what is the best realistic fiction book?

Question

In your opion

Answer 1

the Shopaholic series of books by Sophie Kinsella - when I read the first two I thought it was a biography of my own life

Answer 2

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

It's very short, spare, and affecting - around a hundred pages of one guy's day in a gulag camp in the Soviet Union. He's spent a long time there, and he'll spend a long time more. This isn't an account of a prison break or of some sort of heroic action, just an average Joe (average Yosif?) in a fairly average work camp of the Soviet Union in the middle of the century.

If you get a quality translation (or read it in the original Russian), Solzhenitsyn's prose is affecting and simple and clear. It's an excellent book.

Answer 3

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.....very powerful book about love, betrayal, redemption...it takes place in Afghanistan and the United States.

Two of my favorite quotes from the book are "For you, a thousand times over," and "There is a way to be good again."

Answer 4

I like the Gossip Girl series by Cecily von Ziegesar, the It Girl series also by von Ziegesar, and The Clique series by Lisi Harrison. They are all similar types of young adult books that tell about rich, spoiled girls that always includes someone not fitting in and the problems that teens face in their every day lives.

Answer 5

I'd have to say "A Million Little Pieces" and "My Friend Leonard"... when I read them, I thought they were completly true... great books, but a bit disappointing when you find out that most of it is a work of fiction.... very convincing though!

Answer 6

The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck
To Live, by Yu Hua

both about rural Chinese life. the stark, minimalist way that they written makes them realistic to me.

Answer 7

Any of the novels by Elmore Leonard. He has an uncanny knack for writing dialog and portraying interactions between his characters that always "rings true."

Answer 8

Tuesdays with Maury.