Literary Fiction Ebooks
If you’re looking for some of the most beloved books in literary fiction, you’re in the right place. Great literary novels are filled with nuanced characters, intriguing themes, and powerful writing. Start reading the best literary fiction ebooks right now on your smartphone, tablet, or other device.
If you’re looking for some of the most beloved books in literary fiction, you’re in the right place. Great literary novels are filled with nuanced characters, intriguing themes, and powerful writing. Start reading the best literary fiction ebooks right now on your smartphone, tablet, or other device.
Spotlight
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023 • NATIONAL BESTSELLER On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police on her step. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart, caught in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny. As the life she knows and the ones she loves disappear before her eyes, Eilish must contend with the dystopian logic of her new, unraveling country. How far will she go to save her family? And what—or who—is she willing to leave behind? The winner of the Booker Prize 2023 and a critically acclaimed national bestseller, Prophet Song presents a terrifying and shocking vision of a country sliding into authoritarianism and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.
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Piranesi Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life of Pi: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Man Called Ove: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Alchemist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anna Karenina: Bestsellers and famous Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Master & Margarita Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Only Woman in the Room: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pride and Prejudice: Bestsellers and famous Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Is How It Always Is: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Quiet American Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Handmaid's Tale Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ulysses: With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Tattooist of Auschwitz: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Bee: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Carnegie's Maid: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The House of the Spirits: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Demon Copperhead: A Pulitzer Prize Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Jungle: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Farewell to Arms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Elegance of the Hedgehog Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Power and the Glory Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Jackal, Jackal: Tales of the Dark and Fantastic From Shirley Jackson award-nominated author Tobi Ogundiran, comes a highly anticipated debut collection of stories full of magic and wonder and breathtaking imagination! In "The Lady of the Yellow-Painted Library" -- featured in Levar Burton Reads -- a hapless salesman flees the otherworldly librarian hell-bent on retrieving her lost library book. "The Tale of Jaja and Canti" sees Ogundiran riffing off of Pinocchio. But this wooden boy doesn't seek to become real. Wanting to be loved, he journeys the world in search of his mother-an ancient and powerful entity who is best not sought out. "The Goatkeeper's Harvest" contains echoes of Lovecraft, where a young mother living on a farm finds that goats have broken into her barn and are devouring all her tubers. As she chases them off with a rake, a woman appears claiming the goats are her children, and that the young woman has killed one of them and must pay the price: a goat for a goat. These and other tales of the dark and fantastic await. "Superb weird-fantasy fictions... an unfailing capacity for surprise." -Publishers Weekly, Top 10 Summer Read "These stories will captivate readers with their haunting atmosphere, confident voice, and immersive settings." -Becky Spratford, Booklist "Jackal, Jackal is a great showcase of Ogundiran's consistency and strengths of a storyteller and dark fabulist. Forget logic. These are stories you are meant to feel. Think Grimm by way of Amos Tutuola. Stephen King meets Cyprian Ekwensi." -Wole Talabi, Locus magazine "Ogundiran's tales revel in small moments that create big ripples. Jackal, Jackal is a collection of such stories, characters grasping at a wish in their own unique, earnest way. An exciting yet intimate collection from a writer who continues to surprise and delight." -Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Author of The Nameless Republic trilogy "Jackal, Jackal is an astonishing debut collection with real teeth." -Priya Sharma, Author of Pomegranates
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird: Stories An NPR Best Book of 2023 A collection of nineteen dark, wildly imaginative short stories from the author of the award-winning TikTok sensation Tender Is the Flesh. From celebrated author Agustina Bazterrica, this collection of nineteen brutal, darkly funny short stories takes into our deepest fears and through our most disturbing fantasies. Through stories about violence, alienation, and dystopia, Bazterrica’s vision of the human experience emerges in complex, unexpected ways—often unsettling, sometimes thrilling, and always profound. In “Roberto,” a girl claims to have a rabbit between her legs. A woman’s neighbor jumps to his death in “A Light, Swift, and Monstrous Sound,” and in “Candy Pink,” a woman fails to contend with a difficult breakup in five easy steps. Written in Bazterrica’s signature clever, vivid style, these stories question love, friendship, family relationships, and unspeakable desires.