The best fiction doesn’t have to be straightforward, and some novels contain clever devices to make the reader complicit in the story itself. Arianna Reiche, lecturer in metafiction at City, University of London, recommends five gamified novels that subvert our ideas of how fiction works.

The story of America is not one of a manageable unified nation, says novelist and critic David Hering. It may, however, be the story of America's dream — which is why many of the best American novels have a distinctly dreamlike quality. He picks out five of the best American novels of the 20th century, from 1905 through to 1987.

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 Gothic puts flesh on the bones of our darkest fears, British novelist Sarah Perry tells Five Books. Here, she chooses five favourite novels in this 'irresistible' genre.

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.

Seventy years on from its initial publication, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is just as resonant in today's era of misinformation and fake news as it was in the incipient Cold War era. D J Taylor, author of a prizewinning biography of Orwell, takes us through the extraordinary impact of the author's fiction and reportage.

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.

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’

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, more than a century 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.

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.