The Best Literary Fiction of All Time

Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe’s critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa’s cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man’s futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political and religious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.

It’s 1843, and Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer and his housekeeper and mistress. Now serving a life sentence, Grace claims to have no memory of the murders. An up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness is hired to seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story while bringing her closer and closer to the day she cannot remember. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories? The bestselling author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments reveals the life of one of the most notorious women of the nineteenth century in this “shadowy, fascinating novel” (TIME).

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, caught in the tragic sweep of history, The Kite Runner transports readers to Afghanistan at a tense and crucial moment of change and destruction. A powerful story of friendship, it is also about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons — their love, their sacrifices, their lies.

A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.

The most famous and controversial novel from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century tells the story of Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.

The masterpiece of Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus now in a striking American English translation. The Stranger remains vital for its unsettling insights into the impossibility of moral certainty in the face of violence.

In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fell passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs — yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

Widely considered one of the finest novels by a living writer, Blood Meridian is an epic tale of the violence and corruption that attended America’s westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the “Wild West.” Its wounded hero, the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean, must confront the extraordinary brutality of the Glanton gang, a murderous cadre on an official mission to scalp Indians. Seeming to preside over this nightmarish world is the diabolical Judge Holden, one of the most unforgettable characters in American fiction.

Connell and Marianne grew up in the same small town, but the similarities end there. At school, Connell is popular and well liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation — awkward but electrifying — something life changing begins. A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Normal People is the story of mutual fascination, friendship, and love. It takes us from that first conversation to the years beyond, in the company of two people who try to stay apart but find that they can’t.

In Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, commits an act of murder and theft, he sets into motion a story that is almost unequalled in world literature for its excruciating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its depth of characterization and vision. Dostoevsky’s drama of sin, guilt, and redemption transforms the sordid story of an old woman’s murder into the nineteenth century’s profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel.

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

From the award-winning author of We Should All Be Feminists and Half of a Yellow Sun comes a modern classic about star-crossed lovers that explores questions of race and being Black in America — and the search for what it means to call a place home.

The timeless, structure-bending classic that explores how actions of individual lives impact the past, present, and future — from a postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in fiction. As wild as a video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.

A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim’s agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before.

In Colson Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: Engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman’s will to escape the horrors of bondage — and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.

A wondrous and shattering award-winning novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: All traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. This book is fierce, funny, suspenseful, and impossible to put down — full of poetry and rage, exploding onto the page with urgency and force. There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.

When Heathcliff, a poor young boy, is adopted into wealthy Catherine Earnshaw’s family, he and Catherine form a bond that progresses from childhood friendship to teenage passion. Because of Heathcliff’s lowly social status, however, Catherine decides she cannot marry him, and instead marries the gentleman Edgar Linton. This sets in motion a chain of events that ravages both the Linton and Earnshaw families with jealousy, revenge, and bitterness, leaving only the ghosts of Catherine and Heathcliff to haunt the moors.

In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat — and then for his wife as well — in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.

This is Kazuo Ishiguro’s profoundly compelling portrait of a butler named Stevens. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the “great gentleman,” Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s “greatness,” and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life.

A triumph of realist fiction, George Eliot’s Middlemarch explores a fictional nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of sweeping change. The proposed Reform Bill, the new railroads, and scientific advances are threatening upheaval on every front. Against this backdrop, the quiet drama of ordinary lives is played out by the novel’s complexly portrayed characters — until the arrival of two outsiders further disrupts the town’s equilibrium. Every bit as powerful and perceptive in our time as it was in the Victorian era, Middlemarch displays Eliot’s clear-eyed yet humane understanding of characters caught up in the mysterious unfolding of self-knowledge.

The “devastatingly moving” (People) first novel from the author of Tenth of December: A moving and original father-son story featuring none other than Abraham Lincoln, as well as an unforgettable cast of supporting characters, living and dead, historical and invented.

The bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait delivers a deeply moving novel about the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, and the years leading up to the production of his great play. Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down — a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.

A symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness that provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from the acclaimed Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author.

Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams — invasive images of blood and brutality — torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home … Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.

The blockbuster debut novel from “a preternaturally gifted” writer (The New York Times) and author of On Beauty and Swing Time — set against London’s racial and cultural tapestry, reveling in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, and embracing the comedy of daily existence.

At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her. As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life — sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition — its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.