Best Contemporary Fiction Books

Twin sisters Cath and Wren arrive at college as inseparable unit — and Wren immediately tries to separate. Cath retreats into her beloved Simon Snow fan fiction while the real world crowds in.

Two rival journalists compete for the chance to write the memoir of a reclusive heiress whose family saga spans a century of scandal, secrets, and reinvention on a sleepy Georgia island.

A powerful and emotionally resonant novel about a young woman navigating a complicated love story that forces her to confront cycles of abuse.

A sweeping family epic set across one legendary night in 1983 Malibu, tracing the four Riva siblings through their sun-soaked, complicated lives.

Six astronauts aboard the International Space Station complete sixteen orbits of Earth in a single day, confronting mortality, beauty, and what it means to be human.

Two best friends spend a decade taking annual vacations together until one disastrous trip ends the friendship — and one of them spends years trying to understand what went wrong.

The First Son of the United States and the Prince of Wales are forced into a faux friendship after a scandal — and fall genuinely, complicatedly in love.

A young woman released from prison after a tragic accident tries to reconnect with her daughter and find forgiveness in the small town where everything went wrong.

A pragmatic PhD student and a gentle giant of a security guard agree to a fake relationship for social media attention — and discover they've been taking hints about each other for too long.

Two strangers share a one-bedroom London flat on alternating shifts and fall in love entirely through notes before they ever properly meet.

Two executive assistants who share an office and despise each other slowly — and then suddenly — realize that hatred and attraction are not as different as they thought.

An elderly man reads aloud to his wife from a notebook — the story of their love across decades, class barriers, and the Second World War. One of the best-selling love stories ever written.

A woman arrives in a small town to rescue her twin sister and ends up stranded there, falling into an unlikely arrangement with the town's most infuriating man while raising her niece.

A romance novelist and a literary fiction author spend a summer as reluctant neighbors, challenge each other to write outside their genres, and fall unexpectedly in love.

A woman left at the altar moves in with her ex-fiance's new girlfriend's ex-boyfriend, and the two jilted parties discover they might be exactly what the other needs.

After a near-death experience, Chloe Brown makes a list of things she wants to do before she becomes too ill to do them, and finds an unlikely partner in her brooding building superintendent.

A sheltered homeschooled girl falls for the mysterious boy next door, only to discover their connection runs deeper and darker than either of them could have imagined.

A figure skater and a hockey player are forced to share ice rink practice time, and their rivalry gradually melts into something neither of them planned.

A social-media-famous LA socialite is exiled to a small Pacific Northwest fishing town by her stepfather, where she falls for the town's gruff, widowed boat captain.

Two Irish teenagers, a popular athlete and an awkward intellectual, begin an unlikely relationship that reshapes both of them across years of university life.

An ER doctor and a handyman from a small town have a perfect weekend together — and then have to figure out if real life can hold what they found.

A mother-daughter story of grief, betrayal, and rebuilding after a devastating family tragedy reshapes everything they thought they knew.

An autistic econometrician hires a professional escort to help her practice intimacy, and the arrangement becomes something neither of them could have predicted.

A PhD student in biology impulsively kisses a notoriously intimidating professor to convince her friend she has moved on, and the resulting fake-dating arrangement becomes something neither of them expected.