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The 100 best books of the 21st century

Dazzling debut novels, searing polemics, the history of humanity and trailblazing memoirs ... Read our pick of the best books since 2000

• Read an interview with the author of our No 1 book
• Read Ali Smith on Autumn
• Read David Mitchell on Cloud Atlas

I Feel Bad About My Neck

By nora ephron (2006).

Perhaps better known for her screenwriting ( Silkwood , When Harry Met Sally , Heartburn ), Ephron’s brand of smart theatrical humour is on best display in her essays. Confiding and self-deprecating, she has a way of always managing to sound like your best friend – even when writing about her apartment on New York’s Upper West Side. This wildly enjoyable collection includes her droll observations about ageing, vanity – and a scorching appraisal of Bill Clinton. Read the review

Broken Glass

By alain mabanckou (2005), translated by helen stevenson (2009).

The Congolese writer says he was “trying to break the French language” with Broken Glass – a black comedy told by a disgraced teacher without much in the way of full stops or paragraph breaks. As Mabanckou’s unreliable narrator munches his “bicycle chicken” and drinks his red wine, it becomes clear he has the history of Congo-Brazzaville and the whole of French literature in his sights. Read the review

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

By stieg larsson (2005), translated by steven t murray (2008).

Radical journalist Mikael Blomkvist forms an unlikely alliance with troubled young hacker Lisbeth Salander as they follow a trail of murder and malfeasance connected with one of Sweden’s most powerful families in the first novel of the bestselling Millennium trilogy. The high-level intrigue beguiled millions of readers, brought “Scandi noir” to prominence and inspired innumerable copycats. Read the review

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

By jk rowling (2000).

A generation grew up on Rowling’s all-conquering magical fantasies, but countless adults have also been enthralled by her immersive world. Book four, the first of the doorstoppers, marks the point where the series really takes off. The Triwizard Tournament provides pace and tension, and Rowling makes her boy wizard look death in the eye for the first time. Read the review

A Little Life

By hanya yanagihara (2015).

This operatically harrowing American gay melodrama became an unlikely bestseller, and one of the most divisive novels of the century so far. One man’s life is blighted by abuse and its aftermath, but also illuminated by love and friendship. Some readers wept all night, some condemned it as titillating and exploitative, but no one could deny its power. Read the review

Chronicles: Volume One

By bob dylan (2004).

Dylan’s reticence about his personal life is a central part of the singer-songwriter’s brand, so the gaps and omissions in this memoir come as no surprise. The result is both sharp and dreamy, sliding in and out of different phases of Dylan’s career but rooted in his earliest days as a Woody Guthrie wannabe in New York City. Fans are still waiting for volume two. Read the review

The Tipping Point

By malcolm gladwell (2000).

The New Yorker staff writer examines phenomena from shoe sales to crime rates through the lens of epidemiology, reaching his own tipping point, when he became a rock-star intellectual and unleashed a wave of quirky studies of contemporary society. Two decades on, Gladwell is often accused of oversimplification and cherry picking, but his idiosyncratic bestsellers have helped shape 21st-century culture. Read the review

by Nicola Barker (2007)

British fiction’s most anarchic author is as prolific as she is playful, but this freewheeling, visionary epic set around the Thames Gateway is her magnum opus. Barker brings her customary linguistic invention and wild humour to a tale about history’s hold on the present, as contemporary Ashford is haunted by the spirit of a medieval jester. Read the review

by Helen Dunmore (2001)

The Levin family battle against starvation in this novel set during the German siege of Leningrad. Anna digs tank traps and dodges patrols as she scavenges for wood, but the hand of history is hard to escape. Read the review

by M John Harrison (2002)

One of the most underrated prose writers demonstrates the literary firepower of science fiction at its best. Three narrative strands – spanning far-future space opera, contemporary unease and virtual-reality pastiche – are braided together for a breathtaking metaphysical voyage in pursuit of the mystery at the heart of reality. Read the review

by Jenny Erpenbeck (2008), translated by Susan Bernofsky (2010)

A grand house by a lake in the east of Germany is both the setting and main character of Erpenbeck’s third novel. The turbulent waves of 20th-century history crash over it as the house is sold by a Jewish family fleeing the Third Reich, requisitioned by the Russian army, reclaimed by exiles returning from Siberia, and sold again. Read the review

by Lorna Sage (2000)

A Whitbread prizewinning memoir, full of perfectly chosen phrases, that is one of the best accounts of family dysfunction ever written. Sage grew up with her grandparents, who hated each other: he was a drunken philandering vicar; his wife, having found his diaries, blackmailed him and lived in another part of the house. The author gets unwittingly pregnant at 16, yet the story has a happy ending. Read the review

Noughts & Crosses

By malorie blackman (2001).

Set in an alternative Britain, this groundbreaking piece of young adult fiction sees black people, called the Crosses, hold all the power and influence, while the noughts – white people – are marginalised and segregated. The former children’s laureate’s series is a crucial work for explaining racism to young readers.

Priestdaddy

By patricia lockwood (2017).

This may not be the only account of living in a religious household in the American midwest (in her youth, the author joined a group called God’s Gang, where they spoke in tongues), but it is surely the funniest. The author started out as the “poet laureate of Twitter”; her language is brilliant, and she has a completely original mind. Read the review

Adults in the Room

By yanis varoufakis (2017).

This memoir by the leather-jacketed economist of the six months he spent as Greece’s finance minister in 2015 at a time of economic and political crisis has been described as “one of the best political memoirs ever written”. He comes up against the IMF, the European institutions, Wall Street, billionaires and media owners and is told how the system works – as a result, his book is a telling description of modern power. Read the review

The God Delusion

By richard dawkins (2006).

A key text in the days when the “New Atheism” was much talked about, The God Delusion is a hard-hitting attack on religion, full of Dawkins’s confidence that faith produces fanatics and all arguments for God are ridiculous. What the evolutionary biologist lacks in philosophical sophistication, he makes up for in passion, and the book sold in huge numbers. Read the review

The Cost of Living

By deborah levy (2018).

“Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want ... ” The second part of Levy’s “living memoir”, in which she leaves her marriage, is a fascinating companion piece to her deep yet playful novels. Feminism, mythology and the daily grind come together for a book that combines emotion and intellect to dazzling effect. Read the review

Tell Me How It Ends

By valeria luiselli (2016), translated by luiselli with lizzie davis (2017).

As the hysteria over immigration to the US began to build in 2015, the Mexican novelist volunteered to work as an interpreter in New York’s federal immigration court. In this powerful series of essays she tells the poignant stories of the children she met, situating them in the wider context of the troubled relationship between the Americas. Read the review

by Neil Gaiman (2002)

From the Sandman comics to his fantasy epic American Gods to Twitter, Gaiman towers over the world of books. But this perfectly achieved children’s novella, in which a plucky young girl enters a parallel world where her “Other Mother” is a spooky copy of her real-life mum, with buttons for eyes, might be his finest hour: a properly scary modern myth which cuts right to the heart of childhood fears and desires. Read the review

by Jim Crace (2013)

Crace is fascinated by the moment when one era gives way to another. Here, it is the enclosure of the commons, a fulcrum of English history, that drives his story of dispossession and displacement. Set in a village without a name, the narrative dramatises what it’s like to see the world you know come to an end, in a severance of the connection between people and land that has deep relevance for our time of climate crisis and forced migration. Read the review

Stories of Your Life and Others

By ted chiang (2002).

Melancholic and transcendent, Chiang’s eight, high-concept sci-fi stories exploring the nature of language, maths, religion and physics racked up numerous awards and a wider audience when ‘Story of Your Life’ was adapted into the 2016 film Arrival . Read the review

The Spirit Level

By richard wilkinson and kate pickett (2009).

An eye-opening study, based on overwhelming evidence, which revealed that among rich countries, the “more equal societies almost always do better” for all. Growth matters less than inequality, the authors argued: whether the issue is life expectancy, infant mortality, crime rates, obesity, literacy or recycling, the Scandinavian countries, say, will always win out over, say, the UK. Read the review

The Fifth Season

By nk jemisin (2015).

Jemisin became the first African American author to win the best novel category at the Hugo awards for her first book in the Broken Earth trilogy. In her intricate and richly imagined far future universe, the world is ending, ripped apart by relentless earthquakes and volcanoes. Against this apocalyptic backdrop she explores urgent questions of power and enslavement through the eyes of three women. “As this genre finally acknowledges that the dreams of the marginalised matter and that all of us have a future,” she said in her acceptance speech, “so will go the world. (Soon, I hope.)”

Signs Preceding the End of the World

By yuri herrera (2009), translated by lisa dillman (2015).

Makina sets off from her village in Mexico with a package from a local gangster and a message for her brother, who has been gone for three years. The story of her crossing to the US examines the blurring of boundaries, the commingling of languages and the blending of identities that complicate the idea of an eventual return. Read the review

Thinking, Fast and Slow

By daniel kahneman (2011).

The Nobel laureate’s unexpected bestseller, on the minutiae of decision-making, divides the brain into two. System One makes judgments quickly, intuitively and automatically, as when a batsman decides whether to cut or pull. System Two is slow, calculated and deliberate, like long division. But psychologist Kahneman argues that, although System Two thinks it is in control, many of our decisions are really made by System One. Read the review

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

By olga tokarczuk (2009), translated by antonia lloyd-jones (2018).

In this existential eco-thriller, a William Blake-obsessed eccentric investigates the murders of men and animals in a remote Polish village. More accessible and focused than Flights , the novel that won Tokarczuk the Man International Booker prize, it is no less profound in its examination of how atavistic male impulses, emboldened by the new rightwing politics of Europe, are endangering people, communities and nature itself. Read the review

Days Without End

By sebastian barry (2016).

In this savagely beautiful novel set during the Indian wars and American civil war, a young Irish boy flees famine-struck Sligo for Missouri. There he finds lifelong companionship with another emigrant, and they join the army on its brutal journey west, laying waste to Indian settlements. Viscerally focused and intense, yet imbued with the grandeur of the landscape, the book explores love, gender and survival with a rare, luminous power. Read the review

Nothing to Envy

By barbara demick (2009).

Los Angeles Times journalist Barbara Demick interviewed around 100 North Korean defectors for this propulsive work of narrative non-fiction, but she focuses on just six, all from the north-eastern city of Chongjin – closed to foreigners and less media-ready than Pyongyang. North Korea is revealed to be rife with poverty, corruption and violence but populated by resilient people with a remarkable ability to see past the propaganda all around them. Read the review

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

By shoshana zuboff (2019).

