This Collider feature rounds up what it considers the six best novels published since 2020, arguing that literary fiction since the pandemic has had to compete with an unusually turbulent reality — isolation, political division, economic anxiety and rapid technological change. Rather than tackling these themes head-on, the author argues the standout novels used inventive structures and voices to make that instability feel personal, with family sagas and long friendships used as vehicles for exploring wider societal fractures.

Topping the visible entries is Paul Murray's "The Bee Sting", a Booker Prize-shortlisted saga about an Irish family unravelling amid business collapse and buried secrets, praised for its shifting perspectives and dark humour. Also featured is Gabrielle Zevin's "Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow", which follows two video-game designers across three decades of creative partnership and won Goodreads' 2022 fiction award, and James McBride's "The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store", which opens with a 1972 skeleton discovery and traces a Black and Jewish immigrant community in Pennsylvania. The article text provided is incomplete, so the remaining three titles on the list are not detailed here.