Best Fiction Books

Gabriel García Márquez's Nobel Prize-winning epic follows the Buendía family through seven generations in the mythical town of Macondo, blending magical and real with luminous prose.

Hermann Hesse's spiritual classic follows a young Brahmin's journey to enlightenment through renunciation, pleasure, commerce, and finally the unity of all things found at the river.

Kvothe — innkeeper, legend, the most infamous man alive — agrees to tell his life story to a Chronicler over three days. Day One: his childhood with a troupe of travelling performers, his time as a street orphan in Tarbean, and his legendary entry to the University where magic is studied.

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.

Tress has never left her small island. When the boy she loves is kidnapped and taken across the deadly spore seas, she sets out to rescue him — becoming a sailor, a pirate, and eventually a hero on a world she's never seen.

A rare magician who can travel between parallel Londons teams up with a street thief to prevent a dark power from destroying all the worlds.

Le Guin's first Earthsea novel follows Ged, a boy of extraordinary power who attends a school for wizards on the island of Roke and, in his pride, releases a shadow upon the world that only he can face.

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.

Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece about a former slave haunted by the ghost of her murdered daughter — and the legacy of slavery on the body, memory, and soul.

In the World State of 632 AF (After Ford), human beings are hatched in hatcheries, conditioned from birth for their social function, and kept content by the pleasure drug Soma. There is no disease, no war, no poverty — and no freedom, no art, no genuine love. Bernard Marx begins to question whether happiness without meaning is worth having.

Joseph Heller's darkly comic masterpiece follows bombardier Yossarian through the absurdist bureaucracy of World War II, inventing the most important logical paradox of modern language.

The adventures of the deluded knight Alonso Quijano — who believes himself to be the knight-errant Don Quixote — and his earthy squire Sancho Panza across the plains of La Mancha.

The First Law trilogy's conclusion delivers one of fantasy literature's most ruthless and genuinely surprising endings — a masterwork of subverted expectations that recontextualises the entire trilogy.

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.

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.

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.

A great god is reduced to living in the body of a small tortoise because no one truly believes in him anymore — only one novice monk does — and together they must reckon with what faith really means in a world dominated by the institution built in his name.

Ernest Hemingway's Nobel Prize-winning novella about an aging Cuban fisherman's epic struggle with a great marlin in the waters of the Gulf Stream.

Three timelines converge as Essun and her daughter Nassun race toward opposite ends — one to save humanity, one to end it — in the Hugo Award-winning conclusion to the Broken Earth trilogy.

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.

Young Fitz, the royal bastard of the Six Duchies, is brought to the court of his grandfather King Shrewd and apprenticed to the royal assassin — learning to navigate palace politics, a forbidden magical bond with animals, and the profound isolation of being useful but never truly belonging.

Robert Jordan's final completed novel before his death in 2007: the storylines that had stalled across the previous two volumes suddenly and decisively accelerate, resolving long-running threads and propelling every major character toward the Last Battle.

The obsessive voyage of Captain Ahab, whose all-consuming quest to destroy the white whale that maimed him drives his crew toward catastrophe.