Best Fiction Books

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.

The spiders of Kern's World encounter an alien civilization of uplifted cephalopods — octopuses who have evolved sapience along entirely different lines. Tchaikovsky's sequel to Children of Time raises the stakes and deepens the alien cognition that made its predecessor so extraordinary.

The maji have their powers back — but so do the kosidan nobles who once oppressed them. As civil war breaks out across Orïsha, Zélie and Amari must fight enemies on multiple fronts, including each other. The second book in the Legacy of Orïsha trilogy deepens the world's moral complexity and raises the cost of revolution.

The first human colony on an exoplanet beyond the ring gates faces a conflict between Belter settlers who arrived first and a corporate expedition claiming legal authority — while the planet itself wakes up.

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.

SETI researcher Ellie Arroway detects a signal from the star Vega containing construction plans for a mysterious machine. Sagan's only novel is a rigorous and emotionally powerful exploration of first contact, faith versus science, and what humanity might say about itself to the universe.

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.

Eliza Sommers, a young Chilean woman, follows her lover to California during the Gold Rush of 1849 and, dressed as a man, makes her way across a country shaped by greed, violence, and the collision of races and cultures. Allende's most adventurous novel in structure — a picaresque across two continents.

John Tyree is a soldier on leave when he meets Savannah Curtis during a summer on the Carolina coast. Their brief romance deepens through years of letters — until the world changes and the letters stop coming. A love story about what happens when duty and desire pull in opposite directions.

Set against the upheavals of the Russian Revolution, World War I, and the ensuing Civil War, Doctor Zhivago follows the poet-physician Yuri Zhivago and his consuming love for Larissa Antipova across years of revolution, separation, and survival in a Russia being remade against its own will.

Ten stories of Dominican-American life in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic — the father who abandons his family, the brother who sells drugs, the immigrant boy who discovers he is too Dominican for America and too American for the Dominican Republic. Díaz's debut introduced Yunior and the code-switching prose that would define his voice.

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.

Elmer Gantry, a salesman who discovers that religious revivals are a better business than hardware, becomes a successful evangelist — fraudulent, lustful, charismatic, and eventually powerful. Lewis's most controversial novel provoked death threats and bans across the United States and remains the definitive account of American religious hypocrisy and the specific American type — the con man who believes his own con.

Eva Luna, an illegitimate child who grew up among eccentric employers, becomes a storyteller and eventually a writer of telenovelas, navigating a South American country's political violence and social upheaval. Allende's most playful novel — a celebration of the female storyteller whose power resides entirely in her ability to invent.

Former military operative Maya Stern installs a nanny cam after her husband is murdered — and sees him on the footage two weeks later, alive and playing with their daughter.

Three editors at a Milan publishing house, bored with the occult manuscripts they process, invent an elaborate conspiracy theory connecting the Knights Templar to every secret society in history — only to find their fiction taking on a terrifying life of its own.

Will Klein's brother Ken disappeared eleven years ago after a girl was murdered — and everyone assumed he was guilty. Now that girl's sister has been murdered, and Ken may be connected again.

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.

Not Sidney Poitier — named at birth for the actor by his eccentric mother — grows up in the care of Ted Turner after inheriting a fortune, and survives a series of misadventures that mirror famous Sidney Poitier films, encountering racism, absurdity, and a world that insists on seeing him as someone else.

A barnstorming pilot meets a modern-day messiah who has quit saving people and just wants to fly, sparking a philosophical journey about belief, reality, and personal freedom. Through their conversations and a mysterious Messiah's Handbook, Bach weaves a fable about the unlimited potential of the human spirit.

Beginning with a woman's gesture in a swimming pool — a wave that contains an entire personality — Kundera meditates on the desire for immortality, the nature of fame, and the difference between the person and their image. Characters from the present alternate with Goethe and Bettina von Arnim from the nineteenth century, and the narrator himself appears as a character.

Stories including 'I CAN SPEAK!™' and 'Jon' take Saunders's corporate satire to its extreme: fiction that uses the language and logic of advertising to anatomise what advertising has done to human interiority. The most formally experimental of his collections.

In a world where humans have nearly vanished, a young man named Vic lives in a forest with his found family of robots. When Vic's mechanical father is taken by the Authority — the machine system that controls what remains of civilisation — Vic and his companions must venture into a world of metal and memory to bring him home. Klune's retelling of Pinocchio.