Fiction
Literary Fiction That Rewards You
The novels that repay close attention — beautifully written, deeply felt.
14 books · ranked
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1
Beloved
A formerly enslaved mother is haunted, literally, by the past she escaped; a towering, harrowing masterpiece.
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2
The Stranger
A man feels nothing at his mother's funeral and drifts toward catastrophe; the cornerstone of existential fiction.
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3
The Remains of the Day
An English butler looks back on a life of duty and the love he never let himself feel; restrained and quietly shattering.
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4
Atonement
A child's misunderstanding wrecks two lives; a novel about guilt, storytelling and the limits of saying sorry.
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5
The Secret History
A clique of classics students at an elite college slides into murder; an intoxicating, intelligent thriller of atmosphere.
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6
The Goldfinch
When a bomb destroys the museum where he is visiting, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives but his mother does not. In the chaos, he takes a small Dutch painting — The Goldfinch — which will haunt his life for the next decade and a half, through foster care, antiques, addiction and a criminal underworld. Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a meditation on art, loss and the things we carry.
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7
The Corrections
The three grown children of Alfred and Enid Lambert return home for a final Christmas as Alfred's Parkinson's progresses and Enid refuses to accept what is happening to her marriage and family. Franzen's National Book Award-winning novel moves between the Lambert children's separate American lives and their parents' Midwestern home in a portrait of family, decline and the late-20th-century United States.
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8
Half of a Yellow Sun
The Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967-70 — one of the defining catastrophes of postcolonial Africa — is seen through four perspectives: an educated Nigerian couple, their houseboy and a British journalist. Adichie's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is about the specific collapse of a world that thought itself modern and secure.
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9
Americanah
Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman, moves to the United States for university and spends fifteen years discovering what it means to be Black in America — a category she did not inhabit in Nigeria. Meanwhile Obinze, her first love, tries and fails to build a life in England and returns to Lagos. Adichie's richly observed novel is about race, class and the specific discovery of race-consciousness that comes from leaving home.
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10
The God of Small Things
Twins, forbidden love and a single terrible day in Kerala; lush, fractured and unforgettable.
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11
The Kite Runner
Friendship, betrayal and the long road to redemption against the backdrop of Afghanistan's upheavals.
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12
The Underground Railroad
A reimagining of the escape from slavery as a literal railway; inventive, brutal and morally clear.
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13
Stoner
The quiet life of an ordinary university teacher, rediscovered decades later as a near-perfect novel about an unremarkable life lived fully.
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14
Pachinko
Beginning in early 20th-century Korea, Pachinko follows four generations of a Korean family through their migration to Japan and the systematic discrimination they face as zainichi Koreans — banned from most professions, denied citizenship in the only country their children have ever known. Lee's saga of survival, sacrifice and the pachinko parlours that became one of the few open routes to prosperity was a National Book Award finalist.