NYT 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

The New York Times’ 2024 poll of 500-plus writers and critics, ranked. My Brilliant Friend at #1 — fiction and nonfiction, argue from there.

100 titles

My Brilliant Friend (2012), Elena Ferrante
Two girls grow up in a poor, violent neighborhood of 1950s Naples, one brilliant and reckless, the other studious and watchful. The first of Elena Ferrante's four Neapolitan novels, translated by Ann Goldstein; the author writes under a pseudonym and has never shown her face. HBO and RAI made it a…
The Warmth of Other Suns (2010), Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel Wilkerson follows three Black Southerners who left for Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, and through them tells the story of the Great Migration from 1915 to 1970. Won the National Book Critics Circle Award; her later book is Caste.
Wolf Hall (2020), Hilary Mantel
Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith's son from Putney, talks and schemes his way into Henry VIII's inner circle while the king tries to shed his first wife. Hilary Mantel (A Place of Greater Safety) won the Booker Prize for it. The BBC adapted it with Mark Rylance as Cromwell.
The Known World (2006), Edward P. Jones
In antebellum Virginia, Henry Townsend, a Black man born into slavery, becomes a planter who owns slaves himself, and his death sets the county loose. Edward P. Jones (Lost in the City) won the Pulitzer Prize for it. The county, and its census, are invented.
The Corrections (2001), Jonathan Franzen
Enid and Alfred Lambert, aging Midwestern parents, want their three grown children home for one last Christmas while Alfred's mind slips. Jonathan Franzen (The Twenty-Seventh City) won the National Book Award for it. Oprah picked it, and he made it awkward.
2666 (2004), Roberto Bolaño
In a Mexican border city modeled on Ciudad Juárez, hundreds of women are being murdered, and five long sections circle the killings, starting with four critics hunting a reclusive German novelist. Roberto Bolaño (The Savage Detectives) died before he finished it. Natasha Wimmer's translation won…
The Underground Railroad (2018), Colson Whitehead
Cora escapes a Georgia cotton plantation on an underground railroad that is an actual railroad, each stop a different version of America. Colson Whitehead (The Intuitionist) won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for it. Barry Jenkins made it a series for Amazon.
Austerlitz (2001), W.G. Sebald
A narrator keeps running into Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian who came to Wales as a child refugee and is only now piecing together where he came from. W.G. Sebald (The Rings of Saturn) died in a car crash the year it came out. Translated from German by Anthea Bell, with Sebald's…
Never Let Me Go (2005), Kazuo Ishiguro
Kathy H. looks back on her years at Hailsham, an English boarding school where the students are told very little about what they are for. Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) won the Nobel Prize in 2017. Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield lead the 2010 film.
Gilead (2005), Marilynne Robinson
In 1956 Iowa, the Reverend John Ames, old and dying, writes a long letter to his young son about his father, his grandfather and the town. Marilynne Robinson's second novel came 24 years after her first, Housekeeping. Won the Pulitzer Prize.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), Junot Díaz
Oscar de León is an overweight, lovesick Dominican kid in New Jersey who knows every word of Tolkien, and his family may be cursed. Junot Díaz (Drown) tells it with footnotes on the Trujillo dictatorship. Won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The Year of Magical Thinking (2009), Joan Didion
Joan Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne, died at their dinner table while their daughter lay in intensive care, and she spent the next year expecting him back. Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem) won the National Book Award for it. She adapted it for Broadway with Vanessa Redgrave.
The Road (2006), Cormac McCarthy
A father and his young son push a shopping cart south through a burned, ashen America, avoiding the people who are left. Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian) won the Pulitzer Prize for it. Viggo Mortensen played the father in the 2009 film. Quotation marks were not invited.
Outline (2015), Rachel Cusk
Faye, a divorced English novelist, spends a summer in Athens teaching a writing course, and the people she meets tell her their lives. Rachel Cusk (A Life's Work) barely lets her narrator speak. The first of a trilogy, followed by Transit and Kudos.
