Stories to Make Franz Kafka Proud

With this in mind, a kafkaesque story is often one which examines and criticises normativity, what is typically expected of us both professionally and socially, and the dynamics of behaviour in our day-to-day lives. They are stories that satirise work, etiquette, and even family dynamics. This is what you’ll find here, in these novels.

The following novels all have something of the kafkaesque to them. Some might be comedies, others horror. Some are straightforward; others are surreal and feverish in their presentation. There is a real diversity here, but all of these books wear their kafkaesque themes proudly and in novel, original ways.

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Unconsoled is the longest novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, and calling the book a “fever dream” feels almost unavoidable. The Unconsoled is a masterful work of kafkaesque surrealism which follows concert pianist Ryder, who has just arrived in an unnamed city to play a concert, and from the very moment he enters his hotel, the world becomes an unknowable place.

In the novel’s first chapter, Ryder meets Gustav, a bellhop who begins a pages-long monologue about the nature of his work. From here, Ryder heads to a cinema to watch a late-night viewing of 2001: A Space Odyssey while two men play chess. The next day, he meets with a woman who talks to Ryder about her child, and Ryder steadily realises this is his wife and the child is also his own. And so the rabbit hole continues to deepen.

The Unconsoled is a work of impossible strangeness that owes so much to Franz Kafka in its dreamlike quality, its circular and disjointed narrative, and the ways in which its protagonist is lost and disorientated at every turn, unable to obtain simple answers to simple questions.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith

One of the most successful and beloved Korean novels in translation, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is separated into three parts and begins with Yeong-hye, a woman whose life is upturned in frightening and unimaginable ways after she makes the decision to stop eating meat. Each story follows a member of her family who is shocked by her decision and begins to treat her differently.

Our first narrator, Yeong-hye’s husband, explains that he married her because she was as ordinary as he is, and that she would guarantee a simple, peaceful, well-behaved life. But when she throws away all the meat in their fridge and goes vegetarian, he is disturbed and shocked. He attempts to persuade her to change back, and even invites her father around, who attempts to physically force her to eat meat.

The Vegetarian explores the concept of conformity, and what happens when someone—especially a woman—makes even a small, autonomous decision to change something in a novel and unpopular way. For many, this novel is shocking and disturbing, and it’s one that Kafka would surely have adored.

Authority by Jeff Vandermeer

Authority, the second book in sci-fi author Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach series, is set in the Southern Reach itself—a strange agency which exists to monitor a mysterious stretch of coastline called Area X, which exists inside a gradually expanding bubble. Area X affects any human who enters in dangerous and unpredictable ways (as were explored in the first novel, Annihilation). And in this novel, our protagonist is desperately trying to understand Area X.

That protagonist is John Rodriguez, the Southern Reach’s new director. He prefers, ironically, to go by the name Control, and was given this role by his mother. Periodically, Control reports his findings to someone called The Voice over the phone, and he spends much of his time interviewing people who have returned from expeditions to Area X, as well as searching through reports, findings, logs, photos, and videos.

At times, Authority feels like a dizzyingly circular novel, as Control makes little progress; he is waylaid, distracted, manipulated, and confused at every turn. He wants to do his job but the very agency itself seems to be guiding his hand or stopping him entirely. Control is trapped in an unclear role in a kafkaesque system with no clear direction, and all the while he has a mysterious, possibly alien, and definitely dangerous phenomenon to solve.

City of Ash and Red by Hye-young Pyun

Translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell

This phenomenal Korean novel is perhaps the truest successor to Kafka’s works you’ll ever read. The book’s protagonist is a nameless rat catcher who has been sent by his company to work in a new city. That city has been devastated by sickness and its streets are overflowing with garbage.

Upon arriving, our protagonist is unable to find his prime company contact, and nobody is able to help. Shortly after, his luggage is lost, he is told to quarantine, and he soon gets a call from his friend who breaks the news to him that this friend has married his ex-wife. Not long after, the ex-wife is found dead in our protagonist’s apartment, and he is natural the murder’s prime suspect.

As is the case in Kafka’s The Trial and Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, Pyun’s protagonist wishes to find answers, to straighten up his understanding, and to explain himself. But at every turn, nobody will listen to him. In fact, they display more than just ignorance; they are indifferent to his problems. This is a Korean kafkaesque masterpiece.

Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

Several People Are Typing is a brilliantly strange and inventive work of sci-fi horror comedy with its roots deep in the kafkaesque philosophy. The entire book is presented as a series of conversations via Slack. Our protagonist, Gerald, works at a company which uses Slack for its work-related chats, and Gerald begins one day by informing his team that he is trapped inside Slack. His consciousness has somehow been uploaded into the app itself.

Naturally, nobody believes Gerald. He gets his colleagues’ attention repeatedly, in various work and casual Slack channels, asks them for help, and they laugh it off as a prank. Eventually, Gerald asks a colleague who lives close-by to go and see for himself—to go and check on Gerald’s body. And all the while, we get to know the various people of Gerald’s office as they express themselves through Slack.

In kafkaesque fashion, Gerald is expected to continue his work regardless. And he is even praised for a rise in productivity because he can do nothing but work, since he is trapped in his company’s Slack account. He sends messages and files reports for lack of anything else to do. Nobody takes his situation seriously but they all praise his increase in productivity.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Sayaka Murata is one of the finest Japanese authors writing today, and Convenience Store Woman put her on the map. This novel follows an autistic-coded protagonist who has worked at the same convenience store for almost twenty years, never asking for anything else out of life. But that doesn’t sit right with her colleagues or her family, who often ask her when she will get a career and a husband and a mortgage—all the things we are expected to do.

But Keiko is content. The world is a strange and confusing place; she has never been able to fully understand how people behave or the unwritten rules of society that they dutifully follow. She doesn’t judge others and she is exhausted by their judgement of her. The modern world expects certain performances from us (college, career, marriage, family etc) and Keiko has found a way to survive outside of all that.

And for this, Keiko is endlessly worried over and looked at with suspicion. When in reality, as we learn from select flashbacks, she has always struggled to navigate everyday life. Convenience Store Woman echoes Kafka’s criticism of bureaucratic rule-following and the nonsense laws of life, bringing them into the twenty-first century Japanese society.

Managing and Other Lies by Willow Heath

Managing and Other Lies is a collection of queer horror stories, and its titular tale Managing is a deeply kafkaesque gothic tale set in a labyrinthine house at the edge of an English village. Every day, our nameless protagonist—who has been hired to clean and tidy this strange house—writes about their progress in a journal. As the days go on, they soon learn that they aren’t as alone as they first thought.

A man has barged his way into the house; he refuses to explain his presence and insists that our protagonist is doing a terrible job tending to the garden. Soon after, our protagonist meets a woman who lives in a room upstairs. She seduces our protagonist and offers them the happiness they seek in exchange for various small sacrifices. These sacrifices are bits and pieces of their own body; beginning with a skin tag, then a fingernail, and on it goes.

Our nameless protagonist is battling with dysphoria, berated by the misogynistic and bullish man, and encouraged to make painful sacrifices by a woman who seduces and gaslights them. In order to be happy with who they are, they are forced to fight, perform, and put themself through pain and discomfort, all because the men and women of society expect them to. Being trans is wonderful; it is only the expectations of society that makes it hard.

Buy a copy of Managing and Other Lies here!

The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada

Translated from the Japanese by David Boyd

In one of the most on-the-nose kafkaesque novels ever written, a factory spreads itself impossibly large, and we follow three protagonists who work there. The factory makes all kinds of consumable products, and also behaves like a town with places to live, eat, relax, and play.

In the world of The Factory, there is no separation of work and life; they are now one and the same. People live, work, and die at and for the factory. Nobody can recognise where work ends and every other aspect of life begins. All anyone knows is the factory.

In this novel, Japanese author Hiroko Oyamada takes Kafka’s themes and blows them up impossibly large, painting them on a billboard for every reader to see.

The Ruined Map by Kobo Abe

Translated from the Japanese by E. Dale Saunders

Kobo Abe could accurately be called the Kafka of Japan. Many Japanese authors explore the kafkaesque in their writing, but none with such dedication and surrealism as Kobo Abe. And while many of his books are worthwhile reads, The Ruined Map is the perfect introduction to his works, due to its more clear and direct narrative.

The Ruined Map begins with a detective who has been hired by a woman to find her missing husband. What at first seems like a simple detective story gradually gives way to something more surreal and dreamlike, in a very similar vein to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. The detectives obsession over minor details that lead nowhere, and the circular, empty answers given by his interviewees (the wife included), scream Kafka.

This is a book that asks us if we can ever truly know one another. The titular ruined map is both the city of Tokyo and the mental map we each have, populated by the people we meet and come to know. This is a novel fantastically reminiscent of Kafka’s stories.

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

In Julia Armfield’s queer gothic horror, we follow a couple whose lives have been irreversibly changed by a mission to the bottom of the sea that went horribly wrong. Leah’s trip should have been a short one, but something went wrong and she was stuck down there for a long time. As we follow her story, we learn what she encountered and how she was changed by it.

But the bulk of the narrative is her wife Miri’s story, which takes places after Leah has returned. Leah is no longer communicating properly, and enjoys little more than sitting in a full bathtub day in, day out. Leah gradually grows sick as her skin falls away and she vomits salty water. Miri is powerless to help her, and doesn’t understand how something like this could have happened.

Miri grieves the loss of her wife and her marriage, all while her wife is still technically present. She has so many questions but cannot get answers. Our Wives Under the Sea is a different kind of kafkaesque, examining the bureaucracy of our social and romantic lives, as well as that of loss itself.

To prove that, here are some of the best works of fantasy fiction written by women over the past several decades. Many of these books are modern, but of course great authors like Ursula K. Le Guin flew so high long before many of us even considered trying to walk.

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

With The Goblin Emperor, author Katherine Addison provides a very unique take on the fantasy story. Its setting is familiar: an elven land with a kingdom at its heart. But this is a high court tale of political games, rather than an adventure or a great war. Our protagonist, Maia, is the half-goblin youngest son of the emperor, and when a tragedy leads this exiled prince to suddenly ascend to the throne, he must learn the ins and outs of court life.

Imagine a novel set in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire which takes place entirely in the King’s Landing—more specifically, the Red Keep. The Goblin Emperor is, first and foremost, a political drama. We follow closely, often with bated breath, as Maia navigates palace life, learns quickly who to trust, and who might want to stab him in the back. Then, of course, there’s the matter of the tragedy that took his father and brothers.

The Goblin Emperor is a fresh and unique fantasy novel that succeeds on the back of its fantastic protagonist, its sharp dialogue, and its deep dive into palace politics. A real page-turner of a fantasy novel, and a book like no other in the genre.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the great authors of sci-fi and fantasy; her legacy will last for as long as books themselves do. And while sci-fi novels like The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed encouraged readers to consider social dynamics and gender roles in unique ways, her Earthsea fantasy series—which began with A Wizard of Earthsea—is a masterpiece of world-building, character writing, and plotting.

In this first book in the series, we follow Ged, a young man born on a quiet island in this expansive archipelago world. Ged displays a knack for magic early in his life, and is sent off to study wizardry at a school of magic. From here, we watch him grow up into a powerful wizard.

What sets the novel apart from many of its kind is Ged himself: a reckless and often arrogant young man who makes mistakes and must fix them. This is a coming-of-age story in the trust sense, as Ged fumbles and commits grave errors on his way to being not only a wizard but, simply, an adult. Much like her contemporary Diana Wynne Jones, Le Guin wasn’t afraid to write characters who are at first unlikeable and must learn to face life head on.

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

N.K. Jemisin is a powerhouse of a writer who pens fantasy masterpieces; that’s simply what she does, time after time after time. The City We Became—the first half of an urban fantasy duology—blends Lovecraftian mythology with superhero tropes to create a vibrant, exciting, and brilliantly fast-paced story about the soul of a city. The novel is also an unabashed love letter to the author’s home of New York City.

Our protagonists are the newly-awoken avatars of New York’s five burroughs: people chosen to fight for and protect a city and its people. When a world city has lived for long enough, and has developed enough of an identity, it wakes up and a soul is born. But some cities have more than one soul—London, for example, has twelve. And newly-awoken New York has five (and a sixth for the city itself).

These avatars—Manny, Brooklyn, Bronca, Padmini, and Aislyn—must find one another and also learn to understand themselves as the face off against a mysterious invader who is wreaking havoc on their city: The Woman in White. This is a brilliant work of urban fantasy that also explores contemporary American politics, race relations, gender dynamics, and more in a savvy and engaging way.

Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb

Robin Hobb is a queen of the fantasy genre, and she is known for writing tightly-crafted trilogies of books which all take place in the same world. The best of these trilogies is, in this writer’s opinion, The Liveship Traders, which begins with Ship of Magic. These are books of family politics and trade economics set on islands, in coastal towns, and aboard ships brought to life by a sacred generational magic.

In Ship of Magic, we follow multiple interconnected characters—many of whom come from the same family of liveship traders: the Vestrits—as their liveship quickens following the death of its captain. Liveships are made from wizardwood, and they come to life (quicken) once three generations of captain have died on board. Its a magic that takes much time and sacrifice to finally take effect.

The strength of this series of fantasy novels comes from its interconnected family politics and the strength of those individual characters; some courageous and spirited, others secretive and corrupt. The cast is large, diverse, and brilliantly dynamic, and the political moves that are made keep readers firmly glued to the page.

The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang

R.F. Kuang became an overnight sensation with the publication of her dark academia novel Babel, but her debut novel The Poppy War (the first book in a trilogy of the same name) is also a masterpiece of epic fantasy fiction. The Poppy War is set in a world inspired by 20th century China, and it follows Rin—a southern peasant girl who passes a rigorous test to enter the nation’s most prestigious military academy.

In doing so, Rin immediately frees herself from a life of poverty, removes herself from the place where she became a war orphan, and escapes the guardians who had planned to marry her off for money. But the academy itself is far from a pleasant place, and new struggles await her. Rin must continue her fight to survive, to thrive, and to prove herself against all the odds.

R.F. Kuang is, without a doubt, one of the great fantasy writers of this century. Her novels continue to amaze and inspire, and all of this began with the astonishingly powerful The Poppy War.

Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs

Ink Blood Sister Scribe is a wonderful work of urban fantasy that begins in Vermont and Antarctica. We follow two sisters, daughters of a family that has long been entrusted with protecting a library of powerful magical tomes. When the novel opens, their father stumbles out of their Vermont house, holding one of these books, and it kills him by draining him of his blood. How did this happen, and why?

While Joanna deals with this tragedy and the mystery behind it, her sister Esther is on a research base in Antarctica. She left home as a teenager and was told by her father that she can never stay in one place for longer than a year. Every November, she must pick herself up and move somewhere new. She is running from whatever it was that killed her mother, and that thing requires a year to find and hunt Esther down.

Mysteries abound in this novel, which blends dark academia with urban fantasy and thriller elements. Ink Blood Sister Scribe is a fantastically well-paced and well-plotted novel of dangerous, dark magic and those who keep it secret.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

V.E. Schwab is one of the most successful fantasy authors of this century so far. With her works often being set in our world, and with an urban fantasy vibe, she is often compared to Neil Gaiman, but her books very much have their own style and flavour. And that can best be seen with The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue: a faustian tale about a young French woman who once made a deal with the devil, with unique ramifications.

The titular Addie LaRue made a deal that would see her living forever without ageing, but the catch is that nobody will ever remember her. As soon as she is out of sight, anyone who comes in contact with her instantly forgets her. She has lived this way for centuries, but one day in New York City, she meets a young man who, for some reason, doesn’t forget her.

The novel takes us from 18th century France to the NYC of the modern day, following the cursed and lonely life of a woman who cannot die but can also never be remembered. It’s a wonderful urban fantasy epic for readers of all kinds to enjoy.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Susanna Clarke exploded into the literary scene with her thousand-page historical fantasy epic Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. And years later, she returned with the far shorter and far stranger Piranesi, one of the most singularly enjoyable and beloved fantasy novels of recent years (and winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021).

The less you know about this novel’s plot, the better, but here’s a vague blurb: the titular Piranesi lives in an endless labyrinth known as the House. He is mostly alone, except for routine visits from a well-dressed man he calls the Other. Piranesi explores this house, decorated with clouds and statues and an entire ocean. And one day, the Other gives him a task to complete.

To say more would be to spoil it, but Piranesi is a true page-turner. The mystery of the House begs understanding, as does the Other. And Piranesi himself is one of the most likeable, endearing protagonists in recent fiction—fantasy or otherwise. He is a true treasure of a protagonist, and its thanks to him that the novel is so adored.

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

Until the publication of this book, British fantasy author Samantha Shannon was known for her series of urban fantasy novels The Bone Season. Then came the enormous fantasy epic The Priory of the Orange Tree, which launched Shannon into the upper echelon of great fantasy writers.

The Priory of the Orange Tree is a beautifully queer, brilliantly feminist tale of castles and dragons. It follows several characters in different places around the world. One is the queen of Inys, Sabran. She is struggling to hold onto power and there are those who seek to dethrone her. She also has a maid who secretly serves the titular society of mages: the priory. And then there is the young dragon rider Tané.

Each of these characters risks much from the very beginning, as tensions burn and the world threatens to shift. Worst of all is the threatened return of the great and evil dragon: The Nameless One. The Priory of the Orange Tree is a fantasy epic in every single way; one that adheres to the familiar rules and tropes of the genre but brings them into the modern day.

Gifted & Talented by Olivie Blake

While her novel The Atlas Six was an immediate smash hit, Gifted & Talented is certainly the superior novel. This is a richly detailed novel, written with a kind of gilded prose, which presents us with the lives of three horrible siblings: Meredith, Arthur, and Eilidh.

These nepobabies are the children of Thayer Wren, CEO of a magitech company. Meredith invented an app that asserts an ability to cure mental illness; Arthur is a young senator; and Eilidh is a former ballerina whose career was cut short by an injury.

Our protagonists are all horrid in their own entertaining ways, and each one is a potential inheritor of their father’s empire. Or are they? The events of the novel take a backseat to the unfolding of their hilariously unlovable personalities and behaviours; and Blake also sprinkles in a little (though arguably not enough) fun magic along the way.

The Magician’s Guild by Trudi Canavan

The first book in Trudi Canavan’s Black Magician trilogy, The Magician’s Guild follows a young slum girl named Sonea, who has put a target on her own back by disrupting the peace with a single stone.

The magicians of Imardin are hated and feared, and during one of their routine purges of the city, their magic is pierced by a rock hurled by a little girl. This girl has a gift; untrained and untamed, she could turn their world on its head.

And so Sonea must run, and if she is captured she will be hurled into a world of dominant magic as she is held and trained by the titular Magician’s Guild.

A Winter’s Promise by Christelle Dabos

Translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle

Written by French author Christelle Dabos, A Winter’s Promise is the first book in The Mirror Visitor trilogy of YA fantasy books. The peoples of this world live entirely on floating islands, isolated and heavily distinct from one another. These island nations (known as Arks) have their own traditions, technologies, and cultures.

One the Ark known as Anima, protagonist Ophelia is a girl with the unique ability to communicate with the souls of objects. She is also able to travel by passing through her own reflection. And Ophelia is thrown into an unhappy and unlikely situation when her hand is promised to a powerful member of the Dragon Clan: a man named Thorn.

A Winter’s Promise is a brilliantly inventive YA fantasy novel with a focus on romance and high court politics.

The Unbroken by C.L. Clark

C.L. Clark’s The Unbroken is the first novel in the Magic of the Lost fantasy series. This is a bold and thrilling queer epic about the evils of empire. Through subtle use of established languages and linguistic rules, the novel implies that it takes heavy inspiration from the French Colonial Empire and the North African nations it colonised.

Our first protagonist is Touraine, a soldier taken from her home and conscripted to fight for the very empire that took control of her land and its people. The second is the princess of that empire: a woman named Luca. It’s been years since Touraine was taken, and she has risen through the ranks as a weapon of the empire. Now, she is sent back to her homeland to squash a rising rebellion.

When one the rebellion’s leader is captured and executed, Touraine is told that her mother is alive. In a moment, this splits her loyalties and she is caught between her duty and her homeland. Making things harder is the bond that she forms with the princess after saving her life. The Unbroken is a phenomenal story of colonialism and empire.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Easily one of the most beloved fantasy stories of the past few decades, Erin Morgenstern’s astonishing debut novel The Night Circus is set in an alternate Victorian world, and it follows two protagonists who are pitted against one another by their masters in a contest of magic.

The titular circus is truly magical, travelling from place to place and led by its powerful owner, Prospero. But Prospero has an enigmatic friend named Mr A.H. —, and the two have made a pact to each raise a powerful magic user; when the time comes, their protégés will be made to duel. And it’s these two protégés that we follow over the course of this spellbinding novel.

Celia is Prospero’s daughter, and Marco is the orphan ward of Mr. A.H. —. As the novel goes, we watch them grow and learn more about the circus. The Night Circus stands out thanks to its playful fairytale plot and its author’s magnificent command over writing and dialogue.

Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher

T. Kingfisher is a master author of horror and dark fantasy, and Nettle and Bone is a short novel inspired by the tropes and aesthetics of fairy tales. Everything about these tropes are entirely and playfully inverted here, however. Protagonist Marra is the youngest princess of a small kingdom squashed between two larger and more imposing nations.

Her eldest sister, in a move of political strategy, was married of to the prince of one nation in order to better protect them from the other, but that sister has since died. Now, the prince wants to marry the family’s second daughter. Marra moves to protect her sister from sharing the first daughter’s fate. She means to kill this murderous prince.

