Modern fiction to get lost in

Matt Haig

Between life and death is a library of the lives you could have lived.

Andy Weir

A lone astronaut must save humanity — and he can't remember why.

Delia Owens

A murder, a marsh, and the girl the town called wild.

Madeline Miller

The Iliad reimagined as one of the great love stories.

Kazuo Ishiguro

An artificial friend watches, and learns what love asks of us.

Gabrielle Zevin

Two friends, thirty years, and the games that hold them together.

Taylor Jenkins Reid

A reclusive Hollywood icon finally tells the truth.

Madeline Miller

The witch of Greek myth, given her own voice.

Min Jin Lee

Four generations of a Korean family in Japan.

Sally Rooney

Two people who keep finding, and losing, each other.

Khaled Hosseini

Two boys, one betrayal, and a lifetime spent earning it back.

Bonnie Garmus

A chemist in 1960s TV teaches a nation to cook — and to think.

Anthony Doerr

A blind French girl and a German boy, converging on one occupied town.

Markus Zusak

Nazi Germany, narrated by Death, about a girl who steals books.

Yann Martel

A boy, a lifeboat, and a Bengal tiger — and a choice between two stories.

Cormac McCarthy

A father, a son, a shopping cart, and the ash of the world — carrying the fire south. Pulitzer, 2007.

Fredrik Backman

The grumpiest man in Sweden keeps failing to die because the neighbors keep needing him.

Kristin Hannah

Two French sisters, one occupation, two kinds of courage — the WWII novel that made millions cry.

TJ Klune

A caseworker audits an orphanage of magical children — including the Antichrist, age six — and finds a home.

Arthur Golden

A fishing-village girl becomes Kyoto's most celebrated geisha — art, rivalry, and a life that was never hers to choose.

Donna Tartt

A bomb, a painting, and a boy carrying both for the rest of his life.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

A boy chooses a book from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books — and someone is burning every copy.

Kazuo Ishiguro

A boarding school with a terrible secret, and children raised for a purpose they slowly come to understand.

Donna Tartt

A murder at an elite college, told from the inside by one of the students who did it.

Haruki Murakami

A song on a plane throws a man back to the lovers and losses of his Tokyo student years.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A young Nigerian woman navigates America, race, and the long way back to the man she left.

Arundhati Roy

Twins in Kerala, a single day that breaks a family, and the small things that decide everything.

David Mitchell

Six nested stories across centuries, from a Pacific voyage to a post-apocalyptic future, all secretly linked.

Hanya Yanagihara

Four friends in New York, and one of them carrying a past too painful to ever fully speak.

Barbara Kingsolver

A zealous missionary drags his wife and four daughters into the Congo, and Africa unmakes them all.

Emily St. John Mandel

A flu wipes out most of humanity, and a troupe of actors keeps Shakespeare alive in the ruins.

Khaled Hosseini

Two women bound to the same cruel husband forge an unlikely bond across thirty years of Afghan history.

Colson Whitehead

A runaway slave flees north on a literal underground railroad, state by nightmarish state.

Brit Bennett

Twin sisters run from their Black hometown; one comes back, the other passes as white and disappears.

Kazuo Ishiguro

An aging English butler takes a country drive and finally reckons with a life given entirely to service, and the love he let pass.

Zadie Smith

Two wartime friends, their tangled families, and the comic, chaotic making of multicultural London across three generations.

Jojo Moyes

A small-town woman becomes caregiver to a bitter young banker paralyzed in an accident, and each cracks the other open.

Richard Powers

Nine strangers, each marked by a tree, are drawn together to defend the last of the great forests.

Maggie O'Farrell

In Stratford, a glovemaker's son marries a wild, gifted woman, and the death of their boy will one day become a play.

Audrey Niffenegger

A man with a genetic disorder involuntarily time-travels through the life of the woman he loves, meeting her out of order.

Nicholas Sparks

An old man reads a love story from a worn notebook to a woman in a nursing home, and a summer romance from decades past comes alive.

Amor Towles

Sentenced to house arrest in a grand Moscow hotel, an unrepentant aristocrat must build a whole life within its walls.

Celeste Ng

A free-spirited artist and her daughter upend a picture-perfect Ohio suburb, and a custody battle splits the town in two.

Ann Patchett

Two siblings, exiled from the grand house of their childhood, spend fifty years circling back to it, and to each other.

Susanna Clarke

A gentle man lives alone in an endless labyrinth of statues and tides, keeping a journal, until he realizes he is not truly alone.

Stephen Chbosky

A shy freshman writes letters to an anonymous stranger about first friendships, first love, and the memory he cannot face.

Ian McEwan

A thirteen-year-old's single misreading of an adult scene destroys two lives, and she spends a lifetime trying to atone in the only way a writer can.

Junot Diaz

An overweight Dominican-American nerd dreams of love and sci-fi glory while a family curse born under a dictatorship stalks three generations.

George Saunders

The night after his young son's death, a grieving Abraham Lincoln visits the crypt, watched by a chorus of ghosts who cannot admit they are dead.

Mohsin Hamid

As their city collapses into war, two young lovers hear rumors of doors that open onto distant countries, and step through into the uncertain life of refugees.

Andrew Sean Greer

To dodge his ex's wedding, a failing novelist accepts every half-baked literary invitation around the world, and accidentally runs toward his own life.

Rohinton Mistry

In 1970s India during the State of Emergency, four strangers thrown together in one cramped apartment build a fragile makeshift family against the odds.

Abraham Verghese

Twin brothers, born of a secret union between a nun and a surgeon in Ethiopia and orphaned at birth, are bound and divided by medicine, betrayal, and love.

Margaret Atwood

An elderly woman recalls her sister's mysterious death, unspooling a story within a story within a pulp sci-fi tale that hides the family's darkest truth.

V.E. Schwab

A woman bargains for immortality and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets, until, three hundred years later, a boy remembers her name.

Emily Henry

A cutthroat literary agent keeps running into the brooding editor she can't stand while on a small-town vacation designed to make her the heroine of her own story.

Barbara Kingsolver

A boy born to a teenage mother in the mountains of Appalachia narrates his own hard, funny, heartbreaking survival through foster care and the opioid epidemic.

Hernan Diaz

Four nested accounts, a novel, an autobiography, a memoir, and a diary, circle the fortune of a 1920s Wall Street titan, each version rewriting who really made the money.

Abraham Verghese

Across three generations in South India, a family suffers a strange affliction, in every generation, someone drowns, and a young bride grows into the matriarch who must solve it.

R.F. Kuang

When her more successful friend dies, a struggling white author steals the dead woman's unpublished manuscript, publishes it as her own, and rides it to stardom on a rising tide of lies.