Literary Fiction

The latest from a Booker Prize winner (The Luminaries) is part eco-thriller, part social and political satire, and impossible to put down. (And yes, that title comes from Shakespeare's Macbeth.)INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER. A Best Book of the Year: The New...

*As featured as an editor's pick on Radio Four's OPEN BOOK* *One of the Guardian's books to look out for in 2024* "An immersive feminist novel that meshes the personal and political to moving effect" Preti Taneja, Financial Times "A brilliant novel of...

*Winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Awards for Novel*The Believer Book Awards, 2019: Editors' Longlists in Fiction*The Northern California ‘Golden Poppy’ Book Awards 2019, Fiction longlist*2020 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Longlist*A...

Handsome would-be poet Lucien Chardon is poor and naïve, but highly ambitious. Failing to make his name in his dull provincial hometown, he is taken up by a patroness, the captivating married woman Madame de Bargeton, and prepares to forge his way...

In this striking novel about an unforgettable childhood, four Nigerian brothers encounter a madman whose mystic prophecy of violence threatens the core of their close-knit family.Told by nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, The...

Colin Barrett’s knack for sharp depictions of the working class and witty, wry voice is at its best in Wild Houses. Part coming-of-age story and part thriller, this is a tender, honest tale.The riotous, raucous and deeply resonant debut novel from...

Showing more flashes of dark humour than readers of Cormac McCarthy may be used to, Suttree is a semi-autobiographical novel rich in eccentric characterisation that tells the story of the eponymous outcast living on a disintegrating houseboat. Suttree...

A rollicking ride about the hustle and grind life (literally and figuratively), complicated families and social media. Don't miss this one if you loved the wry voice and sharp insights of Kiley Reid's Come and Get It. “The warmth of...

'A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them' At the end of the twentieth century an old woman sits among the birch trees and reflects on the joys and tragedies...

In this ingenious book Perec creates an entire microcosm in a Paris apartment block. Serge Valene wants to make an elaborate painting of the building he has made his home for the last sixty years. As he plans his picture, he contemplates the lives of all...

A profoundly moving novel told from the alternating point of view of two siblings, this is the story of a Mi’kmaq girl gone missing and the lasting effect it has on her family. Inspired by family stories and written in exacting prose, this gorgeous...

Empire's Pick for The Best Books Made By Women in Fiction 2021.WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2014.SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014.WINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARD.WINNER OF THE SALTIRE SOCIETY LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR...

One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015.One of Jezebel's Favorite Books of 2016.A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin.With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of...

On the Sunday of his eighteenth birthday, in 1975, Colin takes a walk on Box Hill, a biker hang-out. There he accidentally trips over Ray, a biker napping under a tree – and that’s where it all starts. This transgressive, darkly affecting...

When two quiet men form a tentative connection neither knows where it might lead. M has inherited his family's ironmongery business and B is younger by eleven years and can see no future in the place where he has grown up, but when M offers him a job and...

WINNER OF THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE.Finalist for the Kirkus Prize | Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence.From “the shrewdest writer on contemporary masculinity we have” (Esquire), a “captivating...hypnotic...virtuosic”...

WINNER OF THE 2018 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE.From the author of The Door, selected as one of the New York Times "10 Best Books of 2015," this is a heartwrenching tale about a group of friends and lovers torn apart by the German occupation of Budapest...

'Literature is not innocent,' stated Georges Bataille in this extraordinary 1957 collection of essays, arguing that only by acknowledging its complicity with the knowledge of evil can literature communicate fully and intensely. These literary profiles of...

One of The New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2015"An NYRB Classics Original.The Door is an unsettling exploration of the relationship between two very different women. Magda is a writer, educated, married to an academic,...

Suicide cannot be read as simply another novel—it is, in a sense, the author’s own oblique, public suicide note, a unique meditation on this most extreme of refusals. Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close...