Best Literary Fiction Books

Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is 46, co-owner of a Toyota dealership, a member of the country club, comfortable and bored in the Pennsylvania suburb he once tried to escape. It is 1979: the gas crisis, Carter's malaise speech, Iran. His son Nelson has come back with a pregnant girlfriend. Updike's Pulitzer Prize winner — middle-class American contentment as its own form of dissatisfaction.

An escaped Australian convict arrives in Bombay with a false passport, becomes a slum doctor, makes friends and enemies among the city's criminals, and discovers a city that unmakes and remakes him completely.

Macon Leary writes travel guides for people who hate to travel — guides on how to find the familiar in the foreign, how to minimise the discomfort of being elsewhere. After his son is murdered and his wife leaves, he moves back in with his eccentric siblings and their dog. The dog trainer, Muriel Pritchett, enters his life uninvited and changes it. Tyler's most beloved novel.

Augie March grows up poor and Jewish in Depression-era Chicago and refuses to be defined by it. Picaresque, exuberant, and crammed with characters from every class and corner of American life, this is Bellow's most ebullient novel—the one that announced an entirely new way of writing American English.

In an Italian villa at the end of World War II, a burned and dying man is cared for by a Canadian nurse, visited by a Sikh sapper and a former thief; the mystery of the patient's identity, and what the North African desert did to him, forms the novel's slow-burning centre.

A young British woman visits Crete and discovers her family's connection to Spinalonga — the island across the bay that served as Greece's last functioning leper colony until 1957 — uncovering four generations of love, stigma, and survival.

Balram Halwai, born into poverty in a Bihar village, writes a series of letters to the Chinese premier explaining how he became a successful entrepreneur — by murdering his employer. Adiga's debut is a savage, blackly comic account of what it actually takes to escape India's 'Rooster Coop.'

Maggie and Ira Moran have been married for twenty-eight years. On a single day in 1988 they drive from Baltimore to a friend's funeral in Pennsylvania and back. What happens in the car, at the funeral, at an old friend's house along the way, illuminates the whole shape of their marriage — its compromises, its small deceptions, its persistent stubbornness of love. Tyler's Pulitzer Prize winner.

Emil Sinclair grows up in two worlds: the 'bright' world of his bourgeois family and the 'dark' world he senses underneath. Max Demian—strange, self-possessed, seemingly ageless—appears as his guide, leading him through Jungian psychology, Gnostic Christianity, and Nietzsche toward his own self-realization. Written in 1917, published in 1919.

David Lurie, a twice-divorced Cape Town professor, has an affair with a student, loses his position, and retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding in the Eastern Cape, where an attack changes both their lives irrevocably and forces a reckoning with what white South Africans are owed and owe.

The fictional autobiography of Sayuri, a geisha in the Gion district of Kyoto, from the 1920s through post-war Japan — a world of rigorous training, patron rivalries, and hidden lives.

A melancholy, deeply personal novel set in 1960s Tokyo: Toru Watanabe looks back on his student years, his relationships with two very different women, and the losses that shaped him.

Two contemporary academics discover evidence of a secret love affair between two Victorian poets — the eminent Randolph Henry Ash and the lesser-known Christabel LaMotte — and the double narrative that follows, moving between the Victorian and contemporary stories, is a meditation on love, scholarship, and possession in all its senses.

Anna Wulf, a blocked writer and communist, keeps four notebooks — black for her African novel, red for politics, yellow for fiction, blue for her diary — and a fifth golden notebook in which she attempts to bring them together: a formally radical portrait of a woman trying to hold her fractured self in one place.

Istanbul, 1975. Kemal, a wealthy man engaged to a suitable woman, falls obsessively in love with his poor distant cousin Füsun. Their affair ends; she marries another; he spends eight years visiting her family's apartment, collecting objects she has touched. He eventually builds a museum to house these objects. Pamuk has also built the actual museum in Istanbul.

On the Greek island of Kefalonia during the Italian and German occupation of World War II, a young woman falls in love with an Italian officer while her fiancé fights with the partisans in the mountains.

An unnamed young woman in an unnamed city during the Troubles is subjected to the unwanted attentions of a senior paramilitary figure known only as Milkman — and finds that the community, the paramilitaries, and even her family interpret this attention as complicity.

Katey Kontent, a secretary from Brooklyn, begins 1938 in New York City with ambition, wit, and $100 in savings. A chance encounter with Tinker Grey sets her on a course through the social strata of Manhattan.

A mysterious death, a missing fortune, and a damaged woman bring twelve men together in a Hokitika hotel on the New Zealand West Coast in 1866. Catton's structurally extraordinary novel uses astrological charts to determine its form, with each section exactly half the length of the previous one.

Kino, a poor pearl diver in Mexico, finds the Pearl of the World—and everything unravels. A fable in the tradition of the Bible and La Fontaine, The Pearl is Steinbeck's most concentrated exploration of how the dream of wealth destroys those who have nothing.

Tony Webster, a comfortably divorced man in late middle age, receives a small bequest from the mother of his first serious girlfriend that forces him to re-examine the version of his youth he has been living with for forty years — and to confront the gap between what he remembers and what he actually did.

A young British backpacker follows a hand-drawn map to a secret beach in Thailand, joining an isolated community of travellers who believe they have found paradise — before the illusions begin to crack.

Charlie Gordon, a man with intellectual disabilities, undergoes experimental brain surgery that dramatically increases his intelligence — and must grapple with the emotional and social consequences.

Gabriel García Márquez's Nobel Prize-winning epic follows the Buendía family through seven generations in the mythical town of Macondo, blending magical and real with luminous prose.