Literary Fiction

David Szalay’s Flesh is the kind of novel that earns its accolades through restraint rather than spectacle. Winner of the 2025 Booker Prize, this sixth novel from the British-Canadian author tracks the life of Istvan, a Hungarian teenager who grows into a man of considerable wealth and power, yet never quite escapes the gravitational pull…

Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes and published in English by New Directions in 2020, arrives like a force that does not ask permission before it enters. The novel opens with a body: the Witch, a mysterious figure in the rural Veracruz village of La Matosa, has been found face-down…

Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child brings the Neapolitan Novels to a close with the same unrelenting honesty that made the series one of the defining literary events of the decade. This fourth and final volume follows Elena (Lenù) and Lila across middle age and into old age, their friendship as knotted and…

Freshwater, published by Grove Press in 2018, is the debut novel of Akwaeke Emezi, and it announces a singular literary intelligence with a force that few first books manage. The novel follows Ada, a young Nigerian woman born at the intersection of worlds, carrying inside her the ogbanje – spirits from Igbo cosmology who exist…

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado is a striking debut collection that reimagines the female body as a site of horror, desire, and defiant mythmaking. About the Book Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection arrives as one of the most celebrated works of speculative short fiction in recent memory. Spanning eight stories, the…

Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien is an achingly beautiful epic that braids together the fates of Chinese families across three generations, from the Cultural Revolution to the Tiananmen Square massacre, proving that music, memory, and love endure even when history demands silence. About the Book Set across decades and continents, Do…

Suite Française arrives as an extraordinary document before it arrives as a novel. Irène Némirovsky began writing it in the autumn of 1940, in a French village where she was hiding with her family under German occupation. She completed the first two parts between then and the summer of 1942. In July of that year,…

Cloud Atlas comprises six nested stories spanning roughly five centuries, from a mid-19th century Pacific voyage to a post-collapse Hawaii. Each narrative is interrupted at its midpoint and resumed in reverse order: the novel opens a story, opens another, opens another, keeps opening, reaches the center, then unfolds back out. The stories include a Victorian…

Jacob Jankowski tells his story from two vantage points. In one, he is 23 years old: a Cornell veterinary student whose parents die in a car accident the week before his final exams, leaving him broke, adrift, and with no plan except the one that appears when he stumbles onto a moving circus train. In…

Susie Salmon is fourteen years old when her neighbor George Harvey rapes and murders her. From a personal heaven — a place shaped like a wishful version of high school, populated by others who share the things she loved — Susie watches her family fracture and slowly reconstruct in the years following her death. She…