Literary Fiction Ebooks
If you’re looking for some of the most beloved books in literary fiction, you’re in the right place. Great literary novels are filled with nuanced characters, intriguing themes, and powerful writing. Start reading the best literary fiction ebooks right now on your smartphone, tablet, or other device.
If you’re looking for some of the most beloved books in literary fiction, you’re in the right place. Great literary novels are filled with nuanced characters, intriguing themes, and powerful writing. Start reading the best literary fiction ebooks right now on your smartphone, tablet, or other device.
Spotlight
From “China’s foremost literary satirist” (Financial Times) comes a captivating new novel set at a religious training center in Beijing, focusing on the unlikely love story of a Buddhist nun and a Daoist priest At the Religious Training Center on the campus of Beijing’s National Politics University, disciples of China’s five main religions—Buddhism, Daoism, Protestantism, Catholicism, and Islam—gather for a year of intensive study and training. In this hallowed yet jovial atmosphere, the institute’s two youngest disciples—Yahui, a Buddhist jade nun, and Gu Mingzheng, a Daoist master—fall into a fast friendship that might bloom into something more. This year, however, the worldly Director Gong has an exciting new plan: he has organized tug-of-war competitions between the religions. The fervor of competition offers excitement for the disciples, as well as a lucrative source of fundraising, but Yahui looks on the games with distrust: her beloved mentor collapsed after witnessing one of these competitions. Gu Mingzheng, meanwhile, has his own mission at the institute, centering on his search for his unknown father. Soon it becomes clear that corruption is seeping ever more deeply into the foundation of the institute under Director Gong’s watch, and Yahui and Gu Mingzheng will be forced to ask themselves whether it is better to stay committed to an increasingly fraught faith or to return to secular life forever—and nothing less than the fate of the gods itself is at stake. Illustrated throughout with beautiful original papercuts, animated by Yan Lianke’s characteristically incisive sense of humor, Heart Sutra is a stunning and timely novel that highlights the best and worst in mankind and interrogates the costs of division.
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A Farewell to Arms Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Handmaid's Tale Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life of Pi (Illustrated): Deluxe Illustrated Edition Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Life of Pi: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Ulysses: With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Master & Margarita Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anna Karenina: Bestsellers and famous Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Luckiest Girl Alive: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Silmarillion Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Man Called Ove: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Steppenwolf: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Tattooist of Auschwitz: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Elegance of the Hedgehog Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Bee: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dutch House: A Read with Jenna Pick Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ficciones Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi) A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The House of the Spirits: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Alchemist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Anxious People: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Piranesi Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Is How It Always Is: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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The Gospel According to the New World LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2023 “The great voice of the Caribbean.” —Jury, International Booker 2023 A miracle baby is born on Easter Sunday, rumored to be the child of God. Award-winning Caribbean author Maryse Condé follows his journey in search of his origins and mission. "Throughout her four-decade literary career, the Guadeloupean writer has explored a global vision of the Black diaspora, and placed Caribbean life at the center. In the past few years, Condé has been showered with honors and accolades across the globe. The Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat sees Condé as a “giant of literature,” whose prolific work connects continents and generations. One thing is certain: Condé is finally receiving the acclaim her wide-ranging body of work deserves.” ——Anderson Tepper, The New York Times One Easter Sunday, Madame Ballandra puts her hands together and exclaims: “A miracle!” Baby Pascal is strikingly beautiful, brown in complexion, with gray-green eyes like the sea. But where does he come from? Is he really the child of God? So goes the rumor, and many signs throughout his life will cause this theory to gain ground. From journey to journey and from one community to another, Pascal sets off in search of his origins, trying to understand the meaning of his mission. Will he be able to change the fate of humanity? And what will the New World Gospel reveal? For all its beauty, vivacity, humor, and power, Maryse Condé’s latest novel is above all a work of combat. Lucid and full of conviction, Condé attests that solidarity and love remain our most extraordinary and lifesaving forces.
Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Love at Six Thousand Degrees Key Selling Points From the winner of the Akutagawa Prize, “Japan’s National Book Award” For readers of Breasts and Eggs, Heaven, and All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami, recent bestsellers and long-sellers from Europa Editions Target Readership Readers of literary fiction, literature in translation, Japanese fiction Readers of Yoko Ogawa, Fernanda Melchor, Yuko Tsashima, Mieko Kawakami, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar, Territory of Light by Yuko Tshashima
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHourglass A FEBRUARY 2023 INDIE NEXT PICK LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE A short, lyrical debut novel about love, loss, work, time, and the unquenchable desire for connection with others—for fans of Jenny Offill, Mieko Kawakami, David Szalay and Sheila Heti The second time you came, we went from bar to bar to bar. It made the city feel smaller. Like a map we were folding to the size of a stamp. We were good at that. We could have fit an entire universe inside a matchbox. Exquisitely crafted, richly imagined, and as funny as it is moving, Hourglass is an unusual and uniquely told love story. Turning time upside down, it combs the wreckage of personal heartbreak for something universal and asks what it means to lose what you love. “This book is such a sneaky head f*ck—an epic poem in an ancient style about the brutalities of modern love, a masculine interrogation of feminine heartbreak, a really beautiful way to spend an evening”—Lena Dunham
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Applicant A singular debut from “an important and radical new literary voice” (Elif Batuman), The Applicant explores with wit and brevity what it means to be an immigrant, woman, and emerging writer It’s 2017 and Leyla, a Turkish twenty-something living in Berlin is scrubbing toilets at an Alice in Wonderland-themed hostel after failing her thesis, losing her student visa, and suing her German university in a Kafkaesque attempt to reverse her failure. Increasingly distant from what used to be at arm’s reach—writerly ambitions, tight knit friendships, a place to call home—Leyla attempts to find solace in the techno beats of Berlin’s nightlife, with little success. Right as the clock winds down on the hold on her visa, Leyla meets a conservative Swedish tourist and—against her political convictions and better judgment—begins to fall in love, or something like it. Will she accept an IKEA life with the Volvo salesman and relinquish her creative dreams, or return to Turkey to her mother and sister, codependent and enmeshed, her father’s ghost still haunting their lives? While she waits for the German court’s verdict on her future, in the pages of her diary, Leyla begins to parse her unresolved past and untenable present. An indelible character at once precocious and imperiled, Leyla gives voice to the working-class and immigrant struggle to find safety, self-expression, and happiness. The Applicant is an extraordinary dissection of a liminal life between borders and identities, an original and darkly funny debut.
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Birthday Party New York Times Editors’ Choice “A real-time study in crippling self-consciousness, the fragility of normalcy, and the reality of violence.”—The New York Times Buried deep in rural France, little remains of the isolated hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, save a few houses and a curiously assembled quartet: Patrice Bergogne, inheritor of his family’s farm; his wife, Marion; their daughter, Ida; and their neighbor, Christine, an artist. While Patrice plans a surprise for his wife’s fortieth birthday, inexplicable events start to disrupt the hamlet’s quiet existence: anonymous, menacing letters, an unfamiliar car rolling up the driveway. And as night falls, strangers stalk the houses, unleashing a nightmarish chain of events. Told in rhythmic, propulsive prose that weaves seamlessly from one consciousness to the next over the course of a day, Laurent Mauvignier’s The Birthday Party is a deft unraveling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves, a gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present, written by a major contemporary French writer.
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Guest Lecture With “a voice as clear, sincere, and wry as any I’ve read in current American fiction” (Joshua Cohen), Martin Riker’s poignant and startlingly original novel asks how to foster a brave mind in anxious times, following a newly jobless academic rehearsing a speech on John Maynard Keynes for a surprising audience In a hotel room in the middle of the night, Abby, a young feminist economist, lies awake next to her sleeping husband and daughter. Anxious that she is grossly underprepared for a talk she is presenting tomorrow on optimism and John Maynard Keynes, she has resolved to practice by using an ancient rhetorical method of assigning parts of her speech to different rooms in her house and has brought along a comforting albeit imaginary companion to keep her on track—Keynes himself. Yet as she wanders with increasing alarm through the rooms of her own consciousness, Abby finds herself straying from her prepared remarks on economic history, utopia, and Keynes’s pragmatic optimism. A lapsed optimist herself, she has been struggling under the burden of supporting a family in an increasingly hostile America after being denied tenure at the university where she teaches. Confronting her own future at a time of global darkness, Abby undertakes a quest through her memories to ideas hidden in the corners of her mind—a piecemeal intellectual history from Cicero to Lewis Carroll to Queen Latifah—as she asks what a better world would look like if we told our stories with more honest and more hopeful imaginations. With warm intellect, playful curiosity, and an infectious voice, Martin Riker acutely animates the novel of ideas with a beating heart and turns one woman’s midnight crisis into the performance of a lifetime.