The Best Fiction Books

Samuel Beckett remains one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century. Ruthlessly experimental, his plays, novels, and poems represent a sustained attack on the realist tradition. Dr Mark Nixon looks at the mutating nature of Beckett's literary style and explains why he didn't choose Waiting for Godot.

A century ago, the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—became independent. This year, 2018, we highlight five of the best works of Baltic literature recently translated into English. Baltic literature expert Jayde Will breaks each of them down, and introduces us to an area of the world with a vibrant literary culture too often overlooked.

When it was published on December 19th, 1843, Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol was an instant classic. Oxford Professor of English Literature Robert Douglas-Fairhurst runs through the best of Dickens's prolific writings about Christmas.

Looking for the best novels of the year? Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy at New York University and chair of the 2018 Man Booker Prize for fiction, gives an in-depth breakdown of the six books that made this year's shortlist, and reflects on why the novel as a form is stronger than ever.

The Odyssey has been constantly rewritten by centuries of writers, but like so much of Greek myth, it's always already open to revising its own narrative. Emily Wilson, Professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania and the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English, recommends the best books to read after (or alongside) the Ancient Greek epic, and offers sage wisdom about both translating ancient epics and why everyone can learn from the Odyssey today.

All writers draw from lived experience, but today's most exciting experimental writers aren't afraid to mine theirs explicitly. Here, the acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing – author of Crudo and The Lonely City – discusses five works of 'autofiction' that have influenced her.

A sense of displacement is at the heart of many of our greatest works of literature. Here Vanity Fair travel editor Michelle Jana Chan discusses five brilliant novels dealing with this theme that influenced her debut Song.

Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room, which has been shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, discusses the five books that have most influenced her writing, from Dostoyevsky to Marguerite Duras. She muses on the question of what fiction can offer: "A novel itself, if it is good, and effective at whatever its particular aesthetic and philosophical aim is, can answer the question best, so that a novelist doesn’t have to."

Canadian author Esi Edugyan, whose novel Washington Black is shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, picks five books that have inspired her novels, and shares wisdom on what it means to read fiction today

"That’s what writing is: a struggle with oneself." Scottish poet Robin Robertson—author of the verse novel The Long Take, shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize—lists the five works that have most influenced his writing, from Ulysses to Heaney.