Best Fiction Books

Watt arrives at the house of Mr. Knott to serve as his domestic. He observes everything with extreme precision and cannot understand any of it. When his service ends, he moves to an asylum and dictates the story to a man named Sam. Beckett's most comic novel—and the one in which he worked out the machinery he would use for the rest of his career.

The fourth and final Bruce Medway novel, returning to Benin — where the series began — as Medway investigates a brutal murder connected to the region's vodoun culture and its underworld of ritual and violence. A fitting close to the West African series, darker and more interior than the earlier books.

Six stories set in the weeks following the 1995 Kobe earthquake, all featuring characters who are not in Kobe but are affected by the disaster at a psychological distance. The earthquake becomes a figure for the ruptures in ordinary life that expose what is missing underneath. Murakami's most politically engaged fiction — a meditation on collective trauma and individual isolation in Japan in the 1990s.

Colin Singleton has dated nineteen girls named Katherine and been dumped by all nineteen. A child prodigy now between his last Katherine and his uncertain future, Colin and his best friend Hassan embark on a post-graduation road trip to Gutshot, Tennessee, where Colin tries to derive a mathematical theorem to predict the rise and fall of romantic relationships.

Sri Lanka in the 1980s civil war: Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist sent by a human rights organization, works with archaeologist Sarath Diyasena to identify the victims of atrocity. Ondaatje's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel explores testimony, identity, and what it means to bear witness.

Pandora picks up her brother Edison from the airport and barely recognizes him — he has gained nearly two hundred pounds. What follows is her attempt to save him, and the question of how much we owe the people we love when they are destroying themselves.

Tracker, a hunter with a nose that can follow anyone anywhere, is hired to find a missing boy across a mythological Africa of shapeshifters, witches, and ancient gods. The first volume of the Dark Star Trilogy, told as Tracker's interrogation-room account of what happened and why the boy is now dead.

Twenty-four short stories spanning twenty-five years of Murakami's career, many translated into English for the first time in this collection. A frog saves Tokyo, a man's dead wife appears as a crab, a couple separates over a mysterious birthday present. The full range of his imagination in a single volume.

A middle-aged professor is found wandering and amnesiac. As psychiatrists attempt to restore his 'normal' mind, the reader experiences the world he inhabits—visions of a cosmic mission, a tropical island, the war between light and dark. Lessing's most experimental novel, a challenge to the very concept of normality.

Two shapeshifting alien entities — one benign, one predatory — have lived on Earth for millions of years, each gradually learning to pass as human. A mysterious artifact discovered on the ocean floor draws them both toward the same location.

Two college friends in Dublin become entangled with a married couple, and the relationships that develop test every assumption both women hold about themselves.

Multiple storylines converge around the aftermath of Rand's cleansing of saidin, each character reacting to a distant magical event they witnessed but did not understand. The series' most divisive entry for its pacing, yet a necessary bridge to the series' final acceleration.

Chicago, 1942. Joseph, waiting to be drafted, keeps a journal for seven months. He has left his job; he cannot do anything else; he hangs in suspension. Bellow's first novel—written under the influence of Dostoevsky and Kafka—is the purest statement of the anxious intellectual that would define his career.

Ellie has always avoided the Elites — the four students who run Elites Academy with brutal authority. Now Aiden King, the most dangerous of them, has decided she is his. She has no idea why. She is not sure she wants to find out.

Maria, a young Brazilian woman, travels to Geneva dreaming of fame and fortune. Instead, she becomes a high-end prostitute, all while searching for — and philosophising about — the nature of love, desire, and the sacred in the profane.

Three thousand five hundred years after the events of Children of Dune, Leto II — now half-human, half-sandworm — rules as God Emperor. He has seen all possible human futures and chosen the only path that ensures humanity's survival: a brutal peace that will ultimately shatter into the Scattering. The most philosophical and challenging book in the Dune series.

Bride, a beautiful dark-skinned young woman who has turned her blackness into a brand and a career asset, confronts her traumatic childhood—and the lie she told as a child that sent an innocent woman to prison—when her boyfriend suddenly vanishes. Morrison's final novel, set in contemporary California.

A small Colombian town is disturbed by anonymous pamphlets—lampoons—that appear overnight on doors and walls, revealing private scandals. As the town's mayor tries to suppress them and violence escalates, García Márquez creates his most purely political early novel.

The first Bruce Medway novel, introducing the fixer and sometime investigator who operates in West Africa's underworld of corrupt business, smuggling, and sudden violence. Medway is hired to find a missing German businessman in Benin — a job that quickly becomes far more dangerous than advertised. The first of four West African thrillers that established Robert Wilson's reputation before the Falcón series.

The boys of Plumfield are now young adults, facing real-world choices about career, marriage, and moral character, while Jo March has become a famous author and must cope with the peculiar burdens of literary celebrity.

Jude Fawley, a Dorset stonemason, dreams of university and an intellectual life. His marriage, his passion for his unconventional cousin Sue Bridehead, and society's refusal to accommodate either his ambitions or his love, grind him down. Hardy's final and darkest novel caused a scandal on publication.

A portrait painter, after his wife leaves him, retreats to a house in the Odawara mountains once owned by the painter Tomohiko Amada. In the attic he finds a canvas of an obscure Japanese-style painting titled 'Killing Commendatore'. Soon a mysterious bell begins ringing from a sealed pit in the woods, and a faceless figure called the Idea emerges to set the narrator's world in motion. Murakami's most art-focused novel.

A kind-hearted American boy named Cedric Errol discovers he is the heir to an English earldom, and his natural goodness gradually transforms his crusty grandfather, the Earl of Dorincourt.

Written in 1819 but suppressed by Shelley's father and unpublished until 1959, Mathilda is a harrowing gothic novella about a young woman destroyed by her father's incestuous obsession and her subsequent withdrawal into grief. Autobiographical in its emotional truth, it is among the most painfully honest works Shelley ever wrote.