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Fiction

Made-up people having real problems. Our fiction coverage leans toward novels from roughly the last decade that people still argue about, and every review here comes with a tweet-sized verdict.

Colson Whitehead · 2019The Nickel BoysWhitehead tells the story of a Jim Crow reform school so calmly that the anger creeps up on you, then moves in and stays.

Claire Keegan · 2021Small Things Like TheseA coal merchant, a convent and one cold Irish Christmas: Keegan packs more moral nerve into a hundred-odd pages than most writers manage in six hundred.

Gabrielle Zevin · 2022Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and TomorrowA love story with almost no romance, a gaming novel for people who have never held a controller, and the best book about creative partnerships in years.

Barbara Kingsolver · 2022Demon CopperheadDickens moves to a trailer in southwest Virginia, swaps the workhouse for foster care and OxyContin, and somehow keeps the jokes.

Kazuo Ishiguro · 2021Klara and the SunThe most tender book ever narrated by an appliance, and the reason you'll say thank you to your smart speaker for at least a week.

Brit Bennett · 2020The Vanishing HalfTwo twins, one secret, four decades and a fictional Louisiana town obsessed with skin tone: a family saga that reads like a page-turner and argues like an essay.

George Saunders · 2017Lincoln in the BardoA ghost story told by a graveyard full of chatterboxes that turns, somewhere around page fifty, into the most moving book about grief we know.

Sally Rooney · 2018Normal PeopleTwo clever Irish kids who could fix everything with one honest conversation, and a novel that makes you watch them not have it for four years.

Reading listIf you liked The Nickel Boys: 8 books to read nextMore Whitehead, a Mississippi road trip with a ghost, and other novels about institutions that fail children and the people who outlast them.

Reading listNovels under 200 pages worth your weekendShort books with long tails: eight novels you can finish between Friday night and Sunday lunch, and keep thinking about for weeks.