Best Literary Fiction Books

Ed Kennedy, an underage cab driver with no real ambitions, accidentally stops a bank robbery and begins receiving mysterious playing cards that send him on missions to help — and sometimes confront — strangers in his city.

The conclusion of the Lilith's Brood (Xenogenesis) trilogy. Jodahs, the first human-Oankali construct to develop into an ooloi — the alien third sex — must master terrifying new powers and find acceptance, completing Butler's meditation on humanity, transformation, and the making of a new species.

Jack Boughton and Della Miles, a Black schoolteacher, meet in St. Louis in the late 1940s and fall in love in a state where their relationship is illegal.

The Loftis family of Port Warwick, Virginia, is disintegrating: the father drinks, the mother is cold, the beautiful daughter Peyton has been driven mad by the love and hatred of both parents. Styron's first novel — written in the shadow of Faulkner but not trapped by it — is the most accomplished American debut novel of the postwar period, and its account of Peyton's stream-of-consciousness interior monologue rivals the master's best.

The conclusion of the MaddAddam Trilogy — survivors of the waterless flood, including the Crakers (Crake's genetically engineered humans), form an uneasy community. Toby must tell the Crakers stories about the old world as they all try to build something new.

Jim Burden looks back on the Bohemian immigrant girl who defined his Nebraska childhood and shaped everything he has become.

Three mail pilots fly dangerous night routes over South America while their director, Rivière, drives them beyond human limits in service of a vision of what aviation can be — a meditation on duty, mortality, and the cost of achievement.

An elderly colonel waits, every week, for a pension that has been promised but never arrives. He has waited for fifteen years. His wife is ill, their money is nearly gone, and their only valuable possession is a fighting rooster that may be their last chance at financial survival. García Márquez's most restrained and most heartbreaking novella.

Timofey Pnin, a Russian émigré professor at a small American college, navigates American life with earnest incomprehension and frequent misfortune — Nabokov's most warm and compassionate novel.

Tayeb Salih's landmark Sudanese novel, often called the finest Arabic novel of the twentieth century. A young man returns from England to his village on the Nile and becomes obsessed with the enigmatic Mustafa Sa'eed, whose violent history in colonial London mirrors and shadows his own.

Narrated by Stingo, a young Southern writer who moves to Brooklyn in 1947, Sophie's Choice tells the story of his friendship with Sophie Zawistowski — a Polish Catholic Holocaust survivor — and her volatile lover Nathan Landau, and the secret at the heart of Sophie's experience in Auschwitz.

The friendship between Nel Wright and Sula Peace, two Black women in the Bottom — a hilltop community in Ohio — over five decades, and what Sula's freedom costs both of them.

The first volume of Marcel Proust's seven-volume In Search of Lost Time, Swann's Way begins with the narrator's memory of childhood in Combray, triggered by the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, and extends into a long account of Charles Swann's consuming love for Odette de Crécy.

The conclusion of His Dark Materials — Lyra and Will descend into the land of the dead, the war against the Authority reaches its climax, and the full theological argument of the trilogy is made explicit. The first children's book to win the Whitbread Prize.

In 1920s Barcelona, struggling writer David Martín is commissioned by a mysterious publisher to write a book that will make people believe anything — and finds himself drawn into a labyrinthine conspiracy involving the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and forces he cannot understand.

An Irish family — parents, teenage daughter, and young son — each narrate their version of the secrets and crises that are simultaneously destroying and revealing them.

Seven loosely connected stories meditate on memory, forgetting, laughter, and totalitarianism — opening with a Communist official literally erased from a photograph by the regime that once celebrated him. Kundera's most formally experimental novel blurs fiction, essay, autobiography, and music theory into a structure that mirrors what it describes: the way history is rewritten, forgotten, laughed away.

Sam Hill is born with ocular albinism, giving him red eyes that make his childhood in a Catholic community of 1960s Northern California an endless trial of cruelty, faith, and unexpected friendship — and set the course of a life he must learn to claim.

The second novel of Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy. London, 1918: Billy Prior, recovered enough to return to intelligence work, is caught between his duties and his sympathies as the state turns on pacifists and homosexuals, while Dr. Rivers treats minds the war has split.

Magic is draining out of Earthsea. Wizards are forgetting their spells. Ged and the young prince Arren must sail to the farthest reaches of the world to find the source of the wound in the world — and the entity responsible for it. The concluding volume of the original Earthsea trilogy is Le Guin's meditation on death, courage, and the limits of power.

Nabokov's last Russian-language novel follows young émigré poet Fyodor in 1920s Berlin as he writes, falls in love, and constructs an audacious biography of Russian literary critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky — an account of what it means to be a Russian writer in exile.

A woman disappears from a container ship. Her half-brother tends bar at a remote hotel on Vancouver Island. A financier runs a Ponzi scheme that will destroy hundreds of lives. Mandel's companion novel to Station Eleven weaves together haunted characters across a story of fraud, ghosts, and the way money makes certain people invisible.

Richard Tull is a failed literary novelist; his best friend Gwyn Barry is a massively successful one. Their friendship — strained for years by the disparity in their careers — collapses when Richard's envy produces a campaign of sabotage as petty, unsuccessful, and undignified as Richard himself.

As Florida is progressively submerged by increasingly powerful hurricanes driven by climate change, Wren — born during a storm, named for the storm — grows up in a world in retreat, learning what persists and what must be abandoned as the state she knows slowly disappears beneath the water.