The Best Literary Fiction Books: 13 Titles Worth Your Time
Literary fiction is a broad label, so this list sticks to books with a clear claim on your attention: Pulitzer winners, Booker shortlistees, long-running New York Times bestsellers and novels that sit on the Modern Library and TIME lists of the best English-language fiction.
The order comes from our own readers. The titles our shop visitors look up most often sit at the top, which is why a 1992 campus novel leads and a 1936 Orwell sits at the bottom. A play and a short story have made the cut too, both of them unusually influential for their length.
Each entry gives you the premise and the credentials, so you can work out which of these belongs on your shelf next.
The Secret History
Donna Tartt's debut, published by Alfred A. Knopf in September 1992, follows six Classics students at Hampden College, a small elite liberal arts school in Vermont. It is an inverted detective story: narrator Richard Papen looks back years later on the murder of their friend Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran, and the events leading to it unfold in sequence. Knopf ordered a 75,000-copy first print run rather than the usual 10,000 for a debut, and the book became a bestseller. The New York Times credits it with originating the dark academia sub-genre.
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath's only novel appeared in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, a month before her death. Esther Greenwood, a 19-year-old scholarship student from outside Boston, wins a summer internship at a New York magazine in 1953 and finds she can feel nothing but anxiety and disorientation. It is often read as a roman à clef, since Esther's descent into mental illness parallels Plath's own experience. Published in the United States only in 1971, it became an instant bestseller and has been translated into more than forty languages.
The Goldfinch
Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives a bomb attack at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that kills his mother, and in the chaos he takes Carel Fabritius's painting The Goldfinch. The novel follows him across years and cities, from a Park Avenue apartment to Las Vegas and back to a New York antiques business, with the stolen painting hidden the whole time.
The Metamorphosis
Kafka's 1915 novella opens with travelling salesman Gregor Samsa waking to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. His family, who depended on his wages to clear his father's debts, shut him in his room while he learns to use his new body. At around 70 printed pages it is the longest of the stories Kafka considered finished and published in his lifetime, and critics have been arguing over how to read it ever since.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini's follow-up to The Kite Runner traces two Afghan women a generation apart. Mariam is married off at fifteen to Rasheed, a Kabul shoemaker thirty years her senior; Laila, her young neighbour, ends up in the same household after a rocket attack kills her parents. Hosseini has described it as a mother-daughter story in contrast to the father-son story of his debut. It sold over a million copies in its first week and spent fifteen weeks at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
Cannery Row
Steinbeck's 1945 novel is set during the Great Depression on a Monterey street lined with sardine canneries. The cast includes Lee Chong the grocer, Doc the marine biologist, and Mack and his group of unemployed men, who decide to throw Doc a thank-you party that goes badly wrong. Doc was based on Steinbeck's friend Ed Ricketts. The real Ocean View Avenue was formally renamed Cannery Row in 1958 in Steinbeck's honour.
Lonesome Dove
Winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and listed among TIME's 100 best novels. Two retired Texas Rangers, Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae, drive a stolen herd of cattle from a dusty border town to the Montana Territory in the late 1870s. The 1989 television adaptation starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall won both critical and popular acclaim, and McMurtry went on to write a sequel and two prequels.
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara's 2015 novel follows four friends in New York: Jude, a lawyer with a damaged spine and a past he will not discuss; Willem, an actor; Malcolm, an architect; and JB, a painter. It is long and deals directly with self-harm, sexual abuse and addiction. The book was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards and became a bestseller.
Franny And Zooey
Two linked pieces by J. D. Salinger, first printed in The New Yorker in 1955 and 1957 and published together as a book in 1961. In the first, college student Franny Glass falls apart over lunch with her boyfriend while carrying a copy of The Way of a Pilgrim. In the second, her brother Zooey tries to talk her through the aftermath in their parents' Upper East Side apartment.
Mrs Dalloway
Woolf's 1925 novel covers a single day in post-war London as Clarissa Dalloway prepares for a party. Running alongside her is Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran suffering from deferred traumatic stress, whose fate reaches Clarissa at the party that evening. The stream of consciousness narration moves backwards and forwards in time to build a picture of inter-war society. It was included on TIME's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923.
An Inspector Calls
Priestley's three-act morality play takes place on one night in 1912, when a man calling himself Inspector Goole interrupts an engagement dinner at the home of the prosperous Birling family. He questions each of them about the death of a young working-class woman, Eva Smith, and each turns out to have played a part. First staged in the Soviet Union in 1945 and in London the following year, it is a set text for GCSE and IGCSE English Literature, and Stephen Daldry's 1992 National Theatre revival restored its reputation.
The Greatest Gift
Philip Van Doren Stern's 1943 short story, loosely modelled on A Christmas Carol, became the basis for the film It's a Wonderful Life. George Pratt stands on a bridge on Christmas Eve and tells a stranger he wishes he had never been born, then has to live with the wish granted. Stern self-published it as a booklet before it appeared as a book in 1944.
Keep The Aspidistra Flying
Orwell's third novel, published in 1936 and set in 1930s London. Gordon Comstock walks out of a good copywriting job to work in a small bookshop and write poetry, declaring war on what he calls the Money God. His slim published volume gathers dust on the remainder shelf, his long poem goes nowhere, and his relationship with Rosemary strains under his poverty.
Between them these thirteen titles cover a century of fiction, from Kafka's insect to a cattle drive across the American plains. If you are building a reading list, the award winners and the school set texts are the safest places to start.