Best Fiction Books

The tragic story of Anna Karenina's adulterous passion and the parallel story of Levin's spiritual search for meaning — together forming the supreme portrait of nineteenth-century Russian society.

Prince Hamlet of Denmark, confronted by his murdered father's ghost, hesitates on the path of revenge — generating centuries of analysis about the nature of action, consciousness, and death.

The epic masterwork of fantasy literature. Frodo Baggins inherits the One Ring — the instrument of Sauron's power — and must carry it to the fires of Mount Doom to destroy it before the Dark Lord reclaims it and enslaves all of Middle-earth.

The sparkling comedy of manners in which Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy navigate pride, prejudice, and the marriage market of Regency England.

Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spacecraft millions of miles from Earth, with no memory of how he got there. As he pieces together the mission, he realises he may be humanity's last hope against a microscopic threat that is slowly extinguishing the Sun — and that he is not entirely alone.

Odysseus's ten-year voyage home from Troy to Ithaca — through the Cyclops's cave, Circe's island, the underworld, and the sirens — is Western literature's founding journey narrative.

Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork about racial injustice and moral growth in Depression-era Alabama, seen through the eyes of young Scout Finch.

In the totalitarian super-state of Oceania, Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history to serve The Party. His secret rebellion — and its consequences — is one of the most important political novels ever written.

On the desert planet Arrakis, young Paul Atreides must navigate political intrigue, ecological disaster, and prophetic destiny to avenge his family and fulfil a legend centuries in the making. The best-selling science fiction novel of all time.

Andrew 'Ender' Wiggin is humanity's most gifted military mind, trained from childhood in the zero-gravity Battle Room of a space station to fight the alien Formics. But the game and the war may not be as separate as Ender believes.

Young Pip's journey from blacksmith's apprentice to London gentleman, and the mysterious benefactor who funds his transformation.

An orphaned governess's fierce quest for independence, dignity, and love in Victorian England — one of literature's most powerful assertions of female selfhood.

The Joad family, driven from their Oklahoma farm by the Dust Bowl, joins the great migration west to California — and finds exploitation, hunger, and community in equal measure.

Seconds before Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, Arthur Dent is rescued by Ford Prefect — who turns out to be a researcher for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the standard repository for all knowledge and wisdom in the universe. Their adventures take them to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, a planet populated by telephone sanitisers, and a search for the Ultimate Question to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Janie Crawford's search for love and selfhood across three marriages in Black Southern communities — told in a voice of extraordinary lyrical power.

The series finale: Tarmon Gai'don, the Last Battle, as Rand al'Thor faces the Dark One at the Bore while the armies of Light and Shadow fight across five simultaneous battlefields. The culmination of a 23-year, 14-book epic.

Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is thrown back in time to the days of his youth, forced to take the place of his old mentor and train his younger self during one of the city's defining revolutionary moments.

Percy leads the defense of Olympus against Kronos's army as the Great Prophecy — the one that has shadowed his life since birth — finally comes true in a battle for the fate of the gods.

An English navigator is shipwrecked in feudal Japan in 1600 and drawn into the deadly rivalry between samurai lords competing for supreme power. One of the great historical novels of the twentieth century.

A young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever but is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets — until she finds a man who remembers her.

FBI trainee Clarice Starling is sent to interview the imprisoned Dr. Hannibal Lecter — brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer — hoping to gain insight into a new killer called Buffalo Bill, who is making suits of human skin.

In Ford County, Mississippi, a Black father kills the two men who brutally raped his ten-year-old daughter — and the young lawyer Jake Brigance must defend him before a white jury in the Deep South.

Three converging storylines — a desperate quest across a dying world, a brutal siege in the frozen North, and a city drowning in political corruption — deepen the First Law's devastating subversion of every fantasy trope it deploys.

The eighth Discworld novel and first in the City Watch sub-series: a secret brotherhood summons a dragon to seize power in Ankh-Morpork, and the only thing standing between the city and a new dragon king is the most incompetent police force in fantasy history.