Best Fiction of the Last Quarter Century
Discover the best fiction books of the last 25 years! Explore our curated list of must-read novels that defined the last quarter century in literature.
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Underworld
by Don DeLillo
A finalist for the National Book Award, Don DeLillo's most powerful and riveting novel--"a great American novel, a masterpiece, a thrilling page-turner" (San Francisco Chronicle)--Underworld is about the second half of the twentieth century in America and about two people, an artist and an executive, whose lives intertwine in New York in the fifties and again in the nineties. With cameo appearances by Lenny Bruce, J. Edgar Hoover, Bobby Thompson, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor, "this is DeLillo's most affecting novel...a dazzling, phosphorescent work of art" (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).
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CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
by George Saunders
From the New York Times bestselling author of Tenth of December, a 2013 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction, and the novel Lincoln in the Bardo. A New York Times Notable Book Six short stories and a novella. Set in a dystopian near-future in which America has become little more than a theme park in terminal disrepair, they constitute a searching and bitterly humorous commentary on the current state of the American Dream. Funny, sad, bleak, weird, toxic - the future of America as the Free Market runs rampant,the environment skids into disarray, and civilization dissolves into surreal chaos. These wacky, brilliant, hilarious and entirely original stories cue us in on George Saunder's skewed vision of the legacy we are creating. Against the backdrop of our devolvement, our own worst tendencies and greatest virtues are weirdly illuminated.
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Frolic of His Own
by William Gaddis
A satirically jaundiced view of modern law and justice chronicles the fortunes of Oscar Crease, a middle-aged college instructor and playwright, as he sues a Hollywood producer for pirating a play
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Blindness
by José Saramago
A stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. "This is a shattering work by a literary master."--The Boston Globe A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers--among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears--through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses--and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit.
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A Suitable Boy
by Vikram Seth
Tells the story of four large extended families in 1950s India against the political and religious upheavals of the time.
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White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
On New Year's morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his Cavalier Musketeer station wagon. Archie--working-class, ordinary, a failed marriage under his belt--is calling it quits, the deciding factor being the flip of a 20-pence coin. When the owner of a nearby halal butcher shop (annoyed that Archie's car is blocking his delivery area) comes out and bangs on the window, he gives Archie another chance at life and sets in motion this richly imagined, uproariously funny novel. Epic and intimate, hilarious and poignant, White Teeth is the story of two North London families--one headed by Archie, the other by Archie's best friend, a Muslim Bengali named Samad Iqbal. Pals since they served together in World War II, Archie and Samad are a decidedly unlikely pair. Plodding Archie is typical in every way until he marries Clara, a beautiful, toothless Jamaican woman half his age, and the couple have a daughter named Irie (the Jamaican word for "no problem"). Samad--devoutly Muslim, hopelessly "foreign"--weds the feisty and always suspicious Alsana in a prearranged union. They have twin sons named Millat and Magid, one a pot-smoking punk-cum-militant Muslim and the other an insufferable science nerd. The riotous and tortured histories of the Joneses and the Iqbals are fundamentally intertwined, capturing an empire's worth of cultural identity, history, and hope. Zadie Smith's dazzling first novel plays out its bounding, vibrant course in a Jamaican hair salon in North London, an Indian restaurant in Leicester Square, an Irish poolroom turned immigrant cafe, a liberal public school, a sleek science institute. A winning debut inevery respect, White Teeth marks the arrival of a wondrously talented writer who takes on the big themes--faith, race, gender, history, and culture--and triumphs.
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Illywhacker
by Peter Carey
In Australian slang, an illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey's uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Badgery is a walking embodiment of the Australian national character—espcially of its proclivity for tall stories and barefaced lies. As Carey follows this charming scoundrel across a continent and a century, he creates a crazy quilt of outlandish encounters, with characters that include a genteel dowager who fends off madness with an electric belt and a ravishing young girl with a dangerous fondness for rooftop trysts. Boldly inventive, irresistibly odd, Illywhacker is further proof that Peter Carey is one of the most enchanting writers at work in any hemisphere.
