The Best Fiction Books

Paris in the 1920s was a creative melting pot, the haunt of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce. The Yale English professor gives us a feel for what it was like to be there

F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, set during a hedonistic zenith before the Great Depression, has fresh appeal today as we face down our own crisis, says American literature professor Sarah Churchwell, author of a biography of The Great Gatsby. She talks us through books to better understand the novel, its author and the era it was set in.

The celebrated Swedish crime-writing duo take turns to recommend gripping and grisly Scandinavian thrillers, as well as to tell us about visiting prison – and being in it

Writers in China are afraid to criticise the state and society, says London-based author Ma Jian. From the 3rd century BC to 2008, these five exceptional works show how it’s done.

The acclaimed author recommends the most exciting new writing out of India and South Asia, including accounts of 9/11 from a Pakistani perspective and an emigré's return to an unfamiliar Bangladesh.

Who read Byron in his time? How much did a copy of Wordsworth cost? The scholar guides us through the astonishing history of reading in the Romantic period of English literature

Do you have to be cruel to be comedic? It often helps, says bestselling humour writer, Andy Borowitz. He picks his favourite comic novels.

Novelist Tim Lott, whose autobiographical book Under the Same Stars lays bare a dysfunctional relationship with his brother, tells us about love and rivalry among siblings – and, from Cain and Abel on, the dark, even murderous, impulses that can be engendered between them.

In Russia, it’s often fallen to writers to challenge conventions and speak the truth, says the translator and biographer Rosamund Bartlett. She makes a personal selection of some of the most exhilarating Russian short fiction.

Modernism is about form more than content, says literary scholar and critic Alexandra Harris, author of Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper. She tells us about the history of the modernist movement, and picks five books that exemplify or explain it.