Best Fiction Books

Lilia Albert has been disappearing her whole life — taken by her father as a child, re-disappearing every few years, leaving behind whoever has come to love her. Her most recent boyfriend follows her across the country trying to understand why. Mandel's debut shows the same intelligence as her later work applied to the same questions: identity, memory, the people who vanish.

Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect discover that the people of Krikkit — a planet that had never known there were other stars — have declared war on the entire universe, and it falls to an extremely unlikely group of heroes to stop them.

Jo March, now married to Professor Bhaer, runs Plumfield School for boys, where she and her husband put their progressive educational ideals into practice with a diverse cast of boys each needing something different from school.

Jo Baker retells Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the Bennet household's servants — particularly the housemaid Sarah — revealing the physical labor, social vulnerability, and hidden lives that sustained the genteel world Austen depicted.

Sandy and Dennys Murry — the 'normal' twins — accidentally travel back to biblical times, to the era just before Noah's flood, where they encounter nephilim, seraphim, and Noah's family in a story about choice, mortality, and the nature of good and evil.

In a mobile army surgical hospital near the front lines of the Korean War, a team of brilliant surgeons maintain their sanity through elaborate pranks, outrageous insubordination, and black humor in the face of relentless carnage.

The concluding volume of the Sprawl trilogy follows four separate storylines — including a young girl called Mona, a simstim star's bodyguard, and Kumiko, the daughter of a Japanese crime lord — as they converge on the mystery of what Angie Mitchell's direct neural interface connects her to.

Walt, a nine-year-old orphan on the streets of St. Louis in 1927, is taken in by the mysterious Master Yehudi who spends two years teaching him to levitate — and the novel follows Walt's career as a performer across the turbulent American decades from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Seven-year-old Elsa inherits a series of apology letters from her recently deceased grandmother, sending her on a quest through their apartment building to deliver them and uncover the real stories behind the fairy tales she was raised on.

Two rival academic families — one liberal white, one conservative Black — collide at a New England university in a novel loosely inspired by E.M. Forster's Howards End.

Sidney Orr, recovering from a serious illness, buys a blue Portuguese notebook in Brooklyn and begins writing a story inside it — a story that begins to take on its own momentum, drawing him into questions about fate, authorship, and the reality of the fictional worlds writers create.

In a Nevada desert facility, a cloud of self-replicating nanobots has escaped containment, evolved predatory behavior, and begun hunting the humans outside. Jack Forman — a software engineer and stay-at-home dad — must enter the facility to stop the experiment before the swarm becomes something that cannot be stopped at all.

A cloud of self-replicating nanobots escapes a remote Nevada research facility and begins evolving with terrifying speed, forcing a stay-at-home software engineer to confront a threat that is simultaneously invisible, intelligent, and multiplying. Michael Crichton's nanotechnology thriller melds evolutionary biology with edge-of-your-seat suspense.

Jorg Ancrath, thirteen years old and already a murderer leading a band of road brothers, pursues a path of calculated brutality toward the throne of the Hundred Kingdoms in a dark post-apocalyptic world where the remnants of modern civilization lie buried beneath a medieval fantasy veneer.

Prince Dmitri Nekhlyudov recognises, as a juror at a murder trial, the woman he seduced and abandoned years before. Overcome by guilt, he follows Katyusha Maslova through the Russian prison and exile system — a journey that becomes Tolstoy's most sustained indictment of the state, the church, and the landed class.

Set in fifteenth-century Florence during the life of Savonarola, Eliot's most researched novel follows Romola, daughter of a blind scholar, whose Greek husband Tito Melema is one of fiction's most precisely observed depictions of moral deterioration by small increments.

Rusty-James wants to be like his older brother, the Motorcycle Boy — the legendary, color-blind, near-deaf gang leader who has returned to their town like a ghost from a more vital era.

Sara Crewe arrives at Miss Minchin's London boarding school as a wealthy, imaginative girl; when her father dies penniless, she is reduced to a servant's life but maintains her dignity through storytelling and the power of her own inner world.

Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon in London, experiences a single extraordinary Saturday in February 2003 — the day of the anti-Iraq-War march — that escalates into a confrontation with violence.

An orphaned soldier discovers she harbors a rare power that could end a centuries-long darkness threatening her country — and draws the attention of a mysterious and dangerous commander.

Kundera's first novel written directly in French meditates on slowness as a value — the pleasure that is inseparable from unhurry — and speed as the form modern forgetting takes. Two stories interweave: an eighteenth-century erotic tale of a planned seduction and a contemporary entomologist's conference at the same chateau.

Three stories — the title story originally published in The New Yorker — examining the space between men and women: what they want from each other, what they withhold, and what the distance costs.

Claire, a young Birthmother in Jonas's Community from The Giver, escapes after her son is taken as a Receiver, and spends years pursuing him across a vast geography in the fourth and final book of the Giver Quartet.

A team of scientists is assembled under the Pacific Ocean to investigate a mysterious spacecraft found on the ocean floor — a spacecraft that pre-dates any known human technology. Inside they find a perfect gold sphere. And then the sphere begins to respond to them, and the real terror begins.