Best fiction reads of 15 years (in no particular order)
Discover the best fiction reads of the last 15 years in this curated list of must-read books. Explore top-rated novels across genres for your next literary adventure.
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Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
The story of Saleem Sinal, born precisely at midnight, August 15, 1947, the moment India became independent. Saleem's life parallels the history of his nation.
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The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An affluent Indian family is forever changed by one fateful day in 1969, from the author of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness “[The God of Small Things] offers such magic, mystery, and sadness that, literally, this reader turned the last page and decided to reread it. Immediately. It’s that haunting.”—USA Today Compared favorably to the works of Faulkner and Dickens, Arundhati Roy’s modern classic is equal parts powerful family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama. The seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel see their world shaken irrevocably by the arrival of their beautiful young cousin, Sophie. It is an event that will lead to an illicit liaison and tragedies accidental and intentional, exposing “big things [that] lurk unsaid” in a country drifting dangerously toward unrest. Lush, lyrical, and unnerving, The God of Small Things is an award-winning landmark that started for its author an esteemed career of fiction and political commentary that continues unabated.
![All the King's Men [2006 Movie Tie-In Edition] Cover](https://ec2.images-amazon.com/images/P/0156031043.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
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A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
by Marina Lewycka
Nominated for the Man Booker Prize “A charming comedy of eros . . . A ride that, despite the bumps and curves in the road, never feels anything less than jaunty.” —Los Angeles Times “Charming, poignantly funny.” —The Washington Post Book World 'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.' Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must aside a lifetime of feuding to save their émigré engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of Western wealth. But the sisters' campaign to oust Valentina unearths family secrets, uncovers fifty years of Europe's darkest history and sends them back to roots they'd much rather forget . . .
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Don Quixote
by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Don Quixote has become so entranced reading tales of chivalry that he decides to turn knight errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, these exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray—he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants—Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together-and together they have haunted readers' imaginations for nearly four hundred years. With its experimental form and literary playfulness, Don Quixote has been generally recognized as the first modern novel. This Penguin Classics edition, with its beautiful new cover design, includes John Rutherford's masterly translation, which does full justice to the energy and wit of Cervantes's prose, as well as a brilliant critical introduction by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarriá.
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Modern Classics Ulysses
by James Joyce
'Everybody knows now that Ulysses is the greatest novel of the century' Anthony Burgess, Observer Following the events of one single day in Dublin, the 16th June 1904, and what happens to the characters Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly, Ulysses is a monument to the human condition. It has survived censorship, controversy and legal action, and even been deemed blasphemous, but remains an undisputed modernist classic: ceaselessly inventive, garrulous, funny, sorrowful, vulgar, lyrical and ultimately redemptive. It confirms Joyce's belief that literature 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'. 'The most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape' T. S. Eliot 'Intoxicating ... a towering work, in its word play surpassing even Shakespeare' Guardian
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Chance
by Joseph Conrad
Chance was Conrad's most popular book. It tells the story of Flora de Barral, the abandoned daughter of a bankrupt tycoon, who struggles to achieve dignity and happiness. The revised edition features a new text (the English first edition), revised notes, and a new bibliography and chronology.
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The Sea, the Sea
by Iris Murdoch
Winner of the Booker Prize—a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a playwright as he composes his memoirs Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors-some real, some spectral-that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
