Literary Fiction

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A Farewell to Arms

By Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway's 1929 novel follows Frederic Henry, an American lieutenant driving ambulances for the Italian army in the First World War. Wounded at the front, he is nursed in Milan by Catherine Barkley, an English nurse, and what begins as a casual flirtation becomes the central commitment of his life. When the Italian line collapses at Caporetto, Frederic is swept into a chaotic retreat and makes a decision that cuts him off from the army. The couple's flight toward Switzerland and a fragile private peace gives the book its second half. Written in plain, restrained prose, it is a war novel, a love story and a study of how people absorb loss. It remains one of the classic novels to read for anyone curious about modern American fiction and the literature of 1914–1918.

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The Most

By Jessica Anthony

Jessica Anthony's The Most is a short, tightly built novel set on a single Sunday, November 3, 1957, in Newark, Delaware. Kathleen Beckett, a former tennis prodigy turned suburban housewife, skips church, puts on an old red swimsuit and lowers herself into her apartment complex's empty pool, where she stays. Over roughly eight hours, the book moves between Kathleen, her insurance-salesman husband Virgil, their sons and the people around them, while the Soviet satellite carrying the dog Laika circles overhead. What starts as a small act of defiance opens onto the compromises, secrets and unspoken ambitions inside a mid-century marriage. It was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction and suits readers who want compact, precise historical fiction.

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North Sun

Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther

By Ethan Rutherford

North Sun is Ethan Rutherford's first novel. It follows the whaleship Esther, which leaves New Bedford in 1878, when American whaling is in decline and the oceans have been hunted close to empty. Captain Arnold Lovejoy takes the ship north toward the Chukchi Sea. He has a private errand for the wealthy family that owns the vessel, and that errand sits alongside the ordinary work of killing whales. The book begins as a recognizable sea story, then slowly slides into stranger, more mythic territory. Rutherford writes in short, lyrical chapters and uses period detail to ask what extraction costs the natural world and the men sent to do it. As historical fiction it is unusual: grounded in real industry and then deliberately unsettled. It was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction.

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Yr Dead

By Sam Sax , Rita Bullwinkel

Yr Dead is the first novel by poet Sam Sax. It is set in the interval between the moment Ezra, a 27-year-old queer Jewish New Yorker, sets themself on fire at a 2016 protest outside Trump Tower and the moment Ezra dies. Instead of a linear plot, the book moves through short vignettes: a Jewish childhood, a mother who vanishes, lovers and friends, a college reunion full of ghosts, and the imagined lives of ancestors in the old country. Sax uses this structure to ask how inherited memory, diasporic belonging, desire and political despair combine to shape one life. Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction, this debut novel is formally inventive, emotionally heavy and best approached with care.

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Heart Lamp

Selected Stories

By Banu Mushtaq , Deepa Bhasthi

Heart Lamp is a selection of twelve stories by the Kannada-language writer Banu Mushtaq, translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi. The stories were first published between 1990 and 2023. They follow Muslim women, girls and their families in Karnataka, southern India, as they deal with marriage, property, money, motherhood, religious authority and neighbourhood gossip. Mushtaq is also a lawyer and activist. She handles these pressures with anger, irony and tenderness rather than lecturing. In 2025 the book became the first short story collection, and the first work translated from Kannada, to win the International Booker Prize. Readers looking for translated fiction or short story collections will find a close, dryly funny account of domestic power struggles. It also shows the solidarity that sometimes pushes back against them.

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Early Sobrieties

By Michael Deagler

Early Sobrieties is Michael Deagler's first novel, published in 2024. It follows Dennis Monk, a 26-year-old seven months into recovery from alcoholism. His family has pushed him out of the Pennsylvania suburbs, and he drifts between friends' couches in South Philadelphia over one uncertain summer. The book treats early sobriety as an awkward, funny and often unresolved stretch of life rather than a triumphant ending. Dennis has to rebuild friendships, face the people who remember his drinking, and work out what adulthood might look like. The novel won the 2025 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, and readers looking for debut novels about recovery will find an unusually specific, comic and humane example.

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The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

A Novel

By Taylor Jenkins Reid

Reclusive screen legend Evelyn Hugo summons little-known journalist Monique Grant to record the truth behind her celebrated career and seven marriages. Moving from 1950s Hollywood to the present, Evelyn describes how ambition, sexuality, reinvention, and carefully managed publicity shaped both her stardom and her private life. Her account gradually reveals that the husbands named in the title were only part of the story: the defining relationship of her life was one she could not safely acknowledge in public. Meanwhile, Monique must determine why Evelyn selected her and what to do with a confession that may transform her own understanding of family, success, and moral responsibility.

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The Song of Achilles

By Madeline Miller

Patroclus, an exiled and unexceptional young prince, is sent to the court of King Peleus, where he forms an intense bond with Peleus’s gifted son, Achilles. Friendship becomes love as they train under the centaur Chiron and grow toward the futures prescribed by family, prophecy, and heroic culture. When the Greek kings sail against Troy, Achilles pursues the glory that may immortalize his name but shorten his life, while Patroclus follows out of devotion. Narrating from the margins of epic fame, Patroclus reveals the private costs behind the public legend: captivity, pride, political rivalry, and the transformation of human beings into instruments of war. Miller’s novel reimagines the Trojan cycle as both a coming-of-age story and a tragedy about love confronting mortality.