An agenda-setting book that is devastating about the extent to which big tech sets out to manipulate us for profit. Not simply another expression of the “techlash”, Zuboff’s ambitious study identifies a new form of capitalism, one involving the monitoring and shaping of our behaviour, often without our knowledge, with profound implications for democracy. “Once we searched Google, but now Google searches us.” Read the review

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

By chris ware (2000).

At the time when Ware won the Guardian first book award, no graphic novel had previously won a generalist literary prize. Emotional and artistic complexity are perfectly poised in this account of a listless 36-year-old office dogsbody who is thrown into an existential crisis by an encounter with his estranged dad. Read the review

Notes on a Scandal

By zoë heller (2003).

Sheba, a middle-aged teacher at a London comprehensive, begins an affair with her 15-year-old student - but we hear about it from a fellow teacher, the needy Barbara, whose obsessive nature drives the narrative. With shades of Patricia Highsmith, this teasing investigation into sex, class and loneliness is a dark marvel. Read the review

The Infatuations

By javier marías (2011), translated by margaret jull costa (2013).

The Spanish master examines chance, love and death in the story of an apparently random killing that gradually reveals hidden depths. Marías constructs an elegant murder mystery from his trademark labyrinthine sentences, but this investigation is in pursuit of much meatier questions than whodunnit. Read the review

The Constant Gardener

By john le carré (2001).

The master of the cold war thriller turned his attention to the new world order in this chilling investigation into the corruption powering big pharma in Africa. Based on the case of a rogue antibiotics trial that killed and maimed children in Nigeria in the 1990s, it has all the dash and authority of his earlier novels while precisely and presciently anatomising the dangers of a rampant neo-imperialist capitalism. Read the review

The Silence of the Girls

By pat barker (2018).

If the western literary canon is founded on Homer, then it is founded on women’s silence. Barker’s extraordinary intervention, in which she replays the events of the Iliad from the point of view of the enslaved Trojan women, chimed with both the #MeToo movement and a wider drive to foreground suppressed voices. In a world still at war, it has chilling contemporary resonance. Read the review

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

By carlo rovelli (2014).

A theoretical physicist opens a window on to the great questions of the universe with this 96-page overview of modern physics. Rovelli’s keen insight and striking metaphors make this the best introduction to subjects including relativity, quantum mechanics, cosmology, elementary particles and entropy outside of a course in advanced physics. Read the review

by Gillian Flynn (2012)

The deliciously dark US crime thriller that launched a thousand imitators and took the concept of the unreliable narrator to new heights. A woman disappears: we think we know whodunit, but we’re wrong. Flynn’s stylishly written portrait of a toxic marriage set against a backdrop of social and economic insecurity combines psychological depth with sheer unputdownable flair. Read the review

by Stephen King (2000)

Written after a near-fatal accident, this combination of memoir and masterclass by fiction’s most successful modern storyteller showcases the blunt, casual brilliance of King at his best. As well as being genuinely useful, it’s a fascinating chronicle of literary persistence, and of a lifelong love affair with language and narrative. Read the review

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By rebecca skloot (2010).

Henrietta Lacks was a black American who died in agony of cancer in a “coloured” hospital ward in 1951. Her cells, taken without her knowledge during a biopsy, went on to change medical history, being used around the world to develop countless drugs. Skloot skilfully tells the extraordinary scientific story, but in this book the voices of the Lacks children are crucial – they have struggled desperately even as billions have been made from their mother’s “HeLa” cells. Read the review

Mother’s Milk

By edward st aubyn (2006).

The fourth of the autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels finds the wealthy protagonist – whose flight from atrocious memories of child abuse into drug abuse was the focus of the first books – beginning to grope after redemption. Elegant wit and subtle psychology lift grim subject matter into seductive brilliance. Read the review

This House of Grief

By helen garner (2014).

A man drives his three sons into a deep pond and swims out, leaving them to drown. But was it an accident? This 2005 tragedy caught the attention of one of Australia’s greatest living writers. Garner puts herself centre stage in an account of Robert Farquharson’s trial that combines forensic detail and rich humanity. Read the review

by Alice Oswald (2002)

This book-length poem is a mesmerising tapestry of “the river’s mutterings”, based on three years of recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. From swimmers to sewage workers, boatbuilders to bailiffs, salmon fishers to ferryman, the voices are varied and vividly brought to life. Read the review

The Beauty of the Husband

By anne carson (2002).

One of Canada’s most celebrated poets examines love and desire in a collection that describes itself as “a fictional essay in 39 tangos”. Carson charts the course of a doomed marriage in loose-limbed lines that follow the switchbacks of thought and feeling from first meeting through multiple infidelities to arrive at eventual divorce.

by Tony Judt (2005)

This grand survey of Europe since 1945 begins with the devastation left behind by the second world war and offers a panoramic narrative of the cold war from its beginnings to the collapse of the Soviet bloc – a part of which Judt witnessed firsthand in Czechoslovakia’s velvet revolution. A very complex story is told with page-turning urgency and what may now be read as nostalgic faith in “the European idea”. Read the review

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

By michael chabon (2000).

A love story to the golden age of comics in New York, Chabon’s Pulitzer-winner features two Jewish cousins, one smuggled out of occupied Prague, who create an anti-fascist comic book superhero called The Escapist. Their own adventures are as exciting and highly coloured as the ones they write and draw in this generous, open-hearted, deeply lovable rollercoaster of a book. Read the review

by Robert Macfarlane (2019)

A beautifully written and profound book, which takes the form of a series of (often hair-raising and claustrophobic) voyages underground – from the fjords of the Arctic to the Parisian catacombs. Trips below the surface inspire reflections on “deep” geological time and raise urgent questions about the human impact on planet Earth. Read the review

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

By michael pollan (2006).

An entertaining and highly influential book from the writer best known for his advice: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” The author follows four meals on their journey from field to plate – including one from McDonald’s and a locally sourced organic feast. Pollan is a skilled, amusing storyteller and The Omnivore’s Dilemma changed both food writing and the way we see food. Read the review

Women & Power

By mary beard (2017).

Based on Beard’s lectures on women’s voices and how they have been silenced, Women and Power was an enormous publishing success in the “ #MeToo ”’ year 2017. An exploration of misogyny, the origins of “gendered speech” in the classical era and the problems the male world has with strong women, this slim manifesto became an instant feminist classic. Read the review

True History of the Kelly Gang

By peter carey (2000).

Carey’s second Booker winner is an irresistible tour de force of literary ventriloquism: the supposed autobiography of 19th-century Australian outlaw and “wild colonial boy” Ned Kelly, inspired by a fragment of Kelly’s own prose and written as a glorious rush of semi-punctuated vernacular storytelling. Mythic and tender by turns, these are tall tales from a lost frontier. Read the review

Small Island

By andrea levy (2004).

Pitted against a backdrop of prejudice, this London-set novel is told by four protagonists – Hortense and Gilbert, Jamaican migrants, and a stereotypically English couple, Queenie and Bernard. These varied perspectives, illuminated by love and loyalty, combine to create a thoughtful mosaic depicting the complex beginnings of Britain’s multicultural society. Read the review

by Colm Tóibín (2009)

Tóibín’s sixth novel is set in the 1950s, when more than 400,000 people left Ireland, and considers the emotional and existential impact of emigration on one young woman. Eilis makes a life for herself in New York, but is drawn back by the possibilities of the life she has lost at home. A universal story of love, endurance and missed chances, made radiant through Tóibín’s measured prose and tender understatement. Read the review

Oryx and Crake

By margaret atwood (2003).

In the first book in her dystopian MaddAddam trilogy, the Booker winner speculates about the havoc science can wreak on the world. The big warning here – don’t trust corporations to run the planet – is blaring louder and louder as the century progresses. Read the review

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

By jeanette winterson (2011).

The title is the question Winterson’s adoptive mother asked as she threw her daughter out, aged 16, for having a girlfriend. The autobiographical story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit , and the trials of Winterson’s later life, is urgent, wise and moving. Read the review

Night Watch

By terry pratchett (2002).

Pratchett’s mighty Discworld series is a high point in modern fiction: a parody of fantasy literature that deepened and darkened over the decades to create incisive satires of our own world. The 29th book, focusing on unlikely heroes, displays all his fierce intelligence, anger and wild humour, in a story that’s moral, humane – and hilarious. Read the review

by Marjane Satrapi (2000-2003), translated by Mattias Ripa (2003-2004)

Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel follows her coming-of-age in the lead up to and during the Iranian revolution. In this riotous memoir, Satrapi focuses on one young life to reveal a hidden history.

Human Chain

By seamus heaney (2010).

The Nobel laureate tends to the fragments of memory and loss with moving precision in his final poetry collection. A book of elegies and echoes, these poems are infused with a haunting sense of pathos, with a line often left hanging to suspend the reader in longing and regret. Read the review

Levels of Life

By julian barnes (2013).

The British novelist combines fiction and non-fiction to form a searing essay on grief and love for his late wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh. Barnes divides the book into three parts with disparate themes – 19th-century ballooning, photography and marriage. Their convergence is wonderfully achieved. Read the review

Hope in the Dark

By rebecca solnit (2004).

Writing against “the tremendous despair at the height of the Bush administration’s powers and the outset of the war in Iraq”, the US thinker finds optimism in political activism and its ability to change the world. The book ranges widely from the fall of the Berlin wall to the Zapatista uprising in Mexico, to the invention of Viagra. Read the review

Citizen: An American Lyric

By claudia rankine (2014).

From the slow emergency response in the black suburbs destroyed by hurricane Katrina to a mother trying to move her daughter away from a black passenger on a plane, the poet’s award-winning prose work confronts the history of racism in the US and asks: regardless of their actual status, who truly gets to be a citizen? Read the review

by Michael Lewis (2010)

The author of The Big Short has made a career out of rendering the most opaque subject matter entertaining and comprehensible: Moneyball tells the story of how geeks outsmarted jocks to revolutionise baseball using maths. But you do not need to know or care about the sport, because – as with all Lewis’s best writing – it’s all about how the story is told. Read the review

by Ian McEwan (2001)

There are echoes of DH Lawrence and EM Forster in McEwan’s finely tuned dissection of memory and guilt. The fates of three young people are altered by a young girl’s lie at the close of a sweltering day on a country estate in 1935. Lifelong remorse, the horror of war and devastating twists are to follow in an elegant, deeply felt meditation on the power of love and art. Read the review

The Year of Magical Thinking

By joan didion (2005).

With cold, clear, precise prose, Didion gives an account of the year her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, collapsed from a fatal heart attack in their home. Her devastating examination of grief and widowhood changed the nature of writing about bereavement. Read the review

White Teeth

By zadie smith (2000).

