Literary fiction books

Literary fictionModern classics

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov · 1955

Lolita is presented as a memoir written in prison by a middle-aged European man who publishes under the name Humbert Humbert and addresses his reader as a jury. He describes a childhood attachment on the French Riviera and the obsession it becomes, and then the journey he takes across the United States with his twelve-year-old stepdaughter, Dolores Haze, the girl he privately calls Lolita. The book is narrated entirely in his voice, and the reader is left to judge what that voice is doing. The novel was written in English and first published in Paris in 1955.

Literary fictionModern horror

American Psycho

Bret Easton Ellis · 1991

Patrick Bateman is twenty-six, works in mergers and acquisitions on Wall Street, and spends his evenings in restaurants where the food and the reservations matter more than the people eating it. He is also a killer, and the novel gives both lives in the same flat, detailed register: the suits, the tapes, the grooming routine and the violence are described with identical care. The narration is his own and is not reliable. The book is a satire of a particular version of the 1980s, delivered in the voice of the man it is describing.

Literary fictionModern classics

Dubliners

James Joyce · 1914

Dubliners is fifteen stories about the same city, arranged in an order that runs from childhood to public life. A boy watches a priest's house and a market; a young woman stands at a window and decides whether to leave with a sailor; a canvasser spends an evening with friends while his career quietly ends; a Christmas party hears a singer and remembers. The stories avoid the climaxes a reader expects, and the moment that matters is usually an admission or an understanding that arrives late, in private.

Literary fictionComing-of-age

Normal People

Sally Rooney · 2018

Connell and Marianne attend the same secondary school in County Sligo and pretend in public not to know each other. His mother cleans Marianne's house, which is how they met; in school he is popular and she is an outcast. They begin an affair and then a friendship that continues into Trinity College Dublin, where the balance between them changes. The novel follows them across a few years of misunderstanding, other relationships and the pull that keeps bringing them back to one another.

The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy · 1997

Two-egg twins, Estha and Rahel, are seven years old in Ayemenem, Kerala, in 1969, living in their mother's family home with a grandmother, a grand-aunt and an uncle who has come back from England. Into this household arrives a nine-year-old English cousin, Sophie, whose visit sets off the events the adult twins are still circling twenty-four years later. The novel moves between the two periods in a jagged order, and its subject is the rules that decide who may be loved, and how much.

Survival fictionSea adventure

Life of Pi

Yann Martel · 2001

Piscine Molitor Patel grows up in Pondicherry, the son of a zookeeper, and is named after a swimming pool; he shortens his name to Pi. He is interested in religion from an early age and practises three of them at once, to his family's exasperation. When the family sails for Canada with a cargo of zoo animals, the ship sinks, and Pi spends 227 days in a lifeboat in the Pacific with a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. The novel is presented as a story being told to a writer, and it asks the reader to decide what kind of story it is.

Contemporary romanceLiterary fiction

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

Gail Honeyman · 2017

Eleanor Oliphant is twenty-nine, lives in Glasgow and works as a finance clerk for a graphic design company. She is academically able, does the crossword in her lunch hour, and has no friends at all; her weekends run on frozen pizza, vodka and telephone calls with Mummy. Then she and Raymond, the office IT man, help an elderly stranger who has fallen in the street, and the three of them begin the slow work of rescuing one another from isolation. What changes for Eleanor is not her circumstances but her understanding of them.

Literary fictionSocial realism

Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 2013

Ifemelu is a young Nigerian woman who emigrates to the United States to attend university, and the novel follows her life in both countries. It is threaded through with her love story with Obinze, a classmate from her Lagos secondary school, and with the blog she writes about race in America, a subject she encounters directly only after arriving. The novel moves between Lagos, the United States and Britain, which lets it compare what each country demands of the people who arrive in it.

Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert · 1856

Emma Bovary, the wife of a country doctor, lives beyond her means in an attempt to escape the dullness of provincial life. Her first affair introduces her to luxury and the prospect of a shared future, and then she is abandoned. She continues to spend recklessly, and the debts accumulate until they carry her towards ruin and disgrace.

Magical realismModern classics

Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie · 1981

Saleem Sinai tells his own story against the transition of India from British colonial rule to independence and the partition of the subcontinent. Born at the moment of the country's independence, he is one of the children of that hour, and the novel keeps his private account and the national record running alongside each other so that they cannot be separated.

