The Best Contemporary Fiction Books, Ranked by Reader Interest
Contemporary fiction covers a lot of ground. A murder mystery set in a North Carolina marsh sits on the same shelf as a 1,000-page postmodern epic about addiction and tennis. This guide pulls together nine of the titles readers look at most often on Blurby Posters, with a clear summary of what each book actually contains.
The order comes from reader interest on our site, so the most-viewed books appear first. The selection leans on hard evidence: New York Times bestseller status, major prizes like the Costa Debut Novel Award, a place on TIME's list of the 100 best novels, and sales figures running into the millions. Film and television adaptations are noted where they exist, since many readers come to these books that way.
Where The Crawdads Sing
Delia Owens published this coming-of-age murder mystery in 2018, and by April 2023 it had sold more than 18 million copies. Two timelines run alongside each other: Kya, a girl raised alone in the marshes of North Carolina from the age of six, and the investigation into the death of local golden boy Chase Andrews. Owens is a zoologist, and critics have read the animal behaviour in the book as a mirror for how the men in Kya's life treat her. A film adaptation followed in July 2022.
The Midnight Library
Matt Haig's 2020 novel gives Nora Seed a library that sits between life and death, where every book holds a version of her life shaped by a different choice. She tries stardom as a singer-songwriter, Olympic swimming, glaciology in the Arctic and a philosophy post at Cambridge, and finds that none of them is free of loss. The premise makes it a book about regret as much as possible lives. It was a New York Times bestseller and was generally well received by critics.
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
Gail Honeyman's debut won the 2017 Costa Debut Novel Award. Eleanor is a 29-year-old finance clerk in Glasgow who does the Telegraph crossword on her lunch break, drinks two bottles of vodka every weekend and insists she is absolutely fine. The novel unspools her past slowly, through her scarred face, her years in foster care and the weekly phone calls from her mother. A chance encounter in the street with a colleague called Raymond starts to change things.
The Wedding People
Alison Espach's 2024 novel was a New York Times bestseller and was picked up for film adaptation before it was even published, with Nicole Holofcener writing. Phoebe Stone, an adjunct English professor, books into a Newport hotel intending to end her life, and finds the place taken over by a week-long wedding party. She ends up as the bride's stand-in maid of honour. For a book that opens on suicide, it moves into comedy and romance.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Richard Bach's 1970 novella is an allegorical fable about a seagull who cares more about flight than food, and is cast out by his flock for it. The original edition was illustrated with black-and-white photographs by Russell Munson. It was published with little advertising, then reached number one on bestseller lists largely by word of mouth, with over a million copies in print by the end of 1972. A 2014 complete edition added a previously unpublished fourth part.
Me Before You
Jojo Moyes published this in 2012. Louisa Clark takes a job caring for Will Traynor, a former banker and sportsman left tetraplegic after a motorcycle hit him, and sets out to change his mind about the plans he has made for the next six months. The 2016 film adaptation, which Moyes scripted herself, starred Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin and took $208.4 million worldwide.
Normal People
Sally Rooney's second novel traces Connell and Marianne from a secondary school in County Sligo to Trinity College Dublin, across the years 2011 to 2015 and the Irish downturn that followed 2008. Class runs through everything: his mother cleans her mother's house. It sold almost 64,000 hardback copies in the United States in its first four months, was a bestseller in China, and a number of publications named it one of the best books of the 2010s. The BBC Three and Hulu adaptation was Emmy nominated.
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel appears on TIME's list of the 100 best novels and is usually called his masterwork. It braids together a Boston addiction recovery house, an elite tennis academy, the dysfunctional Incandenza family and a cell of Quebec separatists in wheelchairs, all circling a film so entertaining that watching it kills you. The structure is famously demanding, with hundreds of endnotes, some carrying footnotes of their own. It sold 44,000 hardcovers in its first year and has since passed a million copies worldwide.
The World Is Full Of Divorced Women
Published in 1975, this was Jackie Collins's fifth novel. English journalist Cleo James, living in New York, walks in on her husband and her best friend and decides the marriage is over. A second thread follows Muffin, London's most in-demand nude model, and a man who wants more from her than she is willing to give.
Nine books, and very little that connects them beyond the label. If you want a place to start, the bestseller lists at the top of this page are the safest bet, and Infinite Jest is the one to save for when you have time to spare.