Literary Fiction

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Wolf Hall

By Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall reimagines the rise of Thomas Cromwell, the statesman who moves from Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s household into the center of Henry VIII’s government. Beginning with Cromwell’s violent childhood and advancing through the political crisis surrounding Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the novel follows a gifted outsider as he turns legal knowledge, commercial experience, memory, and personal alliances into power. Mantel presents Tudor politics not as a settled sequence of famous events but as an unstable present in which succession, religion, money, family loyalty, and royal desire continually alter what is possible.

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The Kite Runner

By Khaled Hosseini

The Kite Runner is a first-person novel about Amir, a privileged boy growing up in Kabul, and Hassan, the Hazara son of a servant in Amir’s household. Their intimacy is genuine but structurally unequal: affection, dependence, ethnicity, social rank, and Amir’s desire for his father’s approval all shape what the boys can ask of one another. After Amir witnesses a brutal assault and fails to help Hassan, fear and shame lead him into a further betrayal. The narrative follows the long consequences of that failure. Political upheaval drives Amir and his father from Afghanistan to the United States, where their social positions change dramatically. Amir builds an adult life in California, but migration does not erase his memory or responsibility. A summons from the past eventually returns him to an Afghanistan transformed by war and Taliban rule, where an attempt to help Hassan’s son becomes both a rescue mission and a test of whether remorse can produce meaningful action. Although major ev…

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A Guardian and a Thief

By Megha Majumdar

A Guardian and a Thief is a 2025 novel by Indian author Megha Majumdar, set in a near-future Kolkata buckling under climate catastrophe. Over seven days, two families become entangled: Ma, who manages a homeless shelter and is days from emigrating to the United States with her elderly father and toddler daughter, and Boomba, a young man at her shelter who breaks into their home seeking food and inadvertently steals their climate visas. As their desperate paths intersect and diverge, the novel interrogates the moral boundaries of survival, the ferocity of parental love, and the human toll of a collapsing climate. Majumdar's spare, compressed prose moves with the urgency of a thriller while sustaining the moral ambiguity characteristic of literary fiction, grounding a global crisis in the intimate stakes of two households.

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Half of a Yellow Sun

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Half of a Yellow Sun is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2006 novel about Nigeria's 1960s: the hopeful years after independence, the ethnic violence that followed, and the Biafran secession and war of 1967 to 1970. Instead of a general's-eye account, it follows five people: a village boy turned houseboy, a radical university lecturer, his educated partner, her formidable twin sister, and a shy English writer. As politics reshape their love affairs, loyalties and class assumptions, famine and displacement strip away comfort. As historical fiction it gives a human scale to a conflict many readers know only through photographs of starving children, and it remains one of the most widely recognised novels about the war.

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The Book of Disappearance

By Ibtisam Azem , Sinan Antoon

The Book of Disappearance is a speculative novel by Palestinian writer Ibtisam Azem, published in Arabic in 2014 and rendered into English by Sinan Antoon in 2019. Set over a single forty-eight-hour period, the novel imagines a world in which every Palestinian Arab within Israel vanishes without explanation. The story unfolds through two perspectives: the diary of Alaa Assaf, a Palestinian man in Jaffa who grieves his grandmother and wrestles with a city whose name has been overwritten, and the account of Ariel Levy, an Israeli journalist and neighbor who discovers Alaa's empty apartment and slowly begins to inhabit it. What begins as a story about mass absence becomes a meditation on presence, memory, ownership, and the politics of erasure. The novel operates between literary fiction and speculative fiction, pressing directly on questions of Palestinian identity, colonial memory, and what it means to be rendered invisible.

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The Pelican Child

By Joy Williams

The Pelican Child is Joy Williams's seventh collection of short fiction, published by Alfred A. Knopf in November 2025. The twelve stories, most previously published in literary journals, gather Williams's signature fusion of the mundane and the mythic: talking dogs at a writers' retreat, a Slavic folkloric figure meeting John James Audubon, twin sisters plotting ecological retribution in Wyoming, and a man's mother receiving his terminal diagnosis with a koan. The collection is unified by its preoccupation with mortality, the slow unraveling of the natural world, and the uncanny quality that hides inside ordinary American life. Characters drift through a diminished landscape where care homes replace family photos with stock images, where lakes are drying, and where the boundary between the living and the dead remains stubbornly porous. The book was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award and received broadly favorable critical attention.

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On the Calculation of Volume I

By Solvej Balle , Barbara J. Haveland

Tara Selter, a rare-book dealer, is travelling for work when 18 November begins to repeat. Unlike the people around her, she remembers every iteration, and she keeps ageing. Solvej Balle's novel, the first instalment of a planned seven-volume cycle, is Tara's written account of living outside ordinary time, including the strain on her marriage to Thomas, who wakes each morning knowing nothing of what came before. It treats the time loop less as a puzzle than as a way to examine solitude, attention, language and the physical world. Barbara J. Haveland's English version was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, which makes it a natural starting point for readers new to translated fiction.

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Death Comes for the Archbishop

By Willa Cather

Willa Cather's 1927 narrative follows Jean Marie Latour, a French priest sent to organize the Catholic church in newly American New Mexico, and his friend and vicar Joseph Vaillant. Loosely modeled on the real Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Father Joseph Machebeuf, the book unfolds as a sequence of journeys, portraits and legends rather than a tightly plotted story. Its subject is the slow work of building faith, friendship and institutions across a landscape shaped by Pueblo, Navajo, Hispanic and European presences. Often counted among the major works of American historical fiction, it is valued for its restrained style, its sense of place and its quiet reflection on a life's work and its ending.

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