Best Literary Fiction Books

Six astronauts aboard the International Space Station complete sixteen orbits of Earth in a single day, confronting mortality, beauty, and what it means to be human.

A boy survives a museum bombing that kills his mother and escapes with a small Dutch painting — a theft that shapes his entire life across two decades.

A woman on the verge of death discovers a library between life and death where each book represents a different version of her life she could have lived.

The first of Alexander McCall Smith's beloved series. In Botswana, the warm and wise Precious Ramotswe opens the country's first female-run detective agency, solving small mysteries and large human problems with common sense, kindness, and a deep love of her homeland.

Bernhard Schlink's international bestseller. In postwar Germany, a teenage boy has an affair with an older woman who abruptly disappears — only to reappear years later in a courtroom, on trial for Nazi war crimes, forcing him to confront guilt, complicity, and the generation that came after.

A communist spy embedded in the South Vietnamese army narrates his journey from the fall of Saigon through Los Angeles exile to reeducation camp, examining what it means to be perpetually between worlds.

Set fifteen years after The Handmaid's Tale, three women's testimonies reveal how Gilead began to crumble from within, led by the most unlikely of architects.

A collective autobiography of twentieth-century France, told through the pronoun 'one' rather than 'I,' assembling a life from photographs, memories, and the shared experience of an entire generation.

A Ghanaian-American neuroscience PhD student at Stanford studies the science of addiction and depression while caring for her catatonic mother and processing the loss of her brother to an opioid overdose.

Four interlocking narratives circle the same story of a Gilded Age financier and his wife, each version revealing how wealth constructs, revises, and suppresses the truth.

Two North London families — one Bangladeshi, one English — collide across generations in a novel about race, identity, history, and the inheritance that binds us.

A multigenerational story spanning 60 years and several continents, beginning with a poor Afghan family's decision to give away a daughter and rippling outward through the lives of those touched by that act of sacrifice. Hosseini's most structurally ambitious novel.

An Artificial Friend named Klara, powered by sunlight and possessed of extraordinary observational gifts, narrates her life alongside a sickly teenage girl and her mother in a near-future America.

Two Irish teenagers, a popular athlete and an awkward intellectual, begin an unlikely relationship that reshapes both of them across years of university life.

A microbiologist in near-future Ireland watches her country slide toward authoritarian rule as her family is torn apart, in a novel that won the 2023 Booker Prize.

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

Paula McLain's bestselling novel imagines the marriage of Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, in 1920s Paris. Narrated by Hadley, it portrays their love, the dazzling expatriate world of the Lost Generation, and the slow unraveling of a marriage in the shadow of genius.

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.