To do that, however, she will need to head out on a dangerous quest, completing impossible tasks and recruiting strange people to her cause. She will somehow have to bring a dog to life and forge a cloak out of nettles. Doing so might allow her to complete her dangerous task.

Red Sonja: Consumed by Gail Simone

Red Sonja is a character with a long and storied history, having begun as a Marvel Comics character back in the 70s. Today, she is owned by Dynamite and her story was rebooted by comic book legend Gail Simone back in 2013. A decade late, Simone made the world of Red Sonja the subject of her debut novel, Red Sonja: Consumed. And it is a fantastic sword and sorcery adventure.

Sword and sorcery is a unique subgenre of fantasy with a more pulpy tone and aesthetic; they are violent and less focussed on world-building. Rather, they follow a morally grey antihero on a bloody quest across an eldritch land of monsters and magic. And Red Sonja: Consumed offers fantasy readers a return to that subgenre which has become increasingly unpopular over the past few decades.

The novel begins with the titular Sonja, the She-Devil, having seduced and then stolen from a queen. Now, with the queen in hot pursuit, Sonja must return to her homeland as she hears whispers of a strange evil that rises from the earth and steals the life from unsuspecting innocents. The novel shifts point-of-view frequently, giving us a dynamic look at the world she inhabits and the dangerous tale that unfolds.

Weird girl books are all about upsetting the norm. They’re punk tales of women being gross, strange, dangerous, or even just allowing themselves to be sad, angry, unpleasant, and unlikeable. These subversive books are all about painting women in darker, stranger colours, and we love to see it!

Out by Natsuo Kirino

Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder

One of the progenitors of weird girl fiction, Out is a thriller that follows four women who work night shifts at a sandwich factory. The men in their lives are cruel and hateful, and eventually one of them snaps and murders her husband by choking him to death with his own belt while their kids are in the other room.

With the help of the other three women, she cuts up and hides his body, and they all agree to a vow of silent solidarity. But this vow might not last, and if it doesn’t there will be police and even worse sniffing around, searching for the truth. This is a very bleak novel about downtrodden women doing dark things in order to forge a path too freedom, liberation, or even just a little good old fashioned revenge.

Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Moshfegh is perhaps the quintessential weird woman of fiction right now. Her books are off-kilter and upsetting, leaving readers with a sense of unease. None moreso than Lapvona, a gothic medieval tale of serfdom, subservience, witchcraft, and death.

The titular Lapvona is an isolated village lorded over by a rich man who lives on a hill above the peasantry. One of those peasants is a disfigured boy with a cruel father who lies to him. We learn about these men, as well as the son of the lord, over the course of a year. That year is beset by drought, disease, and day-to-day struggles.

There is also a dark magical element to Lapvona. The village witch was wet-nurse to many of the villagers, and she replaces her eyes with those of a horse in order to regain her sight. Beyond this, Lapvona is a novel with clear socialist undertones from an author who seems to be very cynical towards society, and the book is amazing as a result.

Boulder by Eva Baltasar

Translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanchez

Boulder is a Catalan novel about the complexities of love and relationships. We begin on a ship off the coast of Chile, where the titular Boulder meets a woman with whom she quickly falls in love. When Samsa gets a job in Reykjavik, Boulder follows her and their relationship becomes strained. This is mostly because Samsa wants to have a child and Boulder doesn’t.

What begins as a hedonistic relationship defined by lust and adventure soon becomes a recognisable tale of the struggles of love when one person wants what the other doesn’t. It’s an ugly and uneasy work of sapphic literary fiction. There is little romance in here; instead, it reminds us of the often uneasy and messy nature of relationships.

Boy Parts by Eliza Clark

An icon of weird girl fiction, Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts is a work of literary fiction about a photographer in her twenties who lives in Newcastle and is defined by her own self-destructive behaviour. Irina is building a portfolio of works which all depict boys and men in explicit poses and doing illicit acts. She invited them to her studio, sometimes seduces them, and takes photos for her collection.

Soon, she is offered the opportunity to display her work at a museum in London, which she accepts. In the meantime, she falls into a potential relationship with an actual good guy, goes to parties with friends, and flashes back to a fractured and strange past that we gently piece together over time.

Irina isn’t like other girls; and she is also on the fast track to burning out. Memories are creeping in, and she is shutting everyone out. We watch her like a car crash and we wonder where she will land.

Read More: Essential Fantasy Books by Women

Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval

Translated from the Norwegian by Marjam Idriss

Written by Norwegian singer-songwriter Jenny Hval, Paradise Rot follows a naive young woman who has moved to a dank and wet nameless town for university. She moves into a converted brewery—open-plan but divided poorly by cheap and flimsy walls, like the cubicles in an office. There is an unsettling lack of privacy here between pour protagonist and her new roommate.

What makes this so wonderfully weird and gothic is our protagonist’s obsession with the body—with bodily fluids and the mechanics of our fleshy, wet parts. While it isn’t body horror, it is a novel that makes a horror out of the body, reminding us that we are gooey sacks that take in and expel so much mush and wetness, and everything about us dies and rots. This is a claustrophobic and strange tale.

Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt

A straight-up work of political horror, Tell Me I’m Worthless has become a cult classic of the genre. Rumfitt’s novel tells the story of two women who were once friends at university. As adults, however, one is transgender and the other is a TERF. We know they fell out after spending a night at a haunted house (called Albion—get it?). Something awful happened there, and we will eventually find out what, exactly, that was.

With a real Shirley Jackson edge to it, Tell Me I’m Worthless is a novel about the fascistic attitudes of modern-day Britain to scapegoat transgender people. It explores the “values” of Britain and twists them into something that better resembles what the country really is at its core. A wonderfully subversive and unsettling haunted house horror novel.

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Japanese author Sayaka Murata has become a legend of weird fiction in recent years, and her novel Earthlings upsets as many people as it impresses. It tells the story of a young woman named Natsuki who believes that she is, in fact, an alien.

As a girl, she spent her summers in a mountaintop holiday home with her extended family. She and her cousin Yuu had an unhealthy and taboo relationship at a very young age, and that is only the tip of Natsuki’s iceberg.

As an adult, she still believes that she is an alien, but she has found a way to survive in ordinary human society by entering into an asexual marriage with a man, though she gradually teaches him about how she sees the world: as a factory churning out well-behaved minions for patriarchy and capitalism to suck dry. Natsuki wants to escape this factory, and her methods for doing so are deeply unsettling.

The Pisces by Melissa Broder

Like Ottessa Moshfegh, Melissa Broder is a queen of weird woman fiction, and The Pisces is her masterpiece: a darkly funny tale of mental illness, seduction, unhealthy relationships, and dysfunctional people. Protagonist Lucy is invited to look after her sister’s dog and apartment in Venice, LA. There, she goes on a few bad dates with awful men and eventually falls into a relationship with an actual honest-to-goodness merman.

She goes to group therapy sessions, continues to fall deeper into self-destruction via toxic Tinder dates, and develops a deep obsession with her merman, all the while gradually ignoring her sister’s dog, her responsibilities, and her life. She is a broken, awful woman, and we become addicted to following her decline into depravity and unhinged behaviour.

Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Gretchen Felker-Martin is known for writing the most visceral, uncensored, and frankly depraved scenes of horror in the genre’s history. Her novel Cuckoo plays out like Stephen King’s IT meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers at a conversion camp for gay and trans kids in the ’90s. These kids have been abducted and driven out to the desert to learn “correct” values. There, they will come up against an eldritch horror that threatens their lives.

This group of kids features lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans boys and girls, and we gradually learn about their individual pasts, watch them bond together, and get some kind of idea about the monstrous thing that lives out in the desert, hunts them, and wears their skin. These kids are being hollowed-out, but they’re also resilient and tougher than they look. But the threat is monstrous and deadly.

Bunny by Mona Awad

Bunny is part of the popular dark academia genre, but it stands out by being a strange, satirical, and cynical novel about college life and the cliquey relationships between young women. This modern classic follows Samantha, a masters student of Creative Writing, and she’s the only girl on the course who isn’t part of an exclusionary in-group of vapid girls who all call each other Bunny.

Samantha is a punk outlier until she isn’t. She gets invited into the group via a letter to one of their parties. At this party, the Bunnies play with dark magic and sacrifice rabbits, which conjures up a hot but simple-headed guy who suddenly appears at their door. From here, Samantha falls into a world of off-kilter strangeness. Feverish and occult, it is an addictive tale of weird women being weird.

Seen the films? Now read the books!

Here, we’ll cover the books that you may or may not know exist, and which you absolutely must read, as well as the ones you probably know about but never read because their film adaptations are such beloved classics (but you should still read the novels).

Read More: How to Read More Books (And Faster)

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

This one has a weird and interesting history. Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi movie 2001: A Space Odyssey is a boundary-pushing classic of the genre, and many don’t know that there is also a novel by science fiction storyteller Arthur C. Clarke.

What’s interesting about it, however, is that the movie technically came first. Kubrick had the initial idea, and asked Clarke to work with him on the screenplay, which he did. But Clarke also wanted to turn the screenplay into a novel, which he did, and it was published the same year.

Clarke’s novel is an outstanding work of fiction which arguably improves upon the movie. The film omits so much exposition, opting for minimal dialogue and a lot of vagueness in its storytelling, but the novel clarifies so much of the film’s strangeness without being dull or patronising. It is a must-read for fans of the movie.

Buy a copy of 2001 here!

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Everyone and their mum knows that Peter Jackson’s beloved The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy was adapted from Tolkien’s original book(s). The Lord of the Rings was, after all, the first true work of fantasy fiction. But so many of us never get around to reading the books because of their length, their density, their age, or some other excuse.

While the films are undeniable masterpieces of cinema, the same is true for Tolkien’s novel. All by himself, this one man created an expansive mythology that rivals those of Greece and Scandinavia. Within that mythology, he told an epic tale of adventure, war, love, and magic. If you’ve always felt daunted by The Lord of the Rings, take the plunge. It’s worth it.

Buy a copy of The Lord of the Rings here!

Poor Things by Alasdair Gray

Yanis Varoufakis’ Poor Things is his finest work as a filmmaker. The Greek director has made many incredible movies, but Poor Things is his masterpiece. But Poor Things was based on the novel of the same name by 20th century Scottish author Alasdair Gray.

Gray was widely considered to be the greatest Scottish writer of his time, and Poor Things is, on the surface, a blend of Frankenstein, Lolita, and Flowers for Algernon. But it is also a wildly clever, satirical, and strange novel embedded with intense and important themes of socialism and feminism.

Framed as a true story, uncovered and republished a century after its events by Gray himself, Poor Things shifts its perspective and its form, moving from prose to epistolary letters, finally ending with a long letter from Bella herself, telling her version of events. Fans of Varoufakis’ phenomenal film have to read Gray’s original novel; it is a masterpiece of Scottish fiction.

Buy a copy of Poor Things here!

Dune by Frank Herbert

As is the case with The Lord of the Rings, the vast majority of Dune fans know that Denis Villeneuve’s epic masterpiece is based on a space opera by American author Frank Herbert (and that there was also a 1984 film directed by David Lynch). But Dune is another hefty, intimidating novel that many never find the courage to dive into.

Doing so is incredibly rewarding, however, in part because Herbert wrote two sequels which vary wildly in tone, but mostly because this was a sci-fi novel that altered the landscape and the trajectory of the genre. Science fiction was never the same after the publication of Dune, and reading it makes apparent why that is the case.

Buy a copy of Dune here!

Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

One of Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki’s greatest achievements was his 2004 animated film Howl’s Moving Castle, a favourite among many Studio Ghibli fans. And whether you know that it was based on a children’s novel by Welsh author Diana Wynn Jones or not, this is another book that deserves to be read by fantasy fans of all ages.

While the movie remains a perfect adaptation, there are important and interesting differences between it and its source material. Jones also deserves far more love and attention than she gets; her Chrestomanci series is widely and criminally overlooked as an influential piece of children’s fantasy fiction.

Buy a copy of Howl’s Moving Castle here!

I Am Legend by Richard Mattheson

The 2007 I Am Legend movie isn’t very good. This is not a hot take; a lot of people feel this way. However, what is an enormous shame is that the movie is based on a phenomenal horror novel by Richard Mattheson, and too many people don’t know that or ignore it.

Mattheson’s novel is very different from director Francis Lawrence’s film, and far smarter as well. It is set in a version of the modern day where almost all of the human race has succumbed to a vampire virus. We follow a man who assumes he is the only human left. He hides away in his home and defends it from the vampire scourge.

But society is shifting, changing, and adapting. He is the outlier; he is the dangerous one; he is legend. It’s a wonderfully imaginative, intense, and frightening novel that puts the film to shame.

Buy a copy of I Am Legend here!

Misery by Stephen King

Misery is an excellent horror movie, for which Cathy Bates won an Oscar, and it came hot off the heels of Stephen King’s original novel, which was published only three years earlier. Fans of the movie often ignore the book because the film is such an excellent adaptation. We’re all guilty of doing this, but King’s original novel should not be so readily ignored.

While Rob Reiner’s 1990 film is one of the best adaptations of King’s fiction, the original novel is still its own kind of excellent. Unlike the film, the book manages to double its sense of isolation by locking the reader in the mind of its protagonist. He is unlikeable and difficult, and that makes the tension even more palpable.

This is one of those rare instances where it’s hard to choose a favourite between the original novel and the film adaptation; both are truly excellent realisations of King’s vision, and both should be enjoyed by horror fans everywhere.

Buy a copy of Misery here!

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

It’s not a bold claim to say that Douglas Adams’ sci-fi comedy masterpiece is better than its very mid 2005 movie adaptation, directed by Garth Jennings. One thing the film really has going for it is its cast. Sam Rockwell as Zaphod Beeblebrox and Alan Rickman as Marvin were especially inspired and flawless casting choices.

Beyond the casting, however, the movie really is nothing special and not a patch on the original novel. Adams’ original Hitchhiker’s Guide remains a timeless and flawless work of satirical sci-fi. It’s also the first book in a five-part “trilogy”, all of which are excellent.

Buy a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy here!

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

No Country for Old Men, like Misery, is another great example of a fantastic film adapted from a fantastic novel. Directed by the Coen Brothers, with a screenplay that they adapted from McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men is a really amazing movie. Its direction, tone, style, and performances are all top-tier.

It is a well-loved and admired movie, and the same can be said for Cormac McCarthy’s original novel. While his novel The Road is incomparably better than its average movie adaptation, No Country for Old Men is a far closer call. Both the book and the film are perfect works of fiction. And if you’ve only ever seen the movie, you owe it to yourself to read the book, too.

Buy a copy of No Country for Old Men here!

Northern Lights by Philip Pullman

Better known as The Golden Compass in the US, Philip Pullman’s inspiring and illuminating YA novel has been adapted twice: first into a very average 2007 movie which wrung out all the thematic depth and nuance from Pullman’s novel (though it is a well-cast and beautiful film), and then into a very good BBC series which adapted the full trilogy of novels.

That trilogy is called His Dark Materials, and its first book Northern Lights is an ambitious and, some might argue, radical work of young adult urban fantasy fiction. Radical because Northern Lights is a humanist novel which criticises the Church and organised religion through its themes and events, all of which were ignored by the movie.

Pullman popularised the YA genre of fantasy fiction; and his world and characters have had a transformative and lasting effect on generations of young people, just as the works of Tolkien and Lewis did before him. These are must-read books that their movie adaptation failed to do any justice to at all.

Buy a copy of His Dark Materials here!

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

Alex Garland’s 2018 movie adaptation of Annihilation, starring an excellent Natalie Portman, is really great. And Garland himself is also a novelist; his book The Beach was adapted to film by Danny Boyle long before Garland himself ever took a shot at direction. All of that said, Jeff Vandermeer’s original novel is a wildly original sci-fi novel that should be read.

Annihilation is the first book in the Southern Reach trilogy, and while Garland’s movie is great, it makes some considerable alterations which justify a read of the novels for any moviegoer who enjoyed the film adaptation. This is a strange, unique, and thought-provoking novel that has to be read to be believed.

Buy a copy of Annihilation here!

As for defining a novella, that depends on who you ask. Typically, a novella is any piece of fiction that’s shorter than 200 pages (though some argue for 150 pages), but not so brief as to be considered a short story. Here, we’re going off general consensus.

These are your must-read novellas, separated neatly into different styles and genres. Here, you’ll find a hefty selection of classics, as well as many modern novellas separated out by genre. And so many of these masterful short books come from all around the world.

Classic Novellas

So many of your favourite classic stories and novels often actually fall into the definition of a novella, and this can even take some readers by surprise. These classic novellas have changed the landscape of literature for the better; they’re stories we talk about every day, and they continue to impact readers on the deepest levels.

Animal Farm by George Orwell

George Orwell’s allegorical novella, often taught in high schools all around the English-speaking world, is one of the most popular, beloved, and well-respected novellas ever written. Retelling the story of the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist era that followed, Animal Farm is a fantastic piece of dark satire so brilliantly told.

Orwell famously argued that language and stories should be simple, appealing to the broadest possible audience, and Animal Farm is an excellent example of this. A fable for children and a satirical allegory for adults, the novella appeals to so many, so perfectly.

Buy a copy of Animal Farm here!

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka saw little success in his life, but after his death his works came to define an entirely new genre of fiction: the kafkaesque. The Trial is a novella that tells the story of Joseph K, a man arrested for a crime he is unaware of, who finds himself tossed by the waves of the legal system.

K has no idea what he did, and nobody will tell him. We watch as the system intimidates and confuses him, and he is moved from place to place, all the while desperate to understand his own situation. The Trial is a darkly funny, sombre, frustrating read that bites at bureaucracy in inventive and evocative ways.

Buy a copy of The Trial here!

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson remains the queen of the American gothic, famous for her horror novels and short stories — the best of which is We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a gothic novella about a secluded family on the edge of town. The family is shunned by everyone, and has a lot of secrets to keep hidden.

We follow the family’s youngest daughter, Merricat, who lives with her sister and uncle. Her parents and brother died from poisoning several years ago, and now Merricat uses what she believes to be magical wards to protect what’s left. A chilling and cold piece of gothic fiction and a wonderful classic novella.

Buy a copy of We Have Always Lived in the Castle here!

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

One of the most famous and revered American stories ever written, The Great Gatsby is a true classic of the 20th century. A novella that tells the story of a lonely man who hosts lavish parties that he himself never attends, all with the hope of luring out the woman he has loved for so many years.

The Great Gatsby is written with captivating clarity and lyricism, and it presents the reader with a unique perspective on the great American dream. Gatsby himself is an alluring and haunting figure, and Fitzgerald’s novella has become one of the great American classics.

Buy a copy of The Great Gatsby here!

Silas Marner by George Eliot

George Eliot was a pioneer of realism in 18th century literature; an approach to fiction that set her apart from the likes of Dickens and the Brontës. Silas Marner is a novella that tells the story of a weaver who has settled in a quiet village after dark events came to pass.

Accused of stealing from the congregation in his Northern hometown, and likely framed by a friend, Silas is shunned, loses his love, and retreats to the Midlands to live out his life in seclusion, but things don’t go the way he hoped. Silas Marner is a powerful Victorian novella that cemented George Eliot as one of the great writers of her time.

Buy a copy of Silas Marner here!

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

This gothic novella, like Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, is a gothic tale that has left an enormous legacy. Everyone knows the tale of Jekyll and Hyde, whether they’ve read Stevenson’s novella or not: the story of the scientist who transforms into his beastly and dangerous alter-ego.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a well-loved story by a well-loved author, and its ongoing prevalence in popular culture shows what a powerful and original story it was. The tale of a meek and respectable doctor transforming into a cruel and dastardly monster is one that continues to resonate with readers to this day.

Buy a copy of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde here!

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

One of the most cherished stories that Charles Dickens ever told, A Christmas Carol has since become larger than Dickens ever was, with people knowing the story whether they’re familiar with Dickens himself or not. Adapted to the screen many times, A Christmas Carol is, at this point, a fairy tale that every child has enjoyed.

The story of a miserly old capitalist who strangles the joy from his workers, only to be visited by the regretful ghost of his former business partner, and then frightened into changing his ways by visions of the past, present, and future. It’s a terrifying tale, but also a warming and hopeful one that resonates with readers across the world.

Buy a copy of A Christmas Carol here!

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Alongside Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Henry James’ classic novella The Turn of the Screw made an icon of the governess: the intelligent young woman who works as a teacher to the children of a wealthy and large country home full of ghosts and secrets. In the case of this novella, that home is Bly Manor.

Our nameless governess is charged with the care of two children who live with their uncle after the deaths of their parents. While working at Bly, the governess starts to see ghostly figures, and also learns about two people who once worked and died there; now, their ghosts are seemingly influencing the children. It’s a chilling tale and a classic gothic novella.

Buy a copy of The Turn of the Screw here!

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

James Baldwin was an American author, playwright, and civil rights activist who escaped to Paris. There, he wrote the much-loved novella Giovanni’s Room. The story of a bisexual American man living in Paris and the love affair that unfolds between himself and a bartender named Giovanni.

Giovanni will soon be executed, and our protagonist David narrates the story of their love affair, which took place while David’s girlfriend is in Spain. This is a tale of isolation, gender roles and expectations, and queer expression in the 1950s. An empathetic and vitally important piece of queer fiction.

Buy a copy of Giovanni’s Room here!

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Steinbeck was one of the great American authors, and his novella Of Mice and Men remains as thematically prevalent as it ever did. Frequently taught in schools, the novella tells the story of two men — George and Lenny — who work on a farmstead to raise enough money to eventually free themselves from the cycle of capitalism.

