Best Fiction Books

A year after a boy was murdered on the grounds of a Dublin girls' boarding school, a card appears on the school's anonymous message board: 'I know who killed him.' Detective Stephen Moran sees his chance to make the Murder Squad.

Four characters navigate love, fidelity, and the weight of existence against the backdrop of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, in Kundera's most celebrated philosophical novel.

Jude holds the power behind the throne, controlling the High King she placed there — but court intrigue and her impossible feelings for Cardan threaten everything she has built.

Two sisters from a conservative mountain kingdom are sent to the colorful, decadent city of the Gods, where the divine Returned don't believe in their own religion and a war is being engineered by forces neither fully understands.

An undercover narc in near-future California becomes addicted to the drug he's surveilling, losing his grip on his own identity in this partly autobiographical novel by Philip K. Dick.

A rebellious teenager falls for the quiet minister's daughter in a small North Carolina town — and discovers what it truly means to love someone, and what it costs.

A Regency Cinderella: Benedict Bridgerton dances with a mysterious masked woman at a masquerade ball and cannot forget her — but Sophie Beckett is a servant who knows their worlds can never meet.

A nameless teenager joins a gang of mercenary scalp-hunters in the 1850s Southwest, entering a world of almost incomprehensible violence presided over by the monstrous Judge Holden.

The Reckoners track the source of Epic powers to Ildithia — the former Atlanta — and David confronts the cosmic force behind Calamity itself, with the future of both Epics and ordinary humans at stake.

A writer researching the life of the atomic bomb's inventor discovers ice-nine — a form of water that freezes solid at room temperature — in the hands of dangerous and careless people. Vonnegut's darkest comedy.

Alien Overlords arrive over Earth and usher in an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity — but the price is humanity's future.

Clary Fray must protect those she loves as Valentine prepares to raise a demon army, while the revelation about her relationship to Jace casts a shadow over everything.

Spensa enters the Nowhere — a dimension outside normal space-time — to master her cytonic abilities and find a way to save humanity from the Superiority, encountering fragments of ancient civilizations and the truth about why cytonics are feared.

In a world where a magical city of gods has fallen and its inhabitants are cursed with a living death, a prince, a princess, and a priest navigate politics, religion, and the mystery of what destroyed Elantris.

Three families — the cultivated Schlegels, the commercial Wilcoxes, and the struggling Basts — collide and connect in Edwardian England around the meaning of a country house and the possibilities of human connection.

Nine stories about Indians and Indian-Americans navigating displacement, longing, and the distances between people. Pulitzer Prize winner.

Alex Cross races to find a serial kidnapper called Casanova who keeps intelligent, accomplished women as captives in an underground harem — while simultaneously discovering that his own niece Naomi has become one of Casanova's victims.

Alexandra Bergson inherits her immigrant father's Nebraska farm and builds it into a prosperous enterprise over decades, while the land itself becomes the novel's most enduring presence.

Gregory Bridgerton falls for a woman who loves someone else — and must stop a wedding to claim his own happy ending in the final chapter of Julia Quinn's beloved Regency series.

While vacationing in London, CIA analyst Jack Ryan foils an IRA assassination attempt on the Prince of Wales and becomes the target of a vengeful splinter faction determined to kill him and his family on American soil.

Two city-states occupy the same geography but citizens must 'unsee' the other city on pain of intervention by a mysterious force called Breach. A noir detective novel and a meditation on perception.

Lily Bart, beautiful, brilliant, and financially precarious, navigates New York society's marriage market and slowly loses ground in a game she was not born to win.

In a landmark tobacco liability trial in Mississippi, a mysterious juror named Nicholas Easter appears to be manipulating the outcome from inside the jury box — while his accomplice outside works both sides of the case for an enormous payout.

In Puritan Boston, Hester Prynne is forced to wear a scarlet 'A' for adultery — but it is the hidden guilt of her lover, the Reverend Dimmesdale, that slowly destroys him.