Best Literary Fiction Books

Fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon watches from her personal heaven as her family grieves her murder and her killer walks free among them.

A struggling novelist steals a dead student's book idea — a plot so good it guarantees a bestseller — only to find that someone knows exactly what he did.

A South Korean woman's decision to stop eating meat triggers a crisis that ripples through her family, her marriage, and her sense of self.

Eva Khatchadourian writes letters to her estranged husband in the aftermath of their son Kevin's school massacre, examining her own culpability and the nature of maternal ambivalence.

Before Dorothy dropped in, the Wicked Witch of the West had a life. This is her story — a retelling of The Wizard of Oz from the perspective of Elphaba, a misunderstood girl whose emerald skin and sharp intelligence make her an outsider from birth.

A white female author steals the unfinished manuscript of her Chinese-American friend who has just died, publishes it as her own, and watches her carefully constructed lies unravel as the internet closes in.

A meditation on travel, the human body, and the nature of movement, woven from fragments: a narrator's airport observations, Chopin's preserved heart, an anatomist's guide to plastination, a woman who disappears.

Two grieving brothers — chess prodigy Peter and older lawyer Ivan — navigate love, loss, and each other in the aftermath of their father's death.

On the night of Willie Lincoln's death in 1862, Abraham Lincoln visits his son's crypt as the dead in the Bardo surrounding it attempt to guide the boy to his next passage.

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.

The aging Lambert parents try to assemble their three adult children for one last family Christmas as Alzheimer's, infidelity, and financial ruin cascade through each of their lives.

Cecilia Fitzpatrick discovers a sealed letter from her husband marked 'To be opened only in the event of my death.' When she opens it while he is still alive, the secret inside unravels her marriage and draws in two other women — each carrying their own grief and betrayal — across a tightly-knit Sydney suburb.

Quentin Coldwater is admitted to Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, only to discover that mastering real magic does nothing to cure the depression and aimlessness he hoped it would fix — and that when Fillory, the Narnia-like world from his childhood books, turns out to be real, getting there exacts a price the fantasy never warned him about.

Henry DeTamble has a genetic condition that causes him to involuntarily time travel, always to times and places connected to his own life — including the childhood of the woman he will one day marry.

The twelfth expedition into the mysterious Area X sends four unnamed women scientists into an environment that defies biological and physical understanding.

The daughters of King Minos — Ariadne, who saves Theseus from the Labyrinth only to be abandoned, and Phaedra, who inherits the consequences — reclaim two lives silenced at the edges of the Theseus myth.

Tom Hazard was born in 1581 and ages so slowly he has lived through Shakespeare's London, Captain Cook's voyages, and 1920s Paris — now working as a history teacher in present-day London while belonging to a secret society that forbids its members from falling in love.

A successful New York woman's carefully constructed life begins to unravel as dark secrets from her teenage years resurface.

Mae Holland lands her dream job at the Circle — a technology company that has combined Google, Facebook, and Apple into one dominant platform — and becomes a true believer as the company pushes toward universal transparency and the erosion of all private life.

Six people at a backyard barbecue. Something happened. The novel spends its first half not telling you what, building the mundane detail of three couples' intertwined friendships, then reveals the event and its aftermath.

Three brothers — the sensualist Dmitri, the rationalist Ivan, and the saintly Alyosha — are bound together by the murder of their corrupt father. Dostoevsky's final and greatest novel asks the hardest question: if God does not exist, is everything permitted?

Jay Gatsby's lavish parties, his green light across the bay, and his impossible dream of recapturing the past define Fitzgerald's short, perfect novel about the American Dream's fatal beauty — the defining American novel of the twentieth century.

Dorian Gray has his portrait painted and makes a Faustian bargain: the portrait will age while he remains young and beautiful. Wilde's only novel is simultaneously a gothic horror story, a philosophical fable about hedonism and conscience, and a scandalous document of fin-de-siecle aestheticism.

Five characters across three time periods — fifteenth-century Constantinople, contemporary Idaho, and a generation ship in the distant future — are connected by a single ancient Greek manuscript. A meditation on why stories matter.