George, like so many men, is following the American dream. He will have land of his own, and the simple giant Lenny will help him get there. But the cycle of capitalism is harder to break away from than George thinks, and tragedy awaits them both. Of Mice and Men is a powerful tale, vitally relevant, and beautiful in its simplicity. An amazing novella.

Buy a copy of Of Mice and Men here!

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Albert Camus was a French philosopher known for presenting his philosophical arguments as fiction. The first and most famous of his works was the novella The Stranger, which tells the tale of a man living in French Algeria who kills another man shortly after the death and funeral of his own mother.

In the novella’s first half, we learn about Mersault’s life leading up to the funeral, and the subsequent murder. In the second half, we watch the fallout of these events. The Stranger is a piece of absurdist fiction that explores the theme of isolation in unusual ways (as Camus was known to do), and it remains an impactful novella to this day.

Buy a copy of The Stranger here!

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

Translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker

Japanese author and Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata wrote many beautiful tales, often characterised by their emphasis on beauty. Aesthetics, in the form of both human and natural beauty, were intrinsic to his storytelling and his plots, and that can best be seen in his classic novella Snow Country.

This Japanese novella takes place in a remote hot spring town, where our Tokyoite protagonist, Shimamura, falls in love with a local geisha who works at the town’s onsen. Though geisha are forbidden to show affection for their clients, she too falls in love, and we watch their love affair unfold. A stunning short masterpiece by one of the greats.

Buy a copy of Snow Country here!

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess supposedly wrote A Clockwork Orange over the course of just a few days, and the resulting novella has gone on to become a revered story, adapted into one of the most famous and respected films of all time.

This piece of dystopian satire follows a psychopathic young man named Alex, who spends his days as part of a violent gang, but is later captured and subject to torturous reformation methods by the authorities. A haunting, harrowing story. Surreal and strange, difficult to read, but ultimately powerful and impactful.

Buy a copy of A Clockwork Orange here!

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea is regarded by many readers as Hemingway’s masterpiece. A vital piece of American fiction, and a wonderfully short piece of fiction. This novella presents the reader with exactly what the title promises.

Our old fisherman hasn’t caught a single fish in more than eighty days, but one morning he sets out and hooks an enormous marlin, which he cannot reel in and so holds onto for more than a day and a night, slowly developing great respect and admiration for the fish as the hours tick away. This is a true American classic and one of the great novellas of its time.

Buy a copy of The Old Man and the Sea here!

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys’ novella Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s gothic romance novel Jane Eyre. Using what was hinted at in Brontë’s novel as a framework, Rhys presents us with a powerful and literary feminist novel about English colonialism.

Our protagonist is Brontë’s famous madwoman in the attic, a Creole woman named Antoinette. We follow her life leading to her marriage to the cruel Mr Rochester, who removes her to England and famously locks her away in his attic. Rhys’ novella humanises her, gives her a story, and has become a feminist classic novella.

Buy a copy of Wild Sargasso Sea here!

Modern & Literary Novellas

From Argentina to Japan, so many of the best stories of the past several years have come in the form of novellas; short books that can be enjoyed again and again by readers who cherish what they have to offer. These modern — and often literary — novellas are all must-read stories for fans of the artform.

At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop

Translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis

Winner of the International Booker Prize, French author David Diop’s incredible war novella is set in the trenches of World War I, where we follow a Senegalese soldier who faces death, disease, and prejudice from his fellow soldiers.

When he loses his fellow Senegalese brother-in-arms, he feels alone and isolated, and so dedicates himself to the fight, despite all that is against him. This is a harrowing tale of war on the front lines, as well as the prejudice and dangers that faced Senegalese soldiers made to fight by the French government. A haunting, incredible novella.

Buy a copy of At Night All Blood is Black here!

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Convenience Store Woman is a transfixing, thought-provoking Japanese novella about a woman who has worked at the same convenience store for more than a decade. Her life is predictable, simple, and stable. And so, she is content. But her family worries about her. They want her to climb that ladder, and also eventually get married and have kids.

Our protagonist has found a way to survive and feel comfortable in a strange, capitalistic, traditionalist world that she doesn’t understand or feel part of, but this only serves to confuse those around her. Sayaka Murata’s novella is a profound piece of Japanese fiction. A masterpiece of modern literature.

Buy a copy of Convenience Store Woman here!

Brickmakers by Selva Almada

Translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott

Selva Almada is a genius of feminist literary fiction. Hailing from Argentina, she has written some of the best novels of the modern day. Brickmakers is a novella about cycles of abuse, especially within the context of masculinity.

Starting at the end, with two boys having killed each other in a fight, they are bleeding out on the ground and we trace their personal histories back to the source of this feud. Inherited hatred, masculine pride, and class divides paint a picture of patriarchy in its darkest most honest form. A true masterpiece of a novella.

Buy a copy of Brickmakers here!

Foster by Claire Keegan

Irish author Claire Keegan is a master of short fiction, and Foster is a perfect example. This is a novella about a young girl whose mother is about to go into labour. Our girl is taken, by her father, to stay with a family in a nearby town for the summer.

There, she is welcomed in with open arms by a loving couple and shown a different way of living and loving as part of a family unit. This is a touching tale of growth and experience through the eyes of a child. A stunning work of literary fiction and one of the best modern novellas you’ll ever read.

Buy a copy of Foster here!

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Following on from Foster, Claire Keegan once again wowed the literary world with Small Things Like These. This novella is set during the week leading up to Christmas. Our protagonist is a middle-aged man, married with children, and working as the manager of a lumber mill.

His small community are god-fearing church-going hypocrites, and as the novella progresses we watch him steadily come face-to-face with those hypocrisies. This is a novel that daringly exposes the darkness and corruption of organised religion in the modern day. An incredible novella and a masterpiece of literary fiction.

Buy a copy of Small Things Like These here!

Walking Practice by Dolki Min

Translated from the Korean by Victoria Caudle

A fantastically strange and imaginative Korean novella, Walking Practice tells the story of an alien creature that crash-landed on Earth and spends their days hunting and eating the most delicious thing on this planet: us.

The best way for them to do this is to shapeshift into a man or woman and use dating apps to lure out their prey. The novel explores gender roles in a multitude of ways, as our alien switches genders and plays different roles to get what they want. It’s a fascinating exploration of gender expectations in the modern world.

Buy a copy of Walking Practice here!

The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto

Translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda

Banana Yoshimoto is one of the most beloved Japanese authors of today, and The Premonition is an elegantly simple novella about a teenager with a happy ordinary life and a family who love her. But she also enjoys sneaking out of the house to stretch her legs. One place she likes to go is the home of her hedonistic aunt.

But one day, while visiting her aunt, gaps in her memory become clear, and she starts to uncover a truth about her childhood and her family that had long been kept from her. This reframes her ideas of love, trust, and family bonds. A truly wonderful modern from a talented Japanese author.

Buy a copy of The Premonition here!

Graveyard Shift by M.L. Rio

From the author of the celebrated If We Were Villains (one of my personal favourite novels) comes Graveyard Shift, a gothic novella that clocks in at a mere 108 pages and takes places over a single night. Graveyard Shift follows a group of insomniacs and night shift workers who often meet for a smoke at a local graveyard. Our first protagonist is editor of the university newspaper, and others include a cab driver, a hotel receptionist, and a bartender.

One night, while at the graveyard, they notice a freshly-dug hole. But this graveyard is old; nobody has been interred there in a century. So, who dug this hole and why? Over the course of this night, our misfit gang of protagonists will hunt for answers and uncover a conspiracy along the way. This is dark academia that actually explores the darkness of academia in a creeping, claustrophobic way.

The novella is the perfect medium for this kind of story as well, since it can be enjoyed in a single setting. Reading this will take as long as watching a horror movie, and you will feel just as much edge-of-your-seat tension as the plot thickens and the strangeness amps up.

Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval

Translated from the Norwegian by Marjam Idriss

Jenny Hval is an internationally famous Norwegian singer-songwriter, and she has also written some fantastic short novels. Her novella Paradise Rot is a wonderfully gothic piece of strange fiction about a university student who moves to a new city in a new country for her studies.

When she arrives, she moves in with a local woman. They live together in a converted brewery where the walls between them are more like office cubicles in an open-plan space. Privacy is an illusion, and the space itself becomes a character in its own right. This is a wonderfully unsettling tale and a brilliant work of modern gothic fiction.

Buy a copy of Paradise Rot here!

Boulder by Eva Baltasar

Translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanchez

Boulder is a work of sapphic literary fiction from Catalan author Eva Baltasar. Our nameless protagonist works as a cook on a merchant ship which is off the coast of Chile when she meets and falls deeply in love with a woman named Samsa. Her addiction to this woman leads her to move with Samsa to Reykjavik.

Their relationship quickly becomes strained, however, when Samsa declares that she wants a child, and our protagonist doesn’t. Their lives are moving at different paces and in different ways, causing a painful rift between them. This is a stellar and visceral sapphic novella that everyone should read.

Buy a copy of Boulder here!

The Swallowed Man by Edward Carey

Edward Carey rose to prominence with his incredible historical novel Little, about the life of the girl who would eventually grow up to become Madame Tussauds. His novella The Swallowed Man retells the tale of Pinnocchio, focussing on the experiences of Geppetto after being swallowed by the whale.

We spend time in the whale with Geppetto as he explores his surroundings, finds a shipwreck, and reads the captain’s journal. And we also journey back through his memories to the creation of Pinnocchio in a stunningly human and empathetic tale. A beautiful little novella from a master of the craft.

Buy a copy of The Swallowed Man here!

Ms Ice Sandwich by Mieko Kawakami

Translated from the Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai

Mieko Kawakami is one of the great feminist Japanese writers of today, and her novella Ms Ice Sandwich is a sweet, soulful, uplifting tale. Our protagonist is a teenage boy facing several personal struggles, especially with his at-home family relationships.

However, he has become entranced by a girl who works at his local grocery store; a girl whom he called Ms Ice Sandwich. He admires her, feels as though he is in love with her, and even looks up to her as someone cool, aloof, and unique. It’s a charming tale that will comfort anyone who reads it.

Buy a copy of Ms Ice Sandwich here!

Finger Bone by Hiroki Takahashi

Translated from the Japanese by Takami Nieda

Hiroki Takahashi’s war novella, Finger Bone, places us in the life of a nameless soldier stationed in the jungle of Papua New Guinea. He befriends his fellow soldiers while healing at a war hospital where men are being treated for wounds and sickness, but their lives could be stripped from them at any moment (and they often are).

This is a visceral yet poetic novella about the realities and the uncomfortable truths of war. Like the poetry of Wilfred Owen, this is bleak and honest, painting a raw picture of warfare from the frontlines. An incredible work of short fiction.

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Hex by Jenni Fagan

This is a unique and original novella from a fantastic voice in Scottish literature. Protagonist Iris has found a way to travel back in time several centuries, and there she spends the night in the prison cell of a woman who will be hanged at dawn for witchcraft.

This woman is Gellis Duncan, and she tells Iris the story of how she got here. Iris tells Gellis that the women of today are still treated unfairly, and true equality has still not been reached. The two bond over this painful truth and we learn about the very real North Berwick Witch Trials of 16th century Scotland.

Buy a copy of Hex here!

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie

A stunning piece of literary historical fiction, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain tells the story of two women of English history, both of whom claimed to hear the word of God: Julian of Norwich and a lesser-known woman named Margery.

Julian hid herself away and took to life as an anchoress, giving out advice to strangers who sought it. Margery, however, stood in the town square and cried about the words she heard. The two women will eventually meet, and this meeting will eventually change the course of history.

Buy a copy of For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain here!

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith

Han Kang’s novella, translated with splendour by Tilted Axis Press founder Deborah Smith, won the International Booker Prize in 2017. The Vegetarian tells the story of a woman who decides to become a vegetarian when she is plagued by unsettling and upsetting dreams of animal slaughter.

We see the fallout of this decision from the perspectives of various family members across three parts: her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister. Each one places her at the centre and has a different attitude towards Yeong-hye and her behaviour. This is a radical, powerful Korean novella that should be read by everyone.

Buy a copy of The Vegetarian here!

Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai

Translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton

Japanese author Mieko Kanai’s literary novella is a dense and poetic story about nothing much at all. Our narrator-protagonist is a Tokyo housewife with children and a husband to look after, and we spend time in both her life and her mind as she goes about her daily routine.

What makes this novella so captivating is its structure and delivery, as the realism of the tale is offset by the ways in which we fluidly weave in and out of thoughts, memories, actions, and conversations and lines between them all are blurred in an engaging and fascinating way, all translated amazingly by Polly Barton.

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Mammoth by Eva Baltasar

Translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanchez

Eva Baltasar is a remarkable artist who is able to weave sapphic and feminine themes into stories that explore belonging, hedonism, indecision, and the feeling—whether it be good or bad—of being untethered. Across just one hundred pages, Mammoth accomplishes all of this with harsh, electrifying prose that is translated with staggering force by Julia Sanchez.

Mammoth follows a young lesbian who, as the novella opens, wishes desperately to be pregnant. She works as a researcher at a university and, at a party, attempts to seduce a man who might give her the one thing she wants. When this fails, she quits her job and wanders, almost nomadically, from place to place and job to job, eventually arriving at a rural farm.

This is a story of anxiety. Our protagonist is young, brash, unsure of herself, and seems to be living through a persistent crisis. She knows herself to an extent but experiments with herself and the world in order to better understand both, and harm is often the result. She might often be dark, unlikable, and pitiable, but she is also relatable in one way or another.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital is a novella that traces a single day aboard the International Space Station. Six astronauts orbit the world sixteen times, seeing a new sunrise and sunset every ninety minutes. And in that time, they bond, share memories, discuss God and philosophy, marvel at the beauty of our world, and take stock of our place in the universe.

While it is light on plot and events, Harvey’s focus with Orbital is on musing over the big questions: life, death, love, faith; all those heady questions, all while watching the world spin under your feet. The main subject of the novella is relationships: those between neighbours, family members, nations, and even the relationships between us and our home planet, and between Earth and the rest of the universe.

All of this is written with sharp and poetic prose. While it all feels almost eerily apolitical, avoiding any kind of commitment to one idea or another, it remains introspective, thoughtful, and hopeful. And that, in itself, is something that can be appreciated.

Horror Novellas

Many of the best horror stories of all time take advantage of brevity. Short stories and novellas are uniquely equipped to deliver a terrifying, spine-chilling scare and then simply end, leaving the reader feeling cold but alive. These horror novellas are powerful, frightening things that you will absolutely adore. Not for the faint of heart, of course.

The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf

Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky

This all-but-forgotten classic of gothic horror is a work of strangeness and brilliance. The Black Spider begins with a Swiss family hosting a celebration in their valley home, when the elder patriarch begins telling the story of something dreadful that happened there in the middle ages.

That story involves a village of serfs toiling away to serve a cruel lord in his castle. One day, at the point of starvation, they are visited by a stranger who tempts them with magic that will save them, in exchange for the next child to be born. From here, the village descends into unimaginable horror and tragedy, making for a truly spectacular gothic horror novella.

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Come Closer by Sara Gran

Reminiscent of Rosemary’s Baby, Sara Gran’s horror novella Come Closer is an eerie and unsettling experience. Our protagonist, Amanda, is starting to lose her grip on what is real and what is sane as strange things occur around her. Noises in her apartment, odd and violent dreams, and accusations of things she hasn’t done.

Amanda’s world is turning upside down, and she desperately needs to understand why. There is a voice in her head that’s taking control and telling her to do things she’d never do. She is losing control and it frightens her. This is a whole new kind of terror, and a brilliant short horror novel.

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What Moves The Dead by T. Kingfisher

This is T. Kingfisher’s bold and brilliant retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s iconic short story The Fall of the House of Usher. While that tale is an untouchable classic, Kingfisher took it and created something entirely fresh and unique, adding more detail and dynamism to the story.

What was once a twisted and hopeless tale now features more body horror, more strangeness and grotesquerie. Mysteries are answered but the answers are wonderfully unpleasant. This is a fantastically dark, twisted, and exciting horror novella.

Buy a copy of What Moves the Dead here!

The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

The Salt Grows Heavy is a monstrously strange and bleak horror novella. Our protagonist is a mermaid who, as the story opens, is watching her newborn children feast on the body of their dead father — a cruel patriarch who cut out his wife’s tongue. From here, she leaves on a journey into the woods with a charismatic plague doctor.

In this strange new place, they meet a gang of boys who hunt and kill each other, only to be resurrected by their cultish masters, and so a kind of battle ensues between our heroes and these lords. A wonderfully grotesque and gory tale of body horror and twisted people.

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You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood by Eric LaRocca

You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood is a book within a book. We begin with a man named Martyr Black, who is a self-professed serial killer. We read transcripts, diaries, and poetry from him, as well as a novella that he wrote. And that novella takes up the bulk of this strange and wonderful book.

The novella tells the tale of a young woman who has been recruited by a reclusive and enigmatic video games developer. She lives at his remote mansion with her little brother, but her boss is injured and recovering. She is strapped there and being ordered around by her boss’ sister. It’s a claustrophobic, gothic, and unnerving horror novella.

Buy a copy of You’ve Lost A Lot of Blood here!

Queen of Teeth by Hailey Piper

Queen of Teeth is a gross and fantastic piece of short horror fiction about a young lesbian woman who wakes up after a one-night-stand with the sheets soaked in blood. What she first thinks is her period turns out to actually be a set of teeth growing at the entrance to her hoo-ha.

The people to blame are part of a pharmaceutical company that treated Yaya when she was still in her mother’s womb, and now, decades later, she is transforming and a voice in her head is getting louder. This is a twisted, dark tale and a brilliant horror novella.

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Sci-Fi Novellas

Science fiction is a genre known for its thematic exploration of various politics and big ideas, and having that distilled down into a short, easily re-readable book provides such obvious benefits. It’s so easy to chew on and get all the benefits from a clever sci-fi story if it’s a novella: something short and re-readable. That goes for all of these brilliant books.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells was one of the great godfathers of science fiction, and The Time Machine remains one of his most well-loved books. It tells the story of a man who travels far into the future; so far, in fact, that humanity has branched into two evolutionary chains.

In this future are the pristine and childlike eloi and the monstrous underground-dwelling morlocks, who feed and then eat the eloi. The Time Machine was one of the earliest sci-fi stories and remains a classic novella to this day.

Buy a copy of The Time Machine here!

To Be Taught If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

American author Becky Chambers is the queen of modern sci-fi, and her short novella To Be Taught If Fortunate is a masterful work of hard science fiction. In a near-future socialist Earth, a grass-roots global space agency has been established, and a group of astronauts has been sent on a mission to another solar system.

While there, this team explores the planets and moons, learn, scan, and study. They come across unexpected obstacles and overcome them together. This is a hopeful work of sci-fi that paints a positive picture of our future.

Buy a copy of To Be Taught If Fortunate here!

This is How You Lost the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

These two fantastic authors worked together to pen a masterful work of short science fiction. Two soldiers fight for opposing armies in a war that spans both space and time, but they are both becoming disenchanted by the war, and in that loss of faith love can bloom.

Our soldiers leave taunting, teasing notes for the other to find, and slowly their letters become declarations of love as they journey from a future battlefield full of mechs back to Shakespeare’s London and Plato’s Greece. An incredible work of science fiction romance.

Buy a copy of This is How You Lose the Time War here!

Pluralities by Avi Silver

Pluralities is a queer work of short science fiction; a dual narrative about two very different people. One is a young person who works at a mall and is steadily coming to terms with their gender identity, and also happens to have the power of foresight. The other is a prince who has fled his home planet and all the responsibilities that go with it.

The two never meet, but they are connected by something greater. We watch our earthling form an intense relationship with a trans man and we see the prince’s AI ship gradually fall in love with him. This is a fun and unique work of short science fiction. A fantastic sci-fi novella.

Buy a copy of Pluralities here!

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

All Systems Red is the first novella in a sci-fi series called The Murderbot Diaries. This story is set in a future world where corporations control much of space and the planets in it. While exploring, teams of humans are assigned a “murderbot” to keep them safe.

We follow a team whose own murderbot has managed to hack its own systems and become self-aware. Now, it wishes to better understand itself, its purpose, and its relationship to humanity. A fantastic sci-fi novella.

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Fantasy Novellas

Fantasy is a genre famous for its size and scale. Fantasy novels are so often not only large in stature but also part of long, ongoing series. There are entire worlds full of people, histories, traditions, religions, politics, and more. But condensing all of that down neatly into a novella is its own kind of beauty, as these authors demonstrate.

Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

Thornhedge is a modern fairy tale story by the incredible T. Kingfisher. Blending Shakespearean fairies with elements of Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel, this is the tale of a girl who was stolen by fairies, raised as one, and then given the responsibility of guarding a tower surrounded by thorns.

She has guarded this tower for a long time, and watched as knights try and fail to access it. But one day, she befriends a himbo knight with good intentions, and she tells him her story. The two bond, and we slowly learn about our fairy and about what is actually in the tower. A wonderful fantasy novella from a legendary author.

Buy a copy of Thornhedge here!

The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss

Fantasy fans will know the name Patrick Rothfuss, author of the widely celebrated The Name of the Wind and its sequel. But Rothfuss also wrote The Slow Regard of Silent Things, a fantasy novella which takes place in the world of The Kingkiller Chronicles.