Pachinko (2017), Min Jin Lee
A Korean family moves to Japan in the 1930s and spends four generations as outsiders there, starting with Sunja, a fisherman's daughter pregnant by a married man. Min Jin Lee (Free Food for Millionaires) was a National Book Award finalist for it. Apple TV+ made it a series.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2012), Michael Chabon
Joe Kavalier escapes Nazi-occupied Prague, lands in his cousin Sammy Clay's Brooklyn apartment in 1939, and the two invent a comic book hero called the Escapist. Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys) won the Pulitzer Prize for it. A love letter to the golden age of comics.
The Sellout (2015), Paul Beatty
A Black farmer from a Los Angeles town that has been wiped off the map tries to reinstate slavery and segregation, and ends up before the Supreme Court. Paul Beatty (The White Boy Shuffle) became the first American to win the Booker Prize. It is very funny and very rude.
Lincoln in the Bardo (2018), George Saunders
In 1862, Abraham Lincoln's son Willie dies, and in a Georgetown cemetery a chorus of ghosts who refuse to admit they are dead watches the president visit the crypt. George Saunders's first novel, after decades of stories. Won the Booker Prize.
Say Nothing (2020), Patrick Radden Keefe
In 1972, Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, is dragged from her Belfast flat by the IRA, and Patrick Radden Keefe uses her disappearance to tell the story of the Troubles. Won the National Book Critics Circle Award. FX made it a series in 2024.
Erasure (2001), Percival Everett
Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a novelist too cerebral to sell, is told his books are not Black enough, so he writes a lurid parody under a fake name and it becomes a sensation. Percival Everett (later James) wrote it in 2001. Cord Jefferson adapted it as American Fiction, which won the Oscar for…
Evicted (2017), Matthew Desmond
Matthew Desmond follows eight Milwaukee families and two landlords through the churn of eviction, during the years after the 2008 crash. A sociologist, he lived in a trailer park and a rooming house to report it. Won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012), Katherine Boo
In Annawadi, a slum beside the Mumbai airport, a teenage garbage trader named Abdul and his neighbors scramble for a way up. Katherine Boo, a New Yorker staff writer, reported it from inside the slum. Won the National Book Award; David Hare adapted it for London's National Theatre.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), Alice Munro
Nine stories about ordinary lives in small-town Ontario, where a marriage of convenience or a nursing home visit opens up decades. Alice Munro (Lives of Girls and Women) won the Nobel Prize in 2013. "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" became Sarah Polley's film Away from Her.
The Overstory (2018), Richard Powers
Nine Americans, among them a Vietnam vet, a paraplegic programmer and a scientist who hears trees talk, find their lives bent toward the fight to save the last old-growth forests. Richard Powers (The Echo Maker) won the Pulitzer Prize for it. Trees are the main characters.
Random Family (2003), Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc spent about a decade with two young women in the Bronx, Jessica and Coco, through drug-dealer boyfriends, prison, children and moves upstate. Her first book, reported with rare patience. It reads like a novel and is not one.
Atonement (2009), Ian McEwan
On a hot day in 1935 at an English country house, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees something she does not understand, and her account of it changes three lives. Ian McEwan (Amsterdam) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Joe Wright filmed it with Keira Knightley and James McAvoy.
Americanah (2014), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Ifemelu leaves Lagos for an American university, discovers she is Black in a way she never was at home, and starts a blog about it, while her first love Obinze ends up in London. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for it.
Cloud Atlas (2008), David Mitchell
Six stories nest inside each other like dolls, from a notary crossing the Pacific in the 1850s to a valley in a far-future Hawaii, each interrupted and then finished. David Mitchell (Ghostwritten) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer filmed it in 2012.
The Last Samurai (2000), Helen DeWitt
Sibylla, a brilliant single mother in London, raises her son Ludo on Greek, Japanese and repeat screenings of Seven Samurai, and at eleven he sets out to find his father. Helen DeWitt's debut went out of print and was rescued by New Directions in 2016.