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Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
The story of Saleem Sinal, born precisely at midnight, August 15, 1947, the moment India became independent. Saleem's life parallels the history of his nation.
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Possession
by A. S. Byatt
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A tale of two young scholars researching the secret love affair of two Victorian poets that's an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, an intellectual mystery, and a triumphant love story. “Gorgeously written … A tour de force.” —The New York Times Book Review Winner of England’s Booker Prize and a literary sensation, Possession traces the lives of a pair of young academics as they uncover a clandestine relationship between two long-dead Victorian poets. As they unearth their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany—what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.
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The Collected Stories
by William Trevor
A collection of short stories from celebrated author William Trevor in which he shines a light on the day-to-day life of Ireland and its citizens. From his debut collection, “The Day We Got Drunk on Cake,” published in 1968, to “Family Sins” (1990), William Trevor has crafted the short story to perfection, giving us brilliant and subtle stories full of the reversals, surprises, and shadowy truths we discover in life itself. To read this volume is not just to encounter an extraordinary literary stylist, but to understand life as surely as though we were looking through the eyes of his protagonists and—deeper still—into their hearts. William Trevor: The Collected Stories includes the tales from his seven previous books, as well as four stories that have never appeared in book form in America. They depict the comforts and frustrations of life in rural Ireland, the complexities of family relationships, and the elusive grace of love. They portray the almost invisible strands that bind people to each other as well as the chains that imprison them in solitary yearning.
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic, beloved novel of two boy geniuses dreaming up superheroes in New York’s Golden Age of comics “It's absolutely gosh-wow, super-colossal—smart, funny, and a continual pleasure to read.”—The Washington Post Book World One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of Entertainment Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Decade • Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize A “towering, swash-buckling thrill of a book” (Newsweek), hailed as Chabon’s “magnum opus” (The New York Review of Books), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a triumph of originality, imagination, and storytelling, an exuberant, irresistible novel that begins in New York City in 1939. A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic books, and in a distant corner of Brooklyn, Sammy is looking for a way to cash in on the craze. He finds the ideal partner in the aloof, artistically gifted Joe, and together they embark on an adventure that takes them deep into the heart of Manhattan, and the heart of old-fashioned American ambition. From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly mistress of the night. Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building, Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink. Spanning continents and eras, this superb book by one of America’s finest writers remains one of the defining novels of our modern American age. Winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and the New York Society Library Book Award
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If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
by Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino's classic, multifaceted novel about writing and readers.
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A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
by Julian Barnes
A “playful, witty, and entertaining” book (The New York Times Book Review) that offers an exhilarating vision of the world, starting with the voyage of Noah's ark and ending with a sneak preview of heaven—from the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending. It's a hilariously revisionist account of Noah's ark, narrated by a passenger who doesn't appear in Genesis. It's a sneak preview of heaven. It encompasses the stories of a cruise ship hijacked by terrorists and of woodworms tried for blasphemy in sixteenth-century France. It explores the relationship of fact to fabulation and the antagonism between history and love. In short, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters is a grandly ambitious and inventive work of fiction, in the traditions of Joyce and Calvino, from the author of the widely acclaimed Flaubert's Parrot.
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The Unconsoled
by Kazuo Ishiguro
From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day, here is a novel that is at once a gripping psychological mystery, a wicked satire of the cult of art, and a poignant character study of a man whose public life has accelerated beyond his control. The setting is a nameless Central European city where Ryder, a renowned pianist, has come to give the most important performance of his life. Instead, he finds himself diverted on a series of cryptic and infuriating errands that nevertheless provide him with vital clues to his own past. In The Unconsoled Ishiguro creates a work that is itself a virtuoso performance, strange, haunting, and resonant with humanity and wit.