Best Literary Fiction Books

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.

The long-awaited sequel to Brooklyn returns to Eilis Lacey — now married, settled in Long Island, and confronted with an Italian woman bearing news about her husband that will force Eilis to make the most consequential choice of her life. And Ireland is waiting.

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.

The most hated woman in Three Pines is found dead at the village curling match, electrocuted in a sealed outdoor space — and Chief Inspector Gamache discovers that almost everyone had reason to want her dead.

Four college friends build lives in New York City over decades, but the story centers on Jude St. Francis, whose horrific childhood secrets gradually emerge.

A young Nigerian woman navigates love, identity, and race in America and Britain before returning to Lagos, where she must reconcile who she has become with who she was.

In the carefully planned suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio, the arrival of an artist and her daughter ignites tensions about motherhood, race, class, and the rules that hold carefully ordered lives together.

Elena Greco narrates her lifelong friendship with the brilliant, volatile Lila Cerullo, beginning in their postwar Naples neighborhood and following both girls through childhood and into their teenage years.

Set in 1980s Glasgow during Thatcherite deindustrialisation, Shuggie Bain follows a devoted young boy's desperate love for his alcoholic mother.

In the broiling summer of 1974, as Boston erupts over court-ordered busing, hard-edged Southie mother Mary Pat Fennessy goes searching for her missing teenage daughter — a search that drags her into the city's racial fault lines and the secrets of her own neighborhood.

Milkman Dead journeys from his prosperous Michigan family into the American South in search of gold and discovers instead his family's history, his people's mythology, and the meaning of flight.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec investigates the suspicious death of a beloved woman in the idyllic village of Three Pines.

Esther Greenwood, a brilliant college student in 1950s New York, descends into mental illness and attempted suicide in Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiographical masterpiece.

A Texas farm woman faces an impossible choice during the Great Depression's Dust Bowl: stay on the land that is killing them or take her children to California's labor camps.

In 1974, a Vietnam vet moves his family to remote Alaska wilderness, where the land's magnificent isolation amplifies his PTSD and the family's survival depends on his wife and daughter's strength.

Stevens, an aging English butler, takes a motoring trip through the English countryside and reflects on a lifetime of dedicated service — and the opportunities for love and meaning he declined in its name.

Patroclus, the unassuming son of a minor Greek king, tells the story of his life alongside Achilles — the most beautiful and most doomed of Greek heroes — and the love between them.

The second Neapolitan novel follows Lila into her disastrous marriage and Elena through her university entrance exams and early years of higher education, as their friendship navigates the widening gap of their diverging lives.

American expatriates and British socialites drink their way through Paris and Pamplona, orbiting around the love that Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley cannot consummate.