Set around the unlikely bond between two wartime friends, Smith’s debut brilliantly captures Britain’s multicultural spirit, and offers a compelling insight into immigrant family life.

The Line of Beauty

By alan hollinghurst (2004).

Oxford graduate Nick Guest has the questionable good fortune of moving into the grand west London home of a rising Tory MP. Thatcher-era degeneracy is lavishly displayed as Nick falls in love with the son of a supermarket magnate, and the novel records how Aids began to poison gay life in London. In peerless prose, Hollinghurst captures something close to the spirit of an age. Read the review

The Green Road

By anne enright (2015).

A reunion dominates the Irish novelist’s family drama, but the individual stories of the five members of the Madigan clan – the matriarch, Rosaleen, and her children, Dan, Emmet, Constance and Hanna, who escape and are bound to return – are beautifully held in balance. When the Madigans do finally come together halfway through the book, Enright masterfully reminds us of the weight of history and family. Read the review

by Martin Amis (2000)

Known for the firecracker phrases and broad satires of his fiction, Amis presented a much warmer face in his memoir. His life is haunted by the disappearance of his cousin Lucy, who is revealed 20 years later to have been murdered by Fred West. But Amis also has much fun recollecting his “velvet-suited, snakeskin-booted” youth, and paints a moving portrait of his father’s comic gusto as old age reduces him to a kind of “anti-Kingsley”. Read the review

The Hare with Amber Eyes

By edmund de waal (2010).

In this exquisite family memoir, the ceramicist explains how he came to inherit a collection of 264 netsuke – small Japanese ornaments – from his great-uncle. The unlikely survival of the netsuke entails De Waal telling a story that moves from Paris to Austria under the Nazis to Japan, and he beautifully conjures a sense of place. The book doubles as a set of profound reflections on objects and what they mean to us. Read the review

Outline by Rachel

Cusk (2014).

This startling work of autofiction, which signalled a new direction for Cusk, follows an author teaching a creative writing course over one hot summer in Athens. She leads storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She hears from other people about relationships, ambition, solitude, intimacy and “the disgust that exists indelibly between men and women”. The end result is sublime. Read the review

by Alison Bechdel (2006)

The American cartoonist’s darkly humorous memoir tells the story of how her closeted gay father killed himself a few months after she came out as a lesbian. This pioneering work, which later became a musical, helped shape the modern genre of “graphic memoir”, combining detailed and beautiful panels with remarkable emotional depth. Read the review

The Emperor of All Maladies

By siddhartha mukherjee (2010).

“Normal cells are identically normal; malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways.” In adapting the opening lines of Anna Karenina , Mukherjee sets out the breathtaking ambition of his study of cancer: not only to share the knowledge of a practising oncologist but to take his readers on a literary and historical journey. Read the review

The Argonauts

By maggie nelson (2015).

An electrifying memoir that captured a moment in thinking about gender, and also changed the world of books. The story, told in fragments, is of Nelson’s pregnancy, which unfolds at the same time as her partner, the artist Harry Dodge, is beginning testosterone injections: “the summer of our changing bodies”. Strikingly honest, originally written, with a galaxy of intellectual reference points, it is essentially a love story; one that seems to make a new way of living possible. Read the review

The Underground Railroad

By colson whitehead (2016).

A thrilling, genre-bending tale of escape from slavery in the American deep south, this Pulitzer prize-winner combines extraordinary prose and uncomfortable truths. Two slaves flee their masters using the underground railroad, the network of abolitionists who helped slaves out of the south, wonderfully reimagined by Whitehead as a steampunk vision of a literal train. Read the review

A Death in the Family

By karl ove knausgaard (2009), translated by don bartlett (2012).

The first instalment of Knausgaard’s relentlessly self-examining six-volume series My Struggle revolves around the life and death of his alcoholic father. Whether or not you regard him as the Proust of memoir, his compulsive honesty created a new benchmark for autofiction. Read the review

by Carol Ann Duffy (2005)

A moving, book-length poem from the UK’s first female poet laureate, Rapture won the TS Eliot prize in 2005. From falling in love to betrayal and separation, Duffy reimagines romance with refreshing originality. Read the review

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

By alice munro (2001).

Canada’s observant and humane short story writer, who won the Nobel in 2013, is at her best in this collection. A housekeeper’s fate is changed by the pranks of her employer’s teenager daughter; an incorrigible flirt gracefully accepts his wife’s new romance in her care home. No character acts as at first expected in Munro’s stories, which are attuned to the tiniest shifts in perception. Read the review

Capital in the Twenty First Century

By thomas piketty (2013), translated by arthur goldhammer (2014).

The beautifully written product of 15 years of research, Capital made its author an intellectual star – the modern Marx – and opened readers’ eyes to how neoliberalism produces vastly increased inequalities. Full of data, theories and historical analysis, its message is clear, and prophetic: unless governments increase tax, the new and grotesque wealth levels of the rich will encourage political instability. Read the review

Normal People

By sally rooney (2018).

Rooney’s second novel, a love story between two clever and damaged young people coming of age in contemporary Ireland, confirmed her status as a literary superstar. Her focus is on the dislocation and uncertainty of millennial life, but her elegant prose has universal appeal. Read the review

A Visit from The Goon Squad

By jennifer egan (2011).

Inspired by both Proust and The Sopranos , Egan’s Pulitzer-winning comedy follows several characters in and around the US music industry, but is really a book about memory and kinship, time and narrative, continuity and disconnection. Read the review

The Noonday Demon

By andrew solomon (2001).

Emerging from Solomon’s own painful experience, this “anatomy” of depression examines its many faces – plus its science, sociology and treatment. The book’s combination of honesty, scholarly rigour and poetry made it a benchmark in literary memoir and understanding of mental health. Read the review

Tenth of December

By george saunders (2013).

This warm yet biting collection of short stories by the Booker-winning American author will restore your faith in humanity. No matter how weird the setting – a futuristic prison lab, a middle-class home where human lawn ornaments are employed as a status symbol – in these surreal satires of post-crash life Saunders reminds us of the meaning we find in small moments. Read the review

by Yuval Noah Harari (2011), translated by Harari with John Purcell and Haim Watzman (2014)

In his Olympian history of humanity, Harari documents the numerous revolutions Homo sapiens has undergone over the last 70,000 years: from new leaps in cognitive reasoning to agriculture, science and industry, the era of information and the possibilities of biotechnology. Harari’s scope may be too wide for some, but this engaging work topped the charts and made millions marvel. Read the review

Life After Life

By kate atkinson (2013).

Atkinson examines family, history and the power of fiction as she tells the story of a woman born in 1910 – and then tells it again, and again, and again. Ursula Todd’s multiple lives see her strangled at birth, drowned on a Cornish beach, trapped in an awful marriage and visiting Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden. But this dizzying fictional construction is grounded by such emotional intelligence that her heroine’s struggles always feel painfully, joyously real. Read the review

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night‑Time

By mark haddon (2003).

Fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone becomes absorbed in the mystery of a dog’s demise, meticulously investigating through diagrams, timetables, maps and maths problems. Haddon’s fascinating portrayal of an unconventional mind was a crossover hit with both adults and children and was adapted into a very successful stage play. Read the review

The Shock Doctrine

By naomi klein (2007).

In this urgent examination of free-market fundamentalism, Klein argues – with accompanying reportage – that the social breakdowns witnessed during decades of neoliberal economic policies are not accidental, but in fact integral to the functioning of the free market, which relies on disaster and human suffering to function. Read the review

by Cormac McCarthy (2006)

A father and his young son, “each the other’s world entire”, trawl across the ruins of post-apocalyptic America in this terrifying but tender story told with biblical conviction. The slide into savagery as civilisation collapses is harrowing material, but McCarthy’s metaphysical efforts to imagine a cold dark universe where the light of humanity is winking out are what make the novel such a powerful ecological warning. Read the review

The Corrections

By jonathan franzen (2001).

The members of one ordinarily unhappy American family struggle to adjust to the shifting axes of their worlds over the final decades of the 20th century. Franzen’s move into realism reaped huge literary rewards: exploring both domestic and national conflict, this family saga is clever, funny and outrageously readable. Read the review

The Sixth Extinction

By elizabeth kolbert (2014).

The science journalist examines with clarity and memorable detail the current crisis of plant and animal loss caused by human civilisation (over the past half billion years, there have been five mass extinctions on Earth; we are causing another). Kolbert considers both ecosystems – the Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon rainforest – and the lives of some extinct and soon-to-be extinct creatures including the Sumatran rhino and “the most beautiful bird in the world”, the black-faced honeycreeper of Maui. Read the review

Fingersmith

By sarah waters (2002).

Moving from the underworld dens of Victorian London to the boudoirs of country house gothic, and hingeing on the seduction of an heiress, Waters’s third novel is a drippingly atmospheric thriller, a smart study of innocence and experience, and a sensuous lesbian love story – with a plot twist to make the reader gasp. Read the review

Nickel and Dimed

By barbara ehrenreich (2001).

In this modern classic of reportage, Ehrenreich chronicled her attempts to live on the minimum wage in three American states. Working first as a waitress, then a cleaner and a nursing home aide, she still struggled to survive, and the stories of her co-workers are shocking. The US economy as she experienced it is full of routine humiliation, with demands as high as the rewards are low. Two decades on, this still reads like urgent news. Read the review

The Plot Against America

By philip roth (2004).

What if aviator Charles Lindbergh, who once called Hitler “a great man”, had won the US presidency in a landslide victory and signed a treaty with Nazi Germany? Paranoid yet plausible, Roth’s alternative-world novel is only more relevant in the age of Trump. Read the review

My Brilliant Friend

By elena ferrante (2011), translated by ann goldstein (2012).

Powerfully intimate and unashamedly domestic, the first in Ferrante’s Neapolitan series established her as a literary sensation. This and the three novels that followed documented the ways misogyny and violence could determine lives, as well as the history of Italy in the late 20th century.

Half of a Yellow Sun

By chimamanda ngozi adichie (2006).

When Nigerian author Adichie was growing up, the Biafran war “hovered over everything”. Her sweeping, evocative novel, which won the Orange prize, charts the political and personal struggles of those caught up in the conflict and explores the brutal legacy of colonialism in Africa. Read the review

Cloud Atlas

David mitchell (2004).

The epic that made Mitchell’s name is a Russian doll of a book, nesting stories within stories and spanning centuries and genres with aplomb. From a 19th-century seafarer to a tale from beyond the end of civilisation, via 1970s nuclear intrigue and the testimony of a future clone, these dizzying narratives are delicately interlinked, highlighting the echoes and recurrences of the vast human symphony. Read the review

by Ali Smith (2016)

Smith began writing her Seasonal Quartet, a still-ongoing experiment in quickfire publishing, against the background of the EU referendum. The resulting “first Brexit novel” isn’t just a snapshot of a newly divided Britain, but a dazzling exploration into love and art, time and dreams, life and death, all done with her customary invention and wit. Read the review

Between the World and Me

By ta-nehisi coates (2015).