Sing, Unburied, Sing (2020), Jesmyn Ward
Jojo, thirteen, rides with his drug-using mother and little sister across Mississippi to pick up his father from the state penitentiary, and a ghost from the prison's past comes along. Jesmyn Ward won her second National Book Award for it, the first woman to win twice for fiction.
White Teeth (2003), Zadie Smith
Archie Jones, an Englishman, and Samad Iqbal, a Bangladeshi Muslim, met in the war and raise their families side by side in North London, across race, religion and a few decades. Zadie Smith's debut, published when she was 24. Channel 4 adapted it in 2002.
The Line of Beauty (2008), Alan Hollinghurst
In 1983, Nick Guest, a gay Oxford graduate, moves into the Notting Hill house of a rising Tory MP and drifts into the Thatcher-era rich, as AIDS arrives. Alan Hollinghurst (The Swimming-Pool Library) won the Booker Prize for it. The BBC adapted it in 2006.
Salvage the Bones (2011), Jesmyn Ward
Esch, fourteen and pregnant, lives with her father and brothers in a Mississippi bayou town during the twelve days before Hurricane Katrina hits. Her brother's prize pit bull has just had puppies. Jesmyn Ward (Where the Line Bleeds) won the National Book Award for it.
Citizen (2014), Claudia Rankine
In prose poems, scripts and images, Claudia Rankine records the small, daily racist encounters that pile up, alongside public ones like Serena Williams's treatment on court. Rankine (Don't Let Me Be Lonely) won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. It reads like nothing else on a…
Fun Home (2007), Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel draws her childhood in a Pennsylvania funeral home run by her father, a meticulous, closeted English teacher who died shortly after she came out. A graphic memoir by the creator of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. The Broadway musical won the Tony for Best Musical.
Between the World and Me (2025), Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes a letter to his teenage son about living in a Black body in America, from the streets of Baltimore to Howard University to Paris. Coates (The Beautiful Struggle) won the National Book Award for nonfiction. Short enough to read in an evening.
The Years (2008), Annie Ernaux
Annie Ernaux tells the history of France from 1941 to 2006 through photographs, songs, slogans and dinner-table talk, using "we" instead of "I." Translated from French by Alison L. Strayer, it was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in 2022.
The Savage Detectives (2007), Roberto Bolaño
In 1975 Mexico City, two young poets, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, lead a ragged avant-garde movement and drive north into the Sonoran desert to find a vanished poet. Roberto Bolaño (2666) then scatters their next twenty years across dozens of witnesses. Translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.
A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), Jennifer Egan
Bennie Salazar, an aging punk turned record executive, and Sasha, his kleptomaniac assistant, anchor linked stories that jump decades, including one told in PowerPoint slides. Jennifer Egan (The Keep) won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Time is the goon.
H Is for Hawk (2015), Helen Macdonald
After her father dies suddenly, Helen Macdonald buys a goshawk named Mabel and retreats into training her, while reading T.H. White's own failed attempt with a hawk. Won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year. Macdonald is a falconer and a historian of science.
Small Things Like These (2020), Claire Keegan
In an Irish town in 1985, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant, makes his deliveries before Christmas and sees something at the local convent he cannot forget. Claire Keegan (Foster) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Cillian Murphy leads the 2024 film. It runs barely over a hundred pages.
A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), Marlon James
In 1976 Kingston, gunmen try to kill Bob Marley, never named here, and a crowd of voices, from gang bosses to a CIA man to a dead politician, tell what led up to it and what followed. Marlon James (The Book of Night Women) became the first Jamaican to win the Booker Prize.
Postwar (2005), Tony Judt
Tony Judt covers Europe from the rubble of 1945 to the expanded European Union, East and West together, in one long, readable sweep. Judt, a British historian at New York University, was a Pulitzer finalist for it. Equal parts politics, economics and culture.
The Fifth Season (2015), N.K. Jemisin
On a supercontinent called the Stillness, wracked by recurring cataclysms, a woman named Essun searches for her daughter as a new and possibly final Season begins. N.K. Jemisin (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms) won the Hugo Award for it, then again for each sequel, three years running.
