Best Literary Fiction Books

Eva Khatchadourian writes letters to her estranged husband in the aftermath of their son Kevin's school massacre, examining her own culpability and the nature of maternal ambivalence.

Before Dorothy dropped in, the Wicked Witch of the West had a life. This is her story — a retelling of The Wizard of Oz from the perspective of Elphaba, a misunderstood girl whose emerald skin and sharp intelligence make her an outsider from birth.

A white female author steals the unfinished manuscript of her Chinese-American friend who has just died, publishes it as her own, and watches her carefully constructed lies unravel as the internet closes in.

A meditation on travel, the human body, and the nature of movement, woven from fragments: a narrator's airport observations, Chopin's preserved heart, an anatomist's guide to plastination, a woman who disappears.

Two grieving brothers — chess prodigy Peter and older lawyer Ivan — navigate love, loss, and each other in the aftermath of their father's death.

On the night of Willie Lincoln's death in 1862, Abraham Lincoln visits his son's crypt as the dead in the Bardo surrounding it attempt to guide the boy to his next passage.

The aging Lambert parents try to assemble their three adult children for one last family Christmas as Alzheimer's, infidelity, and financial ruin cascade through each of their lives.

The twelfth expedition into the mysterious Area X sends four unnamed women scientists into an environment that defies biological and physical understanding.

Set during the Nigerian-Biafran War of the late 1960s, the novel follows three characters — twin sisters and a British writer — through one of Africa's most devastating postcolonial conflicts.

The quiet, ordinary life of William Stoner — Missouri farm boy, English professor, failed husband and father — told with such precision and compassion that it becomes a meditation on what makes a life worth living.

Thomas Cromwell orchestrates the fall of Anne Boleyn so that Henry VIII can pursue Jane Seymour — a second act of court destruction more morally troubling than the first. Winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Elena pursues academic success and marriage while Lila works in brutal factory conditions; their lives diverge further as political upheaval grips 1970s Naples.

Lucy Honeychurch travels to Florence with her cousin and chaperone, encounters a room with a view and a young man who insists on honesty, and discovers that choosing her own life is harder than she expected.

Jim Burden looks back on the Bohemian immigrant girl who defined his Nebraska childhood and shaped everything he has become.

The friendship between Nel Wright and Sula Peace, two Black women in the Bottom — a hilltop community in Ohio — over five decades, and what Sula's freedom costs both of them.

An Irish family — parents, teenage daughter, and young son — each narrate their version of the secrets and crises that are simultaneously destroying and revealing them.

Four characters navigate love, fidelity, and the weight of existence against the backdrop of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, in Kundera's most celebrated philosophical novel.

A nameless teenager joins a gang of mercenary scalp-hunters in the 1850s Southwest, entering a world of almost incomprehensible violence presided over by the monstrous Judge Holden.

Three families — the cultivated Schlegels, the commercial Wilcoxes, and the struggling Basts — collide and connect in Edwardian England around the meaning of a country house and the possibilities of human connection.

Nine stories about Indians and Indian-Americans navigating displacement, longing, and the distances between people. Pulitzer Prize winner.

Alexandra Bergson inherits her immigrant father's Nebraska farm and builds it into a prosperous enterprise over decades, while the land itself becomes the novel's most enduring presence.

Lily Bart, beautiful, brilliant, and financially precarious, navigates New York society's marriage market and slowly loses ground in a game she was not born to win.

The life of T.S. Garp — son of the feminist icon Jenny Fields — from birth to violent death, a novel about family, violence, writing, and the absurdity of existence.

A plain, good-natured heiress in 1840s New York is courted by a charming fortune hunter — with her sardonic, brilliant father watching and diagnosing everything.