The Best Fiction Books

Teachers play an important role in our educational and emotional development. But we have a complex relationship with them: one marked by firm boundaries and an unequal power dynamic. Here, novelist and former schoolmaster David Hargreaves discusses five classic works of fiction that portray teachers walking this line with varying degrees of success.

Books are made of trees and sometimes they're also about trees. Best-selling author Tracy Chevalier picks the five best trees in fiction.

The award-winning writer recommends the best books on friendship, the theme of her latest novel Animals.

Autofiction is writing that blurs the boundaries between autobiography and fiction. The writer of Trans: A Memoir, Juliet Jacques, picks her top five examples of the genre.

The biographer and editor of John Berger reveals how Berger's self-characterisation as a storyteller is visible across the numerous genres he writes in.

The best books are the ones that tell great stories, says bestselling author and former British politician Jeffrey Archer. Here, he shares some of his favourites, popular novels that went down well with readers but are sometimes still looked down on by the literary establishment.

Aristotle tells us that all politics starts in the family, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the infamously fraught relationship between mother and daughter. Here, the novelist, playwright and poet Deborah Levy chooses five books – or rather, four books and one film – that explore motherhood.

Ruth Wisse, Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Comparative Literature Emerita at Harvard and author of No Joke: Making Jewish Humour, identifies Tevye the Dairyman as the first standup comic and Sigmund Freud as Jewish humour's greatest analyst.

The Soviet writer bore witness to the horrors of Russia's World War Two and the Shoah — and deserves a place in literary history, says scholar Maxim D Shrayer. He recommends the best books by and about Vasily Grossman.

Warnings about the future of society contained in novels such as Nineteen Eighty-Four may seem less important since the fall of the Soviet Union, but they are all too relevant to China today, argues the Chinese writer