The Argonauts (2015), Maggie Nelson
Maggie Nelson writes about falling in love with the artist Harry Dodge, who is gender-fluid, and about her pregnancy as he begins testosterone, with Roland Barthes and D.W. Winnicott along for the ride. Nelson (Bluets) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Memoir and theory in…
The Goldfinch (2013), Donna Tartt
Theo Decker, thirteen, survives a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum that kills his mother, and walks out carrying a small Dutch painting of a goldfinch. Donna Tartt (The Secret History) won the Pulitzer Prize for it. Ansel Elgort played Theo in the 2019 film.
A Mercy (1998), Toni Morrison
In the 1680s, in the colonies that would become America, an enslaved mother gives her daughter Florens to a Dutch-Anglo trader to settle a debt. Toni Morrison (Beloved) tells it through the girl and the women of his farm. Morrison won the Nobel Prize in 1993. Short, and dense.
Persepolis (2000), Marjane Satrapi
Marjane Satrapi draws her childhood in Tehran through the Islamic Revolution and the war with Iraq, as a sharp-tongued girl with Marxist parents and a punk streak. Originally published in French. Satrapi co-directed the animated film, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes and an Oscar nomination.
The Vegetarian (2016), Han Kang
Yeong-hye, an unremarkable housewife in Seoul, has a bloody dream and stops eating meat, and her family responds with escalating cruelty. Told by her husband, her brother-in-law and her sister. Deborah Smith's translation won the International Booker Prize; Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in 2024.
Trust (2023), Hernan Diaz
A 1920s New York financier and his fragile wife become the subject of a novel, and then of a memoir, a draft and a diary that disagree about who they were. Hernan Diaz (In the Distance) won the Pulitzer Prize for it. The four parts do not trust each other.
Life After Life (2013), Kate Atkinson
Ursula Todd is born in an English snowstorm in 1910, dies, and is born again, living her life over and over through two world wars. Kate Atkinson (Behind the Scenes at the Museum) won the Costa Novel Award for it. Every life gets a slightly different ending.
Train Dreams (2006), Denis Johnson
Robert Grainier, a day laborer in the Idaho and Washington woods of the early twentieth century, works on railroads and logging crews and suffers a loss that defines his life. Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son) wrote it as a novella. A Pulitzer finalist; Netflix released a film of it in 2025.
Runaway (2004), Alice Munro
Eight stories of women in Ontario and British Columbia who run, or think about running, from husbands, homes and their own pasts. Three follow one woman, Juliet, over decades; Pedro Almodóvar adapted them as Julieta. Alice Munro (Lives of Girls and Women) won the Giller Prize for it.
Tenth of December (2013), George Saunders
Ten stories, among them a lab where prisoners are dosed with mood drugs and a family diary about lawn ornaments made of living women. George Saunders (Pastoralia) won the inaugural Folio Prize for it. "Escape from Spiderhead" became a Netflix film.
The Looming Tower (2006), Lawrence Wright
Lawrence Wright traces the decades of ideas, people and failures that led to September 11, following Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the FBI's John O'Neill. Wright, a New Yorker staff writer, won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Hulu made it a series in 2018.
The Flamethrowers (2014), Rachel Kushner
Reno, a young artist and motorcycle racer, arrives in mid-1970s New York, falls for an older Italian artist and follows him into the radical politics of Rome. Rachel Kushner (Telex from Cuba) was a National Book Award finalist for it. Fast bikes, art world, Red Brigades.
Nickel and Dimed (2001), Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich, a journalist with a PhD in biology, takes low-wage jobs as a waitress in Florida, a maid in Maine and a Walmart clerk in Minnesota, and tries to live on the pay. Written at the end of the 1990s boom. The math never works.
Stay True (2022), Hua Hsu
At Berkeley in the 1990s, Hua Hsu, a zine-making indie kid, befriends Ken, a Japanese American frat boy he cannot quite figure out, until Ken is killed in a carjacking. Hsu, a New Yorker staff writer, won the Pulitzer Prize for memoir.