Coates’s impassioned meditation on what it means to be a black American today made him one of the country’s most important intellectuals and writers. Having grown up the son of a former Black Panther on the violent streets of Baltimore, he has a voice that is challenging but also poetic. Between the World and Me takes the form of a letter to his teenage son, and ranges from the daily reality of racial injustice and police violence to the history of slavery and the civil war: white people, he writes, will never remember “the scale of theft that enriched them”. Read the review

The Amber Spyglass

By philip pullman (2000).

Children’s fiction came of age when the final part of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy became the first book for younger readers to win the Whitbread book of the year award. Pullman has brought imaginative fire and storytelling bravado to the weightiest of subjects: religion, free will, totalitarian structures and the human drive to learn, rebel and grow. Here Asriel’s struggle against the Authority reaches its climax, Lyra and Will journey to the Land of the Dead, and Mary investigates the mysterious elementary particles that lend their name to his current trilogy: The Book of Dust. The Hollywood-fuelled commercial success achieved by JK Rowling may have eluded Pullman so far, but his sophisticated reworking of Paradise Lost helped adult readers throw off any embarrassment at enjoying fiction written for children – and publishing has never looked back. Read the review

by WG Sebald (2001), translated by Anthea Bell (2001)

Sebald died in a car crash in 2001, but his genre-defying mix of fact and fiction, keen sense of the moral weight of history and interleaving of inner and outer journeys have had a huge influence on the contemporary literary landscape. His final work, the typically allusive life story of one man, charts the Jewish disapora and lost 20th century with heartbreaking power. Read the review

Never Let Me Go

By kazuo ishiguro (2005).

From his 1989 Booker winner The Remains of the Day to 2015’s The Buried Giant , Nobel laureate Ishiguro writes profound, puzzling allegories about history, nationalism and the individual’s place in a world that is always beyond our understanding. His sixth novel, a love triangle set among human clones in an alternative 1990s England, brings exquisite understatement to its exploration of mortality, loss and what it means to be human. Read the review

Secondhand Time

By svetlana alexievich (2013), translated by bela shayevich (2016).

The Belarusian Nobel laureate recorded thousands of hours of testimony from ordinary people to create this oral history of the Soviet Union and its end. Writers, waiters, doctors, soldiers, former Kremlin apparatchiks, gulag survivors: all are given space to tell their stories, share their anger and betrayal, and voice their worries about the transition to capitalism. An unforgettable book, which is both an act of catharsis and a profound demonstration of empathy.

by Marilynne Robinson (2004)

Robinson’s meditative, deeply philosophical novel is told through letters written by elderly preacher John Ames in the 1950s to his young son who, when he finally reaches an adulthood his father won’t see, will at least have this posthumous one-sided conversation: “While you read this, I am imperishable, somehow more alive than I have ever been.” This is a book about legacy, a record of a pocket of America that will never return, a reminder of the heartbreaking, ephemeral beauty that can be found in everyday life. As Ames concludes, to his son and himself: “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.” Read the review

by Hilary Mantel (2009)

Mantel had been publishing for a quarter century before the project that made her a phenomenon, set to be concluded with the third part of the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light , next March. To read her story of the rise of Thomas Cromwell at the Tudor court, detailing the making of a new England and the self-creation of a new kind of man, is to step into the stream of her irresistibly authoritative present tense and find oneself looking out from behind her hero’s eyes. The surface details are sensuously, vividly immediate, the language as fresh as new paint; but her exploration of power, fate and fortune is also deeply considered and constantly in dialogue with our own era, as we are shaped and created by the past. In this book we have, as she intended, “a sense of history listening and talking to itself”. Read the review

• Best culture of the 21st century
• Hilary Mantel
• Marilynne Robinson
• Fiction in translation
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Blog – Posted on Friday, Feb 28

The 30 best dystopian novels everyone should read.

Whether they’re sci-fi books about androids dominating the world or speculative fiction tales that aren’t so far from real life, dystopian novels are never not in vogue. From widely popular series to critically acclaimed works, these stories’ social commentary caters to both casual readers and literary critics, often making the list for the best books of all time . And the enduring popularity of dystopian novels signals our perpetual and collective curiosity about where society is going. 

Since the twentieth century, there has been a fairly consistent outpour of books in this genre. To help you navigate and choose between these introspective potential futures, here are 30 dystopian novels you should not miss out on. 

How long do you think you can last in a post-apocalyptic landscape yourself? Take our 1-minute quiz below to find out 😉

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1. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

While it was published in 1949, this famous work is predictably set in 1984. Orwell’s world foresees only three continental-sized nations, at least one of which is overseen by an ubiquitous, watchful government. A censorship worker in this nation finds himself questioning the totalitarian system and its effort to obliterate individual thought and emotions, soon beginning a search for others who may be in the same boat. 

On top of its other legacies, what is most astounding about this work of fiction is the meticulous worldbuilding that Orwell undertook. Based on his observations of society on the brink of the Cold War, Orwell crafted complex mechanisms such as “doublethink” and contradictory slogans like  “War Is Peace” with so much care and connection to real life that it’s easy to see how this fictional autocratic world could exist. And that’s not even to mention the story itself —  a chilling and unexpected journey that ensures that Nineteen Eighty-Four will stand the test of time.

2. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Set in a world that many of us avid readers would find nightmarish, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is the story of Guy Montag, a “fireman” who is becoming disillusioned with his job — to put it simply, he’s assigned to set fire to books, rather than put fires out. Unfortunately, society’s short attention span no longer calls for the perusal of novels, and the authoritarian state wants to prevent people from thinking too much (if at all). What the government didn’t expect is Montag opening his mind to the mysteries of the written word and beginning a quest to try and salvage these books, as well as the minds of those around him. 

The Red Scare of the 1940s, which saw America gripped by an anti-communist sentiment that came close to hysteria, prompted Bradbury to write this eternal love story to books in the 1950s. But Bradbury’s warning horn against increased censorship is timeless, perhaps more important than ever in our age of Big Data, and will live on through Montag’s arduous journey. 

3. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

In this once-futuristic world — the book was published in 1985 about the near future — America is taken over by a religious sect, and the order of the country is pushed back several centuries. Horrifyingly, women are domesticized and subordinated to men, even though environmental degradation and its impact on fertility means that fertile women are inordinately more precious and desired. In the middle of all of this is Offred, a young woman who’s forced to bear children for ruling-class men. 

The Handmaid's Tale ’s world is markedly different from many of the other worlds that we read about in well-known dystopian novels. Its focus on women’s experience, however, is not the only extraordinary quality about this book. Atwood’s unconventional style and alternating storylines let readers unravel this complex universe at their own pace before the plot escalates to a fever pitch, cementing Atwood’s masterpiece as one of the great pillars of dystopian fiction.

4. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

In contrast to the well-crafted orders we’ve encountered thus far, The Road transports us to a universe shattered by an unnamed catastrophe. Ordinary lives are replaced by mad scrambles for food and supplies for those who survive. In this bleak “eat or be eaten” situation, a father and his young son trek southwards in anticipation of the winter, driven by their hopes to find and unite with the “good guys.”

Make no mistake:  this book is truly melancholic. From bleak atmospheres to the heartbreaking loss of humanity, both physically and morally, this post-extinction setting comes to life before readers’ eyes through McCarthy’s somber prose. Rather than questioning the structures of our society, The Road encourages readers to look inward and examine our compassion in a world that’s increasingly competitive and individualistic.

5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

In this dystopian classic, the World State government of the year 2540 AD controls the population not by telling them what to think, but by numbing them with happiness. Henceforth Huxley’s Brave New World introduces readers to a seemingly perfect realm, with genetically-engineered, carefree, and well-fed citizens. 

With mass production and Fordism in mind, Huxley’s merry consumers and blissful citizens grow up with this sort of technology and kept satisfied by it. So you can imagine how anyone who comes in from the outside “savage” world would appear to them… which is exactly what occurs, to tragic effect. The most striking and thus memorable thing about this novel is how it shows that the state doesn’t need to ban books or torture dissenters to silence them — our culture can purge itself of intellectuality simply through self-indulgence.

6. Blindness by José Saramago

Set in the 1990s, this Nobel Prize winner describes a city's social order that disintegrates as a curious contagion infects its population. As cases spiral out of control, food runs scarce, and criminals exploit the chaos, the militant state heightens surveillance and set up quarantines to try and maintain order. 

At the heart of Blindness is our refusal to see the violence and heartlessness that already exist in our society. Saramago is a famous allegorist, and he’s at his best in this work: with his unique style and resounding imagery, he emphasizes this harsh reality, and makes note of the importance of solidarity and compassion in dire situations.

7. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

In this disturbing world, youth alienation manifests in a much more dramatic manner than heavy metal rock laden with angst. Indeed, our protagonist, Alex, bonds with his rebellious friends by means of vandalism and atrocious crimes. As his parents and social institutions attempt to stop and help him, Alex begins to adopt a different view of his friends and the isolating culture that he has grown up in. 

Full of violence, psychological manipulation, and a secret language made up of Shakespearian and Russian loanwords, A Clockwork Orange is not the easiest read. Burgess’s system of elaborate slang may have been genius, but his hauntingly powerful descriptions of brutality aren’t exactly pleasant, and made the book rather controversial. Nonetheless, the exploration of youth’s dissatisfaction with what society expected from them, evident at the time of the book’s publication, is still magnificent and incredibly timely. 

8. The Children of Men by P.D. James

Set in 2021, James’s 1992 novel speaks of another society broken by infertility. As the last people to be born on Earth get killed in a pub fight and the world falls into disorder with no future for humanity, historian Theo Faron finds himself caught in a political fight with his dictatorial cousin, Xan. But then the struggles take a new turn when Theo finds out that there may be some hope for a future after all. 

The Children of Men provides a different vision of the end of humankind — one that’s not caused by a holocaust or an ice age, but rather by something much more gradual and believable. While our 2020 (fortunately!) doesn’t seem to be leading us to the death of our species, the suspenseful journey of Theo Faron may shock you with how close we are to the problem of depopulation. 

9. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick’s acclaimed novel transports its readers to a post-apocalyptic world in which conditions on Earth have been made unlivable by natural disasters. As a result, we see the rise of artificial creatures that resemble organic creatures, which include humanoids. A bounty hunter receives an order to kill six of these androids, who he now must identify among the actual humans. 

