• The Best African Contemporary Writing - Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
  • The Best African Contemporary Writing - The Land Is Ours: Black Lawyers and the Birth of Constitutionalism in South Africa by Tembeka Ngcukaitobi
  • The Best African Contemporary Writing - Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa
  • The Best African Contemporary Writing - A Library to Flee by Etienne van Heerden
  • The Best African Contemporary Writing - A General Theory of Oblivion by Daniel Hahn (translator) & José Eduardo Agualusa

The Best African Contemporary Writing, recommended by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

The emphasis in new African writing is away from politics towards how the individual responds to events, says South African novelist Mphuthumi Ntabeni, author of The Broken River Tent and The Wanderers. He picks out five outstanding books of African writing, including novels that paved the way for new genres, a book of short stories from across Africa, and a work of nonfiction that he recommends to “anybody who wants to know what is happening in South Africa.”

  • Notable Novels of Fall 2023 - The Fraud by Zadie Smith
  • Notable Novels of Fall 2023 - The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut
  • Notable Novels of Fall 2023 - A Shining by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls
  • Notable Novels of Fall 2023 - My Work by Olga Ravn, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell
  • Notable Novels of Fall 2023 - The Glutton: A Novel by A. K. Blakemore

Notable Novels of Fall 2023, recommended by Cal Flyn

Outside it’s autumnal and the nights are drawing in. All the better for admiring the bright lights of publishing’s starriest season, when the shiniest baubles are released in time for the Christmas rush. Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn rounds up the most notable new novels of Fall 2023, including eagerly-awaited books from Zadie Smith and Jesmyn Ward, plus the buzziest new releases in literary fiction and novels-in-translation  

  • The Best Toni Morrison Books - The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
  • The Best Toni Morrison Books - Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
  • The Best Toni Morrison Books - Beloved by Toni Morrison
  • The Best Toni Morrison Books - Home: A Novel by Toni Morrison
  • The Best Toni Morrison Books - The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by Toni Morrison

The Best Toni Morrison Books, recommended by Marilyn Mobley

In 1993, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to American novelist Toni Morrison, “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” Here, literary scholar Marilyn Mobley—Professor Emerita of English and African American Studies at Case Western Reserve University and a former President of the Toni Morrison Society—introduces her work, from the best novel to start with to the essays she published just before her death in 2019.

  • The Best Historical Fiction: The 2023 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist - These Days by Lucy Caldwell
  • The Best Historical Fiction: The 2023 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist - I Am Not Your Eve by Devika Ponnambalam
  • The Best Historical Fiction: The 2023 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist - The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane
  • The Best Historical Fiction: The 2023 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist - Ancestry: A Novel by Simon Mawer
  • The Best Historical Fiction: The 2023 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist - The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry
  • The Best Historical Fiction: The 2023 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist - The Geometer Lobachevsky by Adrian Duncan

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2023 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist, recommended by Cal Flyn

Every year, the judges for the Walter Scott Prize highlight the best new historical fiction. In 2023, the shortlisted books include a slow-burn mystery set in colonial Australia and a thrilling new novel from the author of Fatherland. Cal Flyn, our deputy editor, takes us through the seven books that are set 60+ years in the past and yet speak to the present.

  • The Best George Eliot Books - Scenes of Clerical Life by George Eliot
  • The Best George Eliot Books - Adam Bede by George Eliot
  • The Best George Eliot Books - The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
  • The Best George Eliot Books - Middlemarch by George Eliot
  • The Best George Eliot Books - George Eliot's Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals by John Walter Cross

The Best George Eliot Books, recommended by Philip Davis

George Eliot is all but synonymous with Victorian realism; for D H Lawrence, she was the first novelist to start ‘putting all the action inside.’ Here, Philip Davis, author of The Transferred Life of George Eliot, selects the best books by or about one of the greatest novelists of all time: ‘If you want to read literature that sets out to create a holding ground for raw human material—for human struggles, difficulties, and celebrations—read George Eliot’