DystopianLiterary fiction

The Circle

Dave Eggers · 2013

Mae Holland, a recent college graduate, lands a job at a powerful technology company called the Circle, mainly through the help of her college friend Annie, who is one of the most influential people in the firm. Mae is impressed by the campus with its housing, gyms and parties. Her initially rewarding experience turns darker as the company's reach expands.

Magical realismModern classics

The Satanic Verses

Salman Rushdie · 1988

The novel begins with two men falling out of a hijacked aircraft above the English Channel and surviving the fall. It was inspired in part by the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and its title refers to a group of Quranic verses about three pagan Meccan goddesses. Rushdie builds the story from contemporary events and figures and keeps the plane's survivors at the centre.

Family novelLiterary fiction

Cutting for Stone

Abraham Verghese · 2009

Marion Stone and his conjoined twin Shiva are born at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa in September 1954. Their mother, an Indian nun, dies in childbirth and their father disappears, leaving the boys to be raised by the doctors and staff around them. The novel follows the twins through a childhood inside medicine and then along separate paths.

Play It as It Lays

Joan Didion · 1970

Thirty-one-year-old Maria Wyeth's story begins while she is recovering from an implied mental breakdown in a psychiatric hospital in the Los Angeles area. Her journey moves between the dizzying and the domestic as her acting career slows and her personal life collapses, and her history is revealed through fragments rather than in sequence. The story is told in short, dislocated scenes rather than in sequence, so the reader assembles Maria's situation from what she is willing to look at.

Martyr!

Kaveh Akbar · 2024

Cyrus Shams has been grappling with his mother's death since he was a baby, when her plane was shot down over the Persian Gulf. Newly sober, he sets out to learn the truth of her life. An encounter with a dying artist leads him towards the mysteries of his own past, including an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields and a painting by an exiled artist.

Ghost Wall

Sarah Moss · 2018

In the north of England, far from the cities, Silvie and her family spend two weeks living as though they were ancient Britons, using the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age. They have joined an anthropology course that re-enacts life in simpler times, and while the students are there for their coursework, Silvie's father is pursuing a lifelong obsession he has raised her inside. The course puts that obsession within reach of the present.

Family novelLiterary fiction

The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Kim Edwards · 2005

In early March 1964, Dr David Henry is forced to deliver his wife Norah's twins himself, with the help of a nurse named Caroline Gill. Their first child, Paul, is born healthy; the second, Phoebe, is born with Down syndrome. David hands the baby to the nurse and asks her to take the child to an institution, and the novel follows what happens next.

Intermezzo

Sally Rooney · 2024

Aside from being brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek appear to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties, successful and apparently unassailable, and since their father's death he has been medicating himself to sleep while managing relationships with two very different women. Ivan is twenty-two, a competitive chess player who sees himself as socially awkward, and he meets an older woman in the early weeks of his bereavement.

Family novelDomestic horror

Heaven

V. C. Andrews · 1985

Of all the families in the mountain shacks, the Casteels were the lowest, and Heaven Leigh Casteel was the prettiest and cleverest girl in the backwoods despite ragged clothes and a father meaner than ten vipers. Then her stepmother ran off, and her father devised a scheme that threatened to destroy everything Heaven had been holding on to for her brothers and sisters.

Family novelLiterary fiction

Amberwell

D. E. Stevenson · 1955

Five young Ayrtons grow up at Amberwell, playing in its gardens and preparing themselves to go out into the world. To each of the children the house means something different, but they share the belief that Amberwell is more than where they live. It drives one of them into a reckless marriage and heals another of his wounds, and one child stays at home and gives up her life to keep it running.

Family novelComing-of-age

Little Women

Louisa May Alcott · 1868

The four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, grow up during the American Civil War, and the novel follows them from childhood towards adulthood through their work, their friendships and their losses. It is loosely based on the lives of the author and her three sisters, and it was published in two volumes, in 1868 and 1869, before being issued as a single novel in 1880.

Social realismFamily saga

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck · 1939

The Joads are a poor family of tenant farmers in Oklahoma, driven from their home by drought, economic hardship, changes in the agricultural industry and bank foreclosures. They take to the road in a battered truck and head for California to look for work, and find hundreds of others in the same position, forced to accept breadline wages. They begin as fruit pickers, and then as strikebreakers.

