Best Contemporary Fiction Books

Bird—a young Japanese man obsessed with Africa and escape—learns his wife has given birth to a baby with a brain abnormality. Faced with the choice of accepting this life-defining burden or arranging for the baby to die, Bird spends three days in a moral crisis, fleeing into the arms of an old girlfriend while the hospital awaits his decision.

Mevlut Karataş comes to Istanbul from a village in central Anatolia at age twelve and spends the next four decades selling boza—a traditional fermented drink—on the city's streets at night. His life and Istanbul's transformation from 1969 to 2012 unfold together in Pamuk's most warmhearted and expansive novel.

Popular girl Samantha Kingston dies in a car crash and relives her last day seven times, slowly reckoning with the cruelties she participated in and what it would cost to do something different.

Artur Sammler—Polish-Jewish, seventy years old, half-blind from a Nazi massacre he survived by crawling out of a mass grave—moves through 1960s New York observing the chaos of the counterculture with a survivor's cold clarity. A meditation on civilization, death, and what we owe each other.

Ka, a Turkish poet living in exile in Frankfurt, returns to Turkey to cover a string of suicides among young women and falls into a snowbound city—Kars, near the Armenian border—where a political coup is unfolding and the battle between secularism and political Islam is playing out in miniature. Three days, heavy snow, and a love affair that may or may not be real.

A grumpy, recently widowed Swedish man who has given up on life encounters a series of intrusive neighbors who accidentally give him reasons to stay.

Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter witnesses the police shooting of her childhood friend Khalil — and must navigate the collision between her Black neighborhood and her predominantly white private school as she decides whether to speak up.

A privileged Afghan boy's act of betrayal against his loyal servant's son haunts him across decades and continents, from Kabul to California and back.

Two childhood friends become collaborators in an unlikely video game company that spans three decades and raises every question a creative partnership can ask about love, ambition, and what we make and why.

In the carefully planned suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio, the arrival of an artist and her daughter ignites tensions about motherhood, race, class, and the rules that hold carefully ordered lives together.

A cheerful working-class woman becomes caregiver to a cynical, recently paralyzed man, and the relationship that develops challenges everything both of them believe about a life worth living.

A fictional oral history of one of the greatest rock bands of the 1970s, told through interviews with band members years after their legendary breakup.

A profoundly isolated young woman in Glasgow navigates her rigidly structured life while concealing a devastating past and slowly, almost accidentally, discovering what connection feels like.

The thirty-year friendship between Tully Hart and Kate Mularkey — from their teenage years on Firefly Lane through marriages, children, careers, and a devastating betrayal.

The sequel to It Ends with Us, picking up Lily and Atlas's story as they cautiously rebuild a relationship while Lily co-parents with her ex-husband Ryle.

Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew meet on the night of their graduation in 1988, and the novel follows them on the same date — July 15th, St. Swithin's Day — every year for twenty years.

Melinda Sordino begins ninth grade as a social pariah after calling the police at an end-of-summer party — haunted by a secret she cannot speak about and slowly losing her ability to function.

The youngest Brown sister crashes into the uptight owner of a bed-and-breakfast and ends up as his cook — and his closest companion — while he recovers from the injury she caused.

Theodore Finch and Violet Markey meet on a school bell tower, both there for the same dark reason, and fall in love while completing a state geography project that keeps Finch anchored to life.

A cutthroat literary agent keeps bumping into the same brooding editor during her summer in a small town, and their mutual irritation slowly transforms into something neither expected.

Tennis legend Carrie Soto comes out of retirement at 37 to protect her all-time Grand Slam record from being broken by the sport's rising star.