  • The Best Iris Murdoch Books - The Bell by Iris Murdoch
  • The Best Iris Murdoch Books - The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
  • The Best Iris Murdoch Books - A Word Child by Iris Murdoch
  • The Best Iris Murdoch Books - Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature by Iris Murdoch
  • The Best Iris Murdoch Books - The Philosopher's Pupil by Iris Murdoch

The Best Iris Murdoch Books, recommended by Miles Leeson

Iris Murdoch gained fame as a novelist, a philosopher and, perhaps most prominently of all, for her public and rapid decline (and posthumous immortalization by her husband John Bayley) after an early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. But now, a hundred years on from her birth, the attention is returning back to her work: Miles Leeson, Director of the Iris Murdoch Centre at the University of Chichester, recommends what books to read from her canon of 27 novels.

  • The Best Science Fiction of 2023: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist - Venomous Lumpsucker: A Novel by Ned Beauman
  • The Best Science Fiction of 2023: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist - The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard
  • The Best Science Fiction of 2023: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist - Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick
  • The Best Science Fiction of 2023: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist - The Anomaly by Hervé le Tellier, translated by Adriana Hunter
  • The Best Science Fiction of 2023: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist - The Coral Bones by E.J. Swift
  • The Best Science Fiction of 2023: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist - Metronome by Tom Watson

The Best Science Fiction of 2023: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist, recommended by Tom Hunter

Every year, the judges of the Arthur C Clarke Award select the best sci-fi novels of the previous twelve months. We asked prize director Tom Hunter to talk us through the six science fiction books that made the 2023 shortlist—including a space opera romance and a high-concept action thriller that has already won the most prestigious award in Francophone literature.

  • The Best Science Fiction Books About Aliens - Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
  • The Best Science Fiction Books About Aliens - Solaris by Stanisław Lem
  • The Best Science Fiction Books About Aliens - Semiosis by Sue Burke
  • The Best Science Fiction Books About Aliens - The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell
  • The Best Science Fiction Books About Aliens - Embassytown by China Miéville

The Best Science Fiction Books About Aliens, recommended by Jaime Green

Science fiction helps us work through not only the possibilities of the cosmos but also the nature of humanity itself, argues Jaime Green—science writer and author of a new book on the search for alien biology, The Possibility of Life. Here she highlights five classic works of sci-fi that explore ideas of consciousness and communication in the setting of outer space.

  • The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist - Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris
  • The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist - Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
  • The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist - The Marriage Portrait: A Novel by Maggie O'Farrell & narrated by Genevieve Gaunt
  • The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist - Pod by Laline Paull
  • The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist - Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks
  • The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist - Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist, recommended by Cal Flyn

Every year, the Women’s Prize for Fiction highlights the best novels written by women over the previous twelve months. In 2023, the six-strong Women’s Prize shortlist features the latest books by beloved bestsellers Barbara Kingsolver and Maggie O’Farrell, plus a debut novel set during the siege of Sarajevo and a book told primarily from the point of view of a dolphin.

  • The Best Counterfactual Novels - Loop by Brenda Lozano, translated by Annie McDermott
  • The Best Counterfactual Novels - Elizabeth Costello by J M Coetzee
  • The Best Counterfactual Novels - Screen Tests by Kate Zambreno
  • The Best Counterfactual Novels - Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Anne McLean
  • The Best Counterfactual Novels - These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Minna Proctor

The Best Counterfactual Novels, recommended by Catherine Lacey

Novelists often make the decision to create alternate realities—worlds that are very like, but not quite identical, to our our own. Catherine Lacey, the acclaimed novelist whose latest book Biography of X is set in a United States in which the Southern states seceded during the 20th century, talks us through the process of plotting counterfactual timelines and recommends five books that explore the slippery relation between truth, reality, and fiction.

  • The Best William Golding Books - The Inheritors by William Golding, with a foreword by Ben Okri
  • The Best William Golding Books - The Spire by William Golding, with a foreword by Benjamin Myers
  • The Best William Golding Books - Darkness Visible by William Golding, with a foreword by Nicola Barker
  • The Best William Golding Books - Rites of Passage by William Golding, with a foreword by Annie Proulx
  • The Best William Golding Books - Lord of the Flies by William Golding, with a foreword by Stephen King

The Best William Golding Books, recommended by Judy Golding

The Nobel laureate William Golding is best known for his novel Lord of the Flies, in which a group of schoolboys marooned on a desert island revert to savagery. But he was a prolific writer who produced eleven further novels, including the Booker Prize-winning Rites of Passage. Here, his daughter and manager of his literary estate Judy Golding selects five of William Golding’s key texts, including The Inheritors—the book he felt to be his best work.