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bournville A tender and wickedly funny portrait of England told through four generations of one family. Bournville is a quiet village in the heart of England famous for its chocolate. For eleven-year-old Mary, it is the center of her world, the place where most of her family’s friends and neighbors have worked for decades and where the streets smell faintly of chocolate. During the next three-quarters of a century, Mary will have children and grandchildren and great-children. She will live through the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and the 1966 World Cup final (the last time England won), royal weddings and royal funerals, Brexit and Covid-19. Parts of the chocolate factory will be transformed into a theme park, and Bournville itself will gradually disappear into the sprawl of the growing city of Birmingham. As we travel through seventy-five years of social change, from James Bond to Princess Diana, and from wartime nostalgia to the World Wide Web, one pressing question starts to emerge: will these changing times bring Mary's family—and their country—closer together, or leave them more adrift and divided than ever before? Bournville is a rich and poignant new novel from the bestselling, Costa award-winning author of Middle England. It is the story of a woman, of a nation's love affair with chocolate, of Britain itself.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pet A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR The Washington Post・The New Yorker ・Slate・CrimeReads・Good Housekeeping・Amazon Book Review A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE A suspenseful new psychological thriller from the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlisted and Dublin Literary Award shortlisted author of Remote Sympathy, Catherine Chidgey. Like every other girl in her class, twelve-year-old Justine is drawn to her glamorous, charismatic new teacher and longs to be her pet. However, when a thief begins to target the school, Justine’s sense that something isn’t quite right grows ever stronger. With each twist of the plot, this gripping story of deception and the corrosive power of guilt takes a yet darker turn. Justine must decide where her loyalties lie. Set in New Zealand in the 1980s and probing themes of racism, misogyny and the oppressive reaches of Catholicism, Pet will take a rightful place next to other classic portraits of childhood betrayal and psychological suspense: Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping among them. “Refreshing, compelling and surprising.”—Ann Morgan, author of Beside Myself and Reading the World
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cross-Stitch A debut novel of female friendship and coming-of-age from Jazmina Barrera, acclaimed author of Linea Nigra and On Lighthouses, translated by Christina MacSweeney. It was meant to be the trip of a lifetime. Mila, Citlali, and Dalia, childhood friends now college aged, leave Mexico City for the England of The Clash and the Paris of Courbet. They anticipate the cafés and crushes, but not the early signs that they are each steadily, inevitably changing. That feels like forever ago. Mila, now a writer and a new mother, has just published a book on needlecraft—an art form so long dismissed as “women’s work.” But after learning Citlali has drowned, Mila begins to sift through her old scrapbooks, reflecting on their shared youth for the first time as a new wife and mother. What has come of all the nights the three friends spent embroidering together in silence? Did she miss the signs that Citlali needed help?
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSo Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men From Booker Prize Finalist and bestselling author of “pitch perfect” (Boston Globe) Small Things Like These, comes a triptych of stories about love, lust, betrayal, and the ever-intriguing interchanges between women and men. Celebrated for her powerful short fiction, considered “among the form’s most masterful practitioners” (New York Times), Claire Keegan now gifts us three exquisite stories, newly revised and expanded, together forming a brilliant examination of gender dynamics and an arc from Keegan’s earliest to her most recent work. In “So Late in the Day,” Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he behaved differently; in “The Long and Painful Death,” a writer’s arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll for a residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his presence and opinions; and in “Antarctica,” a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger. Each story probes the dynamics that corrupt what could be between women and men: a lack of generosity, the weight of expectation, the looming threat of violence. Potent, charged, and breathtakingly insightful, these three essential tales will linger with readers long after the book is closed.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Small Worlds An exhilarating and expansive new novel about fathers and sons, faith and friendship from National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and Costa First Novel Award winning author Caleb Azumah Nelson One of the most acclaimed and internationally bestselling “unforgettable” (New York Times) debuts of the 2021, Caleb Azumah Nelson’s London-set love story Open Water took the US by storm and introduced the world to a salient and insightful new voice in fiction. Now, with his second novel Small Worlds, the prodigious Azumah Nelson brings another set of enduring characters to brilliant life in his signature rhythmic, melodic prose. Set over the course of three summers, Small Worlds follows Stephen, a first-generation Londoner born to Ghanian immigrant parents, brother to Ray, and best friend to Adeline. On the cusp of big life changes, Stephen feels pressured to follow a certain path—a university degree, a move out of home—but when he decides instead to follow his first love, music, his world and family fractures in ways he didn’t foresee. Now Stephen must find a path and peace for himself: a space he can feel beautiful, a space he can feel free. Moving from London, England to Accra, Ghana and back again, Small Worlds is an exquisite and intimate new novel about the people and places we hold close, from one of the most “elegant, poetic” (CNN) and important voices of a generation.