Trending Literary Fiction Books
Catch-22 (Released: January 1961)
Author(s): Joseph Heller
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.00 (709 Ratings, 43 Reviews)
Pages: 466
Catch-22 is like no other novel. It has its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously funny and strangely affecting. It is totally original. Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off Italy, Catch-22 is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian, who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he hasn't even met keep trying to kill him. Catch-22 is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to someone dangerously sane. It is a novel that lives and moves and grows with astonishing power and vitality -- a masterpiece of our time. - Back cover.
Genre(s): Classics, Fiction, War, History, Historical Fiction, Psychology, comedy, World War
The Thursday Murder Club (Released: January 2020)
Author(s): Richard Osman
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 3.85 (649 Ratings, 112 Reviews)
Pages: 377
Four septuagenarians with a few tricks up their sleeves A female cop with her first big case A brutal murder Welcome to... THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves the Thursday Murder Club. When a local developer is found dead with a mysterious photograph left next to the body, the Thursday Murder Club suddenly find themselves in the middle of their first live case. As the bodies begin to pile up, can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer, before it's too late?
Genre(s): Mystery, Fiction, Murder, Realistic Fiction
The Grapes of Wrath (Released: January 1939)
Author(s): John Steinbeck
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 3.81 (574 Ratings, 52 Reviews)
Pages: 496
Steinbeck’s classic novel of the Great Depression is as vivid now as ever. The story focuses on a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers, farmers who work another man’s land for a share of the crops. Driven from their home by drought and poverty they take to the road in a battered old truck and make their way to California to look for work. When they arrive they find hundreds of others like them being forced to work for breadline wages. they begin working as fruit pickers, strike-breakers replacing the people who have been trying to establish a union but their consciences force them to leave.
Genre(s): Fiction, Classics, Historical Fiction, Literature, Friendship, California
Memoirs of a Geisha (Released: January 1997)
Author(s): Arthur Golden
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 3.96 (634 Ratings, 26 Reviews)
Pages: 435
A fisherman's daughter in 1930s Japan rises to become a famous geisha. After training, Sayuri's virginity is sold to the highest bidder, then the school finds her a general for a patron. When he dies, she is reunited with the only man she loved.
Genre(s): Classics, Fiction, War, Literature, History, Women
The Goldfinch (Released: January 1993)
Author(s): Donna Tartt
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 3.95 (581 Ratings, 103 Reviews)
Pages: 1006
"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present day America and a drama of enthralling force and acuity. It begins with a boy. Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art. As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love-and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle. The Goldfinch is a novel of shocking narrative energy and power. It combines unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and breathtaking suspense, while plumbing with a philosopher's calm the deepest mysteries of love, identity, and art. It is a beautiful, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the ruthless machinations of fate.
Genre(s): Classics, Fiction, Friendship, Spanish, Artists
A Little Life (Released: January 2015)
Author(s): Hanya Yanagihara (著)
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.13 (555 Ratings, 148 Reviews)
Pages: 720
When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever. In rich and resplendent prose, Hanya Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.
Genre(s): Fiction, Classics, LGBTQ, Friendship
Anxious People (Released: January 2019)
Author(s): Fredrik Backman, Neil Smith (Translator)
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.24 (598 Ratings, 125 Reviews)
Pages: 352
Taken hostage by a failed bank robber while attending an open house, eight anxiety-prone strangers--including a redemption-seeking bank director, two couples who would fix their marriages, and a plucky octogenarian--discover their unexpected common traits.
Genre(s): Fiction, LGBTQ, City and town life
Pachinko (Released: January 2017)
Author(s): Min Jin Lee
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.23 (474 Ratings, 66 Reviews)
Pages: 496
In this New York Times bestseller, four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan–the inspiration for the television series on Apple TV+. In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger. When she discovers she is pregnant–and that her lover is married–she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty.
Genre(s): Fiction, Historical Fiction, Classics, War, Literature & Fiction
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Released: January 1962)
Author(s): Ken Kesey
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.07 (469 Ratings, 23 Reviews)
Pages: 336
In this classic novel, Ken Kesey’s hero is Randle Patrick McMurphy, a boisterous, brawling, fun-loving rebel who swaggers into the world of a mental hospital and takes over. A lusty, life-affirming fighter, McMurphy rallies the other patients around him by challenging the dictatorship of Nurse Ratched. He promotes gambling in the ward, smuggles in wine and women, and openly defies the rules at every turn. But this defiance, which starts as a sport, soon develops into a grim struggle, an all-out war between two relentless opponents: Nurse Ratched, backed by the full power of authority, and McMurphy, who has only his own indomitable will. What happens when Nurse Ratched uses her ultimate weapon against McMurphy provides the story’s shocking climax.
Genre(s): Classics, Fiction, Literature, Friendship
My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Released: January 2018)
Author(s): Ottessa Moshfegh
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 3.73 (454 Ratings, 84 Reviews)
Pages: 306
It's early 2000 on New York City's Upper East Side, and the alienation of Moshfegh's unnamed young protagonist from others is nearly complete when she initiates her yearlong siesta, during which time she experiences limited personal interactions. Her parents have died; her relationships with her bulimic best friend Reva, an ex-boyfriend, and her drug-pushing psychiatrist are unwholesome. As her pill-popping intensifies, so does her isolation and determination to leave behind the world's travails. She is also beset by dangerous blackouts induced by a powerful medication.
Genre(s): Fiction, Classics, Literary, Contemporary