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This list of literary fiction brings authors from around the globe to a single place. Many of these are award-winning books filled with attention-grabbing language, diverse voices, and intricate plots woven throughout many human cultures.
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Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami - Knopf
Format: Book
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Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called... |
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The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini - Riverhead Trade
Format: Paperback
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The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal,... |
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Love in the Time of Cholera
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
Format: Book
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In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is heartbroken, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs—yet he reserves... |
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Like Water for Chocolate
Laura Esquivel - Doubleday
Format: Paperback
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Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico became a best-selling phenomenon with its winning blend of poignant romance and bittersweet wit.
The number one bestseller in Mexico and America for almost two years, and subsequently... |
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Black Leopard, Red Wolf
Marlon James - Riverhead Books
Format: Book
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In the first novel in Marlon James's Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child.
Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged... |
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White Teeth
Zadie Smith
Format: Book
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At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged,... |
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The Book Thief
Markus Zusak - Knopf Books for Young Readers
Format: Paperback
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It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will be busier still.
By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook,... |
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Atonement: A Novel
Ian McEwan
Format: Book
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Ian McEwan’s symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose.
On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old... |
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The Girl with the Louding Voice: A Novel
Abi Dare - Dutton
Format: Book
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The unforgettable, inspiring story of a teenage girl growing up in a rural Nigerian village who longs to get an education so that she can find her “louding voice” and speak up for herself, The Girl with the Louding Voice is a simultaneously heartbreaking and triumphant tale... |
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The Thorn Birds
Colleen McCullough - Harper & Row; 1st edition
Format: Book
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The Thorn Birds is a robust, romantic saga of a singular family, the Clearys. It begins in the early part of this century, when Paddy Cleary moves his wife, Fiona, and their seven children to Drogheda, the vast Australian sheep station owned by his autocratic and childless older sister;... |
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Cutting for Stone: A novel
Abraham Verghese - Knopf
Format: Book
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Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural... |
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Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro - Knopf
Format: Book
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Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world... |
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