Best Literary Fiction Books

Hajime, a successful jazz bar owner in Tokyo with a comfortable marriage, is reunited with Shimamoto — his only close childhood friend, with whom he spent hours listening to records. Their reunion opens something he cannot close. A quiet, compressed novel about the specific grief of the road not taken and the women who persist as figures of the unlived life.

Saint-Exupéry's debut novel follows a mail pilot flying routes over the Sahara and a narrator's meditation on love, duty, and the life of aviation against the backdrop of a woman waiting on the ground.

K loves Sumire, who loves a married older woman named Miu. When Sumire disappears on a Greek island where she and Miu have been travelling, K is called to help. A quiet, triangular love story about people who orbit each other without connecting — Murakami's most explicitly about the loneliness of desire and the distances between people who want each other across unbridgeable gaps.

A vast Edwardian panorama following several interconnected families from the Arts and Crafts movement of the 1890s through the catastrophe of the First World War, centred on Olive Wellwood, a writer of fairy tales for children who uses her stories to contain what she cannot say to her family directly.

Brown University, early 1980s. Madeleine Hanna is writing her senior thesis on the Victorian marriage plot in literary fiction; Mitchell Grammaticus is having a religious crisis; Leonard Bankhead is brilliant, charismatic, and bipolar. Their triangular relationship unfolds against the backdrop of literary theory and manic depression.

Penelope narrates the story of her husband Odysseus's twenty-year absence from the afterlife, offering her own corrective to the heroic narrative — including her account of why the twelve maids who served her were hanged at Odysseus's return. Part of the Canongate Myths series.

Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, living under the total control of her possessive mother. Her masochistic relationship with a younger student exposes the violence embedded in Austrian bourgeois culture and its insistence on female repression.

Before The Alchemist, there was the pilgrimage. Paulo Coelho's account of walking the Road to Santiago de Compostela — the ancient Spanish pilgrimage route — and the spiritual lessons his guide Petrus taught him along the way. Part memoir, part spiritual manual, part adventure, this is the book that made Coelho a writer.

Two stories separated by fifty years interweave in a Suffolk village: a contemporary woman researching an architect's life, and the architect's story itself — a portrait of a German-Jewish émigré and the house he built on the English coast.

The final South American novel — Cardinal Guzman's son leads a new Inquisition through the Colombian countryside, while the village of Cochadebajo survives through community, love, and the supernatural.

Three divorced women in a small Rhode Island town have acquired magical powers. When the mysterious Darryl Van Horne arrives, he disrupts their coven. A satirical novel about female power, desire, and the anxieties of the 1960s sexual revolution, told with Updike's characteristic density of observation.

In 1920s Newport, Rhode Island, a young man named Theophilus North arrives to teach tennis and finds himself drawn into the lives of the town's wealthy families — solving problems, righting wrongs, and falling in love.

Harry Morgan, a boat captain in Depression-era Key West, is forced into smuggling and running rum to survive. The novel Hemingway considered his worst tracks Morgan's degradation against the backdrop of wealthy vacationers whose money insulates them from consequence.

A dialogue in which the traveller Raphael Hythloday describes the island of Utopia — a society with communal property, religious tolerance, and rational social organisation. Written in Latin by Thomas More in 1516, the book gave the word 'utopia' (no-place) to all subsequent thinking about ideal societies.

Lizzie Benson is a librarian, a mother, a sister to a difficult brother in recovery. Her former mentor, a climate scientist, asks her to answer listener mail for her podcast on environmental collapse. The novel moves between Lizzie's domestic life and the approaching catastrophe — climate anxiety as the ambient condition of contemporary American life.

The two novellas that launched Murakami's career — 'Hear the Wind Sing' (1979) and 'Pinball, 1973' (1980) — published together for the first time in English. The unnamed narrator and his friend 'the Rat' move through a coastal Japanese town, listening to music, drinking beer, and circling the losses of youth. Quieter and more elliptical than Murakami's later work, these novellas show the essential qualities of his sensibility in concentrated form.

Aviva Grossman has an affair with the congressman she interns for — the internet destroys her life, but not her. A multi-perspective novel about women, politics, and the asymmetry of public scandal.

Mark Spitz is a sweeper — part of a civilian unit tasked with clearing zombies from lower Manhattan after a plague. The novel covers three days of his work, interspersed with flashbacks to the collapse and his survival of it. A literary zombie novel about grief, memory, and the texture of the American city in ruins.

Seven interconnected characters in contemporary London — a hedge fund manager shorting bank stocks before the 2008 financial crisis, a footballer's wife, a Muslim radicalisation plot, a reality TV contestant, a tube driver, a book reviewer. A state-of-England novel of pre-crash London.

The Southern Reach trilogy concludes with three parallel timelines: Control and Ghost Bird inside Area X, the former Director on the last expedition she ever launched, and the original lighthouse keeper in the years before Area X appeared.

One night in Tokyo, told in real time and in the second person plural — 'we' observe, as if a camera, the city between midnight and dawn. Mari, a student, sits in a Denny's with a book; her sister Eri sleeps in their apartment, apparently unable to wake. The night connects them to musicians, a Chinese woman beaten in a love hotel, and the city's insomniac underside. Murakami's shortest and most experimental novel.

Danny, an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant cleaning houses in Sydney, recognises that a client of one of his regular houses may know something about a murder — and spends a single day deciding whether to go to the police, knowing that doing so will mean deportation.

Chopin's first novel follows Thérèse Lafirme, a Louisiana plantation widow whose moral convictions force a divorced man to remarry his alcoholic ex-wife, with tragic consequences that challenge her certainties.

Alice, a novelist recovering from a breakdown, and Eileen, a literary editor in Dublin, exchange long emails about love, politics, art, and how to live ethically in the present. Meanwhile, their respective relationships — Alice with Felix, Eileen with Simon — test what they believe against what they actually do.