Action-packed and full of intriguing worldbuilding — from bizarre psychological tests to see if a human is indeed an android to social status determined by the collection of naturally bred animals — this novel will leave readers reeling. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? proves to be a loaded question, prodding us to think about what makes us human and what AI technology has in store for humanity. 

10. The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard

In the year 2145, the world sweats as global warming takes over, flooding cities and mutating animals into beasts. As civilization becomes ravaged by these prehistoric creatures, Dr Robert Kerans and his team venture into newly uncharted territory to research the now-wild world. 

Published in 1962, The Drowned World is one of the earliest works of “cli-fi” (climate fiction) written. This adventurous novel takes us on a journey into the new unknown, where territories that we once built are morphed into sweltering tropical labyrinths. Yet it’s more than a mere adventure: Ballard’s plot is ultimately a clever Trojan Horse to discover the implications of this grisly possibility and the psychological effects that it has on humans. 

11. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

In a glimmering glass city of the distant future, humans live like androids — emotionless, passionless, and nameless. Each human is identified by number and only one of them, mathematician D-503, seems to realize that he can do things and think about things differently. As he discovers his own feelings through his relationships with others, readers learn more about the odd conventions of this totalitarian system — and the consequences of defying it. 

If the plot of this book sounds familiar to you, that’s because it was the inspiration for many subsequent acclaimed dystopian novels, such as Nineteen Eighty-four and Brave New World . Published in 1921, it was an absolute trailblazer for this genre. Beyond its originality, We  also shines in its prose — its purposefully abrupt sentences and dry language emphasizes both the squarish quality of the mathematician narrator and the colorlessness of the world he lives in.

12. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

At the beginning of Never Let Me Go , we meet a caretaker in her thirties who reminisces about her school days as she runs into her old classmates. While this sounds like it could be just another young adult book mistakenly added to a list of dystopian novels, don’t be fooled: as we sink deeper into Kathy H.’s memories, elements of an unconventional and alarming society will emerge. 

Guiding through the entire maze is Ishiguro’s simple but emotive writing, which captures the eternal question of morality in an age of rapidly developing medical technology. And Never Let Me Go ’s setting in the 1980s, rather than the distant future, gives the story an eerie sense of reality — easily driving Ishiguro’s commentary home.

13. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven hops back and forth between the timelines of several key characters: a dead actor, his first wife, the paparazzi who tried to save him, his close friend, and a young aspiring actress who witnessed his death. As if that’s not enough, their lives were also disrupted by a deadly flu that’s wiped most of civilization out of existence. 

In this popular recent novel, Emily St. John Mandel explores the meaning of humanity by stripping away all the conditions that made it what it is. Rather than surprising you with fantastical mutations, Station Eleven leaves a deep impression on you by showing you what extreme conditions can do to human beings. Indeed, the depth of imagination and care in Mandel’s worldbuilding — what people remember, what survives of the old world, and what must be drastically adapted — gives this dystopian novel the uncanny cadence of a nonfiction account, as if she’s observed it all firsthand.

14. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

This classic (which you can now listen to !) tells the story of a Victorian scientist who tests his time machine and travels to the far-off future, where he finds a carefree world occupied by childlike people. The scientist spends some time uncovering the development of humankind before returning to where he parked his Time Traveller — only to realize it is gone. As his adventure continues, the grim underbelly of this seemingly indulgent future comes to light. 

As one of the first sci-fi works ever written, The Time Machine will take you on a wild ride without a particularly convoluted plot line ( just a very well-executed twist ). In a nutshell, this brilliantly simple story allows the hallmark commentary of late Victorian literature on duality and societies’ dark undersides to shine through.

15. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Oryx and Crake tracks two friends, Jimmy and Crake, who happen to stumble upon the dark side of the Internet in their teenage years: a simple act fuelled by youthful curiosity that would change their lives forever. In their adult years, the world’s population takes a nosedive after an odd pandemic strikes, and survivors desire to create genetically “better” humans. At the center of these technological developments is Crake, now a grown scientist, and Jimmy. 

Very different from Atwood’s popular totalitarian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale , this first installation of The MaddAddam Trilogy is as much a tale of the rippling effects of childhood experiences as it is a warning against gene modification. Atwood’s striking writing fleshes out these dynamics with such depth that it will leave you  both awed and disturbed by how plausible these frightful developments seem to be. 

16. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Returning to the theme of life under totalitarian states, we have Katniss Everdeen’s rise to stardom in a horrific reality TV show called The Hunger Games. If you’re not already familiar, this involves two people from each District of the country being randomly picked out, brought together, and forced to kill each other in what is essentially a massive and deadly obstacle course — only one can emerge victorious, all for the sake of the upper class’s entertainment. 

This gripping survival story, also one in a series of three, became a pop culture phenomenon almost immediately after its publication in 2008. Beyond portraying a twisted, hierarchical society, The Hunger Games is about finding a way to rise above difficulties and the absurd ignorance that people may have for others’ suffering.

17. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

In Parable of the Sower ’s grim and disorderly vision of the future, climate catastrophe leads to scarce resources and global anarchy, sparing only a few gated neighborhoods such as the one in which Lauren Olamina lives. Yet even the safety of her community will come under threat, as Lauren and her family try to prop up whatever’s left of civilization’s moral order. 

Parable of the Sower obliterates all traces of a functioning society, leaving behind profound sorrow, but still honing in on the hope that one can still experience in such a situation. Even though it is told through Lauren’s youthful voice, the emotional depth explored makes the story hauntingly mature. 

18. The Chrysalids by John Wyndham

Plunging the world into a technological dark age after the collapse of civilization, The Chrysalids shows us what remains after the storm — a small community driven by the belief that only by maintaining strict normalcy can they avoid God’s punishment (unlike their predecessors). Subsequently, they become eugenicists, killing or sending “mutant” humans into the unknown. At the heart of this community is David, son to a devout man and authority figure, and his own secret mutation. 

Though dissimilar to Wyndham’s other sci-fi creations, this is often considered his best book. Fast-paced, suspenseful, and insightful in its reflection of social exclusion and discrimination, The Chrysalids is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking.

19. The Giver by Lois Lowry

You likely know this one already. In case you’re not familiar, let’s do a quick recap: The Giver is the story of a teenage boy, Jonas, who grew up in a utopia where everyone is content with their routines and colorless world — including Jonas. But all of this changes when he is chosen to be the Receiver of Memory, a role where he is to know all that others have forgotten. So begins a journey in which Jonas discovers hard truths about his world and must somehow come to terms with them. 

Though this beloved coming-of-age story is a shorter read when compared to other sci-fi and dystopian novels, it packs a powerful message. Lowry vividly takes the readers through the innocent internal dilemmas of a growing boy, highlighting the struggle to choose between individual freedom and security.

20. The Power by Naomi Alderman

Five thousand years into the future, the world is dominated by women, and a male author pens a work of historical fiction detailing how this matriarchy came to be — creating a meta book-within-a-book that allows Alderman to slyly comment on men’s perception of this change. The origin story itself, which is sparked by women’s sudden possession of electrical superpowers, is set in the 21st century, intertwining the stories of many different women from different parts of the world who cultivate this power to turn the tables against those who have been stifling them. 

If you go into this book expecting a gender equality utopia, you will be disappointed. At its heart, The Power is as much a book about systematic inequality as it is about women’s plight. The narrative’s unique concept explores the complexity and difficulty that the characters with superpowers have, and ultimately issues a warning against going too far on our quest to redress an imbalance. 

21. The Stand by Stephen King

From the pen of master story-teller Stephen King comes this horrific tale of good and evil, of humanity and chaos in a broken world. This enduring fantasy novel is the account of the 1% — specifically, their odysseys after the accidental unleashing of a lethal biological weapon.As mayhem rages across the world, survivors have to build a new order for themselves while avoiding infection. But two distinct groups, with different supernatural abilities, come to two drastically different conclusions about how society should go on, eventually confronting each other as their stories converge.

King’s skillful narration takes readers of The Stand on a roller coaster ride as they explore the pains of the characters’ losses, as well as their hopes for a better tomorrow.

22. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin’s powerful book tells the story of physicist Shevek on two wildly different (but parallel!) planets: he hails from the anarchic planet called Anarres, but ends up on the capitalist world of Uras. The two stories set in these different places and times are told alternately as we discover the strange features of their polar-opposite worlds. 

Though The Dispossessed is part of a series of seven books, it can definitely be enjoyed on its own. Interestingly, it is actually a utopian novel which explores and contrasts the freedoms of an anarchic society to the constraints of a capitalist one. Nonetheless, Le Guin’s utopia has been described as “ambiguous,” suggesting that there’s more than what’s on the surface — you’ll have to judge for yourself. 

23. Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

This Japanese thriller novel is about a group of teenagers who are forced onto an island with nothing but weapons, and are expected to kill each other until only one survives — all as a part of a military training program. As chaos ensues, Shuya Nanahara decides to protect his friends rather than abide by this gruesome playbook… but the dark side of a fascist Japan becomes clearer with every passing day that this teenager defies the militant state. 

Though Battle Royale ’s grisly plot line kept it from being published right away, it enjoyed great success once it was printed, and continues to be a cult favorite to this day. (And if the plot sounds similar to The Hunger Games , that’s because Suzanne Collins was inspired by Takami’s ingenious story — all the more reason for you to pick it up!) 

24. Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

In this bizarrely intriguing version of the future, an unknown city is ruled by a ginormous bear. If that’s not strange enough for you, get this: there’s an eccentric organism called Borne tangled in the grizzly’s fur. That fact only comes to light through Rachel, a girl who makes a living out of scavenging for products made by a biotech firm called the Company — which is how she stumbled upon Borne in the first place.

The resulting topsy-turvy literary sci-fi novel, Borne , brings the ecologically ravaged world to readers in the most unconventional way. It may take a while to get into Vandemeer’s writing, but the story that awaits is well worth your time. 

25. The Iron Heel by Jack London

The Iron Heel ’s realm is one in which the long-drawn socialist revolution had succeeded, and totalitarian states reign across the globe. In the US, the Oligarchy runs the show in the name of equality, although the reality of its governance proves to be very different. In a metafictional touch, the readers learn of the origins and problems of this world through the discovery of an autobiography manuscript written in the 1930s. 

First printed in 1908, this book impresses not only because it was among the first dystopian fiction ever published, but also because of its uncanny predictive power. While there is no Oligarchy running the White House now, hats off to Jack London and his interpretation of political developments, which were actually not far off from what the world ended up going through in the 20th century.

