Flesh
- Booker Prize
- NPR Books We Love
István’s life moves from a quiet Hungarian adolescence through military service and into the world of London wealth. Spare episodes trace how desire, class, luck, and violence shape his ascent.
Curated category · 2006—2025
Best literary fiction
Award-winning and editorially recommended literary fiction across twenty years, organized for discovery rather than sales ranking.
- Selections
- 80
- Authors
- 71
- Years
- 20
Showing 1–48 of 80
James
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Everett retells Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through Jim’s eyes, revealing a literate man forced to perform a demeaning persona. The river becomes a route through brutality, comedy, and a pursuit of family and freedom.
The Safekeep
- Women’s Prize for Fiction
In 1961 Netherlands, solitary Isabel’s life is disrupted when her brother’s girlfriend Eva stays at the family house. Suspicion and desire uncover its suppressed wartime ownership.
The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)
- National Book Award for Fiction
- NPR Books We Love
Lebanese philosophy teacher Raja narrates six decades under his formidable mother’s influence. Family misadventures unfold alongside civil war, migration, instability, and the pandemic.
Brotherless Night
- Women’s Prize for Fiction
Tamil medical student Sashi watches her family fracture during Sri Lanka’s civil war. Her brothers take different paths as state violence and militancy narrow neutrality.
James
- National Book Award for Fiction
- NPR Books We Love
- +1
Everett retells Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through Jim’s eyes, revealing a literate man forced to perform a demeaning persona. The river becomes a route toward family and freedom.
Night Watch
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
After the Civil War, a mother and daughter seek refuge at a West Virginia asylum. Fragmented memories reveal wartime violence and the identity of the man controlling them.
Orbital
- Booker Prize
Six astronauts and cosmonauts circle Earth sixteen times in one day aboard the International Space Station. Their routines and memories unfold beneath a borderless, fragile planet.
Blackouts
- National Book Award for Fiction
- NPR Books We Love
In a desert institution, a young narrator keeps vigil beside dying Juan Gay and receives fragments of queer history. Redacted texts and photographs reconstruct distorted lives.
Demon Copperhead
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
- Women’s Prize for Fiction
Born into poverty in Appalachia, Demon narrates his passage through foster care, football, exploitation, and opioid addiction. The novel recasts David Copperfield in a contemporary American voice.
Prophet Song
- Booker Prize
- NPR Books We Love
In an Ireland sliding into authoritarian rule, scientist Eilish Stack tries to protect her children after officers take her husband. Ordinary family decisions narrow into impossible choices as conflict spreads.
Trust
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Four nested documents offer incompatible accounts of a Wall Street fortune and its marriage. As genre and authorship shift, the silenced work of a financier’s wife comes into focus.
The Book of Form and Emptiness
- Women’s Prize for Fiction
After his father dies, Benny Oh hears voices from objects while his mother struggles with grief and hoarding. A library and the voice of his own Book offer refuge.
The Netanyahus
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
At a fictional 1959 college, historian Ruben Blum evaluates Benzion Netanyahu for a faculty appointment. Netanyahu’s arrival with his family turns academic politics into escalating farce.
The Rabbit Hutch
- National Book Award for Fiction
- NPR Books We Love
Residents of an Indiana apartment building orbit eighteen-year-old Blandine and a shocking event. Multiple forms map loneliness, exploitation, ecology, and improbable connection.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
- Booker Prize
- NPR Books We Love
Murdered war photographer Maali Almeida wakes in a chaotic Sri Lankan afterlife with seven moons to identify his killer. He must guide friends toward photographs documenting civil-war atrocities.
Hell of a Book
- National Book Award for Fiction
- NPR Books We Love
A Black author tours the country while an apparently imaginary child accompanies him. His surreal journey alternates with a bullied boy’s life and news of a police killing.
Piranesi
- Women’s Prize for Fiction
Piranesi lives in an immense House of halls, statues, tides, and clouds. Messages and evidence challenge what the only other living person has told him.
The Night Watchman
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
In 1953, Thomas Wazhashk organizes opposition to a federal bill designed to terminate tribal recognition. His niece Patrice searches for her missing sister while navigating work and exploitation.
The Promise
- Booker Prize
A white South African family repeatedly fails to honor a promise that their Black housekeeper will receive her home. Four funerals reveal the family’s fractures alongside the country’s political transition.
Hamnet
- Women’s Prize for Fiction
- NPR Books We Love
- +1
In Stratford, Agnes and her playwright husband build a family shattered by their son Hamnet’s death. The novel imagines the domestic life surrounding Hamlet.
Interior Chinatown
- National Book Award for Fiction
Willis Wu works as a background character in a cop show and dreams of becoming Kung Fu Guy. Screenplay formatting exposes how racial roles structure work and family history.
Shuggie Bain
- Booker Prize
Young Shuggie grows up in 1980s Glasgow devoted to his mother Agnes as alcohol dependence consumes her life. Poverty and neighborhood cruelty shape his effort to care for her and understand himself.