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Orbital A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space—not towards the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. So are the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live. Profound, contemplative and gorgeous, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and a moving elegy to our humanity, environment, and planet.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Night Side of the River A captivating collection of ghost stories from “one of the most gifted writers working today” (New York Times), The Night Side of the River is as ingeniously provocative as it is downright spooky. In this delightfully chilling collection, the iconic Jeanette Winterson turns her fearless gaze to the realm of ghosts, interspersing her own encounters with the supernatural alongside hair-raising fictions. Lifting the veil between the living and the dead, Winterson spirits us away to a haunted estate that ensnares a nomadic young couple in its own dark past, a staged immersive ghost tour gone awry, a West Village séance that threatens the bounds between AI and reality, and a vacation home in the metaverse where a widow visits an improved version of her deceased husband. Gloriously gothic and unnervingly contemporary, Winterson examines grief, revenge, and the myriad ways in which technology can disrupt the boundary between life and death.
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHot Springs Drive The third title in Roxane Gay Books’ inaugural list, Hot Springs Drive is an urgent, vicious blade of a novel about a shocking betrayal and its aftermath, asking just how far you’ll go to have everything you want Jackie Stinson’s best friend is dead, and everyone knows who killed her. Jackie wants to be many things, but a martyr has never been one of them. She is an ex–emotional eater and mother of four, who has finally lost the weight she long yearned to be free of. In her new, sharp-edged body, she goes by Jacqueline. But leaving her old self behind proves harder than she ever imagined. And while she believes she should be happier, misery still chases her, and motherhood threatens to subsume what little is left of her. Jacqueline’s only salve is her best friend Theresa, whose seemingly perfect life she desperately covets. Since they met in the maternity ward fifteen years earlier, the two have survived the trials of motherhood side by side—Theresa with her quiet, cherubic daughter, and Jacqueline with her rambunctious, unruly boys. Their bond is tight, but it is not enough to keep Jacqueline, finally moving through the world in the body she has always wanted, from stealing a bit of Theresa’s perfect life. Hot Springs Drive is a dark, heart-pounding exploration of one woman’s deepest desires, and how the consequences of betrayal can ripple outward beyond the initial strike point. In her third and fiercest novel, acclaimed literary voice Lindsay Hunter deftly peels back the fragile veneer of two suburban families and the secrets roiling between them.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Build a Boat Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize • Shortlisted for the 2023 An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year • One of the Globe and Mail's "Sixty-Two Books to Read This Fall" • One of the Globe 100's Best Books of 2023 • A New Yorker Best Book of 2023 Jamie O'Neill loves the colour red. He also loves tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of certain objects, books with dust jackets, rivers, cats, and Edgar Allan Poe. At age thirteen, there are two things he wants most in life: to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother, Noelle, who died when he was born. In his mind, these things are intimately linked, and at his new school, despite the daily barrage of bullies and cathedral bells, he meets two teachers who might be able to help him, though each struggles against inertias of their own. How to Build a Boat is the story of how one boy’s irrepressible dream finds expression through a community propelled by love out of grief. Lyrical and compassionate, it's a novel about the courage of conviction and the power of the imagination to transform—and how sometimes the best way to break free of old walls is to build something beautiful within them.
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Which of Shakespeare's Why: A Novel of the Authorship Mystery Near Solution Today The controversy over who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays has been around almost since they were written. Was the genius behind the plays really that obscure glover’s son from Stratford? Or was it someone else entirely—a man whose class, background, education, and peculiarities make him a more than plausible candidate? In The Which of Shakespeare’s Why, a 21st-century playwright named Harry Haines makes the case for a major contender via a play he himself is writing for a struggling New Jersey theatre company. Faced with strong disapproval from the “Stratfordites” and with the backing of supporters that sometimes takes some unusual forms, Harry attempts, against great odds, to get the play written and staged. In the process he has to overcome his own doubts, stay on the right side of the right people, keep his romantic life under control, and deal with not only a difficult actress or two but a flock of opinionated Rockettes. Part hilarious farce, part serious critical examination, The Which of Shakespeare’s Why provides a thought-provoking look at a controversial puzzle with a surprising, ingenious, and wholly satisfying ending that Shakespeare—whoever he was—would have given a standing ovation.