Middlesex (2007), Jeffrey Eugenides
Cal Stephanides, born intersex and raised as a girl in Detroit, tells his family's story from his Greek grandparents' flight from Smyrna in 1922 through his own adolescence. Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides) won the Pulitzer Prize for it. It opens with two births.
Heavy (2018), Kiese Laymon
Kiese Laymon writes to his mother about growing up Black in Jackson, Mississippi: weight, hunger, gambling, violence and the lies they told each other. Laymon (Long Division) won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. A memoir addressed to one reader.
Demon Copperhead (2024), Barbara Kingsolver
Damon Fields, born to a teenage mother in a trailer in Lee County, Virginia, narrates his boyhood through foster care, football and the opioid epidemic. Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible) reworks Dickens's David Copperfield. Won the Pulitzer Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction.
10:04 (2014), Ben Lerner
A Brooklyn novelist with a heart condition and a large book advance moves through the city between two hurricanes, while a friend asks him to help her have a baby. Ben Lerner (Leaving the Atocha Station) took the title from the clock in Back to the Future.
Veronica (2005), Mary Gaitskill
Alison, a former model now aging and sick in San Francisco, remembers her friendship with Veronica, an older office temp she met in 1980s New York. Mary Gaitskill (Bad Behavior) was a National Book Award finalist for it. Sharp about beauty and what it costs.
The Great Believers (2018), Rebecca Makkai
In 1985 Chicago, Yale Tishman, an art gallery development director, watches the AIDS epidemic take his friends; in 2015 Paris, his friend Fiona looks for her estranged daughter. Rebecca Makkai (The Borrower) was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
The Plot Against America (2004), Philip Roth
In 1940 Charles Lindbergh beats Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency, and a Jewish family in Newark named Roth watches the country turn on them. Philip Roth (American Pastoral) narrates as his younger self. David Simon and Ed Burns adapted it for HBO in 2020.
We the Animals (2011), Justin Torres
Three young brothers, with a Puerto Rican father and a white mother, run wild in upstate New York while their parents fight, love and fall apart. Justin Torres's first novel, told in short, fierce chapters. Jeremiah Zagar made it a film in 2018.
Far From the Tree (2012), Andrew Solomon
Andrew Solomon interviews hundreds of families whose children differ from them: deaf, dwarf, autistic, schizophrenic, prodigies, conceived in rape, or convicted of crimes. Solomon (The Noonday Demon) won the National Book Critics Circle Award. A 2018 documentary followed some of the families.
The Friend (2018), Sigrid Nunez
A writer in New York loses her closest friend and mentor to suicide and inherits his old, enormous Great Dane, Apollo, in an apartment that does not allow dogs. Sigrid Nunez (The Last of Her Kind) won the National Book Award. Naomi Watts and Bill Murray lead the 2024 film.
The New Jim Crow (2000), Michelle Alexander
Michelle Alexander, a civil rights lawyer, argues that the war on drugs and mass incarceration created a new racial caste system in the United States. Alexander taught at Ohio State. It became a fixture in classrooms, book clubs and policy debates.
All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006), Edward P. Jones
Fourteen stories set in and around Washington, D.C., where Black families who came up from the South make lives in the twentieth century city. Edward P. Jones's companion to his first collection, Lost in the City, published after his Pulitzer for The Known World.
The Copenhagen Trilogy (2021), Tove Ditlevsen
Three short memoirs, Childhood, Youth and Dependency, follow Tove Ditlevsen from a working-class Copenhagen street to poetry fame, several marriages and addiction. Written decades earlier, the English translation by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman found a new audience in 2021. Ditlevsen…
Secondhand Time (2016), Svetlana Alexievich
Svetlana Alexievich gathers the voices of ordinary people from the end of the Soviet Union through the twenty years after it, from loyalists to dissidents to the newly poor. Translated from Russian by Bela Shayevich. Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in 2015.