  • Landmarks of Scottish Literature - The Heart of Mid-Lothian by Walter Scott
  • Landmarks of Scottish Literature - The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Landmarks of Scottish Literature - Gillespie by John MacDougall Hay
  • Landmarks of Scottish Literature - The Grampian Quartet by Nan Shepherd
  • Landmarks of Scottish Literature - Silence by James Kennaway

Landmarks of Scottish Literature, recommended by James Robertson

Scottish culture is best understood as related to, but distinct from, that of Britain or England, says the acclaimed novelist James Robertson. Here, he selects five landmark works of Scottish literature, from Sir Walter Scott’s sweeping, panoramic social novels of the 18th century, through Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, to Nan Shepherd’s beloved nature writing.

  • Forgotten Classics: The Best B-Side Books - Solaris by Stanisław Lem
  • Forgotten Classics: The Best B-Side Books - Lady Into Fox by David Garnett
  • Forgotten Classics: The Best B-Side Books - The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg
  • Forgotten Classics: The Best B-Side Books - Butcher's Crossing by John Williams
  • Forgotten Classics: The Best B-Side Books - Journey in Search of the Way by Myōdō Satomi

Forgotten Classics: The Best B-Side Books, recommended by John Plotz

New books are constantly being published. Sometimes they slip by unremarked; sometimes their impact is so enormous as to divert the flow of literature altogether. But what of those books that made a splash on arrival, but have long since disappeared from view? John Plotz, the literary scholar, has spent five years resurfacing these forgotten classics: the ‘B-side books’ that have fallen from the public consciousness.

  • The Best Philip Roth Books - Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
  • The Best Philip Roth Books - The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
  • The Best Philip Roth Books - The Counterlife by Philip Roth
  • The Best Philip Roth Books - I Married a Communist by Philip Roth
  • The Best Philip Roth Books - The Human Stain by Philip Roth

The Best Philip Roth Books, recommended by Ira Nadel

Philip Roth was one of the great contemporary American novelists. He wrote about what he saw when he looked in the mirror, even when he didn’t like it, and claimed his only real interest was writing about what made him feel uncomfortable. Roth’s literary biographer, Ira Nadel, Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia, talks us through Philip Roth’s novels and explains why they’re worth reading.

  • The Best Novellas - Train Dreams: A Novella by Denis Johnson
  • The Best Novellas - Bear by Marian Engel
  • The Best Novellas - The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns
  • The Best Novellas - A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr
  • The Best Novellas - Reunion by Fred Uhlman

The Best Novellas, recommended by Claire Fuller

The acclaimed novelist Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground, recommends five of the best novellas: short works of fiction that offer the power and intensity of a novel in little more than 100 pages. From an epic-in-miniature set in the American West to an infamous story of bestial love, these books offer short, sharp shocks of fiction that can be enjoyed over a single evening.

  • The Best Edgar Allan Poe Books - Poe: Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays by Edgar Allan Poe
  • The Best Edgar Allan Poe Books - The Detective Stories of Edgar Allan Poe: Three Tales Featuring C. Auguste Dupin by Edgar Allan Poe
  • The Best Edgar Allan Poe Books - Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography by Arthur Hobson Quinn
  • The Best Edgar Allan Poe Books - Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe by Daniel Hoffman
  • The Best Edgar Allan Poe Books - Pym: A Novel by Mat Johnson

The Best Edgar Allan Poe Books, recommended by Shawn Rosenheim

You can’t turn on a television or pass an airport bookstore without seeing the influence of America’s most generative writer, Edgar Allan Poe. He orginated true life crime and detective fiction, sci-fi and horror story tropes, and wrote unforgettable poems. Poe expert Shawn Rosenheim, a professor at Williams College, recommends where to start with Poe, as well as the best books about his influence.

  • Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Fall 2020 - Luster: A Novel by Raven Leilani
  • Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Fall 2020 - All Men Want to Know by Nina Bouraoui
  • Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Fall 2020 - Sisters: A Novel by Daisy Johnson
  • Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Fall 2020 - Jack: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson
  • Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Fall 2020 - Earthlings: A Novel by Sayaka Murata

Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Fall 2020, recommended by Cal Flyn

After coronavirus-induced chaos threw publishing schedules out of whack earlier this year, fall 2020 is shaping up to be a bumper book season. But with hundreds of new titles flooding onto the shelves, it can be hard to identify those that are most deserving of your time. Here, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn highlights some of the most anticipated new novels of the coming weeks.

  • Best Books by Black Queer Writers - The Color Purple by Alice Walker
  • Best Books by Black Queer Writers - Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
  • Best Books by Black Queer Writers - The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman
  • Best Books by Black Queer Writers - Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy: Book 1) by Marlon James
  • Best Books by Black Queer Writers - B-Boy Blues by James Earl Hardy

Best Books by Black Queer Writers, recommended by Robert Jones Jr.

The novels of James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Wallace Thurman and James Early Hardy bring the America of the last two centuries vividly to life. Marlon James brings us a fantasy trilogy set in ancient Africa. Robert Jones Jr., author of The Prophets—a love story set on a plantation in the American South—talks us through his choices of the best books by Black queer writers.

  • The Best Franz Kafka Books - The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (ed. and translated by Stanley Corngold)
  • The Best Franz Kafka Books - The Trial by Franz Kafka
  • The Best Franz Kafka Books - Franz Kafka: The Office Writings by Franz Kafka (ed. Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg, and Benno Wagner)
  • The Best Franz Kafka Books - Kafka's Selected Stories by Franz Kafka
  • The Best Franz Kafka Books - Kafka: The Early Years by Reiner Stach & Shelley Frisch (trans.)

The Best Franz Kafka Books, recommended by Stanley Corngold

“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin”—Kafka, The Metamorphosis. This is one of the most famous opening lines in all of world literature, but how ‘Kafkaesque’ was Franz Kafka? What are our misconceptions about his life and work? Professor Stanley Corngold, one of the most influential Kafka scholars, introduces us to an “athlete of anguish”.

  • Very Short Books You Can Read In A Day - The Fall by Albert Camus
  • Very Short Books You Can Read In A Day - Convenience Store Woman: A Novel by Sayaka Murata
  • Very Short Books You Can Read In A Day - The Sense of an Ending: A Novel by Julian Barnes
  • Very Short Books You Can Read In A Day - Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
  • Very Short Books You Can Read In A Day - The Flick by Annie Baker

Very Short Books You Can Read In A Day, recommended by Cal Flyn

Talked a lot of big talk about writing that novel in lockdown, or repainting the house? Us too. When it came down to it, many of us have felt too frantic to take on big projects – and that goes for our reading lives too. Here, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn recommends some very short books that might be read over the course of a day or, being small and easily surmountable, might just break a reading drought.

  • The Best Fyodor Dostoevsky Books - Lectures on Dostoevsky by Joseph Frank
  • The Best Fyodor Dostoevsky Books - Memoirs from the House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Jessie Coulson
  • The Best Fyodor Dostoevsky Books - Dostoevsky: Reminiscences by Anna Dostoevsky
  • The Best Fyodor Dostoevsky Books - The Master of Petersburg: A Novel by J M Coetzee
  • The Best Fyodor Dostoevsky Books - Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Best Fyodor Dostoevsky Books, recommended by Alex Christofi

His father had clawed his way up into the minor aristocracy, but Fyodor Dostoevsky chose to live the life of an impecunious author. He was sentenced to death, but his execution was stayed and he spent years in a Siberian labour camp instead. His books are about human compassion, but he was a difficult man who had trouble with his own personal relationships. Alex Christofi, author of a brilliant new biography of Dostoevsky, one of Russia’s greatest novelists, recommends five books to learn more about the man and his work—including the novel of which Tolstoy said he ‘didn’t know a better book in all our literature’.