Best Literary Fiction Books

A successful judge who has lived a conventional, comfortable life falls ill and, in the process of dying, confronts the question of whether his life has been good — and discovers that it has not.

The Ramsay family's two visits to their summer house in the Hebrides, separated by ten years and the First World War — and Lily Briscoe's attempt to paint what cannot be painted.

Based on the true story of Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant in Canada convicted of murdering her employer and his housekeeper in 1843. A young psychiatrist interviews Grace in prison — the novel is his attempt to determine whether she is guilty, innocent, or something more complicated.

Neil Gaiman's mythological fantasy follows ex-convict Shadow through a road trip across America with the god Odin, as old gods prepare for war against new gods born of technology and media.

Étienne Lantier arrives at a northern French coalmine and finds a community of miners ground down by poverty and despotism. He organises a strike. The strike fails. The novel follows the miners' world with documentary precision — the mine, the housing, the pub, the hunger — and arrives at a vision of revolutionary potential coiled beneath suffering.

Bjartur of Summerhouses has spent eighteen years in bondage to pay for his croft. Now free, he will be independent or die. Through drought, famine, debt, and the deaths of those he might have loved, Bjartur's stubbornness is heroic and catastrophic in equal measure. Laxness's masterpiece—the great Icelandic novel, and the reason he won the Nobel Prize.

Humbert Humbert's confession of his obsession with and abuse of twelve-year-old Dolores Haze — told in prose of devastating beauty by a narrator who is both brilliant and monstrous.

Two hundred and fifty myths from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar, unified by the theme of transformation. Apollo and Daphne, Narcissus and Echo, Pygmalion, Actaeon, Orpheus and Eurydice, the Fall of Icarus — the source of more subsequent Western art than any other single text.

Born at the exact moment of Indian independence, Saleem Sinai discovers he is telepathically connected to the 1,001 children born in the first hour of a free India — and that his own life is fatally, inextricably entwined with the history of his nation.

A single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, preparing a party in postwar London — intercut with the experiences of Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran she will never meet.

The fall of Satan, the creation of the world, the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve — in twelve books of blank verse written by a blind man from memory and dictation. Milton's stated aim was to 'justify the ways of God to men', but the poem's Satan is so compelling that Blake argued Milton was 'of the Devil's party without knowing it'.

Bertie Wooster decides to handle matters himself for once, without Jeeves. He will sort out Gussie Fink-Nottle's love life and Tuppy Glossop's engagement without the butler's assistance. The resulting catastrophe — culminating in a prize-giving speech at Market Snodsbury Grammar School — is the funniest extended sequence in English comic fiction.

Kurt Vonnegut's anti-war masterpiece follows Billy Pilgrim, who has become 'unstuck in time' and moves non-linearly through his experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden and his later suburban American life.

Iris Chase, elderly and alone, narrates the story of her family's collapse over the 20th century. Nested within her memoir is her dead sister Laura's posthumous novel — and within that, a pulp science-fiction story told by clandestine lovers. The Booker Prize winner 2000.

Bertie Wooster is dispatched to Totleigh Towers, home of the terrifying Roderick Spode and the magistrate Sir Watkyn Bassett, to steal a silver cow creamer and assist various friends with their tangled romantic lives. Only Jeeves can navigate the catastrophe that follows.

Billy Parham, sixteen, traps a pregnant wolf in New Mexico and decides to return her to Mexico — three journeys across the border over a decade, each one costing more than the last.

The final volume: Elena and Lila return to Naples in middle age, their friendship tested by a final, devastating loss as the neighbourhood that made them both begins to dissolve.

Josef K. is arrested one morning without explanation, prosecuted by an opaque authority for an unnamed crime, and gradually consumed by a legal process he can never understand.

A prequel and counter-narrative to Jane Eyre that reclaims the voice of Bertha Mason — Rochester's 'mad wife' — reimagined as Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole heiress in post-Emancipation Jamaica caught between two worlds and belonging to neither.

Captain Charles Ryder, quartered in a stately home during the Second World War, recalls his long entanglement with the Flyte family — the beautiful, dissolute Sebastian; his magnetic sister Julia; and the great house of Brideshead itself — and how Catholicism shaped and ultimately claimed them all.

Lima in the 1950s under the Odría dictatorship. Santiago Zavala and Ambrosio, his father's former driver, talk for four hours in a bar called the Cathedral. Their conversation reconstructs the corruption of an entire society—told in multiple simultaneous timelines that interlace without warning. Vargas Llosa's most ambitious novel, which he called his best.

Private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are hired to investigate the disappearance of a four-year-old girl from a Boston neighbourhood. The case pulls them into drug trafficking, police corruption, and a moral dilemma at the end that has no right answer.

Fourteen interconnected stories following members of the Kashpaw, Lamartine, Morrissey, and Nanapush families on a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation from 1934 to 1984 — Erdrich's debut and the foundation of the great body of work that followed.

A spiteful, self-contradicting underground man addresses us from his Petersburg apartment — a novella that inaugurated modern psychological fiction and anticipated existentialism by seventy years.