Best Fiction Books

Florentino Ariza waits fifty-one years, nine months, and four days to tell Fermina Daza he loves her — and the novel asks what love is, what it does to a person, and whether it survives time.

A welder stumbles on a drug deal gone wrong in the Texas desert and takes the money, setting off a chain of pursuit involving a psychopathic killer and an aging sheriff who can no longer understand the world he patrols.

Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew meet on the night of their graduation in 1988, and the novel follows them on the same date — July 15th, St. Swithin's Day — every year for twenty years.

An eighteenth-century Paris parfumeur with an extraordinary sense of smell and no odor of his own commits a series of murders to create the world's most perfect perfume.

A family moves to rural Maine and discovers a burial ground in the woods with the power to resurrect the dead — with devastating consequences.

Melinda Sordino begins ninth grade as a social pariah after calling the police at an end-of-summer party — haunted by a secret she cannot speak about and slowly losing her ability to function.

New York lawyer Newland Archer is engaged to the perfectly suitable May Welland when the scandalous Countess Ellen Olenska returns from Europe — and complicates everything he thought he wanted.

In 1940s Ohio, a young Black girl named Pecola Breedlove prays for blue eyes, believing beauty — as defined by the white standards she has absorbed — is the one thing that could save her from her world's cruelties.

The Thursday Murder Club investigates a decade-old unsolved murder of a television journalist — while navigating a threat from a dangerous hitman who has targeted the Club itself.

Holden Caulfield, expelled from his fourth prep school, wanders New York for three days before a breakdown — narrating his alienation with an intensity that defined adolescent literary voice.

Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, pursues the man in black across a vast desert in the first volume of Stephen King's magnum opus.

Sixteen-year-old cancer patient Hazel Grace Lancaster meets Augustus Waters at a support group and falls in love — while both of them confront their mortality with wit, books, and each other.

The conclusion of the Inheritance Games trilogy finds Avery Grambs confronting the final deadly game of the Hawthorne brothers as she races to solve the mystery of Tobias Hawthorne's true intentions before time runs out.

A young Harvard Law graduate is recruited by a small but wealthy Memphis firm — and soon discovers it is run by the mob, the FBI wants him to spy on it, and leaving may cost him his life.

An amusement park maintenance man dies saving a child and discovers in heaven how five strangers shaped his seemingly ordinary life.

Lisbeth Salander, recovering from near-fatal wounds, faces a murder trial while Mikael Blomkvist races to expose the secret government faction that has controlled and abused her since childhood.

Avery Kylie Grambs continues navigating the Hawthorne brothers' games and the mystery of why billionaire Tobias Hawthorne left her his entire fortune.

In 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is released from a juvenile work farm, intending to drive west with his brother and start a new life — until two unexpected companions redirect his journey to New York.

The Thursday Murder Club investigates again when Elizabeth's long-lost ex-husband arrives at Coopers Chase with stolen diamonds and a death threat.

A seemingly airtight case against a beloved teacher accused of murder begins to unravel when impossible evidence suggests someone — or something — else was responsible.

Ponyboy Curtis narrates the conflict between the Greasers and the Socs on the streets of 1960s Tulsa — and learns that the divisions between the have-nots and the haves cost everyone something essential.

Through a series of letters to an anonymous friend, fourteen-year-old Charlie navigates his first year of high school while carrying secrets he doesn't yet understand.

A father and son journey through a post-apocalyptic American landscape toward the coast, carrying the fire of their humanity against a world that has been stripped of it.

Based on a true story, a Slovakian Jew assigned to tattoo numbers on prisoners at Auschwitz falls in love with a woman he marks, and the two survive the Holocaust through luck, courage, and each other.