This short novel follows Auri, a character introduced in Rothfuss’ first novel, and the adventures she goes on in a hidden labyrinth nestled beneath the university in which The Name of the Wind is predominantly set. This is a great novella that expands the lore of this world brilliantly.

Buy a copy of The Slow Regard of Silent Things here!

When looking at lesbian novels and the art put out by lesbian authors, you see the darkest kinds of gothic fiction, as well as the brightest dedications to love and kindness. Whatever genre you love, from historical fiction to tales of sea monsters, and love crossing time and space there’s something for you here.

Essential Lesbian Novels

Some of these lesbian novels are dark and twisted; others are celebrations of queer love in the face of patriarchy. Some are in translation from other languages; others are forging new paths for well-trodden genres. What unites them all is their sheer quality. These are essential lesbian novels by some of the best women writers of today.

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

Julia Armfield made an enormous splash with her debut short story collection, Salt Slow. When she followed that with a staggering work of modern gothic fiction in Our Wives Under the Sea it quickly became clear how special her writing really is.

Our Wives Under the Sea is a gothic tale told from two perspectives; and one that explores the concepts of loss and grief from a frighteningly original angle.

Miri’s wife Leah set out on an expedition to the bottom of the sea in a cramped submarine. What should have been weeks turned to months, and when Leah eventually returned, she was different. Leah’s chapters blend the Lovecraftian with the Kafkaesque as we sink slowly with her, and we see what’s down there beneath everything.

Miri’s chapters follow her as she tries to live with, and fails to care for, the returned and broken Leah. A new Leah who barely speaks and behaves in strange and frightening ways. Miri is grieving the loss of her wife, confronted with the fact that whatever has returned is not Leah.

This is a lesbian novel that forces the reader to confront the idea of grief and how it might present itself. It’s a tale of love and loss and loneliness and isolation. A truly original gothic novel.

Watch our full video review of Our Wives Under the Sea

Buy a copy of Our Wives here!

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

After Sappho is the novelisation of a web of interconnected lives: queer women from around the turn of the 20th Century who pushed feminism and queer experiences into the limelight. This is one of the most kind, hopeful, and inspiring lesbian novels you could ever hope to read and enjoy.

We begin in Italy before tracing multiple threads across France, England, Ireland, and across to the US. The women here were all real: artists, writers, actors, philosophers, and travellers. Some you will be familiar with; others you won’t. All of them were inspired by Sappho, and in turn inspired one another to move, act, shake the world, and turn the status quo on its head.

These are women who didn’t conform to gender roles and expectations, who loved other women, who spoke out and inspired the women and queer people around them. The novel is told out of order, in small vignettes that traces these lives over and again; we move through time and across borders to paint a picture of change, growth and love. Beautiful, genius, and perfect.

Buy a copy of After Sappho here!

Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin

Translated from the Mandarin by Bonnie Huie

Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile is a few things: it is one of the quintessential Taiwanese novels of the twentieth century; it is also one of the most prominent and powerful lesbian novels of the past few decades. Separated into a series of notebooks, Notes of a Crocodile tracks the university years of a queer Taiwanese student who goes by the name Lazi.

Lazi is tormented by her love for a woman in the year above; their relationship is tumultuous and aggressive. She also spends time in queer circles populated by other emotionally unhealthy young people. This is a visceral tale of personal hatred and acceptance, of love and lust and danger. Reminiscent of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human, this Taiwanese novel rips you apart unapologetically.

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Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens

Lucky Red is a historical sapphic novel set in the American Wild West of the late 19th century. Our protagonist, Bridget, is a beautiful young redhead whose childhood was plagued with bad luck, to say the least.

Bridget was raised by her dumb and useless father, who sold their house for nothing much at all. While on the road together, they take shelter and he is bitten and killed by a snake. Alone, Bridget wanders until she reaches the frontier town of Dodge, Kansas. There, she is taken in by the kind women of the Buffalo Queen brothel, where she works and finds a community.

She takes to the work well, enjoys having food and shelter, and builds strong bonds with the other women. And soon enough, she realises that men are work but women are what she loves and craves. Her first crush is a fellow sex worker, and her second is an infamous female gunslinger with whom she falls in deeply in love.

Lucky Red is a sapphic novel about sex, lust, love, and the bonds between women and small communities in a dangerous, difficult, hard world.

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The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan

A special and beautifully written book that subtly evokes Scottish folklore while building an original and highly creative world. On a floating circus, in a world divided between those who live on land or at sea, North dances with her beloved bear, betrothed against her will to the ringmaster’s son. However, she’s harboring a secret that could destroy everything.

Meanwhile, Callanish, exiled to a solitary lighthouse, tends to the graves of those lost at sea. A chance encounter sparks a magnetic bond between the two women, offering the promise of a new life together. Perilous waters threaten to tear them apart. If you love theatrical and whimsical books then prepare to fall in love with this novel and its vibrant and endearing ensemble.

Buy a copy of The Gracekeepers here

Love Me Tender by Constance Debré

Translated from the French by Holly James

Like so many great sapphic and lesbian novels, Love Me Tender is a brash and punk piece of lesbian liberation.

Our protagonist is forty-seven, and three years ago she separated from her husband of twenty years when she realised she was gay. Now, she lives in a small studio flat in Paris, spending her days swimming, reading, getting new tattoos, writing in cafes, and sleeping with women. A life of freedom and hedonism.

What complicates this is the fact that she has a son, Paul, whom her homophobic ex-husband is weaponising against her. At just 160 pages, Love Me Tender is a novel that explores queer liberation and the ways in which heteronormativity, bigotry, traditionalism, and family can all feel like ghosts, shackles, stalkers, and abusers.

Our protagonist is a complex woman; from one angle she seems selfishly carefree, and is clearly suffering for that. From another, she’s enjoying her lesbian liberation. This is punk literature, through and through, and one of the most raw and exciting lesbian novels of recent years.

Buy a copy of Love Me Tender here!

Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier

Pizza Girl is a coming-of-age story about an 18-year-old pregnant pizza delivery girl named Pizza Girl (she is never given a real name) who becomes obsessed with a stay-at-home mom named Jenny whom she delivers pizza to.

When we meet Pizza Girl, she is grieving the death of her alcoholic father, avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future. She feels more in common with her dead father than she does with anyone else in her life.

As Pizza Girl and Jenny’s relationship deepens, she begins to question her own identity. She is attracted to Jenny, but she is also deeply afraid of becoming her. She sees in Jenny the future that she herself could have if she doesn’t make some changes in her life. This novel beautifully explores themes of identity, motherhood, obsession, grief, and loss and you truly feel devasted for her as the book goes on.

Buy a copy of Pizza Girl here

Boulder by Eva Baltasar

Translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches

Accomplished and celebrated Catalan poet Eva Baltasar has here written a raw and tender novella about love and pain, and how too often they are one and the same.

Our protagonist, nicknamed Boulder by her geologist girlfriend, spends her days floating from job to job. She’s a cook, and when we meet her she’s working on a ship at sea. Boulder is cold and uncaring; she’s as harsh and unforgiving as the sea upon which she currently works. But when she meets Samsa, she softens and gives into her lust and love for her.

The two move to Reykjavik, and Boulder eventually finds some success opening up a Spanish food truck. Life is solid, good, reliable, stable. Until Samsa, almost forty, insists that she wants a child and it must happen now, before it’s too late for her. Boulder doesn’t want to lose her, so she gives in and agrees.

We watch Boulder struggle with having a pregnant partner, and later a child she never wanted. This sapphic novel is told entirely from the perspective of Boulder, as a kind of diary, as she does nothing but voice her thoughts, feelings, and opinions.

It’s a sensual novel, but also a painfully raw and angry one. Queer and punk, this is one of the most harrowing and powerful lesbian novels you’re ever likely to read.

Buy a copy of Boulder here!

Mrs. S by K. Patrick

Set in an old-fashioned boarding school, Mrs. S tells the story of a nameless Australian who has moved to England for work. There, she meets the headmaster’s wife, the titular Mrs. S, and begins a journey of growing obsession.

Our protagonist is unsure of herself. She wears a binder and enjoys being seen as masculine, but she doesn’t have the language to express how she feels or what she wants for herself. She identifies as a lesbian and begins to see Mrs. S as more than an object of obsession — perhaps this beautiful, charming woman might be able to guide our protagonist to her true self, unlock something in her.

Mrs. S has a very specific and rare style of presentation: run-on sentences and paragraphs that don’t differentiate between narration and dialogue.

Characters are named for their jobs and no proper nouns are used. The all-female school’s student body is described as a faceless mass which K. Patrick simply refers to as The Girls. This makes the characters and setting feel as though they are floating in a vacuum, outside of time and space. This is a nowhere place in which our protagonist is trapped, trying to understand herself and what she wants.

Her obsession with Mrs. S grows. She is lustful, jealous, curious, and eager to know this woman better, despite not knowing herself at all. Mrs. S is an answer, a distraction, a muse, so many things to her. There are few novels as captivating, intimate, claustrophobic, and sensual as Mrs. S; a true modern masterpiece amongst the best sapphic and lesbian novels.

Buy a copy of Mrs. S here!

My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna van Veen

Queer Dutch author Johanna van Veen’s My Darling Dreadful Thing is a work of gothic heartache. This sapphic horror-tinged drama will rip you apart in more ways than one. The novel follows Roos, a young woman barely out of girlhood, who has been working as a medium at her mother’s seances. While her mother is a cruel charlatan, Roos really does have a connection to the spirit world in the form of her ghostly companion, Ruth.

But when Roos meets Agnes—a young widow mourning the loss of her husband—the two form a quick bond and Agnes pays Roos’ mother to have Roos as her own companion at her crumbling estate. There, Roos discovers that Agnes has her own spirit companion, as well as a few dark secrets. And between chapters we read doctor/patient transcripts from after the events of the novel, which reveal that Agnes will not last the novel, and Roos is on trial.

The gothic elements of this story are turned up to eleven, with ever single gothic checkbox being ticked, and what makes this a real dramatic masterpiece is the intense, painful longing that Roos and Agnes grow to feel for each other. Their love blossoms through the novel but it is a flower blooming in a murky, ghost-infested place.

Chlorine by Jade Song

Chlorine is a sapphic coming-of-age story inspired by the author’s own experience as a competitive swimmer.

Our protagonist, Ren, is a Chinese-American girl with a deep love for swimming. We learn from the beginning that she is telling her story after having somehow transformed into a mermaid. We follow Ren as she grows through her teen years, experiencing puberty, sex, depression, friendship, and crises. All the while her friend Cathy, who holds a deep romantic love for Ren, remains by her side.

Occasionally, the narrative switches to Cathy’s perspective, expressed via letters which she has been casting out to sea in the hopes that they will reach the mermaid Ren.

The build up to Ren’s supposed transformation is one fraught with feelings of pain, stress, disappointment, dysphoria, violence, and more. The metaphor being played with can be interpreted in a variety of ways, as one which explores a general sense of truth and honesty, or more specifically feelings of dysphoria, sexual repression, and freedom from society.

This is a raw and difficult coming-of-age story, a tale of sapphic love and self-hatred. A story of frustration and pain; a difficult read that tackles many difficult themes with honesty and empathy.

Buy a copy of Chlorine here!

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder

Melissa Broder leads the charge of unlikeable protagonists and difficult characters, especially amongst women writers. Historically, men are allowed to be unlikeable. Nobody bats an eye when male characters behave in an unlikeable way; and yet Melissa Broder stirs up a lot of ill feelings in certain readers by simply making her women complex, broken, selfish, distant, and difficult.

After the success of The Pisces, she brought us Milk Fed, one of the most daring and original lesbian novels of the last few years.

Milk Fed‘s protagonist is Rachel, a young Jewish woman from New Jersey who lives in LA and works at a talent agency while spending her nights doing stand-up comedy. Rachel has a lot of mummy issues that have instilled in her a lifelong and crippling obsession with calorie counting and weight watching.

Soon, Rachel meets Miriam: an overweight orthodox Jewish woman who loves food and loves her family. She is everything Rachel isn’t, and she soon becomes an unhealthy obsession for Rachel. Rachel lusts after Miriam, is inspired by her attitude towards life, and builds fantasies of sexual desire around her.

Milk Fed is one of the most daring and exciting lesbian novels of recent years.

Watch our full video review of Milk Fed

Buy a copy of Milk Fed here!

X by Davey Davis

X is a sexy, kinky noir story about a non-binary lesbian searching the clubs and dungeons of Brooklyn for the elusive, enigmatic X. Our protagonist, Lee, spends their days working a corporate job and their nights going to punk shows, hooking up with people, and engaging in some amateur sadism.

Despite being a dom, Lee had a particularly exciting masochistic encounter with X a few weeks ago, and now they can think of nothing else but finding X again. However, the US government is systematically deporting immigrants, refugees, and queers, and Lee has heard rumour that X is about to be deported as well.

We spend the novel getting to know Lee, their life, their friends, their kinks, and their childhood traumas, all while we follow them on their hunt for X. This is a very exciting book amongst lesbian novels that really leans on kink. It’s bleak at times, occasionally funny, and unapologetically raw.

Buy a copy of X here!

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

Biography of X is an insightful and harrowing exploration of narcissism and its devastating impact on the lives of others, set against a dystopian backdrop that enriches the story and provides a unique perspective on the protagonist’s development.

After X, a renowned artist and writer, dies suddenly, her widow CM sets out to write a biography, uncovering a Pandora’s box of secrets and betrayals as she goes. We viscerally experience the obsession, disbelief, and anger CM feels as she uncovers X’s hidden past from her collaborations with Bowie and Waits to her hidden past in the fascist Southern Territory.

Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love, introducing us to an unforgettable character who shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves. While the pacing occasionally lags, the novel remains a compelling and thought-provoking read, and is a must for fans of challenging sapphic literature.

Buy a copy of Biography of X here

Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval

Translated from the Norwegian by Marjam Idriss

Written by internationally acclaimed Norwegian musician Jenny Hval, Paradise Rot is a short, visceral, sensual novel about desire, temptation, and the human body. Textured, loud, coarse, and raw, Paradise Rot obsesses over the beautiful and the gross aspects of the female form: what it’s made of, what it creates, how it thrives, and how it decays.

Our protagonist is a young Norwegian woman named Jo who has just moved to a new country to attend university. She moves into a converted brewery and lives with a local woman. This shared space has no real borders; flimsy plywood walls create half-formed rooms and secrecy is non-existent.

These women obsess over each other, give into temptation, make each other jealous, and sexually awaken in each other’s company. This novel is alive, pulling the senses into focus and demanding your attention, even as it behaves in an alluringly crass and gross way. A truly addictive lesbian novel.

Buy a copy of Paradise Rot here!

Solo Dance by Li Kotomi

Translated from the Japanese by Arthur Reiji Morris

Few lesbian novels hit as hard as Solo Dance. Written by Taiwanese-born, Japan-based author Li Kotomi, Solo Dance follows a similar protagonist. Cho Norie grew up in Taiwan and left for Tokyo to pursue a master’s degree, learn the language, and get a job.

However, Norie is horribly depressed, carries heavy trauma, and obsesses over death. She reads the works of novelists who took their own lives and struggles to hide her sexuality for fear of being harassed. As a child, Norie lost a friend. At university, she suffered abuse. Now, as an adult working a corporate job in Tokyo, she struggles with day-to-day life as a lesbian immigrant in Japan.

If you are a queer person who has ever suffered (or feared) abuse, you will relate strongly to Norie and her experiences. You’ll find in her a companion, and perhaps even catharsis through how she struggles and grows and lives.

Solo Dance is not an easy book to read, but it is an extremely rewarding one. It illuminates, especially to cishet readers, the eggshells that LGBTQ+ people walk on every day. It also leans towards hope in the third act, but you have to go through a lot to get there.

Ultimately, queer readers who have faced depression and anxiety will find a friend and a companion in Norie. Solo Dance is one of the best lesbian novels you’ll ever read. Thank you, Li Kotomi.

Buy a copy of Solo Dance here!

A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson

A Dowry of Blood is a gothic romance for the ages. S.T. Gibson has gifted us the story of the cursed marriage between Dracula and his bride Constanta.

We learn on the very first page that Constanta will eventually kill her sire, but we must read on to see how this happens, and the centuries that pass in the meantime. This is a novel dripping with blood, love, and lust. Animal aggression and burning passion.

Soon enough, a second bride joins their marriage. a Spanish woman who becomes a source of burning desire for Constanta. She loves her like nobody else, and it’s their love that plays a part in Dracula’s undoing. The love, lust, and longing laced into this novel is spectacular. There is so much hate and spite and venom to enjoy as well, as with any good gothic romance.

Buy a copy of A Dowry of Blood here!

Night Shift by Kiare Ladner

In Night Shift, author Kiare Ladner paints a gritty picture of late-90s London. Here’s one of the grimiest and gnarly lesbian novels you’re likely to read; fiercely literary and often bleak, Night Shift will twist you as you grow more and more obsessed with its characters and their lives.

Our protagonist is Meggie, a young woman who presumes herself straight until she falls into an obsessive and unhealthy friendship with sexy Belgian Sabine. Meggie works night shifts and spends as much of her days as possible with her boyfriend, Graham, but Sabine steadily shows Meggie a different side of London, work, and life. Meggie is happy to go along for the ride as she questions and explores her sexuality.

Sabine represents possibility, mystery, new experiences, and a new way for Meggie to spend her days. She is intoxicating and illuminating. She is everything Meggie didn’t know she wanted to be, could be, and might yet be. Night Shift is one of the harshest, raw, and punk lesbian novels of today.

Buy a copy of Night Shift here!

Read More: Best Queer Graphic Novels and Manga

The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins

The Confessions of Frannie Langton is one of the boldest and most beautiful lesbian novels. Sara Collins’ debut novel is an homage to the gothic classics while also representing a bright and exciting new direction for the gothic genre as she places a Black lesbian front and centre.

This is a piece of genre fiction that gives readers everything they could want: an enticing mystery, an epic tale of freedom and love, an exciting historical context, an homage to the Brontës, and a tragic lesbian love story led by gothic fiction’s first Black female protagonist.

The titular Frannie Langton was born on a plantation in Jamaica, where she learns to read and write. From there, she moves to London and works in the house of a rich couple. After falling in love with Mrs Benham, however, she is put on trial for her murder. But did she do it? This is her story; these are the confessions of Frannie Langton.

Buy a copy of The Confessions of Frannie Langton here!

Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson

Bloom is a hypnotic descent from alluring sapphic romance into paranoid gothic terror. This short novel begins with a series of chapters in which our young professor protagonist finds herself drawn to a woman who sells her wares—cupcakes, soap, and more—at a farmer’s market. But as these women enter into an electrified and subtly toxic relationship, the darkness starts to creep in, looming and humming at the edges.

Ro went through a bad breakup with a guy in New York, and now she’s taken an assistant professor role at a small town university, and it’s there that she meets Ash, who lives in an isolated farmhouse that she inherited from her grandmother. This is Ro’s first experience of a lesbian relationship, and it’s exciting, but Ash is controlling and secretive. There are places Ro mustn’t go and rules she must follow.

The hows and whys of Ash’s behaviour are kept close to the chest until the eleventh hour, and all the while we watch on, unblinking, as this gothic drama of sapphic love and toxic tension unfolds. It is wonderfully refreshing to read a sapphic book with a toxic relationship that spirals into something truly terrifying at the end of it all.

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

An abstract and beautifully lyrical sapphic love story unfolding through unique letters sent across time and space.

Two rival agents named Red and Blue come from opposite sides of warring factions of a time war and fall in love through the course of this novella. Their love grows through taunting letters that they leave for each other, and these letters appear anywhere and everywhere; from Shakespeare’s London to a far-flung alien war between warring mechs.

This is How You Lose the Time War is highly poetic and may not be for you if you prefer a structured plot and world-building, but this unstructured approach lends itself well to emphasising the fractured yearning and tenderness between these two agents.

The co-writing of This is How You Lose the Time War also means that the two agents have very distinct voices and personalities which makes their love all the more endearing. Beyond being a warming sapphic love story, this is also one of the best sci-fi novels of all time.

Buy a copy of How You Lose the Time War here!

The Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

Winner of numerous awards, this beloved poignant lesbian novel is set in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1954, during the Red Scare, when openly exploring queerness isn’t an option.

Protagonist Lily secretly gathers photos of women with masculine qualities, is drawn toward ‘unfeminine; clothing and interests, and slowly recognises her lesbianism with her budding connection to Kathleen Miller, a white classmate. Last Night at the Telegraph Club seamlessly incorporates cultural touchstones and places with historic Chinese American significance alongside a beautiful and touching sapphic love story.

The inclusion of Mandarin and Cantonese language in the text with footnote translations was also a nice touch.

Buy a copy of Last Night at the Telegraph Club here!

The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

Translated from the Spanish by Fiona Mackintosh and Iona Macintyre

In the great library of lesbian novels, never has there been such a glorious, unshackled celebration of queer love. The Adventures of China Iron is an Argentinian novel that laughs in the face of patriarchy and heteronormativity. It is a wild and wonderful ride from beginning to end.

The titular China Iron is still young, yet she has seen much tragedy. She was married to and then abandoned by a singer. She gave birth at age fourteen and gave her children up. Now, her story begins anew. At the novel’s outset, China meets Liz, a Scottish woman exploring the plains of Argentina. The two quickly fall deeply in love and head out on a wild journey together.

The Adventures of China Iron celebrates lesbian love, sex, and intimacy. It shrugs off the touch of men and shows the reader just how beautiful and alive queer love is. Few lesbian novels were written to be guiltlessly enjoyed this much. What a work of art.