The Passage of Power (2012), Robert Caro
The fourth volume of Robert A. Caro's life of Lyndon Johnson covers 1958 to 1964: losing the nomination to John F. Kennedy, wasting away as vice president, and taking power in Dallas. Caro (The Power Broker) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for it.
Olive Kitteridge (2008), Elizabeth Strout
Olive Kitteridge, a retired math teacher in a small Maine town, is blunt, difficult and appears in all thirteen linked stories, sometimes in a starring role, sometimes passing through. Elizabeth Strout (Amy and Isabelle) won the Pulitzer Prize for it. Frances McDormand played Olive for HBO.
Exit West (2017), Mohsin Hamid
Saeed and Nadia meet in an unnamed city sliding into civil war, and when rumors spread of doors that open onto other countries, they go through one. Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The doors are the only magic; the rest is the news.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022), Gabrielle Zevin
Sam and Sadie, childhood friends who met in a hospital game room, reunite in college in Cambridge in the 1990s and start making video games together, for three decades. Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry) borrowed the title from Macbeth. Love, but not the kind you expect.
An American Marriage (2018), Tayari Jones
Celestial and Roy, Atlanta newlyweds, are a year into their marriage when Roy is convicted of a crime he did not commit and sent to prison for twelve years. Tayari Jones (Silver Sparrow) won the Women's Prize for Fiction. It was an Oprah's Book Club pick.
Septology (2022), Jon Fosse
Asle, an aging painter on the west coast of Norway, drives between his home and the town where another painter, also named Asle, is drinking himself to death. Jon Fosse writes it as one sentence across seven parts. Translated by Damion Searls; Fosse won the Nobel Prize in 2023.
A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015), Lucia Berlin
Stories drawn from Lucia Berlin's own life as a cleaning woman, ER nurse, switchboard operator, teacher and alcoholic, from Texas and Chile to Oakland and Mexico. Berlin died in 2004, little known. This collection, edited by Stephen Emerson with a foreword by Lydia Davis, made her famous.
The Story of the Lost Child (2015), Elena Ferrante
Elena and Lila, now in middle age, find themselves living in the same Naples building again, raising children and still measuring themselves against each other. The fourth and final Neapolitan novel by Elena Ferrante (My Brilliant Friend). Translated by Ann Goldstein and shortlisted for the Man…
Pulphead (2011), John Jeremiah Sullivan
John Jeremiah Sullivan goes to a Christian rock festival, tracks down Axl Rose's Indiana, sits with his brother after an electrocution and visits the reality-TV mansion. Essays written mostly for GQ and Harper's. Sullivan is a Southern magazine writer with a novelist's ear.
Hurricane Season (2020), Fernanda Melchor
In a Mexican village called La Matosa, children find the body of a woman everyone calls the Witch floating in a canal, and the townspeople's accounts circle her death. Fernanda Melchor writes in long unbroken paragraphs. Sophie Hughes's translation was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
When We Cease to Understand the World (2021), Benjamín Labatut
Benjamín Labatut tells, partly true and partly invented, how Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzschild, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger made discoveries that unsettled them. Translated from Spanish by Adrian Nathan West, it was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize…
The Emperor of All Maladies (2010), Siddhartha Mukherjee
Siddhartha Mukherjee, an oncologist, writes a biography of cancer, from ancient Egyptian descriptions through radical mastectomy and chemotherapy to targeted drugs. Won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. It became a PBS documentary series from Ken Burns. His later book is The Gene.
Pastoralia (2000), George Saunders
Six stories of strained Americans, led by a novella about a man who plays a caveman in a theme park diorama and watches his workplace fail. George Saunders (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline) mixes office-memo language with real tenderness. Funny first, then sad.
