Best Fiction Books

During the sweltering London summer of 1976, Robert Riordan walks out to buy a newspaper and disappears — prompting his wife and three adult children to converge on the family home and confront the secrets they have all been keeping.

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

Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death for 'gnostical turpitude' — the crime of being opaque in a world where everyone is transparent. A surreal novel of imprisonment and execution that is also a meditation on consciousness, totalitarianism, and the artist's isolation.

The goddess Hera narrates the years Penelope spent waiting in Ithaca for Odysseus's return, watching a queen manage suitors, politics, and survival with fierce intelligence while the world assumes she is merely waiting.

Baldwin's final novel follows gospel singer Arthur Montana through the civil rights era as narrated by his brother Hall, years after Arthur's death. It is Baldwin's most ambitious attempt to hold the full weight of Black American life — religion, sexuality, music, family, political violence — in a single narrative, and the most direct summation of everything he had written before it.

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.

Constance Chatterley, married to a paralysed, emotionally remote aristocrat, begins an affair with Mellors, the estate's gamekeeper. Lawrence's most notorious novel was banned for obscenity in Britain until 1960, but beneath the explicit content is a serious argument about industrialism, class, and the body's need for genuine tenderness.

Bee Königswasser, a neuroengineer, is forced to collaborate with Levi Ward — her academic nemesis and the man she is convinced hates her — on a NASA-funded brain-helmet project. Two STEM rivals in close proximity with too many sleepless nights and a deadline that won't move.

A kitchen boy named Pug is apprenticed to the court magician and discovers he has an unusual gift for magic — a discovery that will change his life as the Kingdom of the Isles faces invasion from another world. The first half of the original Magician novel, and the foundation of the Riftwar Saga.

Bill Gray, a reclusive novelist who has not published in decades, is drawn into a situation involving a poet held hostage by a terrorist group in Beirut. DeLillo's meditation on the relationship between writers and terrorists — both of whom claim the power to change how people see the world — is his most concentrated statement of his themes: the crowd, the image, the person who withdraws from visibility and the person who seeks it at any cost.

Meridian Hill, a young Black woman from Georgia, gives up her child and her education to join the civil rights movement, and spends years questioning whether violence is ever justified in the service of justice. Walker's most politically direct novel — a nonlinear account of the movement and its costs.

Twilight retold from Edward Cullen's point of view. After a partial manuscript leaked online in 2008, Stephenie Meyer spent twelve years completing the full novel. Reading the original story through Edward's immortal, analytical, perpetually-conflicted mind transforms a familiar love story into something darker and more psychologically complex.

Marco Stanley Fogg arrives at Columbia University in 1965 as an orphan with a modest inheritance, spends it all on books, comes close to starvation, and is gradually drawn into a series of coincidences that reveal his family history across two more generations of lost and wandering American men.

The murder of a Hong Kong immigrant liquor store owner in South Los Angeles leads Bosch into a confrontation with triad extortion networks — and then to Hong Kong itself, when a video surfaces appearing to show his daughter Maddie in danger.

Marc Seidman wakes in hospital — shot, his wife dead, his infant daughter missing. Six months later a ransom demand arrives, and the investigation into who took his daughter opens questions about who his wife actually was.

In the fictional South American republic of Costaguana, revolution tears the country apart while the silver mine that funds both sides becomes the novel's true subject — the material interest that corrupts every idealism. Conrad's most ambitious novel is the first great political novel of the twentieth century.

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.

A tech startup's team-building ski trip in the French Alps turns deadly when an avalanche traps employees in a luxury chalet with no rescue in sight — and someone is killing them off while they wait. An Agatha Christie-style closed-room mystery in a contemporary setting, with a cast of colleagues who each have reasons to want each other dead.

August moves to New York and meets Jane on the Q train — a punk girl stuck in 1977 who should not exist in 2020. Impossible and inexplicable, Jane is somehow trapped in a moment in time, and August is the only one who can see her. A queer love story about memory, identity, and what we're willing to change to keep something worth keeping.

Thirteen-year-old Joel Harrison Knox travels to a decaying Louisiana mansion to find the father he has never met, and discovers instead a world of eccentrics, decay, and his own nascent desires. Capote's debut is the definitive Southern Gothic coming-of-age novel.

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.

Cayce Pollard, a coolhunter with a pathological sensitivity to corporate branding, is hired to trace the source of mysterious film footage appearing anonymously online — footage that obsesses millions of people worldwide.

A roman à clef of London intellectual and artistic life in the 1920s, following dozens of characters through parties and arguments and affairs, structured like a fugue in prose with multiple themes developed simultaneously.