26. Saga of the Nine: Origins by Kawika Miles

In this new American dystopian, we follow both Jax, a lowly mill worker in an unnamed tyrannical future, and Mica Rouge, a veteran watching his country being torn apart in a not-too-distant time. In a war across time, both men are pulled into a fight against the Nine, the Ordean Reich, and their dystopian designs for not only the United States, but the world.

In this debut novel by American author Kawika Miles, readers will find themselves in a refreshing take on the dystopian genre. While the world Miles creates is rampant with your typical themes of censorship, corruption, rebellion, and tyranny, characters are rife with internal conflict due to the violence, betrayal, and dishonor within factions and amongst apparent comrades.

27. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Following unreliable narrator Billy Pilgrim, who flits back and forth between the memory of his service during World War II and his years after repatriating to America, Slaughterhouse-Five is clearly the story of a man driven to the brink by violence. Billy’s life becomes even more unbelievable when he gets abducted by an outer-space race whose conception of time and death eerily reflects the inhumane sentiments he encountered during the war. 

Though its plot might be a little mind-bending, Slaughterhouse-Five discusses the same questions of morality and materialism at its core. What really stands out is Vonnegut’s decision to let his character look back in time, which reminds us that dealing with the past is as big a part of progressing as searching for the future.

28. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Many are probably familiar with this classic from their middle school years: they make us learn it for a reason! But let’s run through it: a wartime evacuation flight crash-lands on a deserted island, leaving only a gang of preadolescent boys as its survivors. This band of ragtag boys are forced to organize themselves in order to survive. Meanwhile, their mini-society exposes the true horror at the heart of humanity. Lord of the Flies compresses the trials of growing up into a single event, thus accentuating the devastating consequences of a world that is selfish and without orders. 

29. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

In Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One , teenager Wade Watts joins an Easter egg hunt in the virtual world of his gaming community, hoping to reap its hefty rewards: the inheritance of both the company that produced the game and the fortunes of its creator. But what were once just virtual fights become very real as players battle each other for this unbelievable prize. 

Reader Player One intrigues on several counts — firstly, in the portrayal of the increasingly unequal world in which Wade lives; and secondly, in the book’s advanced technology, which is actually not far from our own. Cline’s work duly reminds us of how blurred the line between reality and virtuality is becoming, and how that may also be seen as a way to blur crucial social divides.

30. The Wall by John Lanchester

The Change has flooded the world — leaving Joseph Kavanagh’s island nation to build a wall to protect itself from the tide and asylum seekers who deemed “the Others.” Joseph’s job as a Defender is to keep these people out, although there are moments where he comes to question this task. 

Rightly called the “ dystopian fable for our time ” for its handling of immigration and xenophobia, this novel touches on all of the most urgent issues currently flooding our media. Most noteworthy is The Wall ’s ability to show what may be waiting for us several decades down the line, forcing us to take stock of the vulnerability of humans in the face of nature.

If suspenseful novels are your cup of tea, check out this list of the best ones here ! Or if you’d like some food for thought but are short on time, have a quick look at these super short stories . 

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The 20 Best Novels of the Decade

Yes, here it is..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the  best debut novels , the  best short story collections , the  best poetry collections , the best memoirs , the best essay collections , the best (other) nonfiction , and the best translated novels of the decade . We have now reached the eighth and most difficult list in our series: the very best novels written and published in English between 2010 and 2019.

You may be shocked to learn that we had a hard time deciding on 10. So, being captains of our own destiny, we decided we were allowed to pick 20 . . . plus almost that many dissents. We did not allow reissues, otherwise you had better believe this list would include The Last Samurai ,  Speedboat , and Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead , among a robust host of others. We also, for this list, discounted novels in translation, as they got their very own list last week, and including them would have necessitated a list twice as long. (My beloved  Sweet Days of Discipline , certainly in the top ten novels I personally read this decade, is doubly ineligible , but luckily I also write these introductions.)

Now, for the last time: the following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Twenty

Jennifer egan,  a visit from the goon squad   (2010).

There are some moments from  A Visit From the Goon Squad  that I won’t forget. In one chapter, a former PR hotshot named Dolly is tasked with reviving the public image of an African dictator known as “The General” with the help of a B-list actress named Kitty Jackson. Kitty’s job is to stand next to The General in a photo, but she ends up asking too many questions about a genocide and gets thrown into prison. Months later, it turns out, The General’s government becomes a democracy, Kitty is freed, and Dolly opens a sandwich shop. This strand of Egan’s polyphonic, funny, and often poignant book encapsulates some of her satire’s recurring ideas. In  Goon Squad , a book with a large cast of characters set in a period roughly spanning the late 1970s to the 2020s, shifts in time are always jarring—they can destroy the body, corrupt memory, and blur processes of change. Nominally centered on the American celebrity industrial complex (particularly rock’n’roll in the Bay Area),  Goon Squad  is also very much about media “spin,” fragmented perspectives, illusory identities, and aimless materialism in a capitalist society. Though the premise may seem to indicate otherwise, the book is decidedly skeptical of nostalgic impulses. “Time is a goon,” one of Egan’s characters says. The past is nothing if not the foundation of contemporary disillusionment with its promises—promises of beauty, fame, family, and the attainment of other icons.  Goon Squad  earned Egan well-deserved plaudits, including the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and cemented her status as one the 21st century’s most insightful (and formally experimental) American writers.  –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

David Mitchell,  The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet   (2010)

It is easier to conjure the intellectual-literary atmosphere of an era when it is 30 years’ past than when it is a mere decade ago. It is hard to see 2010 right now, as we wait for time and the canon to true the lens, but I have a very clear sense-memory of revelation and exhilaration as I sped through David Mitchell’s epic-historical ghost story, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet , wondering if the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson had momentarily taken possession of Haruki Murakami. Here was a reminder that the world of a novel—in this case, a very detailed rendering of an 18th-century Dutch trading post in the port of Nagasaki—can be fuller, more vivid, than our own, that it can exist as a hothouse for the reader’s moral imagination.

It is difficult to say what another 25 years will make of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. In the context of Mitchell’s more recent novels, and their space-operatic excesses, the plot of De Zoet seems worryingly baroque, show-offy, even. But it is clearly the work of the same writer who gave us the near-perfect coming-of-age novel, Black Swan Green , its language similarly precise and unexpected, all in aid of a story that seems somehow to tell itself, a true history that never quite happened.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Denis Johnson,  Train Dreams   (2011)

If I was tasked with proving that literary awards are a cruel joke and that life is nothing but a bleak and meaningless trudge toward the grave, Exhibit A would be what I have dubbed The Great Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Travesty of 2012. 2012 was, of course, the year the Pulitzer board (not the jury) decided that no book published in the previous twelve months merited the most prestigious honor in American letters, despite the fact that the trinity of finalists included Denis Johnson’s hallucinatory masterwork  Train Dreams , as well as Karen Russell’s lushly brilliant debut novel  Swamplandia!  and David Foster Wallace’s unfinished opus  The Pale King . (An explanation as to how this happened was proffered by novelist and 2012 jury member Michael Cunningham in a  rather wonderful letter  to the  New Yorker  in the wake of the non-decision).  Train Dreams  may well be the 21 st  century’s most perfect novella (he said, having of course read them all…). It’s the incantatory story of a turn-of-the-century logger and railroad laborer, Robert Grainier, who loses his family to a wildfire and retreats deep into the woods of the Idaho panhandle as the country modernizes around him. Johnson’s spare, strange, elegiac prose conjures a world that feels both ancient and ephemeral, full of beauty and menace and deep sorrow. As Anthony Doerr wrote in his  New York Times  review: “His prose tiptoes a tightrope between peace and calamity, and beneath all of the novella’s best moments, Johnson runs twin strains of tenderness and the threat of violence.” An American epic in miniature,  Train Dreams is a visionary portrait of soul untethered from civilization, a man stoically persevering on his own hermetic terms in the face of unimaginable tragedy. A haunted and haunting reverie.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Julie Otsuka,  The Buddha in the Attic (2011)

Julie Otsuka’s groundbreaking (and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning) Buddha In the Attic begins: “On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves.” This is how we are introduced to our narrators, a group of Japanese “picture brides.” We follow them as they immigrate to California. We watch helplessly as they meet the husbands they were promised to, as they attempt to assimilate to America and raise children across a cultural divide. The collective first person narration matches the subject matter beautifully; it mimics the immigrant experience, the way “others” are often seen as the same and the automatic camaraderie and safety we might find among those who share our stories. Slipping out of the shared “we” and “most of us” and “some of us,” Julie Otsuka creates a dizzying dislocation, a confusion of identity that serves the story well: “…unable to remember our own names, not to mention those of our new husbands. Remind me one more time, I’m Mrs. Who? ” Her timing is impeccable. Just when you start to grow weary of the collective voice, for just a sentence or two, she’ll give us an intimate detail, an individual life, to hold onto, and it always catches you off guard when she does, like a rule broken: “The youngest of us was twelve, and from the eastern shore of Lake Biwa, and had not yet begun to bleed.” The specificity is heartbreaking. You can feel the intention behind every choice; so rarely does a book mesh style and subject so brilliantly. The most shattering bit comes at the end (SPOILER ALERT!)—when there is a sudden shift in the narrative. The “we” abruptly becomes the white Americans who are left to tell the story, after their Japanese neighbors are sent to internment camps. It’s chilling, and terribly accurate, the way their voices are literally taken from them in this story. I’ve re-read this novel many times, trying to understand how it can encompass such a wide scope of things. What Julie Otsuka has accomplished here is both an artful, intimate portrait of individual lives and a piercing indictment of history.  –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Téa Obreht,  The Tiger’s Wife   (2011)

Although it came out in 2011, I read  The Tiger’s Wife , the elegant first novel by Téa Obreht, only recently. I found it stunning, so perfectly moving on its many levels. Obreht’s protagonist and narrator, a young doctor named Natalia Stefanovic whose life is upended by the mysterious death of her beloved grandfather, is one of the most mellifluous, engrossing storytellers I’ve encountered in my life (she has learned well—her grandfather is one of the most mellifluous, engrossing storytellers she has encountered in hers). Her account remembers and aches for her loved one in a way that is both so poetic and relatable; she chiefly connects to his memory through a text, using his beloved copy of  The Jungle Book  to try to solve the puzzle around his last days, as well as his interior life. I also found  The Tiger’s Wife  to be very personal—Obreht was born in former Yugoslavia, and  The Tiger’s Wife  takes place in the Balkans, immediately after the war. My family, too, is from former Yugoslavia (where I spent much time, growing up), and though my life in America (and my age) has removed me from deeply experiencing the region’s turmoil firsthand, I marveled and cherished how Obreht’s book performs the acts of both collection and remembrance about the recent scarring and splintering of this region—this region which has historically been scarred and splintered so many times. (And it made me think of my own grandfather, another Yugoslavian storyteller, with whom I spent much of my childhood dreaming of animals.) “Collection and remembrance” are more than fluid themes of the novel, though—they comprise its methodology. Inspired by the format of  The Jungle Book , perhaps, but also a culture that incorporates so many legends and beliefs (both Eastern and Western), Natalia begins interweaving fables and stories and flashbacks in her story—connecting an older, superstitious, and magical world and a bleak, modern, and disillusioned age. She does this as a device for the reader, but also because they keep unfurling in her own life as she learns her grandfather’s full story, and becomes, in a way, herself, inspired by the magic of it all.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Jesmyn Ward,  Salvage the Bones   (2012)

