Best Literary Fiction Books

The Berglunds — an outwardly ideal liberal family in St. Paul — fall apart across decades as Walter, Patty, and their son Joey pursue freedom in ways that destroy the people around them.

In 1926 Harlem, a man shoots his young lover at her funeral while his wife grieves, attacks the dead girl's face, and attempts to understand what the city and their history have made of them all.

A girl's impulsive act in 1984 draws her into a centuries-long conflict between two secret factions; the novel spans her entire life across six decades.

A meditation on whiteness, grief, and a sister who died hours after birth — Han Kang's most lyrical and formally experimental work.

Two rival academic families — one liberal white, one conservative Black — collide at a New England university in a novel loosely inspired by E.M. Forster's Howards End.

Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon in London, experiences a single extraordinary Saturday in February 2003 — the day of the anti-Iraq-War march — that escalates into a confrontation with violence.

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

Maria, a young Brazilian woman, travels to Geneva dreaming of fame and fortune. Instead, she becomes a high-end prostitute, all while searching for — and philosophising about — the nature of love, desire, and the sacred in the profane.

Brida O'Fern is a young Irish woman driven by a hunger for spiritual knowledge. She seeks out two teachers — a wise man in the forest and a witch who teaches through the Wiccan Tradition of the Sun — in search of magic, purpose, and her soulmate.

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.