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The best novels of all time
Struggling to pick your next read? Let us help.
We've compiled a list of sure bets—novels that get everything right, from plot to character to tone. This eclectic list has a winner for every kind of reader, whether you're looking for historical fiction, mythology retellings, mysteries, dark academia, dystopian fiction, family sagas, or contemporary fiction. From fun and dishy thrillers to literary masterpieces, these books are the best of the best in literature.
The Nightingale
In one of Kristin Hannah's most beloved novels, two sisters face the horrors of living under Nazi occupation in France during WWII. Despite violence, fear, and repression, these two very different women find unique ways to fight back in the midst of war. This isn't a lighthearted book by any means, but it is easy to sink into it, and despite the grim subject matter, it's overflowing with the small (and big) things that make life worth living.
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The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
If you're looking for a biopic in book form, this one is for you. In this sweeping epic, Hollywood icon Evelyn Hugo tells a young reporter the story of her life, revealing the true, unexpected circumstances behind each of her seven marriages. It's easy to see why this book is so popular: Evelyn is an unforgettable character with a fresh, unique voice. This is a juicy but deeply moving novel about American film history and hidden queer lives.
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Little Fires Everywhere
Celeste Ng's sharp, smart, study of the veneer of suburban neighborliness—and what can tear it apart—has become a contemporary classic, and for good reason. With vivid prose, she brings the Ohio suburb of Shaker Heights to life alongside the main characters: Elena Richardson, who craves order, and Mia Warren, whose free-spirited, rule-breaking ways shake up the entire town. When a family tries to adopt a Chinese American baby, Elena and Mia find themselves caught up in a fierce custody battle. Moving, and revelatory, this is modern American drama at its best.
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The Song of Achilles
No one does the Greek myths like Madeline Miller. This gorgeous, heartbreaking retelling of The Iliad is equal parts queer love story and violent tragedy. It's told through the first-person point of view of Patroclus, which gives readers a front row seat as he watches the man he loves—Achilles—descend deeper and deeper into glory and greed. Like The Iliad, this novel refuses to look away from the horrors of war. But it's also a shockingly tender book, so keep the tissues handy.
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Olive Kitteridge
Elizabeth Strout is the queen of small-town writing, and Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher in a small town in Maine, is a character for the ages. With her assured prose, quiet observations, and deep understanding of human nature, Strout makes even the most mundane moments feel important. Definitely pick this up if you're craving stories that illuminate all the joys, challenges, surprises, struggles, and strangeness of being human.
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The Road
Cormac McCarthy's dystopian vision of America makes for bleak reading. But, like all the best dystopian literature, the bleakness isn't empty or gratuitous. Instead, it provides the backdrop for a profoundly human story about the love between a father and his son—even during (and after) the end of the world. As the two travel across an unrecognizable America: burned, cold, empty, and dangerous, they discover that what matters most isn't the circumstances they're stuck in, but who they're with, and what they're willing to risk for each other.
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Pachinko
This intergenerational family saga spans decades and countries. In the early 1900s, a young woman gets pregnant during an affair she has with a wealthy, married stranger visiting her small Korean fishing town. Instead of letting him manipulate her, she marries a soft-spoken minister who is leaving soon for Japan. Her decisions reverberate across the years, changing the lives of nearly everyone she knows. Sweeping and ambitious, this is a potent, intricately plotted, and unforgettable story about love, loss, survival, ambition, power, and lineage.
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My Brilliant Friend
Few contemporary authors have captured the literary world's attention like Elena Ferrante. Her Neapolitan Quartet, which tells the story of two best friends over the course of their lives, is a startlingly honest, raw, and vivid portrait of female friendship. My Brilliant Friend is set in Naples in the 1950s; friends Elena and Lila navigate their changing friendship, and, through them, the story of a town and a country in flux emerges.
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The Vegetarian
This dark, disturbing, and insightful novel makes for a good introduction to the work of Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature. Yeong-hye lives an ordinary life with her husband in Korea, until she begins to have grotesque nightmares. Craving relief from these night terrors, she decides to stop eating meat, a decision that soon takes over her entire life. This story of obsession and power is not for the faint of heart, but for fans of smart social horror, it's a must-read.
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The Goldfinch
At 771 pages, The Goldfinch is definitely a commitment—but it's one worth making. It begins with a tragedy when 13-year-old Theo Decker survives a catastrophe in an art museum that kills his mother. From here, the novel radiates outward, following Theo throughout his life as he floats among people, places, and jobs, always looking for something he can't quite find. Tartt writes with compassionate detail about art, antiques, city streets, dogs, friendship, and grief—no moment or emotion is too small to merit close observation.
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Circe
In her sophomore novel, Madeline Miller turns her attention to the life of the goddess Circe, famous for trapping Odysseus on her island of Aiaia and turning his men into pigs. In this novel, Circe is not a villain but the center of her own story, a complex woman with her own desires and fears. This is a book about witchery and power, motherhood and friendship, and, more than anything else, the long, slow work of becoming your true self. You'll never look at Greek mythology the same way again.