Most of what remains with me years after reading Jesmyn Ward’s second novel is impressionistic. One of the final images in  Salvage the Bones  is of the 14-year-old protagonist Esche’s father roughing out the initial impact of Hurricane Katrina in the attic of their flooded house. They’ve been separated from the family dog, China, and her litter of puppies; Esche’s dad resolves to stay there until China returns. Ward’s story is largely about caretaking; the slimness of the book and the small-scale—a father and his children prepare for a hurricane that people are warning about—belie the immensity of what Ward set out to do with this National Book Award-winning novel. We all have at least some sense of the disastrous Katrina response and what it revealed about government infrastructure and shortsightedness concerning communities of color in particular. Katrina is the costliest natural disaster in US history, and by the time  Salvage the Bones  was published, the long-term mental and material costs of the hurricane were in some ways easier to see, though also largely lost in an over-saturated media market. China and the puppies are not just decorations Ward includes, but in fact central to the identity of a poor black family in the fictional Mississippi Gulf town of Bois Sauvage. China’s “motherhood” is a source of strength for Esche, who is quietly pregnant herself; Esche’s older brother, Skeetah, hopes to one day sell the puppies as fighting animals—a decision motivated by economic desperation rather than callous detachment. Ward explicitly sought to remind readers of the dignity, suffering, and hopefulness of families of color amid one of the largest-scale disasters of our times.  –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Rachel Kushner,  The Flamethrowers   (2013)

Rachel Kushner’s 2013 masterpiece has the advantage of being both epic in its historical sweep and highly, acutely specific in its characterization, observation, and ultimately, its aesthetic goals. The story is simultaneously too sprawling to do justice to in a few lines and disarmingly simple. A woman moves to New York City in the 1970s primed to create. She’s an artist. She’s swept up in the circles of other artists and finds herself perhaps too much under the sway or influence of an older man, a successful artist and the heir to an Italian tire/motorcycle fortune. The novel is a wash of conversations remembered, urges subsiding and returning, impressions. Reno, as the protagonist is nicknamed, travels to the western salt flats, crashes a motorcycle, challenges a speed record. Then she’s in Italy, adjacent to extreme luxury and wealth; next she’s in the streets, caught up in riots and a burgeoning activist culture on a collision course with her past. There is, throughout, an eerie sense of destiny, partly because we know she’s passing through important modern historical epics, but also because of the dreamlike grace of Kushner’s prose. “I was doing that thing the infatuated do,” Kushner writes through Reno, “stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.” In other moments, the writing turns rock hard and visceral. A world spreads out before us, and before Reno, and we can’t help but follow the path ahead, knowing that it’s full of mistakes, cruelties small and large, and pain. But there’s also an electricity there. This is a book, ultimately, about art, that deeply human subject.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Miriam Toews,  All My Puny Sorrows   (2014)

How rare is it to come across a novel that elicits a physical reaction from its reader? All My Puny Sorrows runs the gamut of emotions. Miriam Toews will have you laughing out loud one minute and sobbing on the subway the next. Her novel tells the story of Elf and Yoli, two sisters with an incredible bond despite living very different lives. By all external trappings, Elf is the successful sister. She is a world-renowned virtuoso pianist. She’s wealthy and happily married. Yoli is not any of those things. Instead, she is struggling with how to love someone who no longer wants to live. And so here we find ourselves, in the room with these two inseparable sisters in the aftermath of Elf’s suicide attempt. The way Miriam Toews describes her sadness is haunting: “Then Elf tells me that she has a glass piano inside her. She’s terrified that it will break. She can’t let it break. She tells me that it’s squeezed right up against the lower right side of her stomach, that sometimes she can feel the hard edges of it pushing at her skin.” (I read this novel months ago, and I still think of the glass piano often. It’s so memorable in its specificity! It’s so weird and unique that it could only have come from the mouth of this wonderfully well-rounded, surprising character.) But it’s not all sorrow! It hits all the notes. Shown through some flashbacks to the sisters’ Mennonite upbringing and cutting to their cruel present, the intimacies of their relationship are a saving grace, a sigh of relief. Miriam Toews has an ear for dialogue. Elf and Yoli talk like flesh-and-blood sisters. The details are spot-on. At some point, they speak of their plans to “chop wood, pump water, fish, play the piano, sing together from the soundtracks of Jesus Christ Superstar and Les Miserables , re-imagine our pasts, and wait out the end of the world.” There’s a version of this story, painted with less carefully crafted strokes, that comes out cliche. But Miriam Toews is a pro at teasing out the details that make the story full and unexpected.  –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation   (2014)

It is possible to read Jenny Offill’s second novel, Dept. of Speculation , in a day. In fact, it is more difficult not to, as you will not want to stop reading once you’ve started. The first time I read it, I remember being dazzled by the form: a progression of short paragraphs, sometimes continuous with those around them, sometimes ostensibly standalone, each one a jolt of intelligence or feeling. Here is the one everyone quotes:

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.

The novel is filled with anecdotes like these, and also sayings, or literary quotes, like this one, which I have written down in my notebook every time I have read this book:

What Rilke said: I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

The second time I read it, I was heartbroken by the story, every bit of it: the writer who sacrifices (too much?) for her family, the wife whose husband has strayed, the woman rebuilding. It is the quality of mind Offill creates that makes this novel so extraordinary, that makes me want to live inside it.

The third time I read it, I realized that this is one of the few novels that I find both formally exciting and emotionally devastating—in a good way. Most writers can pull off one or the other, but Offill does it right: she uses the form to slay you good.

PS: For those, like me, who have read this book too many times already, I am pleased to inform you that Offill’s forthcoming Weather is just as brilliant and wonderful as Dept. of Speculation , but it swaps out marriage and swaps in climate change/existential malaise as its main concern, which makes it exactly the kind of book we need right now.   –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Paul Beatty,  The Sellout (2015)

It’s tough to sell me on a novel that’s not funny. To me, fiction without humor is missing an essential part of the human experience. Paul Beatty’s Booker Prize-winning masterpiece is one of the funniest—and most human—novels I’ve ever read. Not only that, it made me feel entirely vindicated for insisting upon comedy. The Sellout is so sharp you might not notice it’s cut you until you’ve already feeling faint. It’s a combination of laugh-out-loud comedy, precision social satire (rooted in a deep understanding of history), and literary tour de force. It’s so good it made me use the phrase “tour de force.” The mission of The Sellout ’s narrator, a black man, is to reintroduce (official) segregation to his rural neighborhood within inner-city Los Angeles after it is mysteriously disappeared from the map. The novel fittingly begins with the narrator lighting a joint in the halls of the Supreme Court, where his re-segregation endeavor landed him. As Kevin Young wrote in his review , “Beatty takes the same delight in tearing down the sacred, not so much airing dirty laundry as soiling it in front of you.” But The Sellout celebrates as much as it torches. It is, in addition to being one of the great satirical novels of the decade, and maybe of all time, a celebration of blackness in an allegedly post-racial era (keep in mind, this was 2015).  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Viet Thanh Nguyen,  The Sympathizer   (2015)

As a novel, The Sympathizer is a roiling, darkly comic, propulsive literary thriller set in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, as a North Vietnamese mole keeps watch on the exiled South Vietnamese government in Southern California—it is compulsive reading, arresting in its language, unforgettable in its imagery. But it is more than that. By simply writing the words “Vietnam War” I am able to conjure an entire American mythology, the 40-year cultural byproduct of so much not-quite propaganda/not-quite art: long-haired protesters in the streets, Rustbelt grunts wading through steaming jungles, a flock of juddering choppers against an enormous foreign sun, broken men returning to a country that does not want them… This is the “American” version of the war, a story we’ve told “ourselves” that, while not particularly flattering, is as narrow and myopic as any campfire epic.

So let’s try this: The Sympathizer is an American novel about an American War, a devastating and needless conflict that created hundreds of thousands of refugees, new Americans (we were all new here, at some point) who found a home in the empire that displaced them, and who’ve made it better. Our cultural account of the American war in Vietnam has never been fully “ours” because it has neglected and actively excluded the perspectives of these refugees and their descendants. The Sympathizer is a vital work of art that begins to redress that imbalance.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Hanya Yanagihara,  A Little Life   (2015)

A Little Life is a polarizing book. There are those who love it, who hate it, and who spend their entire reading experience vacillating between these extremes. As one of the book’s advocates, even I experienced moments when I felt like throwing the book across the room. But the brilliance of this book is in the unbearable suffering it causes its characters; if the Bible was about how to survive the arbitrary punishments of angry Lord to such figures as Job, then A Little Life is about how to stay friends with Job, without forcing Job to, well, get better.

A Little Life follows four college friends through the ups and downs of their lives in any-time New York City, but is primarily focused on Jude, the survivor of an unimaginable childhood, grimly detailed in the most horrifying sections of the book. (While many would find the depth of suffering in A Little Life to be implausible in its extremes, Hanya Yanagihara, at a bookseller meet and greet I attended, said she’d received plenty of mail since publication that would suggest otherwise.) All this suffering sets Jude up for a central conflict between his friends, who want him to be happy, and his own understanding that the best he can aim is not to be happy but instead to just…be.

To me, the plausibility of the text was neither here nor there. My respect for the novel is more grounded in the book’s return to 19 th century style emotional narratives, as opposed to the hyper-masculine modernity of mid-century America that insisted on short sentences from the perspectives of nascent psychopaths (yes, that was a jibe at Hemingway). It’s also a turn away from the usual misery memoir’s happy healing, in favor of a grimly realistic portrayal of the long shadow of trauma. A Little Life gives me all the feels, and yet provides no easy answers, and to me, that’s what makes for good literature.  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

N. K. Jemisin,  The Fifth Season   (2015)

It’s not always possible to tell that a novel is great while you’re reading it. I mean, obviously you can usually tell if you like something, but to for me, you only know that a novel is capital-g Great when you find yourself, weeks or months or years after the first reading, still thinking about it. Most books, even delightful and brilliant ones, do not pass this test, at least for me. But I have thought about N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (and its two sequels, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky ) at least weekly since I read it a few years ago.

