15 Literary Fiction Books for Beginners, Easiest First

Keiko has worked the same shop for eighteen years. She knows the sound the door makes when a customer wants cigarettes, she copies her speech patterns from colleagues, and she is fine. Everyone around her is not fine about it: her sister, her friends, her parents all keep waiting for her to want a husband and a career. The book is under 200 pages, it is funny in a way that sneaks up on you, and it is quietly brutal about the scripts we hand people and then punish them for refusing.

Connell is popular and poor, Marianne is rich and friendless, and in school they pretend not to know each other in public. Then they both go to Dublin and the power between them flips. Rooney writes without quotation marks, which sounds like a gimmick and is not: it pulls the dialogue and the thinking into one stream, so you catch what a character means and what they actually manage to say at the same moment. The plot is small on purpose. The misunderstandings are the plot.

Bill Furlong delivers coal and timber in New Ross in 1985, has five daughters, and is the sort of man who does not make trouble. Then he opens a shed door at the convent. That is nearly the whole plot in 128 pages, and yet it is one of the most complete books I have read, because Keegan spends her word count on the exact texture of a small life: the ledger, the cold hands, the wife who wants him to leave it alone. The last page stops where a lesser book would keep going.

The narrator sits in a coffee house and remembers: the ant-infested small house, the father's job, the uncle's spice business that suddenly makes everyone money, the new address, the wife who asks the wrong questions. It is around 100 pages in Srinath Perur's English and it moves like a short story that will not stop widening. The title is a nonsense phrase the family uses for something tangled beyond fixing, which is also a fair description of what money does to them.

Changez is a Princeton graduate with a valuation job in Manhattan and a complicated love for a grieving woman, and then September 11 happens and the city looks at his beard differently. The whole novel is his side of a conversation in a Lahore market, so you never hear the American speak, only Changez responding to him. Under 200 pages, and the tension is not in the politics but in the question of what exactly is going on at that table as the light goes.

Tony Webster is comfortable, divorced, mildly pleased with himself, and telling you about school friends and a girlfriend from forty years ago. Then a letter arrives and the past starts moving. It is about 150 pages and the first half feels like a mild memoir, which is the trap: Barnes is letting you get used to Tony's account before he shows you what Tony left out. I re-read the opening twenty pages the moment I finished, which almost never happens to me.

A couple in Boston use a nightly power cut to confess things they could not say with the lights on. A tour guide in Konark decides his passenger's secret means something about him. A young wife in a Massachusetts flat cooks fish and cannot drive. Lahiri writes plainly, which is deceptive, because the stories run on things characters notice and refuse to mention. Nine of them, none longer than an evening, and the good ones stay with you for years.

Sam and Sadie meet as children in a hospital games room, meet again at university, and build a studio that makes them famous. The book covers three decades, moving between Los Angeles, Cambridge and the inside of the games themselves, including one chapter that takes place in a world one character built. It is long for this stage of the list, around 400 pages, but it reads fast because Zevin writes friendship with the intensity most novels reserve for romance.

A photographer and a dancer meet in a pub, become friends, and take a long time to admit what it is. Nelson writes the whole thing in the second person, so the book keeps saying you, and it moves in the rhythm of the music it keeps naming. Around 150 pages. What makes it more than a love story is the second thread: what it does to a man's body to be watched, stopped and searched by police in his own city, and what that fear does to his ability to be held.

Stevens has served Darlington Hall for decades and is now driving to visit a former housekeeper on what he insists is staff business. Along the way he recounts dinners, protocols, his father's death during an important evening, and his employer's politics in the 1930s. He never once admits what any of it cost him. The voice is formal and unhurried, and once you tune into it, the gap between what Stevens reports and what actually happened becomes almost unbearable.

William Stoner is sent to university to study agriculture, sits in a compulsory literature class, and quietly changes course. What follows is his whole life at a Missouri university, told straight, without irony and without any attempt to make it larger than it is. It should be dull. Instead it is the book I have pressed on the most people, because Williams treats an ordinary life with the seriousness usually reserved for kings, and by the last page you understand your own father differently.

Yeong-hye empties the fridge one morning and will not explain herself. The novel is told in three parts by her husband, her brother-in-law and her sister, so you only ever see her from outside, the way her family sees her, which is the engine of the whole thing. It is short and it gets progressively stranger and more physical, moving from a bad marriage to an art project to a hospital. Unsettling is the right word, and the discomfort is the argument.

The murder is announced in the opening sentence, so the book is not a mystery about what happens but an investigation into how it was allowed to. A narrator returns decades later and interviews everyone: the bride returned to her family, the brothers who advertised their plan all night, the cook, the priest, the mayor. It is around 120 pages, built like a case file, and it is the least intimidating way into a writer most people are told to approach through a 400 page family saga.

Warwickshire, the 1580s. A Latin tutor marries a strange, self-possessed woman who keeps bees and knows plants, and they have three children. One of them dies of plague at eleven. O'Farrell never names the father, who is away in London for most of it, and gives the book to Agnes instead. There is a chapter that follows a flea from Alexandria to England that I still think about, and a grief section in the last third that is as exact as anything I have read on the subject.

A widow taking in tailors to survive, two men from a village who left caste violence behind, and a student boarder. Mistry gives them a stretch of ordinary life together, food, jokes, rent arguments, and then the state arrives. It is 800 pages and the first 300 are warm enough that you relax, which is the design. Nobody who finishes this book forgets it, and a fair number of readers put it down two-thirds through and never pick it up again.