Best Literary Fiction Books

Based on the life of Erdrich's grandfather Patrick Gourneau, a Chippewa tribal council chairman who organised against House Concurrent Resolution 108 in 1953 — the legislation that would have terminated federal recognition of Native American tribes. Told alongside the story of Patrice, a young Turtle Mountain woman.

Mexico in the 1930s: religion has been outlawed, priests are hunted, and the last priest in a southern state is a wanted man. He is also a drunkard who has fathered a child and abandoned his vows. Pursued by a mestizo informer and a dedicated police lieutenant, he continues to administer sacraments he believes himself unworthy to give. Greene's greatest theological novel.

Vietnam, 1952. Thomas Fowler, a world-weary British journalist, watches as Alden Pyle, a young idealistic American CIA operative, arrives in Saigon with theories about a Third Force. Their rivalry over a Vietnamese woman, Phuong, becomes inseparable from the political catastrophe Pyle helps to engineer. Greene's prescient masterpiece about American innocence and its costs.

George Smiley, retired from British intelligence, is brought back to investigate a Soviet mole at the top of the Circus — the MI6 analogue. The investigation requires him to reconstruct events across a decade and penetrate the loyalties of men he has known his whole career. The first Smiley novel of the Karla trilogy.

Mohun Biswas—born inauspiciously, married into the large and overbearing Tulsi family, and destined to spend his life struggling against dependence—spends forty-six years in Trinidad attempting to own a house of his own. Naipaul's great novel transforms this modest quest into an epic of postcolonial identity, Hindu tradition, colonial modernity, and the universal need for self-determination.

An unexplained epidemic of blindness sweeps through an unnamed city, and those afflicted are quarantined in a former asylum under military guard. One woman—the doctor's wife—alone can see, and she guides a small group through the collapse of all social order in a world suddenly without sight.

Monterey, California, during the Depression: the Palace Flophouse, the Bear Flag Restaurant (a brothel), the marine biologist Doc (based on Steinbeck's friend Ed Ricketts), and the assorted drifters, bums, and working people who plan a surprise party for Doc. Steinbeck's most affectionate novel.

Munro's final collection—she announced her retirement from writing shortly after publication—contains fourteen stories, including four autobiographical pieces at the end ('not quite stories,' she calls them) about her Ontario girlhood and her relationship with her mother. The title story ends the collection with one of her most devastating final images.

Twelve interconnected characters — most of them Black British women — navigate love, work, identity, and belonging across several decades and social positions, from a theatre director's opening night to a ninety-three-year-old farmer in County Durham, in Evaristo's signature flowing prose-poetry.

Lemuel Gulliver travels to four extraordinary lands — Lilliput (tiny people), Brobdingnag (giants), Laputa (flying island of abstracted philosophers), and the country of the Houyhnhnms (rational horses served by bestial humans). Each voyage is a systematic satirical assault on something Swift found contemptible in early eighteenth-century Europe.

Rob Fleming owns Championship Vinyl, a record shop in Holloway, North London. His girlfriend Laura has just left him. He compiles top five lists compulsively — top five break-ups, top five records to play on a Monday morning — and eventually decides to investigate his past relationships to understand what is wrong with him. Hornby's debut novel and the defining book about men who use pop culture to avoid growing up.

Albany, 1938. Francis Phelan is a bum, an alcoholic, a man who dropped his infant son on the kitchen floor and could not live with it. He was also a professional baseball player and is haunted, literally, by the people he has killed. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize winner is the third of the Albany Cycle — a hallucinatory, lyrical, deeply American novel about guilt, grace, and the impossibility of going home.

Del Jordan grows up in the small Ontario town of Jubilee—between the respectable town and the rougher country her family comes from—discovering sex, religion, ambition, and the limits of small-town life in a linked series of stories that constitute Munro's only novel. The essential Munro.

A medieval monastery: Narcissus the ascetic scholar and Goldmund the passionate wanderer are the closest of friends. Goldmund leaves the cloister to seek the Mother, art, love, and experience. Narcissus stays and seeks God through the mind. When they meet again, each has found what the other never will—and both understand what they sacrificed.

Frank and April Wheeler have convinced themselves they are different from their suburban Connecticut neighbours — more intelligent, more alive, too good for the lives they are living. April proposes they move to Paris. Frank agrees. The plan unravels. Yates's debut novel is the most precise and merciless portrait of postwar American suburban conformity ever written.

Eight stories — three of them following the same woman across decades — about women who attempt to escape: from marriages, from pasts, from the limitations of the lives available to them in rural Ontario, and the unexpected ways those attempts succeed and fail.

In 14th-century Barcelona's Ribera neighbourhood, a serf's son rises from bondage to become a respected stoneworker and bastaix — a carrier of stones for the construction of the great Gothic church of Santa Maria del Mar.

Cora, a slave on a Georgia plantation, escapes on a literal underground railroad — a secret network of actual trains and tunnels — and is hunted across an alternate-history antebellum America. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.

Seventeen minimalist short stories of working-class American life: waitresses, mechanics, salesmen, the recently divorced and the chronically unemployed. Carver's people drink too much, talk around what they mean, and find that love and damage are often the same thing. The landmark collection that defined American minimalism and influenced a generation of writers.

Thomas Cromwell rises from a blacksmith's son to become Henry VIII's chief minister, navigating court intrigue, the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, and the king's desire for Anne Boleyn. Winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Salim, a Muslim of Indian descent from the East African coast, moves inland to run a shop at a bend in a great river in an unnamed post-independence African country. As the Big Man's regime lurches between modernization and authoritarianism, between ideology and violence, Salim's world becomes a study in the instability of everything—business, friendship, love, and selfhood—in a postcolonial state.

The attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Kingston, Jamaica in December 1976 is the still point around which this vast, polyphonic novel turns — following gang members, CIA operatives, journalists, and ghosts across three decades and multiple continents in dense, overlapping Jamaican voices.

Will Freeman is 36, wealthy from his father's royalties, and has constructed a life entirely free of obligation or development. He invents a fictional son, Ned, in order to meet single mothers at SPAT (Single Parents Alone Together). Through this deception he meets Marcus, a twelve-year-old who is relentlessly uncool and whose mother is suicidally depressed. Their unlikely friendship changes both of them.

An older Polish woman who teaches English, translates Blake, and keeps astrological charts becomes the prime suspect when hunters in her village start dying in mysterious circumstances. A murder mystery narrated by a woman who believes animals are taking revenge. One of the most surprising and original novels of recent decades.