Read our full written review of The Adventures of China Iron

Buy a copy of The Adventure of China Iron here!

The Colour Purple by Alice Walker

Currently the only work featuring a lesbian relationship written by a woman to win a Pulitzer, this epistolary novel is a true classic that spans twenty years of protagonist Celie’s life.

It’s a beautifully written and important novel that can be difficult to read at times due to the subject matter, while explicitly a lesbian novel The Color Purple also tackles race, class, gender, sexual assault, domestic abuse, religion, and the South in the early 1900s.

Told through a series of letters to ‘God’ (and later her sister Nettie in Africa), Celie is fourteen at the beginning of the novel and is being physically and sexually abused by her father — she is desperately trying to protect her sister from a similar fate.

Later we are privy to the events of Celie’s abusive forced marriage to ‘Mister’ and also her developing relationship with Shug, Mister’s mistress, who shows her love and intimacy for the first time. It’s a very human book that will definitely stay with you.

Buy a copy of The Color Purple here!

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

One of the most popular Sarah Waters novels for good reason, the twists and turns in this book just don’t let up and just when you think you have a handle on what is going on, the rug is pulled from under your feet. If you have seen Park Chan’Wook’s Handmaiden film which is based on Fingersmith and think you will be prepared for the events of this novel don’t be fooled, the film deviates from the book in a big way at the end of part one.

This is an addictive read and at no point feels slow despite being a bigger novel. Protagonist Sue Trinder is raised by a group of scam artists in Victorian London and finds herself drafted into a plan to steal a fortune from an unmarried, rich young woman named Maud Lilly.

Things are never as straightforward as they seem, however. If you enjoy historical fiction or simply want a lesbian novel with endless backstabbing, revenge, and twists then Fingersmith is the one for you.

Buy a copy of Fingersmith here!

An Education in Malice by S.T. Gibson

Adapted liberally from Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (below) S.T. Gibson’s An Education in Malice is an exciting work of sapphic, vampiric dark academia. When the novel opens, its protagonist, Laura Sheridan, has moved to rural Massachusetts to attend the isolated Saint Perpetua’s College, and in her poetry class she meets the professor she will develop a deep obsession with—a woman named De Lafontaine—and the girl who will quickly become her rival.

This rival is Carmilla, De Lafontaine’s pet (in more ways than are initially implied). Aggravating Carmilla, Laura proves to be a formidable poet, and this is enough to snatch De Lafontaine’s attention from her. Competition for the professor’s affections grows more complicated with the revelation that De Lafontaine is a vampire, and soon the rivalry will flip on its head completely.

An Education in Malice is a sapphic enemies-to-lovers narrative in a teasingly oppressive dark academia setting. The kind of blood-soaked romance that you’ll find yourself unable to look away from.

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

From the author of the highly successful Red, White & Royal Blue, we have another light-hearted and witty romance novel that successfully captures the fizzing energy of meeting someone for the first time and knowing that they are your person.

Unfortunately, when August meets Jane on the subway, it is not a straightforward romance since Jane is displaced in time from the 1970s and August has to help her. The interesting concept of One Last Stop offers a lot of insight into historic queer culture across the US during the 70s and keeps you hooked as you get more and more invested in a happy ending for these cute lovers.

Buy a copy of One Last Stop here!

House of Hunger by Alexis Henderson

Alexis Henderson’s second novel House of Hunger is a tumble into a frightening gothic fantasy world that gently shifts from grim and gory to sexy and sapphic as the pages turn.

Set in a fantasy world reminiscent of Victorian Britain, our protagonist Marion is a twenty-year-old maid living in the slums of a smog-filled city. Sick of her work as a maid to a cruel woman, and going home each night to a sick and cruel brother, she answers an advertisement for a new blood maid.

Blood maids are women who serve the powerful houses of the North, where counts and countesses believe that drinking the blood of others can help with their maladies. As she rises through the ranks of blood maids at the House of Hunger, the relationship between Marion and her countess blossoms into something far more intimate and romantic, though it remains frightening and unstable.

Buy a copy of House of Hunger here!

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

A lesbian book list wouldn’t be complete without another offering from Sarah Waters, just as beloved as Fingersmith, Tipping the Velvet is another historical novel set in the late Victorian period.

The setting of this novel is delicious, treating us to an imagined lesbian cabaret underworld as we follow Nancy from the sleepy seaside town of Whistable to London as she pursues her lover Kitty. This book has a real sense of place, and it’s difficult not to be fully present in the world Sarah is creating even if you are not fully invested in the characters who can be unlikeable at times.

Buy a copy of Tipping the Velvet here!

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu

Published more than two decades before Stoker’s Dracula Le Fanu’s Carmilla was not only the first great vampire novel, it was also a daring work of sapphic gothic fiction. This short and tense novel opens with a genuinely unsettling chapter, establishing the bleak and empty world of its protagonist, Laura, before introducing us to her soon-to-be playmate and predator, the titular Carmilla.

Carmilla is left at Laura’s father’s castle by her mother, and while she is there she develops a deep bond with our protagonist. They play and explore, and soon Carmilla openly admits her love and affection for Laura. But there is something dark and monstrous lurking just beneath the surface.

Carmilla works both as a campy work of gothic fiction and as a truly chilling piece of 19th century horror fiction. And the sapphic mood created by the tension between Carmilla and Laura is nothing short of intense.

Shakespeare’s plays and poetry remain as popular today as they ever have been, and much of that is down to his mastery of language and expression. Shakespeare quotes are special.

We quote Shakespeare often without even knowing it, so stitched into our language and everyday experiences are his words. They have lasted lifetimes and will continue to do so.

To celebrate his legacy, his ability to express thought and feeling through comedy and tragedy, and his mastery over the English language, here are some of the best Shakespeare quotes.

Here, you’ll find a wide selection of Shakespeare quotes from his comedies, tragedies, histories, and a select handful of sonnets.

These are Shakespeare quotes to remind you of the beauty of his stories and characters, and to inspire you in your everyday life.

Buy a copy of Shakespeare’s complete works here!

Shakespeare Quotes (Comedies)

Shakespeare’s comedies, generally defined by their happy endings and emphasis on love and marriage, offer us levity, humour, and sweet feelings.

These are some of the most memorable and imaginative Shakespeare quotes from his best-loved comedy plays.

Read More: Inspiring Oscar Wilde Quotes

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;

And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.

Nor hath love’s mind of any judgment taste;

Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste:

And therefore is love said to be a child,

Because in choice he is so oft beguil’d.”

— A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Though she be but little, she is fierce!”

— A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

— A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“And yet,to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays.”

— A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”

— Twelfth Night

“With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.”

— The Merchant of Venice

“You speak an infinite deal of nothing.”

— The Merchant of Venice

“I am a Jew. Hath

not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,

dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with

the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject

to the same diseases, healed by the same means,

warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as

a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?

if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison

us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not

revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will

resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,

what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian

wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by

Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you

teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I

will better the instruction.”

— The Merchant of Venice

“They do not love that do not show their love.”

— Two Gentlemen of Verona

“Our doubts are traitors,

and make us lose the good we oft might win,

by fearing to attempt.”

— Measure for Measure

“I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow, than a man swear he loves me.”

— Much Ado About Nothing

“I can see he’s not in your good books,’ said the messenger.

‘No, and if he were I would burn my library.”

— Much Ado About Nothing

“Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.

Men were deceivers ever,

One foot in sea, and one on shore,

To one thing constant never.

Then sigh not so, but let them go,

And be you blithe and bonny,

Converting all your sounds of woe

Into hey nonny, nonny.

Sing no more ditties, sing no more

Of dumps so dull and heavy.

The fraud of men was ever so

Since summer first was leafy.

Then sigh not so, but let them go,

And be you blithe and bonny,

Converting all your sounds of woe

Into hey, nonny, nonny.”

— Much Ado About Nothing

“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break.”

— The Taming of the Shrew

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”

— As You Like It

“Love all, trust a few,

Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy

Rather in power than use; and keep thy friend

Under thy own life’s key: be check’d for silence,

But never tax’d for speech.”

— All’s Well That Ends Well

Shakespeare Quotes (Tragedies)

Many of the best Shakespeare quotes come from his tragedies, and most of his most celebrated plays are tragedies.

We so fondly remember lines spoken by titular characters like Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth.

Faulted and doomed characters who speak such beautiful tragedy and they talk about love, friendship, fate, war, cruelty, family, and so much more.

The Bard really expressed so much beauty through his tragedies, and these Shakespeare quotes exemplify that perfectly.

“When he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night

And pay no worship to the garish sun.”

— Romeo and Juliet

“These violent delights have violent ends

And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,

Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey

Is loathsome in his own deliciousness

And in the taste confounds the appetite.

Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;

Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.”

— Romeo and Juliet

“Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.”

— Romeo and Juliet

“Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow,

That I shall say good night till it be morrow.”

— Romeo and Juliet

“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.”

— Romeo and Juliet

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

— Julius Caesar

“Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear;

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come.”

— Julius Caesar

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.”

— Macbeth

“Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.”

— Macbeth

“Look like the innocent flower,

But be the serpent under it.”

— Macbeth

“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.”

— Macbeth

“By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something wicked this way comes.”

— Macbeth

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

— Hamlet

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.”

— Hamlet

“Doubt thou the stars are fire;

Doubt that the sun doth move;

Doubt truth to be a liar;

But never doubt I love.”

— Hamlet

“To die, – To sleep, – To sleep!

Perchance to dream: – ay, there’s the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;”

— Hamlet

“This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

— Hamlet

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

— Hamlet

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

— The Tempest

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

— The Tempest

“What’s past is prologue.”

— The Tempest

“In time we hate that which we often fear.”

— Antony and Cleopatra

“The breaking of so great a thing should make

A greater crack: the round world

Should have shook lions into civil streets,

And citizens to their dens.”

— Antony and Cleopatra

Read More: Iconic Jane Austen Quotes

Shakespeare Quotes (Histories)

Shakespeare’s histories are less well-known and well-remembered than his comedies and tragedies.

Even his historical plays that are well remembered — Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra — are actually designated Shakespearean tragedies, not histories.

That said, there is beauty in everything The Bard ever wrote, regardless of what plays we’re reading or watching.

For that reason, his histories shouldn’t be overlooked (especially Richard III and Henry V). So, here are some wonderful and memorable Shakespeare quotes from his history plays.

“Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.”

— Richard III

“A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!”

— Richard III

“The better part of valour is discretion; in the which better part I have saved my life.”

— Henry IV (Part 1)

“I kiss thee with a most constant heart.”

— Henry IV (Part 2)

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;

Or close the wall up with our English dead.”

— Henry V

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

— Henry VI (Part 2)

“Presume not that I am the thing I was;

For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,

That I have turn’d away my former self;

So will I those that kept me company.”

— Henry VI (Part 2)

Shakespeare Quotes (Sonnets)

Shakespeare’s sonnets, each of which consists of fourteen lines, are best enjoyed in their entirety, in order to fully understand their context and enjoy their beauty.

That said, if you need some inspiration, here are a few beautiful Shakespeare quotes from his sonnets to whet your appetite for more. Read, and enjoy.

“Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken.”

— Sonet 116

“For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.”

— Sonnet 29

“So are you to my thoughts as food to life,

Or as sweet-seasoned showers are to the ground.”

— Sonnet 75

“This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

— Sonnet 73

“And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.”

— Sonnet 130

For that reason, succinct quotes about reading can inspire and comfort bookworms and appreciators of language and the written word.

For many, reading is not merely a pastime, but a passion that nourishes the soul and allows us to experience a life other than our own, if only for a short time.

From the hushed halls of ancient libraries to the cozy corners of modern bookshops, reading has always held a certain kind of magic, and writers have conveyed their love for writing many times; in many beautiful ways.

That expression from inspiring authors has given us some of the most beautiful quotes about reading you’re ever likely to read.

Inspiring Quotes About Reading

Attempting to encapsulate one’s love for reading and writing is a challenge, but here is a wonderful selection of quotes about reading from many cherished authors that will inspire and comfort you.

Here, you’ll find the most profound and inspiring quotes about reading from classic and contemporary authors, shedding light on the emotions and transformative experiences that books bring to our lives.

We love reading above all else, and so do these authors. Here are their most inspiring quotes about reading.

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” – Harper Lee

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss

As you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

“For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle.” – Banana Yoshimoto

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” – Mortimer J. Adler

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” – Oscar Wilde

“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.” – Maya Angelou

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” – Stephen King

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.” – Ernest Hemingway

Read More: Best Biographies Ever Written

“Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.” – Mason Cooley

“When you become a writer, your heart and mind become divided between your many selves.” – Kazuo Ishiguro

“No two persons ever read the same book.” – Edmund Wilson

“A word after a word after a word is power.” – Margaret Atwood

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” – Lemony Snicket

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” – George R.R. Martin

“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” – Victor Hugo

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” – Anna Quindlen

“People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.” – Terry Pratchett

“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.” – René Descartes

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” – Ray Bradbury

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” – Haruki Murakami

“We read to know we’re not alone.” – William Nicholson

“There are many little ways to enlarge your world. Love of books is the best of all.” – Jacqueline Kennedy

“A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.” – Neil Gaiman

“Reading is an act of civilization; it’s one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.” – Ben Okri

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” – Frederick Douglas

Read More: Best Literary Fiction To Read Right Now

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.” – William Styron

“A book is a device to ignite the imagination.” – Alan Bennett

“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” – Oscar Wilde

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.” – Joyce Carol Oates

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” – Carl Sagan

“Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.” – Jeanette Winterson

“Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.” – Mary Schmich

“The world was hers for the reading.” – Betty Smith

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.” – Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“One must always be careful of books,” said Tessa, “and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.” – Cassandra Clare

Video: Why Book Cover Art is Important

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.” – Charles W. Eliot

“Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.” – Mark Haddon

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” – Oscar Wilde

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” – Jane Austen

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” – C.S. Lewis

“We read to know we are not alone.” – C.S. Lewis

“Keep reading. It’s one of the most marvelous adventures that anyone can have.” – Lloyd Alexander

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” – Jorge Luis Borges

“Books break the shackles of time – proof that humans can work magic.” – Carl Sagan

“There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.” – P.G. Wodehouse

“Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.” – Jean Rhys

“Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.” – John Green

“Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.” – Marcel Proust

“A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.” – Astrid Lindgren

“Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life.” – Jesse Lee Bennett

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.” – Desiderius Erasmus

“Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.” – Arthur Helps

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.” – Ezra Pound

“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.” – Orhan Pamuk

If you enjoyed this list of bookish quotes, please consider sharing.

Biographies hold a unique place in the world of nonfiction. The best biography books often appeal to people who may not even explicitly care about the book’s subject.

It’s all about human connection. Learning the historical, cultural, religious, political, economic and social contexts behind a person’s life is satisfying, but connection is what sells it.

For some of us, we read biography books to become intimate with historical figures we admire. For others, it’s simply about the act of connecting with someone through their story.

The Best Biography Books to Read Now

With all of that in mind, you’ll find here a wide range of the best biography books.

These are biographies about writers, artists, musicians, political figures, scientists, and more.

When composing a list of the best biography books, variety is essential. Variety of work, ethnicity, gender, and class.

And, with variety at the forefront, here is a selection of the best biography books of all time.

Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd is a huge name in the world of nonfiction, having written celebrated history books and biography books about British history.

Ackroyd has written an entire history of England, and another of London. And here, he dedicated five hundred pages to The Bard himself: William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is widely considered the most influential writer in history.

His plays are studied in schools around the world, and people make full careers out of being Shakespearean scholars, actors, directors, and more.

A legacy like The Bard’s inevitably leads to speculation, conspiracy, and more. Against all of that is Peter Ackroyd’s biography: a full and immersive journey through Shakespeare’s life.

Ackroyd has spent time researching and detailing the period in which Shakespeare lived.

London’s religious and political dynamics, Shakespeare’s own family and education, and the world of English theatre at the time. All of this and so much more is laid bare here.

While nobody will ever know every detail of Shakespeare’s life, Ackroyd has done his due diligence when it comes to piecing together a vivid picture of who The Bard was.

An incredible feat of biography writing from one of England’s best-loved historians, and one of the best biography books you’ll ever read.

Buy a copy of Shakespeare: The Biography here!

Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh & Gregory White Smith

So much has been written about Vincent Van Gogh, and deservedly so.

Multiple documentaries have been made; museums, galleries, and interactive exhibitions have been built; songs have been sung; and books have been written.

The 19th century Dutch painter was a revolutionary of the craft, a legend of post-impressionism, and his life was a truly fascinating one.

His life is well-known, and remembered with as much intrigue as his art. Van Gogh was the original struggling artist, the one who began the toxic trend of seeing depression as a mark of genius.

Deeply troubled, Van Gogh lived a life of tragedy as much as one of beauty. And all of that is masterfully captured in Van Gogh: The Life.

Working alongside Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have brought us nearly a thousand pages of incredible research and writing.

Van Gogh: The Life is the definitive work of biography on the genius Dutch painter. A truly remarkable book, and one of the very best biography books ever written.

Buy a copy of Van Gogh: The Life here!

Ida: A Sword Among Lions by Paula J. Giddings

Ida B. Wells was a hero. Born in 1862, she was a great feminist and a leader of the Black civil rights movement.

Wells dedicated her entire life to the fight for equality within the USA; part of that fight was being a founding member of the NAAPC.

As a teacher and journalist, Wells used every skill available to advance the movement for racial equality forward. And all of that (and more) is explored in this immense biography.

Focussing less on the personal and more on the political, Ida: A Sword Among Lions is as much a history of American racial politics and change as it is a biography.

This is because the changes we can trace were made by Wells and her comrades, and those comrades — including her husband Ferdinand L. Barnett — are also given their due.

This is an inspiring work of nonfiction that throws into sharp relief the importance of community effort, of always fighting for change, justice, and equality.

It’s impossible to imagine what 20th century USA would have looked like without Ida B. Wells, but the changes she made were goliath, and the world should forever be grateful.

We are reminded of that over and again as we read this book and marvel at what she accomplished.

Paula J. Giddings has done Wells justice in a way that nobody else could have, and in doing so she has written one of the best biography books in American history.

Buy a copy of Ida: A Sword Among Lions here!

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

You’ll find that many of the best biography books ever written have also inspired a huge number of great cinematic biopics, and this is one of them.

American Prometheus is the biography on which writer/director Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece Oppenheimer was based.

And while that is an excellent piece of filmmaking, it took a huge number of liberties that make American Prometheus required reading for fans of the film.

Theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer led the USA’s Manhattan Project during World War II, which led to the invention and production of the first atomic bombs.

All of this led to two of the darkest days in world history: the bombing of Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

American Prometheus tells the full story of Oppenheimer’s life and the Manhattan Project.

This is a biography that offers readers so much; so much more than just a life. This is a book about the USA, about war, science, politics, and more.

An astonishing work of nonfiction that stands alongside many of the best biography books ever written.

Buy a copy of American Prometheus here!

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

Shirley Jackson is a legendary figure within the world of gothic fiction, and of American literature in general.

A dark figure and an author of beloved gothic masterpieces such as The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and the iconic short story The Lottery.

Jackson is one of many great authors and artists whose own life was as strange, dynamic, and interesting as the art she created.

And that is all proven here in Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life — one of the best biography books about an author you’ll ever read.

If you happen to have seen Josephine Decker’s excellent 2020 film Shirley, a biopic about Jackson starring Elizabeth Moss, that film was in fact not based on this biography.

Jackson saw a lot of professional success in her life, and her legacy has been fully cemented, but her personal life was far more rocky and inconsistent.

This biography goes into why that was, exactly, and how her turbulent home and family life, relationships, and mental health inspired her great works.

Biographies of authors are often as compelling as what those authors created, but that goes double for this book; one of the best biography books you should read right now.

Buy a copy of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life here!

Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera

One of the most celebrated and beloved painters of the 20th century, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo left behind an enormous legacy.

Anecdotes about her life are liberally shared by those who love her work. Her disability, her love affairs, her communist sympathies. These are all well-known facts

But in this incredible biography of her life, author Hayden Herrera has expanded on these details, stitching them into the rich and dramatic tapestry of her varied life.

This is a book that celebrates her artistic genius and her creative mind, and one that also takes time to explore the love and romances of her life.

Kahlo’s tempestuous relationship with Diego Rivera is the stuff of legends, and it is given room to breathe in this biography, which paints them both in honest light.

Kahlo was a great feminist, a revolutionary, a proud communist, and a champion of the working class. All of that is explored and expanded upon here.

A wonderful exploration of the life and loves of one of the 20th century’s greatest painters, and one of the best biography books of our time.

Buy a copy of Frida here!

Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain by Charles R. Cross

Few individuals from across the history of rock & roll — and modern music in general — have been as memorialised as Kurt Cobain.

There are many reasons for this: the ways in which he pushed and defined genres; his outspoken aggression towards sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry.

But the most obvious reason is his mind. Cobain battled depression for all of his twenty-seven years, until it finally won and he took his own life.

And so began an enormous legacy that has been explored across multiple books and documentaries, but this one is easily the most impressive.

Heavier Than Heaven is an unapologetically honest book that peels back the layers and exposes the truth behind so many myths about the infamous grunge rock star.

You’ll unlearn things that were never true, learn things you never would have known otherwise, and come close to understanding the mind behind the art.

Through some impressive sleuthing, analysis, and good old-fashioned journalism, Charles R. Cross has given us access to the man behind the myth.

A truly wonderful book, Heavier Than Heaven should be celebrated by Nirvana fans the world over. One of the best biography books the music world has ever been gifted.

Buy a copy of Heavier Than Heaven here!

