Fiction
Literary and contemporary fiction: invented stories that use character, place and time to say something true about how people live. Expect family sagas, coming-of-age novels, historical epics and quiet books about ordinary lives.
Strong characters, prize-winning writing, stories that stay with you.
Curated picks
American Hagwon
Min Jin Lee
A maximalist novel of the Korean diaspora that stretches from Seoul to Sydney to Southern California, tracing families who stake everything on education in the wake of the 1997 financial crisis.
Land
Maggie O'Farrell
A sweeping historical novel set in 19th-century Ireland, following three generations of women bound to a windswept stretch of coast as famine, love and revolution reshape their world.
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Taylor Jenkins Reid
Aging Hollywood icon Evelyn Hugo finally tells the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life.
Crossing the Quiet
Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver returns to Appalachia with the story of a rural nurse holding together a town that the rest of the country has decided to stop looking at.
The Four Winds
Kristin Hannah
An epic story of a woman's fight for her family during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era.
More in this genre
The Song of Achilles
Madeline Miller
A reimagining of The Iliad told from the perspective of Patroclus, Achilles' companion and lover.
The Weight of Angels
John Boyne
A witty, melancholy act of literary resurrection, in which a forgotten writer is dragged back into the light by the people who once buried him.
Whistler
Ann Patchett
When a long-lost brother reappears at a family reunion in the North Carolina mountains, decades of buried secrets begin to surface. A literary, absorbing portrait of siblings learning to forgive.
Circe
Madeline Miller
The story of the witch Circe, banished to a deserted island, discovering her powers and defying the gods.
Cool Machine
Colson Whitehead
Whitehead's latest is a high-voltage caper set in 1970s New York, where a jukebox engineer with a sideline in stolen art gets pulled into the heist of his life.
The Birthing Tree
Amanda Peters
From the author of a breakout debut comes a tender novel about a Mi'kmaw family, a stretch of forest they refuse to sell, and the child who returns to claim it.
The Calamity Club
Kathryn Stockett
In 1933 Oxford, Mississippi, three women on the margins — an orphan, an outspoken unmarried woman, and a woman with a past — form an unlikely sisterhood and hatch an audacious plan to take back control of their lives. The triumphant return of the author of The Help.
The House in the Cerulean Sea
TJ Klune
A delightful tale about a caseworker sent to investigate an orphanage for magical children on a remote island.
The Lamplighter's Daughter
Louise Kennedy
A November novel of small-town Ireland, where a young woman's love affair collides with the loyalties her family cannot afford to break.
The Long Drum
Marlon James
James delivers a ferocious, mythic novel of power and inheritance, told in voices that argue with each other across centuries.
Villa Coco
Andrew Sean Greer
A Tuscan coming-of-age story from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less. One impossible summer at a crumbling villa changes the lives of three young Americans forever.
Anxious People
Fredrik Backman
A failed bank robber accidentally takes an apartment viewing group hostage in this poignant comedy about second chances.
Sunrise
Téa Obreht
From the author of The Tiger's Wife, a hypnotic novel set across a single summer night on the Adriatic coast, where myth, memory and the sea collide.
The Borrowed Year
Yiyun Li
A spare, piercing novel about a translator who agrees to spend twelve months living someone else's life — and finds she prefers it.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
V.E. Schwab
A Faustian bargain gives a young woman immortality but curses her to be forgotten by everyone she meets.
The Glass Innings
Chad Harbach
Fifteen years after his bestselling debut, Harbach returns with a campus-and-ambition novel about a data analyst who thinks he has solved human potential.
The Midnight Library
Matt Haig
Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. Nora Seed finds herself faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.
The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead
Based on a true story of an abusive reform school in Florida during the Jim Crow era.
The Shampoo Effect
Jenny Jackson
From the author of Pineapple Street, a sparkling satire of a Manhattan beauty heiress whose family empire — and personal life — start to unravel one summer in the Hamptons.
The Astral Library
Kate Quinn
Alix Watson, a foster-care survivor working three dead-end jobs, stumbles through a hidden door in the Boston Public Library and discovers the Astral Library — where books are doors to new worlds and new lives. But a shadowy enemy threatens everyone the Library has ever protected.
The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho
A shepherd boy's journey to find treasure teaches him profound lessons about following your dreams.
Half His Age
Jennette McCurdy
From the bestselling author of I'm Glad My Mom Died comes a startlingly perceptive novel about Waldo, a yearning seventeen-year-old who becomes obsessed with her creative writing teacher. A rich character study of desire, loneliness, and the lengths we'll go to be seen.