The Nickel Boys
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Elwood Curtis is unjustly sent to a brutal reform school in Jim Crow Florida and befriends the skeptical Turner. Their opposing survival strategies meet an institution built on abuse.
An American Marriage
- Women’s Prize for Fiction
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are separated when Roy is wrongfully imprisoned. Their letters record a marriage changing as Celestial builds a life during his absence.
Girl, Woman, Other
- Booker Prize
- NPR Books We Love
Twelve interconnected lives span generations of mostly Black British women and nonbinary people. Their stories move through art, work, family, sexuality, and prejudice.
The Overstory
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Nine lives branch toward one another through inherited trees, science, art, activism, and loss. Their human stories become part of a much longer nonhuman timescale.
The Testaments
- Booker Prize
Three women narrate Gilead’s inner workings fifteen years after The Handmaid’s Tale. Their separate records converge around secrets capable of destabilizing the regime.
Trust Exercise
- National Book Award for Fiction
At a performing-arts school, teenagers submit to an influential teacher and volatile relationships. A later perspective overturns the apparent account and challenges who controls it.
Home Fire
- Women’s Prize for Fiction
British Muslim siblings are pulled into conflict with a home secretary’s ambitious son. Recruitment to ISIS turns private loyalty into a public crisis.
Less
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
To avoid an ex-boyfriend’s wedding, novelist Arthur Less accepts literary engagements around the world. Mishaps in travel and translation gradually reveal a deeper love story.
Milkman
- Booker Prize
During the Troubles, an eighteen-year-old reader attracts the unwanted attention of a powerful paramilitary known as Milkman. Gossip and communal surveillance make her private life dangerous.
The Friend
- National Book Award for Fiction
A writer grieving her mentor inherits his enormous Great Dane despite a lease forbidding dogs. Sharing her apartment with Apollo changes the shape of mourning.
Lincoln in the Bardo
- Booker Prize
- NPR Books We Love
After Willie Lincoln dies, restless spirits crowd the cemetery where his grieving father returns to the crypt. Their competing voices form a chorus of denial, comedy, and compassion.
Sing, Unburied, Sing
- National Book Award for Fiction
- The New York Times — 10 Best Books
- +1
Thirteen-year-old Jojo travels through Mississippi with his mother to collect his father from prison. Living and dead voices accompany a journey shaped by addiction and racism.
The Power
- Women’s Prize for Fiction
- NPR Books We Love
- +1
Teenage girls develop the ability to generate electrical force, reversing assumptions about physical power. Four lives trace the upheaval across politics, religion, crime, and media.
The Underground Railroad
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Cora escapes a Georgia plantation through a literal underground railway and crosses states embodying different racial terrors. A slave catcher follows as each refuge reveals another system of control.
The Glorious Heresies
- Women’s Prize for Fiction
An accidental killing connects Cork residents navigating crime, sex work, addiction, and religion. Their darkly comic paths reveal a neglected underclass.
The Sellout
- Booker Prize
A Black farmer in the erased California town of Dickens attempts to restore its identity through segregation and an outrageous relationship. His case eventually reaches the Supreme Court.
The Sympathizer
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
A communist double agent escapes Saigon with South Vietnamese officers and reports on their California exile. His confession moves through espionage, friendship, filmmaking, and revolutionary violence.
The Underground Railroad
- National Book Award for Fiction
- The New York Times — 10 Best Books
- +1
Cora escapes a Georgia plantation through a literal underground railway and crosses states embodying different racial terrors. A slave catcher follows as each refuge proves conditional.
A Brief History of Seven Killings
- Booker Prize
Many voices orbit the 1976 attack on Bob Marley and its aftermath in Jamaica and America. Gang members, intelligence operatives, journalists, and ghosts tell overlapping versions of violence and survival.
All the Light We Cannot See
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Blind French teenager Marie-Laure and German radio prodigy Werner converge in occupied Saint-Malo. Their stories are linked by broadcasting, resistance, and a sought-after jewel.
Fortune Smiles: Stories
- National Book Award for Fiction
- NPR Books We Love
Six stories move from Louisiana and Silicon Valley to East Germany and North Korea. Their characters confront technology, illness, political coercion, and compromised love.
How to Be Both
- Women’s Prize for Fiction
Linked narratives connect grieving teenager George with Renaissance painter Francesco del Cossa. Editions present the halves in either order, changing their echoes.
A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing
- Women’s Prize for Fiction
- NPR Books We Love
A young Irish woman addresses the brother whose brain tumor shapes their family. Fragmented language follows her through religious pressure, violence, defiance, and grief.
Redeployment
- National Book Award for Fiction
- NPR Books We Love
- +1
Twelve stories follow American service members through combat in Iraq and difficult returns home. Marines, chaplains, specialists, and civilians reveal different vocabularies for guilt and duty.
The Goldfinch
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
After an explosion kills his mother, Theo Decker secretly takes a Dutch painting from the wreckage. It follows him through grief, friendship, antiques, addiction, and crime.