Literary fiction
Every literary fiction author we cover, with each series in the right reading order.
Literary fiction leans on character and craft — the kind of writing that stays with you after the last page. Where these authors build linked works, the order is here.
Taylor Jenkins Reid
Before Taylor Jenkins Reid became a novelist known for contemporary fiction that explores love, ambition, and the versions of ourselves...
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Delia Owens
Delia Owens is an American author and wildlife scientist who won the John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing before turning...
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Paula Hawkins
Paula Hawkins is a Zimbabwean-born author who writes thrillers. She lived and worked in Zimbabwe for many years before moving...
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Pierce Brown
Pierce Brown is an American author who writes young adult fantasy novels, best known for the Red Rising series that...
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Celeste Ng
Celeste Ng is an American novelist whose domestic dramas explore family secrets, identity, and the fault lines of community. Born...
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Mary Kubica
Mary Kubica is an American suspense author who explores how ordinary lives fracture under the weight of secrets. She built...
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Evie Woods
Evie Woods is an Irish author who writes historical fiction and fantasy novels laced with magical realism, working from an...
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Tara Westover
Tara Westover is a historian and memoirist who writes about the tension between self-invention and family loyalty. She grew up...
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Laura Dave
Laura Dave is an American author whose novels have been translated into forty languages and sold millions of copies worldwide....
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Tana French
Tana French is an American-Irish novelist and theater actress who brings her training in character and tension to psychological mystery....
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Gabrielle Zevin
What happens when a writer understands both the architecture of story and the ache of human connection? Gabrielle Zevin happens....
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Donna Tartt
Donna Tartt is an American novelist who became a literary sensation in 1992 with The Secret History, a debut that...
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Maggie O’Farrell
Maggie O’Farrell, an Irish author, writes fiction and historical fiction novels. Her novel Hamnet won the 2020 Women’s Prize for...
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Jane Harper
Jane Harper is an Australian author who writes crime novels. She was born in Manchester, UK, but her family moved...
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Khaled Hosseini
Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan-American author and physician who turned personal displacement into universal stories. He practiced medicine for ten...
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Ann Napolitano
Ann Napolitano is an American novelist who writes literary fiction that excavates grief, family, and what it means to survive...
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Emily Bleeker
Emily Bleeker is an American author of psychological thrillers and women's fiction. Bleeker discovered her passion for writing after introducing...
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A.J. Finn
A.J. Finn—the pen name of former publishing editor Dan Mallory—burst onto the thriller scene in 2018 with The Woman in...
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James McBride
James McBride is an American author and musician who writes historical fiction and nonfiction. He grew up in Brooklyn, New...
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Gillian McAllister
Gillian McAllister is a British novelist who writes thrillers that place ordinary people in impossible moral traps. Raised in Tamworth,...
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Cara Hunter
Cara Hunter is an English author who writes the DI Adam Fawley series of crime novels. She lives in Oxford,...
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Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara is an American novelist, journalist, and travel writer who has built a career spanning fiction and editorial work....
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Natalie Barelli
Natalie Barelli is an Australian author who writes psychological thrillers, a genre she has made her own with books like...
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Sally Thorne
Sally Thorne is an Australian author of romantic comedies. By day, she navigates the world of funding submissions and contract...
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M.L. Stedman
M.L. Stedman is an Australian author who has also published short stories in anthologies. She began writing in 1997, seeking...
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Markus Zusak
Markus Zusak is an Australian author who writes young adult novels and children's books. Growing up in Sydney, Zusak became...
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Maddie Dawson
Maddie Dawson is an American novelist who writes women's fiction that excavates the emotional truths buried in relationships, regrets, and...
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Lily King
Lily King is an American novelist who writes literary fiction that probes the friction between ambition, desire, and the human...
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David Nicholls
David Nicholls is a British novelist and screenwriter who reached readers worldwide with One Day, his 2009 novel about two...
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Petra Durst-Benning
Petra Durst-Benning is a German author of historical fiction. Her novels, including the Glassblower Trilogy and Century Trilogy series, have...
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Sarah Penner
Sarah Penner is an American author who writes historical fiction. Penner traded the ledgers of corporate finance for the shadowed...
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Justin Cronin
Justin Cronin is an American author of horror and science fiction. Raised in New England, he is a graduate of...
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Wally Lamb
Wally Lamb is an American novelist whose fiction draws on the small-town Connecticut landscape where he grew up. Born and...
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Ashley Audrain
Ashley Audrain is a Canadian author whose debut novel, The Push, introduced readers to a psychological drama about a woman...
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Adam Mitzner
Adam Mitzner is an American legal thriller writer who made his debut in 2011 with A Conflict of Interest, a...
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Jean M. Auel
Jean M. Auel is an American novelist known for her Earth's Children series, a set of prehistoric fiction novels that...
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Gilly Macmillan
Gilly Macmillan is an English author who writes crime fiction, mystery, and suspense novels. She grew up in Swindon, Wiltshire,...
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Tracy Rees
Tracy Rees is a Welsh author who writes historical fiction, women's fiction, and romance and became the first winner of...
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William P. Young
William P. Young is a Canadian novelist who writes suspense fiction that wrestles with faith, loss, and forgiveness. Raised among...
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Harper Lee
Harper Lee was an American novelist from Monroeville, Alabama, the daughter of a former newspaper editor and lawyer. She was...
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Stephen Chbosky
Stephen Chbosky is an American novelist and screenwriter who gave a generation its defining coming-of-age story with The Perks of...
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Edward Rutherfurd
Edward Rutherfurd, the pen name of Francis Edward Wintle, writes historical fiction that spans centuries. He began his career after...
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Laurie Frankel
Laurie Frankel is an American author who writes novels, teaches writing, and has a background in gender studies. She made...
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Sofía Segovia
Sofía Segovia is a Mexican novelist who reached international readers with The Murmur of Bees, a book that won recognition...
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Maria Semple
Maria Semple is an American novelist who brings the sharp comedic timing of a television writer to fiction that is...
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Jenny Lawson
Jenny Lawson is an American author and blogger known for her candid explorations of mental illness through dark humor and...
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Ottessa Moshfegh
Ottessa Moshfegh is an American novelist who writes dark, psychologically unsettling fiction about characters who live on the margins. Born...
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John J. Gobbell
John J. Gobbell writes naval thrillers steeped in the authenticity only a former Navy weapons officer can deliver. He served...
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Noah Hawley
Noah Hawley is an American author of literary fiction. He is also an Emmy, Golden Globe, PEN, Critics’ Choice, and...
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Diane Setterfield
Diane Setterfield is an English novelist who writes literary gothic fiction, and she made her name in 2006 with The...
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