Some Good Mainstream Fiction
Explore a curated list of the best mainstream fiction books. Discover captivating stories, bestselling authors, and must-read novels for every fiction lover.
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The Pact
by Jodi Picoult
From Jodi Picoult, one of the most powerful writers in contemporary fiction, comes a riveting, timely, heartbreaking, and terrifying novel of families in anguish -- and friendships ripped apart by inconceivable violence. Until the phone calls came at 3:00 A.M. on a November morning, the Golds and their neighbors, the Hartes, had been inseparable. It was no surprise to anyone when their teenage children, Chris and Emily, began showing signs that their relationship was moving beyond that of lifelong friends. But now seventeen-year-old Emily has been shot to death by her beloved and devoted Chris as part of an apparent suicide pact -- leaving two devastated families stranded in the dark and dense predawn, desperate for answers about an unthinkable act and the children they never really knew.
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On Beauty
by Zadie Smith
Struggling with a stale marriage and the misguided passions of his three adult children, long-suffering art professor Howard Belsey finds his family life thrown into turmoil by his son's engagement to the socially prominent daughter of a right-wing icon. By the author of White Teeth. 200,000 first printing.
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Small Island
by Andrea Levy
Told in four distinct voices, the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2004 is a courageous novel of tender emotion and sparkling wit, encapsulating the most American of experiences: the immigrant's life.
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Tangerine Dream
by Ken Douglas
Best friends Haley and Taylor must deal with a terrible loss when Taylor's twin sister, Dylan, is killed in a car crash. Meanwhile, Taylor and Dylan's father, a senator running for president and supposedly somewhere on the campaign trail, can't be reached because he is in the arms of a prostitute. While the girls and the twins' mother try to recover and avoid the press in New Zealand, Nick Nesbitt, a television news reporter, senses a story and will stop at nothing to get it.
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The Secret River
by Kate Grenville
"London, 1806 - William Thornhill, happily wedded to his childhood sweetheart Sal, is a waterman on the River Thames. Life is tough but bearable until William makes a mistake, a bad mistake for which he and his family are made to pay dearly. His sentence: to be transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life." "The Thornhills arrive in this harsh and alien land that they cannot understand and which feels like a death sentence. But among the convicts there is a rumour that freedom can be bought, that 'unclaimed' land up the Hawkesbury offers an opportunity to start afresh, far away from the township of Sydney. When William takes a hundred acres for himself he is shocked to find aboriginal people already living on the river. And other recent arrivals - Thomas Blackwood, Smasher Sullivan and Mrs Herring - are finding their own ways to respond to them" "Soon Thornhill, a man neither better nor worse than most, has to make the most difficult decision of his life."--BOOK JACKET.
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The Lightning Keeper
by Starling Lawrence
The Lightning Keeper is a sweeping epic novel of ambition, love, and enterprise in America. It is the story of an unlikely Romeo and Juliet romance at the dawn of the electric age, with the nation balancing on the brink of world war and a scientific revolution. In 1914 Toma Pekocevic is a penniless immigrant in New York recently escaped from the bloody politics of the Balkans that have claimed most of his family. He is also a gifted inventor who designs a revolutionary water turbine while working with Harriet Bigelow, scion of a proud Connecticut iron-making dynasty now fallen on hard times. Their attraction is immediate and overwhelming, but every circumstance is against them. Toma is eventually drawn inside the industrial empire of General Electric, his machine an essential cog in its grand scheme to provide electricity to the entire country. His invention is all he has after losing Harriet to a wealthy politician, but Toma is determined to win her back, setting the stage for a confrontation that could change not only his life but the course of scientific progress. Deeply evocative and utterly engrossing, The Lightning Keeper is a rich tapestry of technology, romance, and war -- an unforgettable and distinctly American saga that establishes Starling Lawrence as one of the most talented writers at work today.
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The Love Season
by Elin Hilderbrand
When Renata comes to Nantucket to visit her fiancee's family, she decides to also visit Marguerite, the god-mother she's been forbidden to see her entire life--the one person who can unlock the mystery surrounding her mother's death.
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A Wedding in December
by Anita Shreve
At an inn in the Berkshire Mountains, seven former schoolmates gather to celebrate a wedding--a reunion that becomes the occasion of astonishing revelations as the friends collectively recall a long-ago night that indelibly marked each of their lives. Written with the fluent narrative artistry that distinguishes all of Anita Shreve's bestselling novels, A Wedding in December acutely probes the mysteries of the human heart and the endless allure of paths not taken.
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Last Night
by James Salter
A superbly accomplished new collection explores the acclaimed author's signature themes: love, honor, sacrifice, friendship, and abandon. In these taut, powerful stories, Salter portrays men and women in their most intimate moments.
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Envy
by Kathryn Harrison
A New York psychoanalyst in the midst of a midlife crisis, William Moreland comes face to face with a woman he had loved twenty-five years earlier during a college reunion, an encounter that leads to shocking revelations about their relationship.
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Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson
In 1956, toward the end of his life, Reverend John Ames begins a letter to his young son, sharing the story of his life and explaining how his faith influenced his choices and actions.
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Fallen
by David Maine
The author of "The Preservationist" pens a provocative epic of temptation and murder, of exile and loss, in this convincing portrait of a family driven by passions and jealousies.
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The Doctor's Daughter
by Hilma Wolitzer
The Doctor's Daughter is a haunting portrait of a woman coming to terms with her family history and the fallibility of memory.
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Appaloosa
by Robert B. Parker
Itinerant lawmen Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch attempt to rid Appaloosa of renegade rancher Randall Bragg.
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Intuition
by Allegra Goodman
A trio of researchers becomes caught up in the desperate quest for a financial grant from the Philpott, a prestigious research laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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The Mercy of Thin Air
by Ronlyn Domingue
This first-time author offers a stunning, imaginative love story that tests the boundaries of time, grief, and death.
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A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
by Yiyun Li
In this collection of stories, the author illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate.
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There Will Never be Another You
by Carolyn See
See's provocative new novel is set in the unstable world of the near future, where three generations of a Southern California family face crises both personal and global.
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Portrait in Sepia
by Isabel Allende
Lacking all memory of the first five years of her life because of a brutal trauma, Aurora del Valle is raised by her regal grandmother Paulina and eventually seeks to confront the mystery of her past, in a novel set in late-nineteenth-century Chile.
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Love in the Present Tense
by Catherine Ryan Hyde
Accustomed to leaving her frail young son with her neighbor, Mitch, while she goes to work, Pearl, a teenage mother, one day does not return, leaving Mitch and Leonard alone to grow up together and to become an unusual family.
