Best Literary Fiction Books

Veronika is twenty-four, beautiful, and has everything — and decides to kill herself because her life seems to be going nowhere different from where it already is. She survives, is confined to a psychiatric facility, and told she has only days to live. In the face of certain death, she begins to actually live for the first time.

A young man calling himself Victor Chmara has fled Paris to a lake town near the Swiss border, avoiding a danger he can't quite name. He falls in with a beautiful actress and her circle of summer people. Twenty years later, he reconstructs what happened that summer—and what he lost when it ended. Modiano's most romantic novel.

Vienna in the late 1950s: four young people from different classes terrorise random strangers in a park, acting out their rage against an Austria that refuses to acknowledge its Nazi past.

In Tokyo in 1984, a fitness instructor named Aomame and a maths teacher and aspiring novelist named Tengo are on parallel tracks that gradually converge. Aomame assassinates abusive men; Tengo ghost-writes a novel about a world with two moons. Both become entangled with a sinister religious cult. Murakami's most ambitious novel — nearly a thousand pages, three books, a full reimagining of what a Murakami novel can hold.

James Bray, a British colonial official who was expelled from a newly independent African country for supporting the independence movement, is invited back ten years later to advise the government. He discovers the revolutionary leaders have become the new oppressors. Gordimer's most geopolitically ambitious novel.

A California oil millionaire obsessed with immortality, his entourage, and a visiting English scholar encounter evidence that an eighteenth-century Earl found the key to extending life indefinitely — with grotesque consequences.

Stan and Joy Delaney — retired tennis coaches and parents of four adult children — seem to have the perfect marriage. Then Joy disappears, and each of her children has a theory about what happened. Told across multiple perspectives over the year before and after Joy's disappearance, the novel dissects a family's myths about itself.

Sy Baumgartner, a 71-year-old philosophy professor, has spent nine years living in the aftermath of his wife Anna's death in a swimming accident — still surrounded by her manuscripts, her presence in every corner of the house, and the ongoing conversation with her that he cannot stop having.

A novelist travels to Kyoto to hear the New Year's bell and reconnect with his former lover, now a celebrated painter. But she has sent her young student in her place—and the student has her own agenda. The novel becomes a story of obsession, revenge, and the destruction that art can carry. Kawabata's darkest novel.

Kerouac retreats to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in Big Sur to escape fame and alcohol, fails to escape either, and has a breakdown. His most autobiographically honest novel is also his darkest — the romantic road narrative collapsed into the specific hell of alcoholism and celebrity.

Nathan Glass, a retired insurance salesman who has moved to Brooklyn to die in peace, gradually finds himself drawn back into life through his nephew Tom, a failed academic working in a bookshop, and a series of warm, eccentric characters who make Brooklyn feel like the best possible place to rediscover the will to live.

Pilar and her childhood friend reunite in Spain after eleven years apart. He has become a spiritual teacher; she has become practical and cautious. As they travel through France and Spain together, the question of whether to love — really love, with all the vulnerability that requires — becomes the central conflict. Coelho's most romantic novel.

A young Scottish woman goes to occupied France during World War II ostensibly to find her missing RAF boyfriend, but discovers more about herself and the French under occupation than she expected. The third volume of Faulks's loose French trilogy, following Birdsong.

A group of intellectuals and eccentrics gather at Crome, a country house, for a summer of endless conversation about art, philosophy, sex, and the nature of reality — while accomplishing nothing whatsoever.

An Andean village where three people have disappeared. A corporal and his assistant investigate: the suspects are Shining Path guerrillas, but the mystery deepens into something older and stranger—the Andean world of pishtacos (fat-extracting demons) and ancient violence. Vargas Llosa's novel about Peru's civil conflict as seen from the highlands.

In a small unnamed country, death simply stops. No one dies. The immediate consequences—the chaos for funeral homes, hospitals, insurance companies, and the Church—are comedic and precise. Then death resumes, but only announces her arrivals by violet letter seven days in advance. In the second half, death falls in love with a cellist who refuses to die.

Edith Howland keeps a diary. In it, her son Cliffie is successful, married, fulfilling his potential. In reality, Cliffie is a parasitic failure who has moved back into her house and contributes nothing. Her husband has left her. Her diary diverges from reality and then departs from it altogether — becoming not delusion but an act of private creation, a novel within the novel. Highsmith's most feminist work and one of her most devastating.

Elizabeth Costello is an elderly Australian novelist who travels to give lectures—on animal rights, on evil, on the existence of the good—and returns home to her son's discomfort. The novel is a series of lectures that Coetzee himself gave, presented as fiction; the distinction between author and character is deliberately uncertain.

An unnamed man is buried. The novel is the story of his life told backward from that grave — marriages, affairs, children, his body's progressive failures, the operations that punctuate his later years. Roth's meditation on mortality is his most compressed and perhaps most personal later novel.

Millions of monarch butterflies, blown off their migration route by climate disruption, settle in a Tennessee sheep farmer's pasture — and Dellarobia Turnbow, trapped in a stalled life, finds her world transformed.

Set in Crete during the late 19th-century struggle for independence from Ottoman rule, the novel follows Captain Michalis — a man of elemental passions — as he leads his people in revolt.

A short story retelling the myth of Galatea and Pygmalion, told from the perspective of the marble statue brought to life by the sculptor who loves her — and controls her.

Scout Finch, now Jean Louise and twenty-six, returns to Maycomb from New York to visit her father — and discovers that Atticus Finch holds views on race and segregation she cannot reconcile with the man she idolized.

Harlem, 1960s: Ray Carney sells furniture by day and fences stolen goods on the side, telling himself he's only "slightly bent." Whitehead's crime novel is a departure from his recent literary fiction — a Harlem panorama that celebrates a world and an era while examining the costs of respectability.