Best Fiction Books

T.H. White's retelling of the Arthurian legends follows Arthur from his education by the wizard Merlin — who lives backwards through time — through the founding of the Round Table, the love triangle with Lancelot and Guinevere, and the final destruction of Camelot.

In 1959, Baptist preacher Nathan Price moves his wife and four daughters from Georgia to the Belgian Congo to serve as a missionary — and the novel, narrated by the five women whose lives he commands, traces the consequences of his rigid certainty against the backdrop of Congolese independence.

A standalone epic fantasy featuring three women across three continents facing the return of a world-ending dragon, woven through with questions of faith, queerness, and the nature of historical truth.

Albertine is living with the narrator in Paris, and he is consumed by jealousy, surveillance, and the impossibility of knowing another person's inner life — Proust's most claustrophobic and psychologically intense volume.

In an alternate-history United Isles of America, Joel attends Armedius Academy alongside Rithmatists — students who can bring chalk drawings to life as warriors. When Rithmatist students begin disappearing, Joel and his unconventional mentor Professor Fitch must investigate before the killings reach the school itself.

A double agent for the Russian embassy in London is ordered to commit a terrorist act that can be blamed on anarchists. Conrad's London novel — simultaneously thriller, black comedy, and study of how political violence is always manipulated by those who profit from its effects.

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.

Eustace and his schoolmate Jill Pole are sent to Narnia to rescue the lost Prince Rilian, held captive underground by the Lady of the Green Kirtle.

Malachi Constant is the richest man in America, living proof that God favours the fortunate. He is then recruited into a Martian army, loses his memory, survives a pointless war on Earth, and winds up on Titan. The cosmic joke at the centre of The Sirens of Titan asks whether human history is meaningful or merely convenient — and the answer is bleak and funny in equal measure.

Palestinian terrorists acquire a nuclear device and plant it at the Super Bowl. CIA Deputy Director Jack Ryan must identify the threat and prevent detonation while the world's superpowers are being manipulated toward confrontation. Clancy's most complex thriller works across multiple continents, governments, and ideologies simultaneously.

Carter and Sadie have three days to find the three sections of the Book of Ra and awaken the sun god before the chaos serpent Apophis escapes his prison. Racing against a countdown across multiple continents, the Kane siblings fight gods, demons, and each other's stubborn pride.

Tenar is taken from her family as a young child to become the High Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan — a buried labyrinth serving nameless, ancient powers. Her world is enclosed, complete, and entirely certain. Then Ged the wizard breaks in, and Tenar must decide whether to kill him or help him — and what that choice means for everything she has been.

In Money, Mississippi — the town where Emmett Till was murdered — a series of killings leave white supremacists dead alongside the mutilated body of a Black man who keeps disappearing from the morgue. Two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation investigate while an elderly woman has been recording the names of lynching victims for fifty years.

William de Worde accidentally invents the newspaper in Ankh-Morpork when a chance encounter with dwarfish printers gives him the idea of distributing his letter of city news more widely. Within days he has a press, a staff, and enemies. Someone is trying to frame the Patrician Vetinari, and the Ankh-Morpork Times is the only institution positioned to find out the truth.

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.

The Turbin family in Kiev during the winter of 1918-1919, when the city changed hands multiple times between the Bolsheviks, the German-backed Hetmanate, and Petliura's forces. Bulgakov's first novel is the closest to autobiography — the family is his own, and the account of a cultivated Russian family facing the dissolution of their world is rendered with a warmth and grief the later work deliberately suppresses.

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.

Essex County Prosecutor Paul Copeland has carried the mystery of his sister's disappearance at summer camp for twenty years. When a corpse surfaces that appears to be her supposed killer — still alive until recently — every assumption unravels.

Ten years ago, fifteen-year-old Ellie Mack disappeared. Her mother Laurel has never recovered. When Laurel starts dating a charming widower named Floyd and meets his young daughter — who looks eerily like Ellie — the questions she buried begin to surface. A domestic thriller about obsessive love, missing daughters, and the families we construct from grief.

Three veterans of the First World War try to build ordinary lives in the Weimar Republic while Nazi violence rises around them, and one of them falls in love with a woman dying of tuberculosis. Remarque's most romantic novel is also his most political — the personal tenderness and the historical catastrophe are inseparable, and the love story is written with the knowledge of what is coming.

Chaol Westfall and Nesryn Faliq travel to the Southern Continent to seek an alliance with the Khagan of the Southern Continent — and to find healers who might restore Chaol's ability to walk. What they discover in the Torre Cesme will change everything they thought they knew about the war.

A Hollywood film producer is found shot dead in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce in the hills above Mulholland Drive. The method — two bullets, body in the trunk — is a classic mob signature. Bosch's investigation pulls him from the Hollywood entertainment industry into the organized crime networks of Las Vegas.

Jules and Josh have hated each other for years. When they end up in a fake relationship to serve their own purposes — Jules needs a date for a family event; Josh needs the same — the animosity becomes something more complicated. An enemies-to-lovers romance with more bite than the previous Twisted books.

Lucy Snowe, a young Englishwoman of obscure circumstances, travels alone to the fictional city of Villette in Belgium, where she takes a teaching position at a girls' school and navigates love, professional ambition, and a psychological interior life of extraordinary intensity.