trueba family navigate love, power, magic, and political upheaval in an unnamed Latin American country, culminating in the military coup that destroys what they have built.

A privileged Afghan boy's act of betrayal against his loyal servant's son haunts him across decades and continents, from Kabul to California and back.

A California scholarship student at a Vermont college is drawn into a group of elite Greek students who have committed a murder — the beginning of something far worse.

Two childhood friends become collaborators in an unlikely video game company that spans three decades and raises every question a creative partnership can ask about love, ambition, and what we make and why.