Family sagaLiterary historical fiction

East of Eden

John Steinbeck · 1952

The novel details the lives of two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, and their interwoven stories, in the Salinas Valley of California. Its material includes identity, grief and the question of what it means to be human, and the book is tinged with biblical echoes of the fall of Adam and Eve and the rivalry of Cain and Abel across two generations.

Social realismImmigrant fiction

The Jungle

Upton Sinclair · 1906

The novel follows a Lithuanian immigrant family in the Chicago stockyards at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it exposes the conditions of their working lives. Sinclair set out to show the odds against immigrants and other working people who were trying to secure a share of the American dream, and the book instead became a national scandal about the meatpacking industry.

Post-apocalypticLiterary fiction

The Road

Cormac McCarthy · 2006

Some unnamed catastrophe has scoured the world to a burnt-out cinder inhabited by the last remnants of humanity and a few surviving animals. The sky is perpetually shrouded in dust, and the seasons are only variations in cold and dampness. Through this landscape a father and his young son travel on foot towards the southern coast, avoiding the bands of cannibals who control the roads.

Modern classicsSocial realism

Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand · 1957

The novel sets out the story of a man who said he would stop the motor of the world, and did. It is built on a large cast of industrialists, inventors and administrators whose work is progressively withdrawn or obstructed, and on the question of what happens to a society that treats production as something it is entitled to rather than something people choose to do.

Literary fictionSocial realism

Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver · 2022

Born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Damon Fields has no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-coloured hair, a caustic wit and a talent for survival. The novel follows him through foster care, child labour, failing schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves and crushing losses, in his own voice.

Queer horrorLiterary fiction

Our Wives Under the Sea

Julia Armfield · 2022

Miri thinks she has her wife back when Leah finally returns after a deep-sea mission that ended in catastrophe, but it becomes clear that Leah may have come back wrong. Whatever happened in the vessel, and whatever the crew were meant to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto land and into their home.

Magical realismLiterary fiction

Skinny Legs and All

Tom Robbins · 1990

An Arab and a Jew open a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations. It sounds like the beginning of an ethnic joke, but it is the axis the novel turns on: a philosophising bean can, a mystifying dessert spoon, a young waitress entering the New York art world and a welder who discovers a lost god all revolve around it.

Experimental fictionLiterary fiction

The Accidental

Ali Smith · 2005

A middle-class English family on holiday in a small village in Norfolk is visited by an uninvited guest named Amber, whose arrival has a profound effect on each of them. She is eventually thrown out of the house by the mother, Eve, but the consequences of her appearance continue after the family has returned to London.

Historical fictionLiterary historical fiction

The Garden of Evening Mists

Tan Twan Eng · 2011

Teoh Yun Ling was seventeen when she first heard of the man who had been the gardener to the Emperor of Japan, and a war and a decade would pass before she travelled up to the Garden of Evening Mists in 1951 to see him. A survivor of a Japanese camp, she has been helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, and she asks the gardener to create a memorial garden for her sister.

Literary historical fictionTudor fiction

The Mirror and the Light

Hilary Mantel · 2020

The final instalment of Hilary Mantel's trilogy charts the last four years in the life of Thomas Cromwell, minister at the court of King Henry VIII, from 1536 until his execution in 1540. It follows Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and completes the rise and fall of the man who ran the king's business, on whom the whole machinery of the reign depends.

Climate fictionLiterary fiction

How High We Go in the Dark

Sequoia Nagamatsu · 2022

Dr Cliff Miyashiro travels to the Arctic Circle to continue his late daughter's research and finds a virus newly unearthed from melting permafrost. The plague it releases reshapes life on earth for generations, and the novel follows the people adjusting to that new world, including an aspiring comedian employed at a theme park built for terminally ill children. Grief is the book's subject as much as the catastrophe.

Historical fictionQueer romance

Swimming in the Dark

Tomasz Jedrowski · 2020

The university student Ludwik meets Janusz at a summer agricultural camp and is fascinated yet wary of this handsome, carefree stranger. A chance meeting by a river becomes an intense affair, and after their camp duties end the two spend a few weeks in the countryside, bonding over an illicit copy of James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, before returning to a society that forbids what they are.

Literary fictionExperimental fiction

Trust

Hernán Díaz · 2022

Everyone in 1920s New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a Wall Street tycoon and she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats, and together they have risen to the top of a world of seemingly boundless wealth as a decade of speculation ends. The mystery of what their fortune cost is the centre of a successful 1937 novel called Bonds.