The Brontes by Juliet Barker

The Bronte sisters were three of a kind. As Isabel Greenberg’s graphic novel Glass Town explored, they were creative giants right from childhood.

Penning some of the finest works of romantic and gothic fiction in the history of British literature, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne are celebrated the world over.

And then there’s Branwell, a tragic young man who quite literally painted himself out of their lives.

This family was unique, exceptional, and strange. And all of that is captured in Juliet Barker’s The Brontes, an enormous thousand-page biography of the literary sisters.

When the world of art and literature has so many enigmatic figures, it’s hard to call any one work of nonfiction a “definitive” history or biography, but this might be it for the Brontes.

Juliet Barker spent more than a decade gathering every scrap of evidence and information about these sisters and their works, in order to paint this vivid tapestry of their lives.

The ways in which Charlotte controlled and oppressed the others; the unsung beauty of Branwell’s mind; the anxiety and depression that Emily struggled with.

All of this and so much more is put on display here in one of the very best biography books you’ll ever read.

Buy a copy of The Brontes here!

Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang & Jon Halliday

Chairman Mao Zedong was one of the great villains of recent world history, and there might be nobody better to tell his story than Wild Swansauthor Jung Chang.

Chang has dedicated so much of her life to telling the political stories of 20th century China, including her dynamic work Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister.

But while that book and Wild Swans are both sweeping epic works of nonfiction that focus on multiple people, Mao is a dedicated biography of one man.

Mao’s monstrous political decisions as chairman of China were legendary, but what are far less well-known are the tactics and decisions behind them.

Mao Zedong’s laws and policies led to the most widespread and destructive famine in recorded history. But why? Questions like this are rarely asked, and even more rarely answered.

Jung Chang spent ten years of investigation to answer this, and so many even more pressing questions about Chairman Mao’s life, actions, and relationships.

Jung Chang wowed the world with Wild Swans, and then did it all over again with Mao: The Unknown Story, one of the best biography books anyone has ever written.

Buy a copy of Mao here!

Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

Bad Gays is a remarkable anthology of miniature biographies, each focussing on an infamous person from world history who also happened to be queer.

From the Roman emperor Hadrian to the London gangster Ronnie Kray, Bad Gays offers up a selection of detailed short biographies of histories most unlovable gays.

Excellently researched and presented with real charm and wit, this is one of those rare biography books that blends the informative with the entertaining.

Amongst even the very best biography books, Bad Gays stands as something very important: a work that humanises the queer community by showing readers its darkest sides.

The breadth of subjects here is also satisfying and diverse. King James VI and I of Scotland and England, Lawrence of Arabia, and Japanese author Yukio Mishima are all explored here.

Bad Gays is a fantastic work of nonfiction, one of the most unique and best biography books of the past several years.

Buy a copy of Bad Gays here!

Leonardo da Vinci: The Biography by Walter Isaacson

Leonardo da Vinci’s legacy has cemented him as a unique mind within the realms of both art and science; an inventor and artist of unparalleled genius.

Placing someone on a podium that high can be dangerous and even beggar belief, but as Walter Isaacson’s biography proves, it is certainly deserved where da Vinci was concerned.

Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian renaissance polymath who painted two of the best-known works of art the world has ever seen: the Mona Lisa, and the Last Supper.

But he was also someone with an unquenchable curiosity and an eye for discovery. His passions were spread across the sciences, from biology to geology.

All of this is captured and presented in this remarkable biography. This book explores how da Vinci studied all there was to study, and sought to understand the world on every level.

da Vinci was a man of curiosity and creativity, but he was also human. And this book is what really reminds us of that. It humanises this giant of art and science in a way that few books have.

Whether you’re a lover of Leonardo da Vinci or all you know about him is that he painted the Mona Lisa, this biography book has so much to offer you either way.

Buy a copy of Leonardo da Vinci here!

Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges

As was the case with American Prometheus and Oppenheimer (above), The Enigma is a biography that served as the inspiration for Morten Tyldum’s biopic The Imitation Game.

Unsurprisingly, however, Alan Turing: The Enigma is less concerned with drama and tension, and more with laying bare the extraordinary mind and the tragic life of Alan Turing.

Turning is best known for cracking the “Enigma Code” used by the Nazis during World War II, an act which turned the tide of war for the entire world.

Beyond that act, however, Turing was also a pioneer of computer design and technology, most simply expressed by his infamous “Turing Test”.

But the tragedy of his life was that Turning happened to be gay at a time in British history and culture where that simple fact led to social and political prejudice.

Turning didn’t commit suicide because he was gay; he was killed by a bigoted and unjust political system that ruined the life of a genius and a hero of war.

All of this is explored in great detail in a biography that does Turning’s life justice, which is the least he deserved.

Buy a copy of Alan Turing: The Enigma here!

Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art by Susan Napier

Hayao Miyazaki will forever be known as one of Japan’s greatest filmmakers. A master of multiple disciplines, including art, writing, and directing.

His films, most of which have dark and intense anti-war, anti-industrial, anti-capitalistic underpinnings, are some of the 20th and 21st century’s greatest works of art.

Born during World War II, raised in a turbulent post-war Japan, his life shaped his art and his expression. And all of that is explored in wonderful detail in Susan Napier’s Miyazakiworld.

It’s no secret that Miyazaki was always a workaholic and a perfectionist, but this book demonstrates that wonderfully, as it strips back all the purpose and meaning behind the smallest choices when it comes to his art.

Every tiny nuance, every word, every detail; Miyazaki’s films were meticulously designed, and we see the cogs turning in this biography.

Miyazakiworld contextualises Japan’s animation industry for a non-Japanese audience, gives us a personal background to Miyazaki’s work and writing, and so much more.

A really amazing biography that focuses on the art of a great filmmaker, how it exists, and why it exists. One of the best biography books for film and animation fans.

Buy a copy of Miyazakiworld here!

Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley

After the enormous success of her Jane Austen biography (below), historian and TV personality Lucy Worsley turns her attention to another great woman of English literature.

Agatha Christie was, and will forever be remembered as, an astonishing force of creativity within the world of literature.

Across a career longer than many human lives, Christie wrote timeless tales of murder and mystery, and brought us characters that remain beloved to this day.

But when it came to her personal life, Christie presented an image of meekness and good behaviour, which Worsley reveals was far from the truth.

There are so many facts and titbits about Christie’s life, career, and work ethic that fascinate her fans, but this brilliant biography goes so far beyond all of that.

Agatha Christie wrote many of the greatest thrillers and crime novels of all time, but she also had a wonderfully active and adventurous modern life.

All of that is explored with enthusiasm and wit by Worsley, who has clearly relished the challenge of unpacking the truth about Christie and bringing that truth to us.

Worsley is a charismatic writer and speaker, and that charisma shows in this book; one of the most humorous and best biography books of recent years.

Buy a copy of Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman here!

Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix by Charles R. Cross

Charles R. Cross has written two of the best biography books about members of the “27 Club” — musicians whom we lost at the cursed age of 27.

One was the biography of Kurt Cobain (above) and the other is this: Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix.

Hendrix was a rare example of a kind of reverse British invasion; an American prodigy who found fame and fandom in London’s rock ‘n’ roll era.

With The Jimi Hendrix Experience, he wrote and recorded three albums, and he made a name for himself as a revolutionary guitarist.

But there is so much more to his life behind the scenes. While his struggles with fame and addiction are well-documented, this biography dives so much deeper.

We learn about his tumultuous youth in Seattle and the things he truly wanted from life but rarely ever dared to mention.

Charles R. Cross has proven himself a fantastic biographer of great musicians, and the proof is here in Room Full of Mirrors.

Buy a copy of Room Full of Mirrors here!

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

Another great biography that was given the Hollywood treatment; Sylvia Nasar’s excellent book on renowned mathematician John Nash adapted to the big screen by Ron Howard.

While that film won Howard an Academy Award for best director, it remains an adaptation and, as such, glosses over so much about Nash’s life that is important to know.

A Beautiful Mind tells the full story of John Nash, an eccentric mathematician whose chance to win a Nobel Prize was dashed because of how the world treated his schizophrenia.

As a mathematician, Nash had an enormous effect on the world of American economics, and the onset of his schizophrenia made him a compelling and fascinating person.

Nasar’s biography frames Nash’s schizophrenia in an honest light without vilifying or romanticising it, but it also doesn’t shy away from the more cruel of Nash’s actions.

For example, Nash was abusive towards his wife, unfaithful to her, and even pushed her down the stairs when she was pregnant. The film neatly glosses over these facts.

When creating a biography about a genius and a tragic figure, it’s important to humanise them and reveal the darker sides, even if they may be uncomfortable facts.

This is what makes Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind one of the best biography books of the past several decades.

Buy a copy of A Beautiful Mind here!

Jane Austen at Home: A Biography by Lucy Worsley

Several years before writing her biography on Agatha Christie (above), historian Lucy Worsley dazzled Jane Austen fans with the fantastic Jane Austen at Home.

Jane Austen remains one of the most celebrated classic authors in the history of the English language. Her wit and social commentary is legendary.

The stories and characters of novels like Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion are beloved by bookworms, and likely always will be.

But who was the woman behind the wit? What in Austen’s life inspired such fantastic tales of family life, romance, sisterhood, class disparity, and more?

Lucy Worsley answers all of those questions, and many more, in this amazing biography that paints a vivid picture of Austen’s home life.

Here, we learn about her youth, her family, her home, her habits, her loves, and more.

This is a must-read for any Austen fan, and when it comes to literary figures, this is also one of the best biography books that exists.

Side note: I read this book before visiting Jane Austen’s house, and it wonderfully enhanced the experience.

Buy a copy of Jane Austen at Home here!

Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones

Completely peerless, Jim Henson was one of the most unique creative minds that 20th century TV and film ever had.

Often overshadowed by his creations — The Muppets, Sesame Street, Labyrinth, and his work on Star Wars — Henson was one-of-a-kind.

It’s thanks to his work that puppets remain a part of mainstream television, for children and adults alike, and here you can learn all about his life in this excellent biography.

Henson died tragically young, at age 53, from a bacterial infection, but he accomplished so much in his life, and those accomplishments brought so much joy to the world.

The characters and worlds that he created have gone on to resonate with people of all ages for decades. The impact that his films and TV shows have had is immeasurable.

With the generous support of Henson’s family, Brian Jay Jones has been able to present us with the full life story of Jim Henson and all that he did.

Buy a copy of Jim Henson: The Biography here!

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne & Tamara Payne

Few infamous public figures of American history have ever been as talked-about and obsessed over as Malcolm X.

A civil rights activist who joined the Nation of Islam while in prison as a young man, Malcolm X has fascinated many kinds of people for many reasons for several decades.

Beginning in 1990, renowned investigative journalist Les Payne worked to gather more than a hundred hours worth of interviews surrounding Malcolm X.

However, Payne died before the book was completed, and so his daughter and research partner Tamara finished their work and had it published in 2020.

The Dead Are Arising went on to win the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.

A remarkable work of investigative journalism that reveals to its readers an equally remarkable life.

Given the magnitude of Malcolm X’s life and legacy, and that of Les Payne’s own work and renown, The Dead Are Arising is a uniquely powerful biography.

When it comes to biographies built from tremendous hard work of investigative journalism, few compare to The Dead Are Arising.

Buy a copy of The Dead Are Arising here!

Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields

Author Charles J. Shields is a well-renowned biographer of American writers, and Mockingbird is his most celebrated work.

Two years after its publication, Shields even adapted Mockingbird into a version more palatable for younger readers, titled I Am Scout.

Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee tells the story of one of 20th century USA’s best-known and best-loved authors.

One of the most unique and intriguing things about Lee was that she only ever wrote the one novel, and that novel is rightly considered a great American classic.

To Kill A Mockingbird is taught in schools across the US and UK to this day; it received a celebrated film adaptation; it has even been adapted to the stage with amazing results.

But who was the woman behind this true American masterpiece of a novel? Charles J. Shields answers that question with appreciation and attentiveness.

Buy a copy of Mockingbird here!

Many of these are works in translation, especially from Japan and Korea — countries with a great literary history, and a focus on the literary aspect of their fiction. Before we talk about the best literary fiction books for you to read, let’s define the term “literary fiction” for those new to the concept.

What is Literary Fiction?

Generally speaking, literary fiction is fiction with a focus on themes and form. Stories and novels that are about something very specific. Authors of literary novels use stories to explore a theme or idea that they are curious about, or that they wish to teach their readers about.

This often means that a literary novel will have one defining theme. Examples include: religion, love, growth, loss, family, tradition, power, change, prejudice. All of the themes listed here will be found in the literary fiction books below.

For this reason, literary novels are often political. They might be about feminism, racism, religious persecution, conservatism, class, money, or war.

The themes of literary novels are often embodied by their characters. Protagonists might exist to exemplify the themes which the author wishes to explore. For this reason, literary fiction books are often grounded in reality, set in the modern day, and lacking in fantastical elements. Relatability is often key.

This isn’t always the case, however, and one popular genre of fiction that often crosses into the literary is sci-fi, a genre whose books are so often about a specific theme or concept. Literary fiction is also often about form. Rather than being a simple past-tense, third-person narrative, the story might be epistolary or experimental in its form.

This might also mean a lack of punctuation, a nameless protagonist, an unspecified setting or time, a lack of chapter markers, run-on sentences. These choices of context and form are made with the express purpose of more clearly and eloquently presenting the themes and ideas of the novel.

Fantasy is a genre that rarely blends with the literary, because the purpose of fantasy is escapism, world-building, and sparking imagination. This is not to say that fantasy fiction is never literary, but it is rarer to find specifically literary fantasy books.

For this reason, adult fiction is sometimes divided into two broad camps: literary fiction and genre fiction. This isn’t always accurate or fair but dividing lines and labels have their uses. It might help to think about it this way: if you were to start writing a story, would you begin by imagining the world and the story, or would you focus on something you wish to teach the reader?

If your focus is on telling an exciting story in an exciting setting, you’ll probably come out with a thriller, a fantasy book, or a horror novel. If your focus is on encouraging the reader to think about a specific theme or topic, your novel would likely be considered literary.

Essential Literary Fiction Books

Here are some of the best literary fiction books ever written, from authors around the world who have used literature to explore vital political and social themes.

You’ll find great feminist texts, books exploring class and race dynamics, queer narratives, books about specific political themes, anti-war novels, and so much more. You’ll also find more intimate literary novels about family dynamics, personal growth, and self-discovery.

All of these literary fiction books have something to teach the reader, and all have been carefully and beautifully crafted by mastermind authors of literary fiction.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the most prominent authors of literary fiction. What’s interesting about Ishiguro is that his novels lean into different genres in playful ways. He has written sci-fi, mystery, historical fiction, and fantasy, but all are primarily literary.

His novels are about people, first and foremost. About the fallibility of people; about regret; about loss; about change or the lack thereof. Ishiguro’s magnum opus, The Remains of the Day, is a literary novel that explores tradition, conservatism, and time’s effect on people.

The Remains of the Day begins with our protagonist and narrator, a butler named Stevens, setting out on a road trip. Stevens has worked at Darlington Hall for decades, and his new employer, a nouveau riche American, happily encourages him to take a well-deserved vacation.

Stevens plans to reunite with Darlington Hall’s former housekeeper, a woman for whom he clearly had deep feelings. Stevens, however, has always been married to his job. He is a rigid, unmovable, conservative traditionalist with a particular attitude towards life, work, and class.

He is a man stuck in the past, corrupted and dismantled by his politics, his attitude towards life, and his inability to move forward as time itself does. As such, Stevens is now, in his twilight years, learning of his own regret, seeing the wood for the trees, and wondering if it’s possible to face these facts. One of the great literary fiction books from the master of literary fiction himself, Kazuo Ishiguro.

Buy a copy of The Remains of the Day here!

1984 by George Orwell

Quite often, the best literary fiction books are the same books we studied in high school English, and there’s a reason for that. In high school, we study books that have particular themes to dig deep into, as a means of learning critical thinking and analysis skills. And this is why so many of us studied Goerge Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece 1984.

A warning against the willingness of corrupt politicians to hoard power and wealth, and to control the populace via misinformation and media language, 1984 is a perfect novel.

This is a novel that teaches readers to look for the warning signs of fascism as it rises. The world of 1984 is an England ruled by oligarchs who invade the privacy of all residents with cameras and microphones, and who change the news to suit their needs.

Our protagonist, Winston, seeks to resist the corrupting, brainwashing tactics of Big Brother and the UK government. One of the most powerful books of the 20th century and one of the finest literary fiction books you’ll ever read, 1984 is a staggering achievement from a visionary writer.

Buy a copy of 1984 here!

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

Elena Ferrante is one of the most beloved Italian authors of all time; a literary author whose works explore feminism, class, and family dynamics in fresh and deeply clever ways. The Lying Life of Adults follows Giovanna, a girl from a wealthy family that all live in a house which sits high up, overlooking the poorer, working class people below.

Her father came from rags to riches, and now works as a professor. His wife, Giovanna’s mother, is also a well-educated woman and they are all kind and compassionate on the surface. When her father, in an unthinkingly cruel act of sexism, compares his daughter’s looks to those of his awful, ugly sister, Giovanna is distraught.

To understand why her aunt is so hated, Giovanna visits her and gets to know her. From here, she is torn between the truths that her parents tell, and those her aunt tells. This is a novel about patriarchy and sexism, and about modern-day class divides and privilege. An incredible piece of literary fiction.

Buy a copy of The Lying Life of Adults here!

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Upon its release, The Vanishing Half saw an incredible amount of critical praise, all of which was wholly deserved. A novel of immense hype matched only by its scope of content and theme. The Vanishing Half tells two parallel stories of twin sisters who grow up to be very different women.

Born into a Black community in the deep south, twin sisters Stella and Desiree leave town at the age of sixteen. After spending a little time in New Orleans, one moves to DC and “becomes” Black, while the other ends up in the white suburbs of California and “becomes” white.

In a deeply literary way, The Vanishing Half examines what it means to perform Blackness and whiteness in a societal and cultural sense, beyond just skin colour. The Vanishing Half chronicles the choices and life events of these sisters, as well as those of their children as we move through the second half of the 20th Century.

It considers the relationships between place, race, and class, as well as how our relationships are defined by these seemingly immovable things. Spanning decades, this is a multi-generational novel that makes clear the visible yet ignored racial, political, and class divides of modern America. A masterpiece of Black American fiction and one of the best modern literary fiction books you’ll ever read.

Buy a copy of The Vanishing Half here!

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri

Translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles

Yu Miri was born in Japan to Korean parents, and as such is a South Korean citizen and occasional recipient of racist bias and abuse in Japan. Despite this, she has had a phenomenally successful career in Japan as both a playwright and a writer of prose.

Although born in Yokohama, Japan’s second largest city, she now lives in a small town in Fukushima, close to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant which suffered a meltdown following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami which claimed thousands of lives.

Her novel Tokyo Ueno Station is a boldly raw and angry literary novel about class disparity and social injustice. Kazu, Tokyo Ueno Station‘s protagonist, was born in the same year as Japan’s emperor, and both men’s sons were born on the same day.

While the emperor was born into the height of privilege, Kazu was born in rural Fukushima, a place that would later be ravaged by destruction in 2011. While the emperor’s son would go on to lead a healthy life, Kazu’s son’s life would be cut short, and Kazu himself would live out his final days as one of the many homeless barely surviving in a village of tents in Tokyo’s Ueno Park.

A socialist novel about the unfairness of social standings and class divides. A novel that asks the reader to ponder just how fair it is that the time, place, and financial situation we happen to be randomly born into determines everything we will become.

Buy a copy of Tokyo Ueno Station here!

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Only a handful of authors lay claim to an entire genre, and Franz Kafka is one of those few. The Kafkaesque genre is defined by the specific themes and writing style that Kafka created. Sadly, he was entirely unknown in his day and died in misery and obscurity at a young age.

Kafka’s literary novels and short stories focus on the ways in which post-industrial European society undermines, confuses, and disempowers working men. His stories repeatedly examine the methods and tactics of law, bureaucracy, and social rules which render ordinary working class people frightened and impotent.

The finest example of this is his novel The Trial, which tells the story of a man named Josef K, who is one day very suddenly arrested. Josef has done nothing wrong, to his knowledge, and is not told what his crime is supposed to have been.

He is imprisoned, then freed, told to await instructions and further information, and failed over and over again by an absurd system. There is a bleak and dark humour to The Trial, as our man fails to ever understand what is happening to him, and nonsensical events continue to pile on top of one another.

Kafka is one of my own personal obsessions, and he has inspired so many great books and films over the past hundred years. The Trial remains a masterpiece that helped to forge an entire genre; one of the very best literary fiction books ever written.

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Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel has proven herself a modern master of blending genre fiction with lofty literary concepts. With The Glass Hotel, she created a compelling literary thriller. With Sea of Tranquility, she continued the tradition of blending the literary with incredible sci-fi storytelling.

But before those books, she provided readers with Station Eleven, a celebrated piece of literary fiction that turns the post-apocalypse on its head. Rather than this being another novel about human survival, and returning us to our base, animal selves, Station Eleven is a novel about holding onto human art and culture.

This is a pandemic novel about a group of travelling troubadours; a theatre troupe who roam North America bringing Shakespeare to those of us who are left.

Station Eleven celebrates the things worth holding onto: the art that humans created, and the culture which inspired, and was in turn inspired by that art. A beautiful and hopeful piece of literary fiction that encourages the reader to consider the importance of the art we create, and how it changes us.

