Best Literary Fiction Books

Three interconnected narratives in Manila — a British drug dealer, a Filipino family, and a psychologist — converge in a single violent night. Garland's second novel, more structurally ambitious than The Beach.

Set on a small Greek island before the birth of Christ, the novel follows a courtesan named Chrysis whose philosophical wisdom shapes all those around her, and a young man who loves her.

A world-famous author — unmistakably Coelho himself — wakes one day to find that his war-correspondent wife Esther has disappeared, seemingly of her own will. His obsessive search for her, and for the meaning behind her departure, takes him from Paris to the steppes of Central Asia.

A successful novelist named Henry encounters a taxidermist obsessed with his unfinished play, in which a donkey named Beatrice and a howler monkey named Virgil enact an allegory about survival and the limits of language in representing atrocity.

Thornton Wilder's debut novel — a young American writer arrives in Rome and is drawn into the orbit of a secretive aristocratic circle whose members may be the old gods of Olympus in disguise.

Four north Londoners — each shaped by the same council estate — navigate adulthood differently. Smith's most formally adventurous novel abandons the warm sociability of White Teeth for fragmented, pressured prose that tries to catch consciousness in the act.

A man is beaten into a coma on the London Underground and wakes into a world he cannot trust — uncertain whether he is conscious, dreaming, or still under. A short, unsettling meditation on consciousness and reality.

Sophie Honeywell inherits a house on Scribbly Gum Island from her great-aunt Connie — an island famous for the unsolved Munro Baby Mystery of 1932 — and finds herself drawn into a community of women keeping secrets that have lasted for generations.

The long-awaited sequel to Shantaram, returning to Lin and the Bombay underworld for another epic of crime, philosophy, love, and the city that never lets its inhabitants go.