Best Literary Fiction Books

The final volume: Elena and Lila return to Naples in middle age, their friendship tested by a final, devastating loss as the neighbourhood that made them both begins to dissolve.

Josef K. is arrested one morning without explanation, prosecuted by an opaque authority for an unnamed crime, and gradually consumed by a legal process he can never understand.

Martin Amis's most formally audacious novel tells the life of a Nazi doctor — including his work at Auschwitz — entirely in reverse chronological order, narrated by a consciousness that inhabits the doctor's body but does not share his knowledge, experiencing time running backwards.

A prequel and counter-narrative to Jane Eyre that reclaims the voice of Bertha Mason — Rochester's 'mad wife' — reimagined as Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole heiress in post-Emancipation Jamaica caught between two worlds and belonging to neither.

Vikram Seth's vast novel of postcolonial India. As a mother searches for a 'suitable boy' for her daughter Lata in the newly independent India of the early 1950s, Seth weaves the lives of four extended families into an immense, intimate panorama of a nation finding itself.

W. G. Sebald's haunting final novel. Over years of chance encounters, an unnamed narrator pieces together the story of Jacques Austerlitz, who came to Wales on a Kindertransport in 1939 and spent a lifetime estranged from his own past — until memory, and the Holocaust's long shadow, finally return.

Captain Charles Ryder, quartered in a stately home during the Second World War, recalls his long entanglement with the Flyte family — the beautiful, dissolute Sebastian; his magnetic sister Julia; and the great house of Brideshead itself — and how Catholicism shaped and ultimately claimed them all.

In 1843 Scotland, a Church of Scotland minister is sent to a remote Hebridean island to tell its last remaining inhabitant — a man who speaks only Gaelic and has lived alone since his community was cleared — that the island has been sold and he must leave. Neither man speaks the other's language.

Lima in the 1950s under the Odría dictatorship. Santiago Zavala and Ambrosio, his father's former driver, talk for four hours in a bar called the Cathedral. Their conversation reconstructs the corruption of an entire society—told in multiple simultaneous timelines that interlace without warning. Vargas Llosa's most ambitious novel, which he called his best.

Private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are hired to investigate the disappearance of a four-year-old girl from a Boston neighbourhood. The case pulls them into drug trafficking, police corruption, and a moral dilemma at the end that has no right answer.

A marine biologist named Leigh discovers strange biological activity at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean — then finds herself selected for a mission that will take her far further than any ocean. A novel about life, origin, and what it means to ascend toward something beyond human comprehension.

Philadelphia police officer Mickey Fitzpatrick patrols the Kensington neighbourhood — the epicentre of the opioid epidemic — while searching for her estranged sister, a drug user who has gone missing as a serial killer targets women on the street.

Fourteen interconnected stories following members of the Kashpaw, Lamartine, Morrissey, and Nanapush families on a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation from 1934 to 1984 — Erdrich's debut and the foundation of the great body of work that followed.

A spiteful, self-contradicting underground man addresses us from his Petersburg apartment — a novella that inaugurated modern psychological fiction and anticipated existentialism by seventy years.

The second canticle of The Divine Comedy — Dante and Virgil climb the mountain of Purgatory, where souls atone for the seven deadly sins and prepare for Paradise. The most human and most hopeful of the three canticles, written with greater lyric tenderness than Inferno.

Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh, 1917. Dr W.H.R. Rivers, army psychiatrist, treats officers traumatised by the Western Front — including poet Siegfried Sassoon, who has written an anti-war declaration, and Billy Prior, working class and volatile. The first novel of the Regeneration Trilogy.

Aeneas, survivor of Troy, journeys to Italy to found the civilization that will become Rome. In twelve books of Latin hexameter, Virgil traces Aeneas's trials at sea, his affair with Dido in Carthage, his descent into the underworld, and his final wars in Latium — creating the founding myth of the Roman world.

Mark Schluter survives a car crash on a Nebraska highway and wakes up with Capgras syndrome — he believes his sister Karin, who has moved back to care for him, has been replaced by an impostor. A neurologist, his patients, and the cranes that migrate through the Platte River Valley are woven into the story of Mark's recovery.

Set in Victorian London, The Fraud follows Eliza Touchet, housekeeper to the popular novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, as she witnesses the sensational Tichborne Claimant trial — a case that divided England along class and political lines and exposed the instability at the heart of identity, truth, and social belonging.

The third novel of the Regeneration Trilogy. Billy Prior returns to the front in 1918 alongside Wilfred Owen. Rivers, in London, treats surviving casualties while recovering memories of his anthropological fieldwork in Melanesia — and the parallels between the savagery of the islanders' head-hunting rituals and the Western Front's industrial slaughter become unavoidable.

Coleman Silk, a 71-year-old classics professor, is accused of making a racist remark about two Black students he has never met and whose names he did not know. The accusation ends his career. He is, in a secret he has kept for fifty years, Black himself — a light-skinned man who chose to pass as Jewish.

Two years after settling in Ardnakelty, retired Chicago cop Cal Hooper has built a quiet life with Lena and a near-father bond with teenager Trey Reddy. Then Trey's feckless father Johnny returns with an English moneyman and a scheme about gold in the hills — and a death follows that tests every loyalty Cal has.

Le Guin's landmark science fiction novel about an envoy from a galactic federation who visits a planet whose inhabitants are ambisexual — neither male nor female — and the profound implications for society and consciousness.

In the final volume of the Wolf Hall trilogy, Thomas Cromwell reaches the peak of his power as Henry VIII's chief minister — and begins the long fall that history has already pronounced inevitable. Mantel renders his last years with the same unflinching interiority that made the first two volumes masterpieces.