Best Literary Fiction Books

Jaromil is a poet from birth — his mother has decided so — and grows up to be a genuine revolutionary lyric poet who informs on his girlfriend to the secret police. Kundera's Prix Médicis-winning novel is a satire of the Romantic artist's egoism and the way revolutionary politics and artistic grandiosity feed each other.

Will, a 'coloured' South African teenager, discovers his father Sonny—a political activist—is having an affair with a white woman who works for the anti-apartheid movement. The novel is narrated by Will and is about the cost of the political life on the family that sustains it. Gordimer's most personal meditation on the activist's divided loyalties.

Nana, daughter of the Lantier-Maheu family from L'Assommoir, rises from the Parisian slums to become the most celebrated courtesan of the Second Empire. Men ruin themselves for her; she ruins them. A study of female power and its relationship to the corruption of the Bonapartist regime.

The sequel to Things Fall Apart follows Okonkwo's grandson Obi Okonkwo, who returns to Lagos after education in England, hoping to resist corruption in the colonial civil service. Achebe's mordant second novel is about the generation that inherited colonialism's aftermath — caught between their elders' world and a Western modernity that has no genuine place for them.

In a near-future America consumed by anti-Asian sentiment and a PACT law criminalising anything deemed unpatriotic, twelve-year-old Bird's mother — a poet — has disappeared. Bird sets out to find her, following a trail of clues hidden in her mother's poems. A dystopian novel about the power of stories and what parents sacrifice for their children.

Alexander Portnoy, a Jewish-American man from Newark, unburdens himself to his psychoanalyst about his overbearing mother, his Jewish guilt, his masturbation, his complicated relationships with Gentile women, and his inability to reconcile the person his community wants him to be with the person he is.

Tashi, the African woman who appeared briefly in The Color Purple, undergoes female genital mutilation as an act of cultural solidarity and spends the rest of her life dealing with the trauma, eventually killing the woman who performed the procedure. Walker's most confrontational novel — a direct political act about female genital cutting as a cultural and feminist issue.

Three interlocking stories set in the southern Appalachian mountains over one summer — a wildlife biologist tracking coyotes, an elderly farmer and his new neighbour arguing about insects, and a young widow tending her orchard.

Two stories about Seymour Glass: 'Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,' narrated by Buddy on Seymour's wedding day when he fails to appear, and 'Seymour: An Introduction,' in which Buddy tries and fails to describe his brother. The second story is a meditation on the impossibility of capturing a person in language, and a portrait of obsessive love as a form of artistic blockage.

Shipwrecked alone on a tropical island near Trinidad, Robinson Crusoe survives for twenty-eight years — building a shelter, growing food, domesticating animals, maintaining a calendar, and eventually encountering the man he calls Friday. Often called the first English novel, and the founding text of the survival narrative.

Alicia Western, Bobby's sister, checks herself into a psychiatric facility in Wisconsin in 1972. The entire novel is her dialogues with her psychiatrist: mathematics, consciousness, the nature of reality, and her decision to die.

Harry Haller, a middle-aged intellectual who believes himself to be half-man and half-wolf — the Steppenwolf — is drawn by a young woman named Hermine into a world of dance, pleasure, and eventually the surreal Magic Theatre, where he must confront the multiplicity of selves he has denied.

Three novellas bound by common themes: a child left by his parents with a group of dubious characters in suburban Paris; a writer who reconstructs the people his father knew in the Paris underworld; an attempt to recover a woman who appears and disappears across decades. Modiano's most autobiographically transparent fiction.

The conclusion of the Atlas trilogy: the Alexandrians must face the full consequences of the choices they made across the first two books, with the fate of the Society — and the world's accumulated knowledge — in the balance. Blake resolves the question of who among the six can be trusted and at what cost.

Ricardo Somocurcio, a Peruvian exile in Paris, has loved the same woman since he was fifteen—a woman who appears and disappears, reinventing herself as a Peruvian guerrilla, a Cuban revolutionary, a diplomat's wife, a gangster's moll. Each time she returns she uses him and leaves. Vargas Llosa's most Flaubert-influenced novel.

Taylor Greer leaves rural Kentucky driving west, and ends up in Tucson, Arizona, unexpectedly with a Native American toddler left in her care. She makes a life with the child, forms a family with her neighbour Mattie and Guatemalan refugee Lou Ann, and confronts what it means to be responsible for another person.

Anthony Patch, heir to a great fortune, and his beautiful wife Gloria dazzle New York society while waiting for Anthony's grandfather to die. The wait — and the drinking and the parties — destroy them both before the inheritance arrives.

A girl's impulsive act in 1984 draws her into a centuries-long conflict between two secret factions; the novel spans her entire life across six decades.

David Zimmer loses his wife and sons in a plane crash and, through grief, becomes obsessed with the silent films of Hector Mann, a forgotten comedian from the 1920s — until a letter arrives claiming that Mann is still alive.

Fiona Maye, a High Court judge in London, must rule on whether a seventeen-year-old Jehovah's Witness may refuse a life-saving blood transfusion on religious grounds. The case intersects with the collapse of her marriage.

Undine Spragg arrives in New York society from the Midwest, marriages her way through American and European aristocracy, and discards each world when it ceases to serve her. Wharton's most savage novel is a brilliant portrait of the American appetite for reinvention at any cost.

Bowles's first and most celebrated short story collection — tales of North Africa, Central America, and the American South that share a preoccupation with violence, dissolution, and the encounter between Western consciousness and alien cultures.

Seventeen short stories ranging from the title piece — in which a municipal elephant and its elderly keeper vanish without trace — to encounters with sleeping women, disintegrating marriages, and the surreal textures of ordinary Japanese life. The best single collection for encountering Murakami in concentrated form: all the themes, all the tonal shifts, all the American music, in pieces that can be read in a sitting.

Elizabeth Hunter, a dying Sydney matriarch, has had a mystical experience at the eye of a cyclone. Now her children have gathered, expecting an inheritance. The novel moves between Mrs. Hunter's deathbed present and the cyclone experience that changed her—White's meditation on revelation, mortality, and the family as a system of mutual incomprehension.