Best Fiction Books

Ta-Nehisi Coates's debut novel follows Hiram Walker, a enslaved young man in antebellum Virginia who discovers he possesses a mysterious power called Conduction — a magical ability linked to memory and loss — and who becomes involved with the Underground Railroad.

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.

Nine stories, most narrated by Yunior, about the serial infidelity that destroys his relationships. Díaz's second collection extends the world of Drown and Oscar Wao into a sustained examination of masculinity, Dominican machismo, and the specific ways men sabotage the love they need.

In Verity, violence creates monsters — literally. Kate Harker is the ruthless daughter of the man who runs half the city by selling monster protection. August Flynn is a Sunai, a monster who feeds on souls — and who desperately wants to be human. When they become unlikely allies, the line between predator and prey disappears.

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.

Archibald Isaac Ferguson is born in 1947 in Newark, New Jersey — and Auster follows four parallel versions of his life, diverging from the same starting point based on small accidents of circumstance, through the turbulent American 1960s and into the early 1970s.

In the aftermath of the Red Wedding and the fall of King's Landing, power vacuums open across Westeros. Cersei Lannister consolidates control in the capital, Brienne of Tarth searches for the Stark girls, and Arya begins her training with the Faceless Men in Braavos — while the Iron Islands hold a kingsmoot that will reshape the shape of the war.

Poppy has been taken captive and must survive with Hawke — revealed as Hawke Flynn, a Prince and not the Royal Guard she believed him to be. With truths unravelling around her, Poppy must decide who to trust in a kingdom that has kept her blind.

On a far-future moon where humanity has retreated to let nature reclaim the continent, a tea monk named Dex leaves their comfortable life seeking something they can't name. In the wilderness, they encounter Mosscap — a robot who wants to understand what humans need. A Hugo Award-winning novella of gentle philosophy.

Charles Wallace, now fifteen, travels through time on the back of the unicorn Gaudior to change the course of history and prevent a nuclear war, while Meg participates from a distance through kything — a form of telepathic sharing.

Julia Martin, who has been receiving a small weekly allowance from a former lover, confronts him when it stops, returns to London to see her dying mother, and drifts. Rhys's second novel is the most Chekhovian of her work — nothing is resolved, nothing is dramatized, and the sense of life passing without the protagonist being able to grasp it is achieved entirely through prose of minimal, devastating precision.

Theodore Gumbril, a schoolmaster who invents pneumatic trousers, drifts through London's intellectual and artistic circles in the aftermath of the First World War — Huxley's darkest comedy and his most sustained portrait of 1920s London bohemia.

A British historian in post-Soviet Moscow discovers a notebook that may contain Stalin's most dangerous secret — one that leads him to the remote Arctic city of Archangel and a discovery that could reshape Russia's future.

Told through fifteen narrators, As I Lay Dying follows the Bundren family's harrowing journey across Mississippi to bury their matriarch Addie in the town of Jefferson — a journey that is simultaneously a dark comedy of rural American poverty and one of modernism's most formally radical explorations of consciousness and death.

A generation ship carrying over two thousand colonists departs Earth for Tau Ceti, seven generations and 160 years away. Told partly from the perspective of the ship's evolving artificial intelligence, Aurora is a rigorous, moving exploration of what interstellar travel would actually cost.

Kate Chopin's first short story collection captures life in the Louisiana Creole and Cajun communities of Natchitoches Parish, rendering race, desire, and social constraint with extraordinary sensitivity and precision.

Theo Byrne, an astrobiologist searching for signs of life on other planets, raises his neurodivergent son Robin alone after his wife's death. When Robin's emotional dysregulation threatens his school placement, Theo enrolls him in an experimental neurofeedback program that maps his brain against recordings of his late mother — with transformative and devastating results.

A young novelist's work is accepted by the Moscow Arts Theatre and he is drawn into the labyrinthine machinery of Soviet theatrical production — committees, rewrites, egos, and a mysterious director who never appears. Bulgakov's posthumously published roman à clef about his experiences at the Moscow Arts Theatre is a devastating account of the relationship between art and institutional power.

In a ruined city dominated by a giant flying bear named Mord, a scavenger named Rachel finds a strange creature she calls Borne attached to Mord's fur — and raises it in secret as it grows and changes beyond anything she expected.

Two copy-clerks who become friends retire to the countryside and systematically attempt to master every branch of human knowledge — agriculture, chemistry, medicine, archaeology, philosophy, religion — failing at each in turn. Flaubert's unfinished final novel, published posthumously, is his most radical satirical project.

Dwayne Hoover is a successful car dealer having a mental breakdown. Kilgore Trout is a science fiction writer no one has ever heard of who is about to meet Dwayne. Vonnegut himself wanders through the novel as a character watching his own creations. Breakfast of Champions is a satirical attack on American culture so broad it becomes a self-portrait.