Best Literary Fiction Books

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?

The final volume of In Search of Lost Time returns to the narrator's childhood world — now transformed by war and age — and arrives at the great epiphany: the experience of involuntary memory that he finally understands as the material of which his novel must be made.

Shai is the greatest Forger in the world — able to rewrite the history of objects and grant them new properties. Caught attempting to steal the Moon Scepter, she is given an impossible ultimatum: secretly forge a new soul for the Emperor, who was left brain-dead after an assassination attempt, before the political deadline expires.

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.

The aging writer Gustav von Aschenbach travels to Venice for rest and becomes obsessed with a beautiful Polish boy, unable to leave even as cholera spreads through the city — Mann's most concentrated masterpiece.

Baldwin's first and most autobiographical novel follows fourteen-year-old John Grimes on his birthday in 1935 Harlem, moving between his stepfather's fierce Pentecostal faith and the sins and suffering that faith is meant to redeem. The novel interweaves three generations of a Black family in the American South and Harlem in prose of extraordinary lyrical power.

The essential Borges collection for English readers: twenty-three stories and ten essays, including 'The Garden of Forking Paths,' 'Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote,' 'The Library of Babel,' 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,' and 'The Lottery in Babylon.'

Saunders's most celebrated story collection brings together ten pieces including the title story — a dying man and a boy converge on an icy pond — and 'Escape from Spiderhead.' Winner of the Story Prize, called 'the best book you'll read this year' by the New York Times. The best introduction to what Saunders does: satirical surfaces, genuine moral feeling, linguistic invention that earns its sentiment.

When Alice's grandmother, Babcia, has a stroke and starts whispering names that no one recognises, Alice travels to Poland to uncover the truth. Alternating with the story of a young woman in Nazi-occupied Poland who made impossible choices to protect those she loved.

DeLillo's masterwork begins with a legendary 1951 baseball game between the Giants and the Dodgers — the 'shot heard round the world' — and traces the fate of the ball hit for the home run through fifty years of American history: the Cold War, nuclear anxiety, the waste stream, art, crime, and the interconnected lives of ordinary Americans. It is the great American novel of the second half of the twentieth century.