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The Wind that Lays Waste by Selva Almada

Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews

Selva Almada is one of Argentina’s greatest living writers, and The Wind that Lays Waste is a powerful piece of literary fiction that viciously explores patriarchy, masculinity, and religion.

With The Wind That Lays Waste, Selva Almada has crafted a story with a setting and pace reminiscent of Waiting for Godot, and biting, cutting, rhythmic dialogue that keeps the momentum strong from page one to its almighty conclusion.

This novella takes place at the home and workshop of a mechanic — a quiet, withheld, level, and masculine man named Gringo Brauer — out in the rugged countryside of Argentina. When the nomadic evangelist Reverend Pearson breaks down, he seeks the help of Brauer to fix his car and offer them somewhere to stay for a day or so.

These two men each have a ward, and their wards are drawn by the words of the other man, while the two men — one a preacher and the other an atheist — butt heads time and again. Beyond simply being a book about religious narratives, it’s also a book about masculinity, as these two men move towards self-destruction due to their unshakeable bullheadedness.

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Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

A generation-defining science fiction novel and one of the best pieces of American fiction to come out of the 20th century, Butler’s Kindred is a true literary masterpiece. Written by Black American author Octavia E. Butler, Kindred is considered by many to be her magnum opus, a piece of incredible literary science fiction.

Originally published in 1979 and set in 1976, Kindred follows a Black writer named Dana and her white husband Kevin as they find themselves inexplicably tethered through time to a plantation in the year 1815. When the novel begins, Dana and Kevin are unpacking after moving to a new house in California, when she finds herself teleported back 150 years to a plantation in Maryland and the sight of a drowning red-headed boy.

Dana saves the boy from drowning and immediately finds herself facing down the barrel of a white man’s gun, before being yanked back through time to her present in 1976. As it transpires, the drowning boy is Rufus, an ancestor of Dana’s who will father a child with one of his family’s slaves, and Dana is now caught in a loop: any time Rufus’ life is threatened, she is pulled back to save him.

Kindred is a literary sci-fi novel about cruelty and compassion, about the importance of education and empathy. A true masterpiece of the 20th century by one of the US’s most important literary voices, Kindred is a perfect blend of sci-fi concepts and literary political/social themes.

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Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo

Translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 can be understood as the novelisation of the lived experiences of every ordinary Korean woman for the past forty-plus years.

Our protagonist is not one woman, but is rather a representation of the ordinary and expected experiences of your average woman in modern-day South Korea. The novel traces the life of a woman from early childhood to marriage and, eventually, motherhood.

Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 is a book that brings to light the everyday misogyny, sexism, ignorance, aggression, bias, and abuse (both active and passive) that women in South Korea (and, of course, the world over) suffer and do their best to survive in this modern world.

It is not a story with a view to entertaining us. It is a book that enlightens, and encourages anger in, its readers. A fantastic piece of feminist literary fiction. Kim Jiyoung is not a character to form a bond with. She is every abuse victim. She is every woman who has encountered sexism at home, at school, in the workplace, and on the street, and who perhaps never even realised it.

There is feminist rage stitched into every line of this incredible Korean book; a must-read that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the best literary fiction books.

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James by Percival Everett

James is a work of remarkable strength and spirit by one of the great American authors of today. The novel is a retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the perspective of Jim, the escaped slave who accompanies Huck on his travels. James will likely stand as a timeless work of Black American fiction; a touching and poetic work of historical fiction that reminds us of the US’s rancid history.

Early in the novel, we see James teaching the younger slave children—including his own daughter—how to speak in a way that will keep them safe; not only the words and accents they should us, but also the tactics of their speech. It’s a moving scene that guides the tone of the rest of the novel, as James, while on the run, must use his wisdom and his savvy to outsmart the white men he meets, while also appearing dumb and useless.

James is a wholly different kind of adventure story that is not without its moments of humour, joy, and excitement—not to mention strangeness—but ultimately it is a tale of survival in a world of human ownership, dominance, and abuse. From the moment this novel was published, James became one of the great literary heroes of American fiction.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a curiously unknowable book; one which is very much up for interpretation with regards to its themes and morals. Many of the best literary novels offer no ambiguity at all, making their statements clear and their themes deep but also definitively opaque. Moshfegh is one of the other kind; an author whose works are more fluid and curious.

This novel tells the story of a young, wealthy woman who has graduated from Columbia. Her parents, having both died, left her an inheritance which provided her with a comfortable apartment in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Having left a good job behind, and with plenty of money to sustain her, she has decided to put herself into a kind of forced hibernation; a drug-addled coma that will work as a year-long reset on her life.

She has a therapist who is, for all intents and purposes, mad. He prescribes her a hefty cocktail of medication: anti-depressants, tranquillisers, mood stabilisers, and more. With that in mind, this is a novel that cynically reveals the absurdity of the American pharmaceutical industry and its liberal approach to over-prescribing expensive medications.

This is also a feminist book that examines the traumas which women are subjected to at the hands of objectifying and abusive boyfriends, as well as by their parents in many different fashions. However, this is also a hedonistic and cathartic novel that says to us: there is no right or wrong way to live a life. You can do as you please; you are beholden to nobody unless you choose to be.

Regardless of her wealth and privilege, our protagonist is choosing to throw a year (and maybe more) away. That is her choice, her right, her freedom. This novel is a rebellion against society rules and expectations. A rich, attractive woman in the prime of her life is choosing to sleep through her “best years” and refuse the role that society has laid out for her.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a remarkable literary novel. One of the finest pieces of literary fiction we have.

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I’m A Fan by Sheena Patel

Sheena Patel’s debut novel is a dense piece of literary fiction that spans only 200 pages, and yet provides enough material and inspiration for entire essays to be written about it. The novel’s protagonist is a British woman of Indian descent who lives in London. She has a job and a boyfriend, but you learn next to nothing about them. Instead, her life is defined by two people with whom she is obsessed.

The first is a married man whom she is secretly sleeping with and wishes to be in a real relationship with. The other is an American social media influencer whom the married man is also sleeping with when he’s on business trips in her neck of the woods.

This influencer is a child of nepotism, and our protagonist has formed an intense, unhealthy parasocial relationship with her.

I’m A Fan serves as a diary of our protagonist’s thoughts and feelings about this woman, about the man she wants to be with, and about broader topics concerning capitalism, colonialism, nepotism, privilege, fame, feminism, immigration, and even more.

Her obsession with this woman leads to a critical obsession with influencer culture and how vapid and shallow it is; led by white people who pretend to be altruistic for attention. It’s a book full of unlikeable but undeniably relatable people who all represent different dark aspects of modern life.

I’m a Fan is cynical and incredibly eye-opening, peeling back the layers of the social aspects of modern life, both in person and online. An almost revelatory piece of critical literary fiction that must be read.

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Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Chain-Gang All-Stars is to prisoner justice what The Handmaid’s Tale (below) is to women’s autonomy. A literary novel that explores the racial injustice and capitalistic corruption of the American carceral system. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut novel is set in an America which has turned its prison system into a televised gladiator arena, and its prisoners into fighters who are encouraged to engage in blood sport.

While there is a broad cast of characters, our main protagonists are two Black women who are both teammates and lovers. They have been fighting for years and are close to earning their freedom. In this world there is high freedom and low freedom, with low freedom simply means dying in battle.

Chain-Gang All-Stars also features footnotes which relay facts and statistics about the American prison system, as well as about the police force. These footnotes reveal details about systemic racism, homophobia, and transphobia, and even reminds us of prisoners who died due to unjust circumstances involving the police or the prisons.

Chain-Gang All-Stars will stand shoulder-to-shoulder alongside other great dystopian novels like 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and the aforementioned The Handmaid’s Tale. An essential novel amongst the best literary fiction books.

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The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto

Translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda

Banana Yoshimoto is a cherished and revered Japanese author. Her literary books have been bestsellers across Japan and the rest of the world for decades, and they often tackle the themes of love and death in unique ways. Yoshimoto has told stories of love over and over, whether that love be romantic, familial, or something almost indescribable. And she does all of that here with The Premonition.

This is a short piece of literary fiction — a 110-page novella — that tells the story of Yayoi, a teenage girl who, as far as she is aware, has lived a comfortable life with her parents and brother in modern-day Tokyo. Yayoi also has a free-spirited and aloof young aunt named Yukino, who lives alone and works as a music teacher. Occasionally, Yayoi enjoys sneaking out of the house to visit her aunt and spend time with her.

During one visit, revelations hit Yayoi about her childhood, her family, and those pronounced holes in her memory. These reveals will twist her understanding of herself and her relationships in complicated ways. This is a wonderful piece of literary fiction about how unreliable our own memories can be, and how different kinds of love can manifest.

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Shy by Max Porter

Max Porter is a modern legend of literary fiction books; a leading example of how to writer literary fiction perfectly. He demonstrated this with his debut Grief is the Thing with Feathers. He continued that trend with poise and humour in Lanny, then with intense surrealism in The Death of Francis Bacon. But Shy might be his most complete, succinct, and perfect novel.

Shy tells the story of a teenage boy, the titular Shy, who begins the book by walking away from the “school for troubled boys” which he has been lodging at for a while now. As Shy wanders down the street in the dead of night, we are invited into his mind. We see his thoughts, memories, opinions, and internal conflicts all swirling around together.

This is a dreamscape of a novel that, like so many great literary books, plays with form and language and structure in order to express its themes and tone and emotions. We learn Shy’s backstory out of order as random memories surface and then vanish again. We learn what he thinks and feels, his justifications for certain behaviours and actions. We learn who he is from his perspective.

This is an exploration of how thoughts work, of how we see ourselves, of how our minds operate. It’s engaging, alluring, and thought-provoking, just like all the very best literary fiction books are.

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My Heavenly Favourite by Lucas Rijneveld

Translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison

The author of The Discomfort of Evening returns with another striking, unsettling work of literary fiction told from the perspective of a rural vet who develops an immediate and all-encompassing obsession with a farmer’s daughter. The novel is told from the nameless vet’s perspective, and he speaks as though addressing the girl as he watches, admires and spends time with her.

My Heavenly Favourite is written as a feverishly intense stream of consciousness; every chapter is a single paragraph and often a single sentence. The lines between what he experiences and what he imagines blur and fade. But despite the intensity of his voice, she remains centre-stage: her unanchored imagination, her delusional view of the world, and her dysphoria are all given a voice. They dance with his obsession in a chilling yet hypnotic way.

This is a novel of exquisite prose; it is lit on fire from page one and that fire only spreads through the characters and events of the novel. And all of this is translated so magically by Michele Hutchison, who demonstrates a true talent for literary translation and expression. What a work of madness and jarring, discomfiting beauty.

Boy Parts by Eliza Clark

Eliza Clark’s phenomenal debut novel is a sweat-soaked literary fever dream about one talented young woman’s self-destructive tendencies, and just how far she is willing to go in order to fully ruin herself. Protagonist Irina is a twenty-eight-year-old Geordie who works at a pub half the time, and spends the rest of her waking hours picking up men to photograph in explicit ways for her ever-growing portfolio.

In her downtime, she watches bleak arthouse and horror movies and treats her few friends like crap. She isn’t like other girls, and she is on a path to burnout. Something from her past is troubling her; her mind and memories are fractured. But her fame is also growing; her art is getting her recognised and giving her opportunities. And there may even be a young man who cares for her. But does any of that matter?

Boy Parts is raw, wretched, and brilliant. A discomfiting, sometimes hilarious, often upsetting and unsettling literary novel but a powerful voice.

North Woods by Daniel Mason

Daniel Mason’s North Woods is a literary novel that traces the story of a New England home built in the earliest moments of colonialist settlement in what soon became known as the USA. We move through a collection of interconnected stories that gradually takes us through time until we reach the present day.

We begin by following a young couple in love; two Puritan runaways who make a home in this wooden cabin. Later, a settler woman escapes capture and flees to this cabin, where the woman of the runaway pair is now elderly. Soon after, we follow an English soldier who suddenly drops his rifle and instead builds an apple orchard on this land, and once he is gone we follow the lives of his twin daughters.

Gradually, we are watching the United States grow and change, all from the perspective of a single plot of land, the house that sits on it, and the many people who have called it home. These stories are presented partially as traditional prose, and other times as epistolary journals, letters, articles, and more.

North Woods is a staggering piece of historical literary fiction that traces the life of a nation, presented as the life of a home. An incredible feat of fiction writing.

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The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt’s debut novel The Secret History is, for many of us, the definitive dark academia novel. The Secret History is a twisted yet grounded tale that, on the surface, is about cults and murder but, beneath it all, is an exploration of class privilege, youthful arrogance, and ordinary evils.

A fantastic example of how to write compelling, enigmatic characters, a twisting-turning narrative, and a collection of important socio-political themes. The Secret History follows Richard Papen, newly enrolled at a college in Vermont. Richard is originally from a small California town, poor and uninteresting, but talented at Greek.

He quickly falls into a small class of hideously pompous and dysfunctional students who consider themselves to be their school’s elite. Slowly, this class reveals itself to be a mindless, murderous cult, projected forward by hedonism, carelessness, and arrogance.

The Secret History is a masterpiece, glued together by the internal social politics of its characters, their strained and toxic relationships, dangerous behaviours, and unpredictability.

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The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Much like Orwell’s 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel that exists as a warning against where certain political, religious, and economic roads might lead us. Dystopian fiction like this works simply and elegantly as literary fiction, with its themes presented through allegories that are clear and impactful.

Published in 1985, The Handmaid’s Tale is a bleak look into a possible American future; a time in which women have been reduced to nothing but their anatomy and reproductive abilities. After fertility rates dropped to the point that they threatened human extinction, the US government decided to take the few men who were still fertile and give them power.

They then took fertile women and turned them into sex slaves living in the big houses now owned by the newly powerful fertile men and their faithful but infertile wives. Now known as Gilead, the US is a military dictatorship controlled by traditional Biblical ideals which strip women of all rights and privileges.

It’s a bleak literary novel, but, like 1984, remains one of the most important and influential works of the 20th century, a landmark work of feminist fiction, and one of the very best literary fiction books you’ll ever read.

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Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami

Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett & David Boyd

Breasts and Eggs is one of the best Japanese books of the 21st century, and an absolute masterpiece of feminist literary fiction. Breasts and Eggs follows the story of Nastsuko, an Osaka-born writer living in Tokyo who has spent her adult life trying to see her works get published.

The first half of this two-book novel focuses on a short visit by Natsuko’s more extroverted sister and that sister’s daughter. The daughter has fallen mute and her mother is in Tokyo for breast implants. We see the world from the perspectives of all three women, and they each have differing attitudes to womanhood and its place in society.

In the book’s second story, Natsuko has made it as an author but now dreams of being a mother, though she has no real wish for a partner to share her life with. Both stories explore how womanhood is defined and how women can find happiness, contentment, and strength in a patriarchal modern world.

This is very much a piece of hefty literary fiction about what womanhood is, what it can be, and what we are told it should be by patriarchy and tradition. Breasts and Eggs is a groundbreaking piece of feminist Japanese fiction, and a stellar work of literary fiction.

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To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

To Kill A Mockingbird is one of the great American classics. Heralded the world over as a masterpiece, studied in schools, and a novel that stands the test of time. To Kill A Mockingbird, which has been adapted to the screen and the stage with enormous success, remains a true masterpiece of American literary fiction.

The story is told by a young girl, Jean Louise Finch, lovingly nicknamed “Scout” by her father, the iconic literary character Atticus Finch. Atticus is a widower, and raises Scout and her brother Jem alone, while working as a lawyer. While we follow the local neighbourhood antics of Scout and Jem, the main crux of the novel is Atticus being appointed as legal defender in a case of sexual assault.

A Black man named Tom has been accused of raping a young white woman, and Atticus, whose Black live-in cook has helped him raise his children, has accepted the role of Tom’s defense attourney. We see all of this play out from Scout’s young and naive perspective, and the novel explores American race relations in the South in many different ways: social, legal, and historical.

A great work of literary fiction about the relationship between the American legacy and the racism that is stitched into it.

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Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi’s second novel is a short, tightly-woven literary novel that moves seamlessly from its protagonist’s childhood to her present-day life.

Transcendent Kingdom tells the story of Gifty, a girl born to Ghanian parents in the American south. She is their second child, and their first, Nana, was a sports prodigy — first in soccer, then basketball. Nana, however, succumbed to drug addiction and died of a heroin overdose.

Today, Gifty is a budding neurobiologist at Stanford University, studying the brain’s relationship to addiction; inspired by her brother’s life and death, as well as her mother’s relationship to God and the church. Transcendent Kingdom is an intimate family saga that explores the effects of migration, capitalism, and the promise of freedom in America.

It pits science and religion against one another. It examines the effects of addiction and depression on the mind and the family. It does so much so well; a perfect literary novel.

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A Little Luck by Claudia Piñeiro

Translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle

A Little Luck is one of the most moving tearjerkers you’ll ever read. A beautiful piece of literary fiction from one of Argentina’s greatest living authors. Our protagonist, Mary, is originally from Buenos Aires, but has spent the past twenty years living in Boston, MA.

Mary’s American husband, Robert, has recently passed away, and now she must return to Argentina for a business trip. This will be her first time returning, and she is deeply afraid. We don’t know why she left but her fear of returning — the weight of her anxiety — tells us that she ran away from something and has continued to run for two decades since.

As we continue to read, we learn more about Mary, who she was, what her life in Argentina looked like, and, eventually, what she has been running from. A Little Luck is a powerful, poignant novel about motherhood, duty, and what we believe selflessness to be. There is grief, claustrophobia, and anxiety choking this novel, but there is also hope and beauty here, too.

A remarkable feat of literary fiction from a master storyteller and one of the best Argentinian novels of recent years.

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Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Like 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian tale that serves as a warning against the refusal and destruction of knowledge and stories. In a version of the USA where all books have been banned, we follow a fireman — someone who burns all remaining traces of literature — as he becomes disenchanted with his work.

After giving into temptation and taking a book from a home full of books which he has been ordered to burn, protagonist Guy Montag eventually switches allegiances and vows to preserve the written word and the knowledge it contains.

Inspired by the ways in which fascist regimes burn books, remove academics from positions of authority, and limit the spread of knowledge and information, Fahrenheit 451 carries a powerful and timeless message of warning. One of the most important American novels ever written, Ray Btadbury’s dystopian masterpiece stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the other great dystopian literary fiction books.

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Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck was one of the great American writers, and his short masterpiece Of Mice and Men remains a flawless literary novel about the curse of the “American Dream”. Of Mice and Men follows two men — the sharp and savvy George, and the simple giant Lenny — who have been moving from farm to farm looking for work.

George wishes to free himself from the cycle of labour by saving enough money to eventually build a self-sustaining home and plot of land to call his own. However, this is the dream of countless men, and capitalism’s methods of entrapment guarantee that breaking from this cycle is almost impossible for most men.

But George is different; he has Lenny by his side to help him make more money and work harder than most men ever could. Of Mice and Men is an American tragedy; a savvy literary novel that keenly exposes the lies of the American Dream, and of the cycles of Western capitalism.

A true American masterpiece of literary fiction that works to expose the obvious lies and flaws within the modern capitalist system.

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Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Keiko Furukura is thirty-six and has worked part-time in the same convenience store for eighteen years. She has seen eight managers — whom she refers to only by their numbers — and more co-workers than she could ever count. She is entirely content with her life, and has never asked for anything more; not a better job, more money, nor even a partner to share her life with.

She is a cog in the convenience store machine, as much a part of the furniture as the fluorescent bulbs and door jingles. As a result, this cog has never managed to fit the greater machine we call ‘modern life’. As Keiko is told in the novel, society is all about following a set path: part-time work leads to a career. Relationships lead to marriage and children and a mortgage.

But what happens if you’re content with what you have? No partner, no friends, no career path. Keiko is comfortable and happy, and that confuses everyone around her. Convenience Store Woman is a novel of rebellion, starring a character who isn’t trying to rebel at all; only to live her life in peace and simplicity.

A thought-provoking literary novel about the invisible rules of society that we all become trapped by, and what rebellion might look like. Sayaka Murata is a Japanese writer of revelatory fiction that frightens and challenges; a true visionary of literary fiction.

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Foster by Claire Keegan

Quietly beautiful and poignant; tragic yet hopeful. Foster is a small, perfectly-contained work of literary mastery from beloved Irish author Claire Keegan. This novella, set in the early 1980s, is told from the perspective of a young girl who has been taken by her father to stay with a married couple for the summer while her mother gives birth.

At first, our girl feels like an outsider and is nervous of what is expected of her. But over time, she learns to see home as something warmer, welcoming. A place of food and care and comfort. The couple — the Kinsellas — treat her with so much love and attention. They clothe her and take her into town; they take her to mass and they talk with her, laugh with her.

She comes to see this place and these people as home, but there is something unspoken that lies under the surface. Something she will eventually discover and have to understand. Foster is crafted with such care and composition, where every word carries weight and means something. Keegan is a sculptor of language and story, and that shines so clearly here in Foster. One of the great literary fiction books.

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Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Small Things Like These is a tiny miracle. A beautiful piece of literary fiction bound so tight, packed with many simple truths — some painful — that it is fit to burst. At its heart, this is a novel about the everyday acts of goodness performed by honest people versus the twisted, monstrous, ironically sinful behaviour of organised religion.

The sins of the church are only made worse by the collective silence of a complicit community who turn their noses up to beggars as they march themselves to Mass. It’s the run up to Christmas, 1985, and our protagonist is Bill Furlong, a simple man with a wife and five daughters. Bill spends these days delivering coal and wood to local homes and buying presents for his girls with his wife.