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Station Eleven
If you only read one dystopian pandemic novel, make it this one. Set in a world ravaged and remade by a flu that wipes out most of the world's population, Station Eleven follows the interconnected lives of several characters trying to survive in the wake of the unthinkable. Among them is a young woman who's part of a traveling company of Shakespearean actors, and a man who runs a museum of natural history in the airport community where he lives. Though it's very grim at times, this is ultimately a story about the power of art and the importance of beauty and human connection.
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The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead illuminates an important and little-known piece of American history in this novel about two Black boys sentenced to a nightmare reform school in 1960s Florida. Elwood Curtis has always been an idealist, holding the words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. close to his heart, but the horrors and abuse he experiences at the Nickel Academy force him to reexamine everything he thinks he knows. Whitehead is a writer who's always willing to look deep into the heart of things—no matter how ugly—and this book is no exception; it's a triumph of historical fiction.
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Daisy Jones & The Six
Written as the oral history of a fictional '70s rock band, this novel is bighearted, full of drama, and populated with larger-than-life rockstars who make a lot of complicated (and sometimes terrible) decisions. The interviews with band members and their fans, family, and loved ones feel like something out of a glossy music magazine: this book is so real it's easy to forget it's fiction.
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The Flamethrowers
From the underground art scene in SoHo and the East Village to the social unrest and radical politics that swept through Italy, this novel is a propulsive, turbulent snapshot of the 1970s. It unfolds through the eyes of Reno, a young woman with a love for motorcycles, who arrives in NYC in 1975 determined to make a splash. Fans of stories about unhinged women will find a lot to love in this messy story of art, obsession, longing, and loneliness.
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The Secret History
First published in 1992, Donna Tartt's beloved story of murder and intrigue at an elite New England college has become the standard by which all other dark academia is judged. If you've yet to read this haunting and disturbing classic about a group of students who fall under the dubious influence of a charming classic professor, you're in for a dark and delicious treat.
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Lincoln in the Bardo
George Saunders is beloved for his ability to write truth at a slant, twisting reality just enough to bring it into sharper focus. This experimental, one-of-a-kind novel takes place in a cemetery in February 1862, just after President Lincoln's young son Willie dies. Returning to the cemetery to hold his son's body, Lincoln finds himself in a strange supernatural world, populated by ghosts, spirits, and memories—all of whom have a story to tell. It's a profound meditation on grief and what comes afterward.
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Big Little Lies
Murder, betrayal, a whole lot of gossip, and way too many secrets: the recipe for a perfect contemporary thriller. Three very different women find themselves at the center of a shocking scandal in this delicious mystery by bestselling author Liane Moriarty. This fast-paced novel is a perfect beach read for any time of year.
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Homegoing
In a series of interconnected and stunningly layered character studies, Yaa Gyasi explores 300 years of Ghanaian and American history. In 18th-century Ghana, the lives of two half-sisters diverge forever: Effia marries an Englishman, while Esi is sold into slavery. Gyasi follows the descendants of these two women on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean through to the present day. It's impossible to read this novel and not be changed by it.
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The Corrections
Franzen's classic family tragicomedy is as compelling and relevant today as it was when it was first published 25 years ago. In the wake of her husband's Parkinson's diagnosis, matriarch Enid Lambert just wants something—anything—to look forward to, and so she sets about trying to bring her three wayward children home for Christmas. What follows is a raucous, sharply observant decades-spanning novel about an American family in crisis.
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Never Let Me Go
Contemporary master Kazuo Ishiguro blends literary, speculative, and dystopian fiction to dazzling effect in this chilling novel about a boarding school in the English countryside where all is not as it seems. Students study art, literature, and history, but they're taught nothing of the outside world. A profound study of societal memory and how it might impact the future, this is one of Ishiguro's most uniquely powerful novels.
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Normal People
Few writers have captured the millennial zeitgeist like Sally Rooney. In this novel about the messy relationship between two friends during their years at Trinity College in Dublin, she explores the complex intersections of class, family, identity, friendship, and intimacy. Funny, sometimes scathing, and full of psychological insight, this is a novel that will make you want to call your friends, just so you can talk about it with them.
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The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood's 1985 dystopian classic is still darkly relevant and still has plenty to teach us about the dangers of a repressive future—and what we might do to resist it. Set in an American theocracy where women are used as reproductive vessels and have no rights of their own, it's the story of Offred, a handmaiden who remembers what life was like before the Republic of Gilead came into being. Despite the novel's bleakness, Offred's determination to claim some agency in a world that offers her none is inspiring to witness.
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Bel Canto
This beautiful novel, tense and full of wonder, is about people coming together in the most unusual and dire circumstances. In an unnamed South American country, a host of international guests enjoy the luxuries of a birthday party at the home of the vice president. When a crew of terrorists takes everyone present hostage, the evening turns into a nightmare—before, miraculously, transforming once again into something entirely unexpected. Pick this up if you're looking for a book that will help you believe in the goodness of ordinary people.
View eBook View Audiobook... and we're just getting started. Check back for more of the best novels ever, or browse more of our picks here.
