Best Literary Fiction Books

Bobby Western, a salvage diver in 1980s New Orleans, investigates a sunken plane where a passenger is missing from the manifest — and finds himself pursued. Alternating with Bobby's story are his dead sister Alicia's hallucinatory visions.

A special investigator is sent to a coal-mining region where there are rumours that officials are eating babies prepared as delicacies. His investigation collapses into drunkenness and corruption. Interpolated throughout are letters between 'Mo Yan' and an aspiring writer named Li Yidou, whose own stories appear in the novel. One of the most formally experimental works of Chinese fiction.

Briseis, the enslaved queen who becomes Achilles's war-prize, narrates the Trojan War from the ground level of the Greek camp, where women survive at the mercy of the men who own them.

The Pyrenees crack and the entire Iberian peninsula breaks off from Europe, drifting into the Atlantic. Five Portuguese and Spanish strangers—who each experienced a mysterious personal event just before the detachment—are drawn together as the peninsula sails toward an unknown destination. Saramago's most playful and politically charged novel.

Mary, mother of Jesus, is old and living in Ephesus, watched over by two men who want her testimony. She tells them what she saw — the wedding at Cana, the raising of Lazarus, the crucifixion — without consolation, without miracles, without the story they want. She fled the crucifixion. She does not believe her son was the son of God.

Vietnam, 1963 to 1983. Skip Sands is a CIA officer working for his uncle, a legendary colonel running a psychological operations program called Tree of Smoke. Around him: two brothers from Arizona, a Canadian missionary, a double agent. Johnson's National Book Award winner is the major American novel about the Vietnam War.

Christopher Banks, London's most celebrated detective in the 1930s, returns to Shanghai where his parents disappeared when he was a child. As the Sino-Japanese War rages around him, his investigation into his parents' fate reveals that his entire understanding of his childhood was a kind construction rather than reality.

A Swiss teacher abandons his life on impulse to follow a Portuguese philosopher's book to Lisbon, where he tries to reconstruct a life lived in the resistance against Salazar's dictatorship.

Seven short stories set across contemporary Thailand — a beach resort, a Bangkok suburb, a provincial festival, a military barracks — told from the perspectives of Thai characters navigating the friction between their country's traditions and its tourist economy.

On a Friday noon in July 1714, the finest bridge in Peru collapses and sends five travellers to their deaths. Brother Juniper, who witnesses the accident, spends the next six years investigating their lives to determine whether their deaths were divine plan or pure accident.

Three American expatriates travel through North Africa after World War II — and the desert progressively unmakes them, exposing what lies beneath their identity, their marriage, and their sense of self.

Ryder, a famous pianist, arrives in a Central European city for a concert. But the city's problems keep expanding to include him, his errands take impossible amounts of time, the streets rearrange themselves, and the people he meets keep revealing connections to his own forgotten past. Ishiguro's most formally radical novel, operating entirely in dream logic.

A five-year-old girl's-eye view of Marrakech in the early 1970s, as her unconventional mother pursues Sufi mysticism while her daughters navigate a world of souks, street life, and Moroccan school.

A grieving widow who cleans an aquarium at night forms an unlikely friendship with Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus, as the two of them quietly unravel the thirty-year-old mystery of her missing son.

The daughters of King Minos — Ariadne, who saves Theseus from the Labyrinth only to be abandoned, and Phaedra, who inherits the consequences — reclaim two lives silenced at the edges of the Theseus myth.

Tom Hazard was born in 1581 and ages so slowly he has lived through Shakespeare's London, Captain Cook's voyages, and 1920s Paris — now working as a history teacher in present-day London while belonging to a secret society that forbids its members from falling in love.

Six people at a backyard barbecue. Something happened. The novel spends its first half not telling you what, building the mundane detail of three couples' intertwined friendships, then reveals the event and its aftermath.

Jorge Luis Borges's most celebrated collection of stories — including The Garden of Forking Paths, The Library of Babel, Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote, and The Lottery in Babylon — stories that read like philosophical thought experiments and have influenced nearly every significant fiction writer since.

John Ames, a seventy-six-year-old Congregationalist minister in Gilead, Iowa in 1956, knowing he is dying, writes a long letter to his young son — a letter about faith, memory, his father and grandfather, and the complicated situation of his old friend's son John Ames Boughton.

Set in the Igbo village of Umuofia in pre-colonial Nigeria, Things Fall Apart follows the warrior Okonkwo whose rigid commitment to traditional masculine strength ultimately destroys him — and whose world is irrevocably transformed by the arrival of British missionaries and colonial administrators.

A novel based on a real 1869 political murder — a charismatic revolutionary named Stavrogin and the nihilist cell he inspires drive a provincial Russian town toward catastrophe.

An unnamed insomniac narrator forms an underground bare-knuckle fighting club with charismatic soap salesman Tyler Durden, and watches it escalate from transgressive therapy into something far more dangerous. A diagnosis of consumer capitalism and male alienation that became one of the defining cult novels of the 1990s.

David, a young American man in Paris, is engaged to Hella but falls into a consuming love affair with Giovanni, an Italian bartender — a passion he cannot accept, a shame he cannot suppress, and a tragedy he might have prevented.

The story of Oscar de León — an overweight, sci-fi-obsessed Dominican-American from New Jersey who has never had a girlfriend — and the multigenerational curse his family carries from the Dominican Republic under the Trujillo dictatorship.