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ghost Music From the author of the “original and electric” Braised Pork (Time), An Yu’s enchanting and contemplative novel of music and mushrooms follows a former concert pianist searching for the truth about a vanished musician For three years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. She gave up on her own career as a concert pianist many years ago, but her husband Bowen, an executive at a car company, has long rebuffed her pleas to have a child. He resists even when his mother arrives from the southwestern Chinese region of Yunnan and begins her own campaign for a grandchild. As tension in the household rises, it becomes harder for Song Yan to keep her usual placid demeanor, especially since she is troubled by dreams of a doorless room she can’t escape, populated only by a strange orange mushroom. When a parcel of mushrooms native to her mother-in-law’s province is delivered seemingly by mistake, Song Yan sees an opportunity to bond with her, and as the packages continue to arrive every week, the women stir-fry and grill the mushrooms, adding them to soups and noodles. When a letter arrives in the mail from the sender of the mushrooms, Song Yan’s world begins to tilt further into the surreal. Summoned to an uncanny, seemingly ageless house hidden in a hutong that sits in the middle of the congested city, she finds Bai Yu, a once world-famous pianist who disappeared ten years ago. A gorgeous and atmospheric novel of art and expression, grief and survival, memory and self-discovery, Ghost Music animates contemporary Beijing through the eyes of a lonely yet hopeful young woman and gives vivid color and texture to the promise of new beginnings.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No One Left to Come Looking for You: A Novel A darkly comic mystery by the author of Hark and The Ask set in the vibrant music scene of early 1990s New York City. Manhattan’s East Village, 1993. Dive bars, DIY music venues, shady weirdos, and hard drugs are plentiful. Crime is high but rent is low, luring hopeful, creative kids from sleepy suburbs around the country. One of these is Jack S., a young New Jersey rock musician. Just a few days before his band’s biggest gig, their lead singer goes missing with Jack’s prized bass, presumably to hock it to feed his junk habit. Jack’s search for his buddy uncovers a sinister entanglement of crimes tied to local real estate barons looking to remake New York City—and who might also be connected to the recent death of Jack’s punk rock mentor. Along the way, Jack encounters a cast of colorful characters, including a bewitching, quick-witted scenester who favors dressing in a nurse’s outfit, a monstrous hired killer with a devotion to both figure skating and edged weapons, a deranged if prophetic postwar novelist, and a tough-talking cop who fancies himself a retro-cool icon of the homicide squad but is harboring a surprising secret. No One Left to Come Looking for You is a page-turning suspense novel that also serves as a love letter to a bygone era of New York City where young artists could still afford to chase their dreams.
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Foster Originally published in an abridged version in the New Yorker, and considered a contemporary classic in Ireland and the UK where the Faber edition has sold over 120,000 copies, Claire Keegan’s now expanded and revised Davy Byrnes Prize-winning Foster will be published by Grove for the first time in the US in a beautiful small format hardcover edition. As with Small Things Like These, in Foster Keegan packs immense power into a slender novel. It was named one of The Times’ 50 best books of the 21st century and earned Keegan comparisons to William Trevor, Annie Proulx, and John Cheever. Small Things Like These was an international and national bestseller, selling 50,000 copies in hardcover. It received rave reviews in The Los Angeles Times, New York Times Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, People, Associated Press, and NPR, among others, and was named a best book of the year by NPR, Chicago Public Library, and Publishers Weekly. Small Things Like These has been celebrated by authors Lily King, Douglas Stuart, Hilary Mantel, and more, and was chosen by Colm Toíbín—new laureate for Irish fiction—for his first laureate book club. Keegan’s fans and peers are eager to support her new novel. Small Things Like These will remain in hardcover for another publishing cycle, enabling us to give it another boost upon Foster's publication. Foster will not only draw admirers of Keegan’s work, but will also attract fans of Max Porter, William Trevor, Anne Enright, Colm Toibin, and Elizabeth Strout. The film adaptation of Foster, An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl), has been selected as the Opening Film of this year’s Dublin International Film Festival. Grove published Keegan’s debut collection, Antarctica, in 2001 to great acclaim. It was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and recipient of the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the William Trevor Prize (awarded by Trevor), and the Martin Healy Award. It received rave reviews in Esquire, the Boston Globe, the NYTBR and the LA Times (“Reading these stories is like coming upon work of Ann Beattie or Raymond Carver at the start of their careers.") Her second collection, 2007’s Walk the Blue Fields, was published in Black Cat to a huge critical reception (see quotes in full below) and went on to win The Edge Hill Prize for the strongest collection published in The British Isles. Given the great success of Small Things, we expect huge attention for this new edition of Foster.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
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