Contemporary Fiction Title Generator
Contemporary fiction lives on the book club table, where titles are quieter and do more work. Tell the generator about your family, your town or your turning point, and get titles that sound like a friend's recommendation.
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Everyone Here Is Fine
Three adult siblings come home for their father's second wedding.
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The Year We Sold the Farm
A Nebraska family splits over land worked for five generations.
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Pilar Learns to Drive
A sixty-eight-year-old widow in Phoenix takes her first lesson.
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Group Chat
Four college friends at forty and the message nobody should've sent.
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Can You Keep the Dog?
A divorce settled, except for one aging golden retriever.
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Night Shift at the Laundromat
A laundromat owner and the late regulars who confide in her.
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Ordinary Weather
A small-town TV meteorologist's marriage, one forecast at a time.
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Tell Them I Said Goodbye
A hospice volunteer delivers a dying man's messages to strangers.
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Fourth Floor, No Elevator
Three generations of one family share a Queens walk-up.
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The Weight of Other People's Kids
A high school counselor whose own son stopped speaking to her.
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Lemon Season
A daughter returns to Sicily to close her mother's restaurant.
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Help Wanted, Inquire Within
A laid-off executive takes the only job in town: fry cook.
Naming Contemporary Fiction books: what works
Contemporary Fiction is a mirror to the present day, depicting the realities, struggles, and stories of our current time. It's a genre grounded in the now, resonating with contemporary issues and themes.
Choose titles that speak to the essence of modern life and the human condition. Your title should resonate with the themes of your story, whether it's about love, loss, or the search for identity.
Try a whole sentence
Book club fiction is one of the few shelves where a sentence can be a title. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman and Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple both sound overheard, and both carry a joke the book pays off. If your narrator has a strong voice, let the title borrow it.
Find the image the book circles
Ann Patchett's The Dutch House is named for the house two siblings lose and keep driving back to look at. A central object or place gives the title weight without stating a theme. List the images that recur in your draft; one of them is often the title.
Choose plain words that turn
Words like 'fine', 'normal', 'good' and 'ordinary' look harmless on a cover and carry irony once a reader knows the characters. That double meaning is a hallmark of the shelf. Test the title against your ending: it should sound slightly different after the last page.
Skip the shelf's tired nouns
'Secret', 'sister', 'summer', 'lake house' and 'the last' appear on so many covers that readers stop seeing them. If your book really is about a lake house, name the lake, or the thing that happened there. Specific words make a quiet book findable.
Well-known Contemporary Fiction titles
Titles that already work in this genre. Read them for shape and length: how many words, how much they give away, what they leave out.
| Title | Author | Published |
|---|---|---|
| Normal People | Sally Rooney | 2018 |
| Where the Crawdads Sing | Delia Owens | 2018 |
| Big Little Lies | Liane Moriarty | 2014 |
| The Goldfinch | Donna Tartt | 2013 |
| The Night Circus | Erin Morgenstern | 2011 |
| Little Fires Everywhere | Celeste Ng | 2017 |
| The Underground Railroad | Colson Whitehead | 2016 |
| A Man Called Ove | Fredrik Backman | 2012 |
| The Art of Racing in the Rain | Garth Stein | 2008 |
| The Alchemist | Paulo Coelho | 1988 |
| Life of Pi | Yann Martel | 2001 |
| The Kite Runner | Khaled Hosseini | 2003 |
| The Secret History | Donna Tartt | 1992 |
| Never Let Me Go | Kazuo Ishiguro | 2005 |
| The Time Traveler's Wife | Audrey Niffenegger | 2003 |
| Room | Emma Donoghue | 2010 |
| The Light Between Oceans | M.L. Stedman | 2012 |
| The Lovely Bones | Alice Sebold | 2002 |
| Water for Elephants | Sara Gruen | 2006 |
| The Help | Kathryn Stockett | 2009 |
Thrillers & SuspenseA thriller title has one job: make a stranger in an airport pick up the book.
Historical FictionHistorical novels carry their period in the title: a trade, a house, a war, a city.
RomanceRomance readers decide in a second whether a book is their kind of love story.
Mystery & CrimeMystery readers like a title that turns out to be a clue.
Science Fiction and FantasyFantasy titles promise a world; science fiction titles promise an idea.
Movie, TV, and Literary Fan FictionFic titles follow their own rules: lyric fragments, quotes, puns and lowercase sentences.
A plot, a first scene, a shelf
Questions about Contemporary Fiction titles
Is a literary fiction title different from a book club title?
Literary fiction can be oblique: Jenny Offill's Weather is a single word that opens up as you read. Upmarket book club fiction usually wants a clearer hook, often a person, a place or a situation. Decide which shelf you're aiming for, because agents and readers will read the title as a signal.
How long can a contemporary fiction title be?
Longer than most genres allow. Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Gail Honeyman's Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine both run five or more words. Length works when the rhythm does, so read it aloud and cut any word that doesn't change the meaning.
Should a beach read sound like a beach read?
It helps. Summer and coastal words tell readers the book is warm, absorbing and suitable for a lounge chair, as Elin Hilderbrand's 28 Summers does. Pair the seasonal word with something specific to your story so it stands apart from the many other summer titles.
A title deserves a book.
Put it on a cover, write the first chapter under it, and see if it holds.
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