Best Fiction Books

Harry Haller, a middle-aged intellectual who believes himself to be half-man and half-wolf — the Steppenwolf — is drawn by a young woman named Hermine into a world of dance, pleasure, and eventually the surreal Magic Theatre, where he must confront the multiplicity of selves he has denied.

Three novellas bound by common themes: a child left by his parents with a group of dubious characters in suburban Paris; a writer who reconstructs the people his father knew in the Paris underworld; an attempt to recover a woman who appears and disappears across decades. Modiano's most autobiographically transparent fiction.

Bryon and Mark have been inseparable since childhood — more brothers than friends — but as they move into their mid-teens, Bryon begins to change in ways that will make their bond impossible to sustain.

A satellite crashes in rural Arizona, and everyone in the nearest town is dead within minutes. A team of scientists races to a secret underground lab to identify and contain an extraterrestrial microorganism before it escapes — and before the government's nuclear failsafe triggers and makes everything catastrophically worse.

A chemical company facing a massive jury verdict quietly funds the election of a handpicked judge to the Mississippi Supreme Court, ensuring a favourable ruling on appeal. Grisham's most overtly political novel strips legal fiction of its heroics to expose the machinery of judicial corruption.

The conclusion of the Atlas trilogy: the Alexandrians must face the full consequences of the choices they made across the first two books, with the fate of the Society — and the world's accumulated knowledge — in the balance. Blake resolves the question of who among the six can be trusted and at what cost.

Ricardo Somocurcio, a Peruvian exile in Paris, has loved the same woman since he was fifteen—a woman who appears and disappears, reinventing herself as a Peruvian guerrilla, a Cuban revolutionary, a diplomat's wife, a gangster's moll. Each time she returns she uses him and leaves. Vargas Llosa's most Flaubert-influenced novel.

Anthony Patch, heir to a great fortune, and his beautiful wife Gloria dazzle New York society while waiting for Anthony's grandfather to die. The wait — and the drinking and the parties — destroy them both before the inheritance arrives.

A girl's impulsive act in 1984 draws her into a centuries-long conflict between two secret factions; the novel spans her entire life across six decades.

David Zimmer loses his wife and sons in a plane crash and, through grief, becomes obsessed with the silent films of Hector Mann, a forgotten comedian from the 1920s — until a letter arrives claiming that Mann is still alive.

When a series of brutal murders in Copenhagen is linked by small figures made of chestnuts left at each scene, detectives Naia Thulin and Mark Hess discover a connection to the missing daughter of a prominent politician — a girl who has been gone for a year and is assumed dead.

The first Discworld novel follows the hapless failed wizard Rincewind and the naive tourist Twoflower across a flat world balanced on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant star turtle — a comic masterpiece that parodies epic fantasy.

Undine Spragg arrives in New York society from the Midwest, marriages her way through American and European aristocracy, and discards each world when it ceases to serve her. Wharton's most savage novel is a brilliant portrait of the American appetite for reinvention at any cost.

Hal is a tarot card reader barely surviving on Brighton pier. When a solicitor's letter arrives informing her she's named in a will she has no right to inherit, Hal travels to Trepassen House — a decaying Cornish mansion where the eccentric Westaway family is gathering — and decides to pretend to be the granddaughter she isn't.

Seventeen short stories ranging from the title piece — in which a municipal elephant and its elderly keeper vanish without trace — to encounters with sleeping women, disintegrating marriages, and the surreal textures of ordinary Japanese life. The best single collection for encountering Murakami in concentrated form: all the themes, all the tonal shifts, all the American music, in pieces that can be read in a sitting.

Elizabeth Hunter, a dying Sydney matriarch, has had a mystical experience at the eye of a cyclone. Now her children have gathered, expecting an inheritance. The novel moves between Mrs. Hunter's deathbed present and the cyclone experience that changed her—White's meditation on revelation, mortality, and the family as a system of mutual incomprehension.

A retelling of the Orpheus myth set in the world of rock and roll, following Indian rock stars Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama from Bombay to London to New York across the second half of the twentieth century. Rushdie's most ambitious deployment of myth weaves together earthquake, music, fame, love, and death in the kind of vast, allusive narrative that makes him the heir to García Márquez in the English-speaking world.

A bomb destroys an apartment building in Seville, killing dozens and injuring hundreds. The investigation pulls Falcón into the world of Islamist extremism, Spanish intelligence, and the specifically Sevillian world of the Moorish quarter — the Barrio Santa Cruz — where the city's Christian and Islamic histories are still legible in the architecture. Wilson's most politically charged Falcón novel, written in the aftermath of the 2004 Madrid bombings.

The Pyncheon family has lived for generations under the shadow of a curse laid by a man their ancestor wrongly executed for witchcraft. Hawthorne's second novel is a Gothic meditation on inherited guilt — the way the sins of the ancestors persist in the family's blood, property, and character.

Ten years ago, Hannah's Oxford roommate April — beautiful, charismatic, and impossible to ignore — was murdered by the college porter. The case seemed closed. Now the porter has died in prison claiming innocence, and new evidence suggests the wrong man was convicted. Hannah must revisit the most disorienting year of her life.

Set in a twenty-first century England that has adopted republican government, Mary Shelley's visionary 1826 novel follows Lionel Verney as a plague sweeps across the world, wiping out humanity one country at a time, until he walks the earth alone — the last human survivor. One of the earliest and most devastating pandemic novels ever written.

Gavin Sasaki, a journalist demoted after fabricating a quote, returns to his Florida hometown to investigate a decade-old mystery involving his high school jazz quartet and a girl who disappeared. Mandel's third novel is her most explicitly crime-shaped and demonstrates the quality that would make Station Eleven great: the ability to make nostalgia and grief do the work of suspense.

Leda, a middle-aged professor, takes a solo holiday on the Ionian coast and becomes obsessed with a young mother and her daughter on the beach — an obsession that forces her to confront the choices she made as a young mother herself. A novella about maternal ambivalence, guilt, and the parts of ourselves we cannot reconcile.

Marine Sergeant Logan Thibault survives three tours in Iraq carrying a photograph of a woman he doesn't know, believing it brought him luck. When he tracks down the woman — Beth Clayton, a dog trainer in small-town North Carolina — he doesn't tell her why he came, and the secret becomes its own kind of weight.