Best Fiction Books

The mythological history of Middle-earth, from the creation of the world by the god-like Ainur through the ages of the Elves, the forging of the Silmarils, and the great wars of the First Age — assembled posthumously by Christopher Tolkien from his father's lifelong writings.

The life of T.S. Garp — son of the feminist icon Jenny Fields — from birth to violent death, a novel about family, violence, writing, and the absurdity of existence.

Eloise Bridgerton has been writing letters to a widowed botanist for months. When she decides to meet Sir Phillip Crane in person, she discovers that a man on paper and a man in a home are not the same man at all.

Joe Chip works for a psychic-shielding agency in a world of commercial telepaths, until a bomb blast sends his team into a reality that keeps regressing — a mind-bending exploration of reality, death, and consumerism.

A plain, good-natured heiress in 1840s New York is courted by a charming fortune hunter — with her sardonic, brilliant father watching and diagnosing everything.

Michael Stirling falls in love with Francesca Bridgerton at first sight — and discovers that she is about to marry his cousin. This is the darkest, most formally daring novel in the Bridgerton series.

Paul Atreides is gone. His twin children, Leto II and Ghanima, inherit both his bloodline and his terrifying prescience — while a crumbling empire and Alia's increasingly erratic regency threaten to consume everything Paul built and sacrificed.

The Berglunds — an outwardly ideal liberal family in St. Paul — fall apart across decades as Walter, Patty, and their son Joey pursue freedom in ways that destroy the people around them.

In 1926 Harlem, a man shoots his young lover at her funeral while his wife grieves, attacks the dead girl's face, and attempts to understand what the city and their history have made of them all.

A divorced journalist finds a heartbreaking love letter in a bottle on the beach and tracks down its author — a widower still grieving his lost wife — and must discover whether love can exist alongside grief that refuses to be finished.

One hundred colonists arrive on Mars in 2026 to begin humanity's first permanent settlement — and the political and philosophical fault lines that will define the planet's future immediately emerge.

A girl's impulsive act in 1984 draws her into a centuries-long conflict between two secret factions; the novel spans her entire life across six decades.

The first Discworld novel follows the hapless failed wizard Rincewind and the naive tourist Twoflower across a flat world balanced on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant star turtle — a comic masterpiece that parodies epic fantasy.

An alternate history set in an Axis-occupied America where the Allies lost WWII — Philip K. Dick's Hugo Award-winning masterwork of speculative fiction.

Rand's military campaign through the Westlands takes a dark turn as the One Power begins to behave strangely around him, while Egwene al'Vere leads the rebel Aes Sedai in an audacious campaign to reclaim the White Tower from Elaida.

A young governess at a remote English estate becomes convinced that the children in her charge are in contact with the malevolent spirits of two dead servants.

A meditation on whiteness, grief, and a sister who died hours after birth — Han Kang's most lyrical and formally experimental work.

Rand attempts a desperate and unprecedented gambit to cleanse saidin — the male half of the One Power — of the Dark One's taint, while Mat is trapped in Ebou Dar under Seanchan occupation and Perrin searches for his captured wife.

Seven years after the events of The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is living freely in Florence under an assumed identity, pursued simultaneously by a vengeful Mason Verger — the only surviving victim — and by Clarice Starling, now an embattled FBI agent.

Two rival academic families — one liberal white, one conservative Black — collide at a New England university in a novel loosely inspired by E.M. Forster's Howards End.

Prince Dmitri Nekhlyudov recognises, as a juror at a murder trial, the woman he seduced and abandoned years before. Overcome by guilt, he follows Katyusha Maslova through the Russian prison and exile system — a journey that becomes Tolstoy's most sustained indictment of the state, the church, and the landed class.

Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon in London, experiences a single extraordinary Saturday in February 2003 — the day of the anti-Iraq-War march — that escalates into a confrontation with violence.

An orphaned soldier discovers she harbors a rare power that could end a centuries-long darkness threatening her country — and draws the attention of a mysterious and dangerous commander.

Two college friends in Dublin become entangled with a married couple, and the relationships that develop test every assumption both women hold about themselves.