Coming-of-ageImmigrant fiction

We Need New Names

NoViolet Bulawayo · 2013

Whenever foreigners visit Paradise they ask Darling and her friends to smile for the camera, and the things they have to smile about include stolen guavas, gifts from aid organisations and singing along to pop songs at the top of their voices. What all of them want is the real paradise, in America or Britain, and the novel follows Darling from Zimbabwe to the American Midwest.

Memento Mori

Muriel Spark · 1959

Dame Lettie Colston, seventy-nine and a pioneer of penal reform, has a great deal in common with the elderly residents of the Maud Long Medical Ward: scorn, resentment, boredom and the humour that masks an awareness of approaching death. Then the anonymous telephone calls begin, with a voice saying simply that the recipient must remember that they will die.

Classic adventureComing-of-age

Black Beauty

Anna Sewell · 1877

Black Beauty's life begins on the grounds of an aristocratic English family, where the young horse learns early lessons from his mother about not biting or kicking even in play. Circumstances force his sale to a new master, and the first of several such moves takes him from pasture to the cobbled streets of nineteenth-century England as he passes between owners with different attitudes to animals.

Coming-of-ageFamily novel

Bridge to Terabithia

Katherine Paterson · 1977

The life of a ten-year-old boy in rural Virginia expands when he becomes friends with a newcomer who then dies trying to reach their hideaway, Terabithia, during a storm. Jesse Aarons is an artistic boy from a poor family, and Leslie Burke is a tomboy from a wealthy one, and together they create a kingdom for themselves that only the two of them enter.

Victorian fictionComing-of-age

Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens · 1838

Oliver Twist is raised in a workhouse and escapes to London, where he falls in with a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin. He discovers the secrets of his parentage and reconnects with the family he has left. The novel portrays the lives of criminals without romance and exposes the treatment of the many orphans in England in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Siddhartha

Hermann Hesse · 1922

Siddhartha sets out on a spiritual journey of self-discovery during the lifetime of the Gautama Buddha, and the novel follows his search rather than his arrival. It is written in a simple, lyrical style, and it is a compact work that reads like an allegory about the finding of wisdom rather than a biography of its subject.

Modern classicsSocial realism

The Pearl

John Steinbeck · 1947

The story follows Kino, a pearl diver, and explores questions of purpose as well as greed, defiance of social convention and evil. Steinbeck took the material from a Mexican folk tale he heard in La Paz in Baja California Sur, in a region that had once been rich in pearls, and the book is often described as a parable.

Modern classicsFamily novel

Heidi

Johanna Spyri · 1881

Heidi is a five-year-old orphan who goes to live with her grandfather and his goats on an Alpine pasture. She brings happiness to the people around her on the mountain, and when she is sent to Frankfurt to work in a wealthy household she dreams of returning to the mountains, her friend Peter and her grandfather.

Literary historical fictionHistorical romance

The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton · 1920

Newland Archer is charming, tactful and thoroughly a product of the New York society of the 1870s. He accepts its standards and abides by its rules while recognising its limitations, and his engagement to May Welland promises him a safe and conventional future. Then May's cousin Ellen Olenska arrives, independent and separated from her husband, and Archer has to decide where his loyalty lies.

Family novelComing-of-age

The One and Only Ivan

Katherine Applegate · 2012

Ivan has spent twenty-seven years behind the glass walls of an enclosure in a shopping mall and has grown used to humans watching him. He hardly thinks about his life in the jungle, and occupies himself with television, his friends Stella and Bob, and painting. Then he meets Ruby, a baby elephant taken from the wild, and is forced to see their home and his art through new eyes.

Coming-of-ageFamily novel

The Secret Life of Bees

Sue Monk Kidd · 2002

Lily Owens is fourteen, and her life has been shaped around a blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When her stand-in mother Rosaleen insults three of the town's most committed racists, Lily decides that the two of them should leave, and they travel to Tiburon, South Carolina, a town that holds the answer to her mother's past. There they are taken in by three beekeeping sisters.

Experimental fictionDystopian

Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell · 2004

A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer in Belgium between the wars; an ambitious journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing the family of his star author; a genetically modified dinery server on death row; and a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation. The narrators hear each other's echoes down the corridor of history.