Best Literary Fiction Books

William Golding's intense allegorical novel of faith and obsession. Dean Jocelin is consumed by a vision: to raise a vast spire atop his medieval cathedral, though the foundations cannot bear it. As the tower rises, so do the costs — to the building, to the men, and to Jocelin's own soul.

Famagusta, Cyprus, 1972. The Sunrise hotel is the most glamorous in the eastern Mediterranean, and the Georgious and Özkan families are its heart — one Greek Cypriot, one Turkish Cypriot, bound by friendship across the island's division. Then 1974 arrives: the Turkish invasion, the occupation of northern Cyprus, and the abandonment of Famagusta — a ghost city still frozen in that summer. Hislop's most politically charged novel.

Yasmina Khadra's spare, devastating novel of Taliban-ruled Kabul. The fates of two couples intertwine in a city crushed by fear and fundamentalism, as ordinary people struggle to hold onto love and dignity under a regime that has outlawed both — a short, harrowing portrait of life under tyranny.

A loose sequel to The Color Purple following several characters — including an aged spirit named Miss Lissie who remembers multiple past lives — through a meditation on African and African American history, gender, and spiritual continuity. Walker's most ambitious and most polarizing novel.

Father Time is the man who first counted the hours — and was punished for it by being forced to hear all of humanity's pleas for more time, or for time to stop. Albom's modern fable weaves three stories across millennia to examine humanity's complicated relationship with time.

Howard Ingham, an American writer, has come to Tunisia to work on a screenplay. His fiancée doesn't arrive. A colleague dies ambiguously. One night Ingham may have killed an intruder with a typewriter. He isn't certain. Set almost entirely in Hammamet, Tunisia, this is Highsmith's most existential novel — the question of whether Ingham committed a crime becomes less important than the question of whether it matters to him that he might have.

A fictional British rock band in 1967 London — Utopia Avenue — rises from Soho to the Royal Albert Hall and across America, with chapter-length songs as the structural unit and the actual music scene of 1967 as the setting.

The first novel in Louis de Bernières's South American trilogy — a magical realist tale of a Colombian village caught between a corrupt landowner, the army, and guerrillas, as a British woman tries to divert the river to water her garden.

Six friends speak their inner lives across childhood, youth, and middle age — not in dialogue but in pure soliloquy, interspersed with wave descriptions. Woolf's most radical novel dissolves the boundaries between prose and poetry, self and world.

Narrated by Mr. Bones, a dog, as he accompanies his dying owner Willy G. Christmas — a homeless poet of genuine but unrecognised talent — to Baltimore to find Willy's former teacher, and then navigates the world alone after Willy's death.

Three novellas set in the same New York apartment in 1893, 1993, and 2093, connected by recurring names and the theme of freedom — what it means, what it costs, and whether it is ever truly available.

Set over a single day in Dublin on June 16, 1904, James Joyce's Ulysses follows advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and the young writer Stephen Dedalus through the city in a revolutionary act of literary modernism modeled on Homer's Odyssey.

David Nicholls's Booker-longlisted novel of a marriage in crisis. On the eve of a grand European tour, Douglas's wife Connie tells him she may be leaving him. Determined to win her back and reconnect with his estranged son, the buttoned-up Douglas embarks on a poignant, funny grand tour across the continent.

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.

Grady Tripp, a creative writing professor at a Pittsburgh university, has been working on his second novel for seven years. It is 2,600 pages and shows no signs of ending. Over one chaotic weekend — during a literary festival — everything in his life comes apart at once: his wife leaves, his editor arrives, his student steals a jacket from the chancellor's house.

In 1970s London, a middle-aged travelling salesman is captivated by a young Yugoslav woman named Roza, who claims to be a prostitute and tells him stories about her father — a partisan in Tito's Yugoslavia — that may or may not be true.

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.

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.

Elisabeth Demand, a young woman, visits Daniel Gluck, her hundred-year-old neighbour, who is dreaming in a care home. The novel moves between their past friendship and the present moment — post-Brexit Britain, 2016, a country divided in ways it cannot articulate. The first of the Seasonal Quartet.

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