Best Fiction Books

The Mortal War is over, but Clary and Jace's happiness is short-lived. Someone is murdering Shadowhunters and turning their bodies into weapons. As Jace struggles with dark visions that threaten his relationship with Clary, a new and terrifying enemy emerges — one whose connection to Valentine's legacy runs deeper than anyone suspected.

The Cinderella story retold from the perspective of Iris, one of the stepsisters — set in seventeenth-century Haarlem among Dutch painters and tulip merchants, asking who is really the beautiful one and what beauty costs.

A tech consortium races into the Congo rainforest to find a lost city — and the deposits of industrial diamonds it holds. They are joined by a primatologist and her signing gorilla named Amy, who may hold the key to what killed the previous expedition. Crichton combines African adventure, corporate espionage, and animal intelligence research.

A group of intellectuals and eccentrics gather at Crome, a country house, for a summer of endless conversation about art, philosophy, sex, and the nature of reality — while accomplishing nothing whatsoever.

A friendly St. Bernard contracts rabies and traps a mother and her young son inside a broken-down car on a sweltering summer day in rural Maine. With no supernatural element, King strips horror down to its barest components: an animal, heat, thirst, and time running out.

An Andean village where three people have disappeared. A corporal and his assistant investigate: the suspects are Shining Path guerrillas, but the mystery deepens into something older and stranger—the Andean world of pishtacos (fat-extracting demons) and ancient violence. Vargas Llosa's novel about Peru's civil conflict as seen from the highlands.

In a small unnamed country, death simply stops. No one dies. The immediate consequences—the chaos for funeral homes, hospitals, insurance companies, and the Church—are comedic and precise. Then death resumes, but only announces her arrivals by violet letter seven days in advance. In the second half, death falls in love with a cellist who refuses to die.

The first Rain Wild Chronicles novel follows the misfits assigned to tend a group of deformed dragons — creatures that hatched wrong and cannot fly — as they journey upriver to find the lost Elderling city of Kelsingra. A new entry point to the Realm of the Elderlings set after the events of the Liveship Traders.

Edith Howland keeps a diary. In it, her son Cliffie is successful, married, fulfilling his potential. In reality, Cliffie is a parasitic failure who has moved back into her house and contributes nothing. Her husband has left her. Her diary diverges from reality and then departs from it altogether — becoming not delusion but an act of private creation, a novel within the novel. Highsmith's most feminist work and one of her most devastating.

Elizabeth Costello is an elderly Australian novelist who travels to give lectures—on animal rights, on evil, on the existence of the good—and returns home to her son's discomfort. The novel is a series of lectures that Coetzee himself gave, presented as fiction; the distinction between author and character is deliberately uncertain.

Joyce's final novel is written in a multilingual dream-prose of puns, portmanteaux, and allusions, narrating the sleep and dream of HCE in a Dublin pub. The greatest single act of formal ambition in the novel's history.

Harry Dresden investigates a series of brutal murders during the full moon — and discovers that werewolves in Chicago are far more complicated than folklore suggests.

In 2043, American soldiers fight a distant war by remotely operating robotic killing machines called soldierboys — linked neurally in teams of ten — while a physicist discovers a plot to recreate the Big Bang that would destroy the universe.

A bored aristocrat escapes her London life for the Cornwall coast, where she discovers a French pirate ship hidden in a creek and falls in love with its captain — du Maurier's most overtly romantic novel and a study of the desire for freedom.

A short story retelling the myth of Galatea and Pygmalion, told from the perspective of the marble statue brought to life by the sculptor who loves her — and controls her.

In a brutal, medieval village far from the Giver's Community, the orphaned girl Kira is spared from abandonment because of her gift for embroidery, and is put to work restoring the Robe that tells her people's history.

Scout Finch, now Jean Louise and twenty-six, returns to Maycomb from New York to visit her father — and discovers that Atticus Finch holds views on race and segregation she cannot reconcile with the man she idolized.

Seven years after the events of The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is living freely in Florence under an assumed identity, pursued simultaneously by a vengeful Mason Verger — the only surviving victim — and by Clarice Starling, now an embattled FBI agent.

Harlem, 1960s: Ray Carney sells furniture by day and fences stolen goods on the side, telling himself he's only "slightly bent." Whitehead's crime novel is a departure from his recent literary fiction — a Harlem panorama that celebrates a world and an era while examining the costs of respectability.

Eugene Henderson — a huge, rich, impossible Connecticut pig farmer with a voice in his head that insists 'I want, I want' — abandons everything and travels to Africa, where he becomes entangled with two tribes and discovers something about what he wants.

Adam Walker, a Columbia student in 1967, meets the charismatic Rudolf Born at a party — and a single violent act, witnessed and then reported with growing unreliability across four different narrative perspectives, shapes the rest of his life.

In 1936, charismatic demagogue Buzz Windrip wins the US presidency on a platform of patriotism, nostalgia, and contempt for elites, then rapidly dismantles American democracy to establish a fascist state. Seen through the eyes of Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, Sinclair Lewis's 1935 satire is a manual for recognising authoritarianism written before the word was widely used.

Set in twelfth-century England during the aftermath of the Crusades, Ivanhoe follows the disinherited Saxon knight Wilfred of Ivanhoe as he jousts for honor, navigates treacherous Norman politics, and fights alongside a mysterious Black Knight revealed to be King Richard I.

A white senator who was raised as a Black child by a Black preacher in the American South is shot on the floor of the Senate and, as he lies dying, remembers his childhood with Reverend Hickman. Ellison's posthumously published second novel — assembled from forty years of manuscript — is flawed and incomplete but contains passages equal to anything in Invisible Man, and the central figure of the Black minister who raised a white child is among the most complex moral situations in American fiction.