As this short novel progresses, we learn about Bill’s childhood; about how his mother had him young, how she claimed not to know who his father was, and how they were both saved by the kindly woman for whom Bill’s mother worked.

We spend a satisfying chunk of the novel in Bill’s childhood memories, while also learning about his work, his family, and his community. In these days leading up to Christmas, Bill begins to butt heads with the church. He finds the courage of kindness to stand up to their lies and their sins, in spite of the collective silence of his small community.

Small Things Like These is a powerful novel in a small package; a novel that shows how kindness is instinctive and infectious, and is not taught by the church.

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Penance by Eliza Clark

Penance is a remarkable subversion of the thriller; a meta-fiction presented as a piece of true crime nonfiction written by a man named Alec Z. Carelli. Carelli is a journalist-turned-crime writer, and after being embroiled in controversy, suffering the loss of his daughter to suicide, and his previous two books flopping, he decides to write about a tragic, infamous case of child murder.

That murder took place on the night of the 2016 Brexit referendum, in the fictional seaside town of Crow-on-Sea in North Yorkshire. Three teenage girls, who all attended the same high school, tortured their classmate — Joan Wilson — inside a beach chalet, before dousing her in petrol and setting her alight.

Penance is fiction presented as investigative journalism, written in a mostly epistolary style: a collection of interviews, accounts, transcripts, and blog and social media posts. The novel opens with a detailed account of the evening of the murder, before then spending the rest of its time telling the stories of the three murderers.

Penance is a remarkable piece of crime fiction. A book that brilliantly captures the myriad experiences of British teenagers, both at home and at school. It explores the effects that pop culture has on us, that the Internet has on us; the often dizzying divide between our online and offline worlds and experiences.

It also cynically investigates the concept of true crime writing and the effects that it has, both on narratives and broader culture and, more specifically, on the lives of those involved. Penance is a novel like no other; its epistolary style and savvy examination of the effects of true crime make it one of the most unique and impressive literary fiction books of recent years.

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Private Rites by Julia Armfield

Following the enormous success of her debut novel, Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield’s Private Rites is a more subtle and literary affair, yet one that is also far larger in scope. This is an apocalypse novel set in a Britain that has been flooded by rising sea levels and endless rainfall. Yet, unlike many apocalypse stories, this one depicts a slow, almost dull collapse, and there is something so chilling and bleak in that.

Capitalism remains; people still commute and work their day jobs, only they must do so with difficulty. Everything is too expensive now, and travel is almost impossible. Our protagonists are three sisters from a King Lear-inspired family. Their father—an architect who designed homes that can adapt to the changing climate—has died, and that death forces these near-estranged sisters back together.

Family drama meets apocalyptic tale, Private Rites is a deeply bleak tale that settles into your bones. Written with heft and poetic consideration, it is a novel that will surely be studied in the future.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

Irish author Sally Rooney’s second novel, Normal People, became an overnight literary sensation upon its publication. Called a modern day Jane Austen by some readers and critics, Rooney is a writer exploring the ebb and flow of modern-day relationships within the context of capitalism and class.

Normal People follows two teenagers, Connell and Marianne, who develop a fraught kind of romance over the course of the novel. While at school, Connell is popular and admired, and Marianne is meek and unassuming, outside of school Connell is a working class lad and Marianne comes from privilege.

Both are well-read and intelligent, and end up attending university together, where they shift and change and struggle in different ways. Normal People is a literary romance novel about class divides, social struggles, and the rapid ways in which we grow, learn, and change as individuals and within our relationships.

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Second Place by Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk’s Second Place is a stunning literary exploration of one woman’s place in her own world, reminiscent of the style and tone of Virginia Woolf. Our protagonist, M, once fell in love with the paintings of a man known only as L. Years later, M lives with her husband Tony on a remote and marshy patch of English coastland.

Now that their daughter is at university in Germany, and they have a “second place” on their land where guests can stay, M and Tony invite this great painter to stay with them and paint the local landscape. M second-guesses her life, comes to see herself as something else. Or rather, she examines herself closely for the first time and doesn’t love what she sees.

For much of the novel, we come to know M through her opinions of others, through her examination of the world around her; but we learn almost nothing about M herself. Second Place has us considering what a person is made up of; how we define ourselves, fit into the world, find our place in it, take up space in it, especially as women.

Second Place is one of the more subtly feminist literary novels you’re likely to read, but it is all the more impactful and beautiful for that subtlety.

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Violets by Kyung-sook Shin

Translated from the Korean by Anton Hur

Kyung-sook Shin is one of South Korea’s most beloved and revered authors, and Violets is a subtle work of feminist literary fiction. This novel is a story about female friendships in the modern day, and about the insidious, quiet, eerie, near-invisible ways in which men subtly abuse women on a daily basis.

Violets begins with its protagonist, San, as a young girl in 1970. San was born and raised in a small rural village and, growing up, was a lonely social outsider. In the book’s first chapter, San shares a moment of tender intimacy with her best friend. For San, this is an awakening. For her friend, it is frightening and wrong.

As an adult in Seoul, San takes a job as a florist. There she develops a sweet friendship with her coworker, who soon moves in with her. But San also learns about the power and violence of men. She comes to see how men violate the spaces and bodies of women on a daily basis, in a way that seems almost invisible. With their voices and motions and posture, men invade women’s worlds without a thought.

Violets is a smart feminist literary novel that has the power to reshape how we all see the social dynamics at play between men and women. The physical and verbal weapons softly used by men to scare, suppress, and intimidate the women in their lives. Violets is a piece of literary fiction that leaves a mark, but also provides readers with a tender and beautiful narrative.

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Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was a genius of postmodern 20th century literature, and his experiences as a World War II veteran and survivor inspired his 1969 magnum opus, Slaughterhouse-Five. The novel tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, who saw the same traumas of war that Vonnegut saw, but was also abducted by aliens and put in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore.

Slaughterhouse-Five is an anti-war literary science fiction novel that utilises absurdism, time travel, and alien abduction to make its point. It is a deeply moral and philosophical literary novel, detailing the effects of war on the human psyche. It asks big questions related to purpose, life, and death.

There is nothing quite like Slaughterhouse-Five, one of the great anti-war novels and a true masterpiece of American literary fiction.

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Sinking Bell by Bojan Louis

Written by Diné Native American poet, writer, and teacher Bojan Louis, Sinking Bell is a short collection of eight literary stories which explore and expose the raw and difficult lives of Navajo people in the modern day. All of these stories are set in and around the town of Flagstaff, Arizona, and the tell the stories of labourers, addicts, artists, wanderers, and even ghosts.

One story centres around a relapsed addict who attends a writing workshop and becomes enamoured with a white woman whose prose is undeniably electric. Another follows a labourer who is, in Of Mice and Men fashion, looking for a way to break free of the capitalistic cycle that has ensnared him. One follows the tragic life of a boy whose parents separated, leaving him desperate for money and willing to do whatever he has to for it.

These are discomforting and honest tales about people struggling to keep themselves and their families together, moving in and out of poverty, and facing racism at every turn. They are powerful, unflinching stories of truth and reality that will affect you on the deepest level.

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Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Flowers for Algernon is a perfect example of how literary themes and form can be used within the context of science fiction, blending the two splendidly. The novel for which Daniel Keyes is best remembered is a true masterpiece of science fiction, using the genre to explore themes of value, intelligence, and human rights.

Our protagonist, Charlie, is an “intellectually disabled” man in his thirties who works in a bakery. Charlie is soon made a test subject for intellectual development. The first test subject was the titular Algernon, a mouse who underwent experimental surgery with impressive results, and Charlie will be the first human test subject.

As the novel — written in an epistolary style as Charlie’s diary — progresses, we see his intelligence grow, and with it his observations, his relationships, and his vocabulary. Charlie’s development from a man of lower-than-average intelligence to one of genius status leads us to question the ways in which we treat one another based on our intelligence.

This is a sci-fi novel with valuable themes to consider, and the ways in which Keyes explores those themes also tug viciously at the reader’s heartstrings. A remarkable masterpiece of the genre, Flowers for Algernon is one of the best sci-fi novels ever written, and likewise one of the greatest literary fiction books of all time.

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What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma

Translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey

What I’d Rather Not Think About is a beautiful but harsh and difficult piece of literary fiction from an incredible Dutch author, told from the perspective of one half of a pair of twins. Our nameless narrator was born 45 minutes after her twin brother, and the two of them have been inseparable ever since. Growing up as best friends, they both moved to Amsterdam when they turned eighteen.

After her brother came out as gay, the twins remained close, sharing dinners with partners and living close to each other. They had dreams of moving to New York before they hit thirty, which never materialised, and when they were thirty-five, our narrator’s brother took his own life.

This Dutch literary novel, presented as a series of tiny vignettes, digs into a life shared, and considers how a life can be lived when it feels as though half of you has died. Told out of order, as a collection of thoughts and memories, and with a minimalistic form and style, this is a raw literary novel that confronts death without apology.

At turns warming, funny, and heartbreaking, What I’d Rather Not Think About takes us on a journey across the emotional spectrum as we are faced with death, loss, separation, and isolation.

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Bellies by Nicola Dinan

Bellies, the debut novel from London-based transgender author Nicola Dinan is at once a story of love and an inversion of love, presenting readers with a complex tale of evolving queer relationships in the modern day. When the novel begins, Ming and Tom are two boys at university together. Tom is newly out, and Ming has dreams of being a playwright.

They hook up and soon fall in love, spending the rest of their uni years growing ever closer. But when they start living together after graduation, Ming begins to change in ways that scare and confuse Tom. These changes build and create a harsh tension, until Ming at last comes out as a trans woman, and from here the love between them will be tested.

Told from both characters’ perspectives, Bellies is an intimate tale of growth, self-discovery, and understanding. Feelings of confusion, betrayal, and hurt must be unpacked and confronted. This is a novel led by emotion, as these characters grow into themselves, face themselves, and find the strength to better understand each other.

Tender and raw, Bellies speaks to the heart of modern queer culture and queer romances. A necessary piece of transgender literature by an amazing, fresh new trans author.

Much like Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Bellies demonstrates how contemporary culture and queerness have pushed literary fiction to grow, seamlessly blending affecting themes with an emotional tale of love, friendship, and self-discovery.

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No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

Translated from the Japanese by Donald Keene

Inspired by the author’s own life events, relationships, and his unique way of seeing the world around him, No Longer Human is a heartbreaking masterpiece of Japanese fiction. Our protagonist, a stand-in for Dazai himself, sees ordinary society as something impossible to navigate.

He paints horrifying pictures, eventually turns to drink, and becomes entirely self-destructive and abusive once he reaches adulthood.

This is a novel about a desperately sad person, ill equipped for even surviving daily life. He doesn’t understand people and people don’t understand him. He is selfish, gross, and unlikeable. But at his core, he is desperately sad and doomed to die.

No Longer Human is a meditation on life and death which begs the question: if we cannot fit in, are we doomed to die? A true literary fiction masterpiece.

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In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

In Ascension is a literary sci-fi masterpiece that has the potential to change the way you think and feel about the world around you, about what we are, where we came from, and where we might go. In the novel’s first part, Leigh, a Dutch biologist, joins an expedition to the north Atlantic ocean, to explore a deep sea vent that might house lifeforms we’ve never glimpsed before.

The life in this undersea vent, untouched for billions of years, has the potential to behave like a time capsule, taking us back to the earliest forms of life on this planet. What Leigh discovers in the vent takes her to the Mojave Desert, to a job working with a NASA-like space agency that is using a newly-discovered form of fuel to send people to the furthest reaches of our solar system and beyond.

The questions that In Ascension poses, and the incredible discoveries made, ask the reader to deeply consider that old cliche: we are all made of star stuff. In Ascension is a modern sci-fi novel that takes us from the most inaccessible parts of the deepest darkest ocean to the furthest point in our solar system.

And, as we explore these places old and new, big and small, we ask ourselves what we are, where we came from, where we will go, and how it is ultimately all the same. We are all star stuff.

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Babel by R.F. Kuang

R.F. Kuang’s Babel is a dense piece of historical fiction, an urban fantasy novel, and one of the best dark academia books you’ll ever read. A perfect example of how literary fiction and genre fiction can not only co-exist but also go hand-in-hand in both form and function.

Set in an alternative Oxford of 1836, Babel follows a boy named Robin who was born and raised in Guangdong, China.

When disease leaves Robin without a family, a rich and educated British man sweeps him away to London, educates and raises him, and sends him off to Oxford. There, he studies translation within the walls of Oxford’s tallest building, Babel.

Babel is the beating heart of not only Oxford University, but the entire British empire, the place where precious silver bars are infused with magic, created through the study and manipulation of language.

Robin’s life at Oxford is made more complicated by the illegal actions of a radical group who aim to disrupt and dismantle the British Empire’s silver industry from the inside. As he learns more about the Empire’s international crimes and evils, Robin becomes interested and works with Hermes as their inside man, helping them take small jabs at Babel and its silver-smithing industry.

Babel is an anti-imperialist novel about the ways in which the spread of one nation’s economic and cultural power has laid waste to the rest of the world. It is not subtle; it is undeniably angry, and that anger is justified and brilliantly well-expressed in this incredible piece of literary fiction that blends multiple genres together masterfully.

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Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi

Translated from the Japanese by David Boyd & Lucy North

Diary of a Void is a biting, sarcastic, witty, and dark literary novel about the ways in which society’s treatment of women depends on their situation and what gives them value.

Our protagonist, Shibata, is a twenty-something office worker who, by virtue of being the only woman in her office, is treated like a dog’s body who must fetch coffee for the men. Driven to breaking point, she one day lies and says she can’t do this anymore because she’s pregnant (which she isn’t).

Committed to this new lie, Shibata starts noticing her life improve. Men treat her with more kindness; she is given permission to gain weight and look after herself.

In reality, nobody wants her to look after herself, but rather the baby. This novel reminds us that society sees cis women as vessels for carrying the future, rather than part of the present. A bleak and angry, but sometimes funny feminist piece of literary fiction from Japan.

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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

This is a literary novel for the digital age; a novel about how people live and work and love now, in a world of entertainment and capitalism. Taking place through the boom of the video games industry in the 1990s, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow follows two friends-turned-colleagues, Sam and Sadie.

They first met in an LA hospital as kids, bonded over video games, fell out, and later reunited in Boston. One is at MIT, the other at Harvard. And the novel tracks their lives as they begin to design and develop video games together, first as budding indie creators, and later as successful owners of their own company.

This is a commercial and literary novel about the complexities of our relationships, and about the waves that life moves through. The murkiness of love, sex, work, and friendship, and how these different kinds of relationships evolve, break down, and build back up again.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a wonderful piece of contemporary literary fiction that reflects how our lives and our loves behave in the modern day.

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Magma by Thora Hjörleifsdóttir

Translated from the Icelandic by Meg Matich

Magma is the debut novel by Icelandic poet Thora Hjörleifsdóttir: a 200-page feminist literary novel written in small vignettes which record the life of a young woman named Lilja. Lilja has entered into a new relationship with a quietly toxic and emotionally manipulative man who remains unnamed, and who becomes something of a gothic monster as the book progresses.

Her partner represents not only the toxic and gaslighting men of the world, but all toxic friends and partners that we have suffered with throughout our lives, regardless of gender or sexuality. Each tiny chapter of Magma jumps forward a little, recording a new moment or stage in their relationship, as Lilja becomes unable to leave, feeling strangely attached to him and convinced that she is in love.

All the while, he controls her, gaslights her, and builds a shell of paranoia around her until she feels cocooned, trapped, lost, and dependent. It’s dark, difficult, and too familiar for many of us. Magma is a mesmerising work of feminist literary fiction that warns us all against the power and tactics used by toxic people to remove our autonomy and grind us down.

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Death Valley by Melissa Broder

Melissa Broder’s third novel is the most intimate, confessional and literary novel she has ever written. Death Valley tells the story of a protagonist who feels very much like an author surrogate. She is an author, forty-one years old, and struggling to handle the limbo state her father is currently in.

Sick and in hospital, he is close to death but we have no idea if and when he will die. Her mother is being a nuisance and she herself feels like a nuisance to her father. She also has a husband back home who has been struggling with a unique illness for almost a decade.

Using the excuse of needing to do research for her new novel — one which sounds suspiciously similar to the very thing we are reading — she heads out into the California desert to get away and clear her head. She hikes the trails and begins to experience feverish and surreal things.

The imagery and themes explored here are myriad, and very much up for interpretation, but this is a very personal novel that is clearly wrangling with the idea of a person having a role to play when it comes to the death of a loved one.

A departure from her previous works, Death Valley is a deeply raw story, through which Broder has exposed her insecurities, doubts, and self-hatred. An excellent work of literary fiction.

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The Grip of It by Jac Jemc

It’s common for literary fiction to blend with genres like sci-fi and dystopia, but far less so when it comes to horror. Though there’s no reason for this, literary horror is a rarity. The Grip of It, however, shows why literary horror should be a far more popular thing. This is a modern-day haunted house story written with weight and beauty. Its language shifts between evocative and enigmatic.

We follow Julie and James, a married couple who decide to leave the city and buy their first house in the countryside. They are spurred to leave by James’ gambling addiction; looking to widen the gap between him and temptation. Once settled into their house at the end of a road and the edge of a forest, Julie and James begin to forget the name of the estate agent they worked with, and which one of them did the research and viewings for the property.

They also hear strange and conflicting stories about the house and its previous residents from new friends and colleagues in town. Soon enough, the house itself begins to haunt them. Rooms appear and disappear; noises start and stop without a source; gaps, holes, and pillars are discovered but have no purpose.

And then there’s their elderly and reclusive neighbour who watches everything they do and never leaves his home. The Grip of It shifts perspective back and forth between Julie and James, with both of their narratives written in the first person and present tense, creating an immediacy and inertia to the novel’s pacing.

And with the chapters averaging 3-4 pages each, the momentum of this literary horror novel is intense, making for a fantastic page-turner.

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Mrs. S by K. Patrick

Set in an old-fashioned boarding school, Mrs. S tells the story of a nameless Australian who has moved to England for work. There, she meets the headmaster’s wife, the titular Mrs. S, and begins a journey of growing obsession. Our protagonist is unsure of herself. She wears a binder and enjoys being seen as masculine, but she doesn’t have the language to express how she feels or what she wants for herself.

She identifies as a lesbian and begins to see Mrs. S as more than an object of obsession — perhaps this beautiful, charming woman might be able to guide our protagonist to her true self, to unlock something in her. Mrs. S has a very specific and rare style of presentation: run-on sentences and paragraphs that don’t differentiate between narration and dialogue.

Experimental form and style like what we see in this novel is part-and-parcel of literary fiction, as is a lack of character names, but these elements don’t work for all readers. Characters are named for their jobs and no proper nouns are used. The all-female school’s student body is described as a faceless mass which K. Patrick simply refers to as The Girls.

This makes the characters and setting feel as though they are floating in a vacuum, outside of time and space. This is a nowhere place in which our protagonist is trapped, trying to understand herself and what she wants. Her obsession with Mrs. S grows. She is lustful, jealous, curious, and eager to know this woman better, despite not knowing herself at all. Mrs. S is an answer, a distraction, a muse, so many things to her.

There are few literary fiction books as captivating, intimate, claustrophobic, and sensual as Mrs. S; a true modern masterpiece of queer fiction.

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Finger Bone by Hiroki Takahashi

Translated from the Japanese by Takami Nieda

Finger Bone is one of those rare novels that transcends its genre; a masterpiece of Japanese war fiction that encourages us to wrestle with that age-old question: where is the good in warfare? It’s 1942, and our nameless protagonist is a young, Japanese soldier in Papua New Guinea. As this short novel progresses, we watch him make and lose friends, connect with frightened locals, and shrug off injury and illness.

Taking place half in a field hospital and half in the thick of the jungle, Finger Bone is beautifully, harshly reminiscent of the poems of Wilfred Owen. A raw tale about the darkest, bleakest aspects of warfare. This is about innocent men suffering fatal wounds, struggling to overcome malaria, forging bonds, and watching those bonds get severed without warning.

At no point are politics discussed in real detail, and that’s what makes us ponder the grand purpose of war. All we see here are men suffering, and trying to keep their spirits high, as well as those of their friends and comrades. Few war novels have such a raw, powerful, painful effect on the reader as Finger Bone does, and it does so in such a short space of time. Read it in one sitting, and it’ll change you forever.

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The Delivery by Margarita García Robayo

Colombian-born, Argentina-based author Margarita García Robayo has written several celebrated novel, including the excellent Holiday Heart, and The Delivery is perhaps her finest achievement.

A deeply thoughtful, borderline surreal piece of literary fiction, The Delivery presents us with a nameless narrator-protagonist who was born in Caribbean, lives in Buenos Aires, and is hoping to relocated yet again to the Netherlands.

She regularly talks with her sister, who remained living at home with their mother and has very little of interest to discuss, but she does occasionally send our protagonist frequent care packages. When the novel begins, she has sent over an enormous crate, which our protagonist doesn’t even want to deal with. Before she has a chance to get rid of it, however, it opens itself up and inside is her mother.

From this strange and disarming moment, the novel takes on a subtly surreal sheen, as our protagonist goes on with her daily life as a freelance writer, and her mother lives there like a ghost, bringing up or reframing memories from the past.

The Delivery is a wonderful piece of literary fiction that calls into question the role of family, and that of memory. It asks us to wrangle with our own human needs for space, for distance, for a world of our own, and the things that we must separate ourselves from in order to achieve what we think we need or want.

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