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCity of Laughter A rich and riveting debut spanning four generations of Eastern European Jewish women bound by blood, half-hidden secrets, and the fantastical visitation of a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 years An ambitious, delirious novel that tangles with queerness, spirituality, and generational silence, City of Laughter announces Temim Fruchter as a fresh and assured new literary voice. The tale of a young queer woman stuck in a thicket of generational secrets, the novel follows her back to her family’s origins, where ancestral clues begin to reveal a lineage both haunted and shaped by desire. Ropshitz, Poland, was once known as the City of Laughter. As this story opens, an 18th century badchan, a holy jester whose job is to make wedding guests laugh, receives a visitation from a mysterious stranger—bringing the laughter the people of Ropshitz desperately need, and triggering a sequence of events that will reverberate across the coming century. In the present day, Shiva Margolin, recovering from the heartbreak of her first big queer love and grieving the death of her beloved father, struggles to connect with her guarded mother, who spends most of her time at the local funeral home. A student of Jewish folklore, Shiva seizes an opportunity to visit Poland, hoping her family’s mysteries will make more sense if she walks in the footsteps of her great-grandmother Mira, about whom no one speaks. What she finds will make her question not only her past and her future, but also her present. Electric and sharply intimate, City of Laughter zigzags between our universe and a tapestry of real and invented Jewish folklore, asking how far we can travel from the stories that have raised us without leaving them behind.
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTrondheim NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE A son’s collapse pulls his two mothers together and apart in a novel that probes the limits of love, hope, and forgiveness In Norway, thousands of miles from home, a student drops dead on the street. A passerby revives his heart, but he remains in a coma from which he may never wake. His mothers rush across the continent to his bedside where they endure the strain of helpless waiting. As the tense hospital vigil continues day after day and they vacillate between extremes of hope, fear, and psychic pain, their troubled relationship is pushed to the edge. A profound exploration of a family in crisis, Trondheim portrays the way each woman copes with the looming tragedy and the possibility of healing in the wake of a life-altering emergency.
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
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About Literary Fiction
These are the books that everyone should read at least once in their lives. The unmissable, important, creative, and world-changing books you should have on your to-be-read list. Literary fiction books range from highly acclaimed debuts from fresh writers to incredible literary classics that are talked about, written about, and re-read by millions. Boundary-breaking and conception-challenging, many literary fiction books become iconic bestsellers and must-reads. You’ll find novels filled with nuanced characters, intriguing themes, and powerful writing. These works of literature, penned by some of the greatest writers in history, contain timeless themes, characters, emotions, and points of view. Some have even spawned entire modern literary fiction genres as a result of their influence. Some bestselling writers in Everand’s literary fiction ebooks category include Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Herman Hesse, and Jonathan Safran Foer. Check out bestselling books The Dutch House, The Storyteller, The House of the Spirits, and The Old Man and the Sea. All timeless, important, and often-cited books that exist in the cultural canon. If you’re looking for some of the most beloved titles in literary fiction ebooks, you’re in the right place.
These are the books that everyone should read at least once in their lives. The unmissable, important, creative, and world-changing books you should have on your to-be-read list. Literary fiction books range from highly acclaimed debuts from fresh writers to incredible literary classics that are talked about, written about, and re-read by millions. Boundary-breaking and conception-challenging, many literary fiction books become iconic bestsellers and must-reads. You’ll find novels filled with nuanced characters, intriguing themes, and powerful writing. These works of literature, penned by some of the greatest writers in history, contain timeless themes, characters, emotions, and points of view. Some have even spawned entire modern literary fiction genres as a result of their influence. Some bestselling writers in Everand’s literary fiction ebooks category include Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Herman Hesse, and Jonathan Safran Foer. Check out bestselling books The Dutch House, The Storyteller, The House of the Spirits, and The Old Man and the Sea. All timeless, important, and often-cited books that exist in the cultural canon. If you’re looking for some of the most beloved titles in literary fiction ebooks, you’re in the right place.