Best Literary Fiction Books

Eugene Henderson — a huge, rich, impossible Connecticut pig farmer with a voice in his head that insists 'I want, I want' — abandons everything and travels to Africa, where he becomes entangled with two tribes and discovers something about what he wants.

Nathan Zuckerman hears the story of Ira Ringold — a Newark ironworker turned radio actor who became a Communist in the 1940s and was destroyed by McCarthyism, betrayed by his wife, the actress Eve Frame, who wrote a memoir exposing him. The second novel of Roth's American Trilogy.

Adam Walker, a Columbia student in 1967, meets the charismatic Rudolf Born at a party — and a single violent act, witnessed and then reported with growing unreliability across four different narrative perspectives, shapes the rest of his life.

A white senator who was raised as a Black child by a Black preacher in the American South is shot on the floor of the Senate and, as he lies dying, remembers his childhood with Reverend Hickman. Ellison's posthumously published second novel — assembled from forty years of manuscript — is flawed and incomplete but contains passages equal to anything in Invisible Man, and the central figure of the Black minister who raised a white child is among the most complex moral situations in American fiction.

Lilia Albert has been disappearing her whole life — taken by her father as a child, re-disappearing every few years, leaving behind whoever has come to love her. Her most recent boyfriend follows her across the country trying to understand why. Mandel's debut shows the same intelligence as her later work applied to the same questions: identity, memory, the people who vanish.

Jo Baker retells Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the Bennet household's servants — particularly the housemaid Sarah — revealing the physical labor, social vulnerability, and hidden lives that sustained the genteel world Austen depicted.

In 1914, a Suffolk fishing village. Thomas Maggs, thirteen, befriends an artist named Mr Mac — the Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who spent his final years painting in the Suffolk village of Walberswick.

Walt, a nine-year-old orphan on the streets of St. Louis in 1927, is taken in by the mysterious Master Yehudi who spends two years teaching him to levitate — and the novel follows Walt's career as a performer across the turbulent American decades from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Seven-year-old Elsa inherits a series of apology letters from her recently deceased grandmother, sending her on a quest through their apartment building to deliver them and uncover the real stories behind the fairy tales she was raised on.

Two rival academic families — one liberal white, one conservative Black — collide at a New England university in a novel loosely inspired by E.M. Forster's Howards End.

Bri, sixteen, is the daughter of a legendary rapper who died before he made it. She wants to be the greatest rapper of all time — and writes a song that goes viral for all the wrong reasons.

Sidney Orr, recovering from a serious illness, buys a blue Portuguese notebook in Brooklyn and begins writing a story inside it — a story that begins to take on its own momentum, drawing him into questions about fate, authorship, and the reality of the fictional worlds writers create.

Philip Perlmann, a celebrated linguist, arrives at a conference in a Ligurian village to deliver a paper — but has nothing to say. As the deadline approaches, his paralysis deepens into a desperate plan that puts everything at risk.

Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon in London, experiences a single extraordinary Saturday in February 2003 — the day of the anti-Iraq-War march — that escalates into a confrontation with violence.

The second South American novel — a professor of philosophy in a Colombian city writes letters to the newspaper denouncing the drug cartels, and falls in love, as the coca lords begin to notice him.

Kundera's first novel written directly in French meditates on slowness as a value — the pleasure that is inseparable from unhurry — and speed as the form modern forgetting takes. Two stories interweave: an eighteenth-century erotic tale of a planned seduction and a contemporary entomologist's conference at the same chateau.

Three stories — the title story originally published in The New Yorker — examining the space between men and women: what they want from each other, what they withhold, and what the distance costs.

Brian Jackson, the first in his family to go to university, arrives at Bristol in 1985 determined to join the University Challenge quiz team and fall in love with the right girl. A funny and tender novel about class anxiety, intellectual aspiration, and the specific humiliations of being young.

The six Alexandrians have been initiated into the Alexandrian Society — the secret organisation that controls the world's most powerful knowledge. Now they must each prove their worth to the Caretakers, competing and conspiring among themselves while an external threat to the Society itself emerges. The second book in Olivie Blake's Atlas series.

A young woman from rural Iceland comes to Reykjavik to work as a maid and learn to play the harmonium. She discovers that Iceland is selling its sovereignty to NATO—her employer is among the politicians profiting from the deal. Laxness's most politically direct novel, written in 1948 as a protest against Iceland's military agreements.

Olive Chancellor, a Boston reformer and feminist, discovers the young Verena Tarrant, whose natural gift for public speaking makes her ideal for the women's suffrage cause. Olive's relationship with Verena is complicated by the arrival of her Southern cousin Basil Ransom, who wants to marry Verena and remove her from public life.

The nameless narrator of The Sympathizer arrives in 1980s Paris with his blood brother Bon, navigating the Vietnamese exile community, Algerian drug networks, and French intellectual life while still haunted by his double-consciousness and the interrogations he survived.

In early 20th-century Illinois, a man named John Ashley is convicted of murder and escapes, leaving his family behind. A multigenerational saga about two American families and the question of what it means to be a good person.

A magical flounder advises men throughout German history—from the Neolithic to the 1970s. Now the flounder has been caught and is being tried by a feminist tribunal. Meanwhile, a narrator who has been alive throughout all of human history recounts his relationship with nine cooks across three millennia. Grass's most formally extravagant novel.