Frederick Douglass (2018), David W. Blight
David W. Blight tells the life of Frederick Douglass, from slavery in Maryland to escape, oratory, newspapers and the Civil War, drawing on newly available family papers. Blight, a Yale historian (Race and Reunion), won the Pulitzer Prize in history for it. About a man who published three…
Detransition, Baby (2021), Torrey Peters
Reese, a trans woman in New York who wants a child, is pulled back to her ex, Ames, who has detransitioned and gotten his boss Katrina pregnant. Ames proposes the three of them raise the baby. Torrey Peters's first novel. Dry, sharp and very funny about families.
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2009), Lydia Davis
Every story from Lydia Davis's four collections, some running pages, some a single sentence, about grammar, mothers, cows, neighbors and the mind talking to itself. Davis, who also translated Proust's Swann's Way, won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. Read one; you will read ten.
The Return (2016), Hisham Matar
In 2012, after Qaddafi's fall, Hisham Matar returns to Libya to learn what happened to his father, a dissident who was kidnapped in Cairo in 1990 and vanished into a Libyan prison. Matar (In the Country of Men) won the Pulitzer Prize for biography.
The Sympathizer (2015), Viet Thanh Nguyen
An unnamed captain, a communist mole in the South Vietnamese army, flees to Los Angeles after the fall of Saigon and keeps reporting on his exiled comrades. Viet Thanh Nguyen's first novel won the Pulitzer Prize. HBO adapted it with Robert Downey Jr. in several roles.
The Human Stain (2000), Philip Roth
In 1998, as the country fixates on Clinton's impeachment, Coleman Silk, a classics professor in New England, loses his job over a single word spoken in class. Philip Roth (American Pastoral) narrates through Nathan Zuckerman. Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman lead the 2003 film.
The Days of Abandonment (2002), Elena Ferrante
Olga, a mother of two in Turin, is told by her husband of fifteen years that he is leaving, and spends a hot summer coming apart with the children and the dog. Elena Ferrante (My Brilliant Friend) wrote it before the Neapolitan novels. Translated by Ann Goldstein.
Station Eleven (2014), Emily St. John Mandel
A flu wipes out most of the world, and twenty years later a traveling company performs Shakespeare and classical music for settlements around the Great Lakes. Emily St. John Mandel (Last Night in Montreal) was a National Book Award finalist. HBO Max made it a series.
On Beauty (2005), Zadie Smith
Howard Belsey, an English art historian at a Massachusetts college, and his family of four collide with his conservative rival Monty Kipps and his family. Zadie Smith (White Teeth) borrowed the shape from E.M. Forster's Howards End. Won the Orange Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker.
Bring Up the Bodies (2012), Hilary Mantel
Thomas Cromwell, now Henry VIII's chief minister, must give the king what he wants in 1536: a way out of his marriage to Anne Boleyn. The sequel to Wolf Hall. Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize again, the first woman to win it twice.
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), Saidiya Hartman
Saidiya Hartman reconstructs the lives of young Black women in Philadelphia and New York around 1900, who tried free love, queer love and new ways to live, mostly recorded by police and reformers. Hartman (Lose Your Mother) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. History told…
Men We Reaped (2013), Jesmyn Ward
Between 2000 and 2004, five young Black men from Jesmyn Ward's home in DeLisle, Mississippi died, including her younger brother. Ward (Salvage the Bones) writes about each of them and about growing up in the town. A memoir counting the cost of being Black and poor in the South.
Bel Canto (2001), Ann Patchett
At a party for a Japanese executive in an unnamed South American country, guerrillas take the guests hostage, including a famous American soprano, and the siege runs for months. Ann Patchett (The Magician's Assistant) won the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for it. Julianne Moore leads the…
How to be both (2014), Ali Smith
Two halves: a 1460s Italian fresco painter, Francesco del Cossa, and George, a teenager in present-day Cambridge mourning her mother. Copies were printed in both orders, so readers start with either. Ali Smith (Hotel World) won the Baileys Women's Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize.
Tree of Smoke (2007), Denis Johnson
Skip Sands, a young CIA officer, goes to Vietnam in 1963 to work for his uncle, a legendary colonel running his own psychological war. Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son) follows them, and a few soldiers, to 1970. Won the National Book Award.