Perhaps it’s unfair. The novel imagines an alternate Earth that is periodically torn apart by apocalyptic weather—like suffocating ash, acid clouds, fungal blooms, mineral-induced darkness, magnetic pole shifts—that lasts for decades at a time, often threatening to wipe out humanity entirely. So you can see how it might come to mind these days.

But I also think about it for its incredible world-building, its unfortunately relevant cultural critique (caste systems, power hierarchies, fear and oppression of the other or unknown, particularly when that unknown other has dreamed-of skills), and its unforgettable characters, particularly, of course, Essun, with all her anger and fear and strength and softness and power. I love her.

And hey, if you don’t want to take my word for it, consider that all three books in the Broken Earth series won Hugos. All three. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Rachel Cusk, Outline   (2015)

There is something about the texture of Rachel Cusk’s prose in Outline (and in the novel’s two follow-ups, Transit and Kudos ) that feels different from anything you’ve ever read before. It’s ostensibly a novel about a woman teaching creative writing in Athens, but it’s really just a series of conversations—importantly, conversations as she remembers them, filter after filter. There’s no real plot, and I’m at a loss to fully describe why the novel is so captivating. Probably, it’s because, as Heidi Julavits put it , it is “lethally intelligent . . . Spend much time with this novel and you’ll become convinced [Cusk] is one of the smartest writers alive. Her narrator’s mental clarity can seem so hazardously penetrating, a reader might fear the same risk of invasion and exposure.” That will do it.

Once, on the subway, I saw a young woman reading Transit and a young man reading Outline , both in the appealing Picador editions. They were standing very close, but they were facing away from one another, and didn’t seem to be together. It took all I had not to stand up and tug on their sleeves—not only because of the perfect meet-cute, but because these books feel like a kind of shibboleth, that rare bit of artistic consumption that might actually tell you something about a person, and how their mind works, and the ways to access their heart. I got off before either of them. I hope they turned around and found each other. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Colson Whitehead,  The Underground Railroad (2016)

Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel is, as they say in the business, a shoo-in for this list. It won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Arthur C. Clark Award, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize. It was also a huge bestseller, of course, and achieved near-unanimous praise from critics. Oprah picked it for her book club. Barry Jenkins is adapting it into a television show . It doesn’t get much better than that.

But, why , you might ask, if by some strange accident you have not already read it yourself? Well, it’s accessible, entertaining, and character-rich, and it also reminds us of some uncomfortable but necessary truths about America and its history. (Though not, mind you, that there was literally a coal-burning railroad underground during the 19 th century—I mean, first of all, where would the smoke go?) It has the intensity, immediacy, and high stakes of any escaped slave narrative—literally life or death—which makes it a captivating page turner, but it’s also written by the talented and adaptable Colson Whitehead, who seems to be able to tackle any genre and style, from historical fiction to bildungsroman to zombies, and make it look easy. All we can ask is that he keeps on doing it. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Adam Haslett,  Imagine Me Gone   (2016)

This was one of those novels I had to be told multiple times to read. I just didn’t want to read a sad book about depression! And to be fair . . . it is sad. But even so, I was wrong to resist, and so are you if you missed this one.

Adam Haslett’s second novel is a full and frank portrait of a family and the mental illness that besieges its members—some genetically, others merely experientially. It’s no more complicated than that—there’s no hook, no high concept twist, just the story of a family, told over the years and through the lens of each member: John, Margaret, and their (adult) children Michael, Celia, and Alec. Michael is the most intense narrator, and the one who has inherited his father’s “beast,” though in him it is changed into an obsessive, endlessly riffing master. In fact, Michael’s writing shows up quite a bit in the novel, and it’s one of the book’s best parts—a direct lens, as it were, into a highly unusual mind.

Throughout, the writing is perfectly calibrated, shifting in tenor between characters but always elevated, even lovely. But the most impressive feat is the empathy with which Haslett unravels this family, and the tenderness with which he writes about love in all of its forms. This is a striking novel, and one of the best examples in recent memory of a certain literary mode: quiet, moving, immersive, beautiful. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Richard Powers,  The Overstory   (2018)

Much has been made of Richard Powers evocation of arboreal deep time. As ecologists and botanists and field biologists having been trying to tell us for decades, trees are alive in ways far closer to what we think of as sentience than anyone thought.

And while they can certainly be characters in bestselling narrative nonfiction (Peter Wohlleben’s The Secret Life of Trees comes to mind), can they be characters in a novel? Yes and no. While Powers does introduce several recurring tree characters—a landlocked and lonely chestnut that measures the generations of a single family, a monumentally giant redwood that’s home to eco activists—the lasting importance of this elegiac epic of climate collapse will be the way it takes environmental activism seriously. Powers’ human characters are heartbroken about the destruction of the planet, and they act upon it in all the messy, complicated ways one might expect from non-trees; but they are taken seriously—they are not quirky Franzonian extras, sprinkled through the narrative for a little radical spice. Here is a novel that contains within it layers of sadness and quiet hope; its concerns are ours, its characters are us. Deep time for dark times.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Hernan Díaz,  In the Distance   (2018)

From the very beginning of Hernan Diaz’s slyly Western noir we are lashed to its main character, an adolescent Swedish immigrant named Hakan, as if to the mast of a doomed ship: we see what he sees, struggle through the same harsh weather; we drift through his grim Sargassos, desperate for that ribbon of land on the horizon that will grant reprieve. Diaz’s close third person shadowing of Hakan makes his felt dislocation ours: we know he has been separated from his brother on the way to New York, we know he has never seen a city (at one point he almost disembarks at Buenos Aires, thinking it his final destination), but we don’t really know where he is, or where he’ll end up, or why.

Though painstaking in its historical detail (without succumbing to the obsessive’s need to show off) In the Distance has the feel of a very contemporary story, capturing as it does the struggle and the will at the heart of migration, along with the cruelties that inevitably surround it. And though Diaz clearly has a copy of the Cormac McCarthy family bible, its brimstone and blood, there is tenderness buried at the borders of this novel, just waiting for a little rain to draw it to the surface.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Susan Choi,  Trust Exercise   (2019)

A finalist (and in my books, at least, the front runner) for this year’s National Book Award, Susan Choi’s fifth novel Trust Exercise is a novel in three parts. There’s a lot of concern over not ruining the twist that comes in part two (and to a lesser extent, part three), but it’s impossible to describe quite why this is one of the best novels of the decade without giving it away. So if you haven’t read it yet, stop reading this and just trust that the central hinge is perfect, and that you should go read it. Now, the spoilers. The first section of the novel begins at a performing arts school in the 1980s, a love story between Sarah and David, friends from opposite sides of the tracks, that suffer through their teenage years, their drama amplified by being sensitive, ambitious theater kids. The shift in part two is that this first story is, in fact, the story within the story, a book written by an adult Sarah (who is not actually called Sarah), being read now by a secondary character from the first story, someone named Karen (who is likewise not actually called Karen). It is an incredibly bold, somewhat shocking twist, resulting in an unraveling that’s pure craft. In The New York Times Book Review , it was labeled unlovingly a “bait and switch,” while Dwight Garner (in the same paper) wrote that it made the book “burn more brightly than anything [Choi’s] yet written.” The second part of the novel is a revenge story too, with carefully built suspense (and a theatrical play with an actual gun), while the third dovetails perfectly, if a bit expectedly, into the future of not-Karen’s life. The premise of Trust Exercise is that teenagers are real people, not just unformed adults, with real concerns and emotional intelligence; they, too, are worthy of great literature.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Anna Burns,  Milkman   (2019)

Anna Burns’s Milkman requires a little commitment. I don’t particularly hold to the idea that some books are “easy” while some are “hard” (or that there is particular virtue in either case) but Burns’s unspooling story of a young woman in Belfast during The Troubles asks of its readers that they be good listeners, that they might have the patience to let the novel’s speech-driven rhythms carry them along, its endless clause-laden sentences tugging like a current toward some unknown destination.

The novel doesn’t specifically locate us in Belfast, nor does it give us an exact era; in fact, the only character that’s ever granted a name is the “Milkman,” an IRA higher-up who may or may not be courting the main character, who’s something close to 18. Already deemed odd for her habit of walking the (dangerous) streets with her nose in a book, the attentions of the older man—he shows up at random in his white van—has people talking (but always just out of earshot, the curtains quickly drawn). Milkman is all menace and mood, its ambiguities like dark corners, places of concealment, its violence latent throughout, ready to explode.

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top twenty, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Tom McCarthy,  C   (2010)

Listen, haters. I know it’s not as good—or at least as pure —as Remainder , which is a nearly perfect novel. But I loved this book for its sheer postmodern ambition, its obsessions—with hearing and mishearing, communication and miscommunication, associative thinking—and its arch coldness. It seems McCarthy, who let’s not forget is the general secretary of the “semi-fictitious” International Necronautical Society, which is “devoted to mind-bending projects that would do for death what the Surrealists had done for sex,” is playing some sort of trick, or set of tricks, on us, and maybe on literature itself, and well, unfortunately I am the sort of reader who appreciates that.

After all, the novel, which is ostensibly about a troubled and troublingly blank young man named Serge Carrefax, building radios and dropping bombs as the twentieth century begins, is so weird, and so much, and so clearly about language and what we make of it, and what it’s for. In her review of the novel for the New York Times , Jennifer Egan wrote that McCarthy “withstands the temptations of emotional plotting and holds out instead for something bigger, deeper, more universal and elemental.

C is a rigorous inquiry into the meaning of  meaning : our need to find it in the world around us and communicate it to one another; our methods for doing so; the hubs and networks and skeins of interaction that result. Gone is the minimalist restraint he employed in Remainder ; here, he fuses a Pynchonesque revelry in signs and codes with the lush psychedelics of William Burroughs to create an intellectually provocative novel that unfurls like a brooding, phosphorescent dream.

To be fair about the response of the critics, Michiko Kakutani hated it, calling it “disappointing and highly self-conscious” and finds his “carefully manufactured symbols and leitmotifs . . . to be more gratuitous than revealing.”

Which is perfectly reasonable. I, however, will continue to delight in its self-conscious, hyper-intellectual handwringing. I love that sort of thing. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Patrick DeWitt,  The Sisters Brothers   (2011)

Patrick DeWitt’s  The Sisters Brothers  is a perfect Western, which is why it’s so startling that it’s a comedy about a protracted existentialist crisis. The Gold Rush-era story of two bounty-hunters, the philosophical Eli and his rowdier, more impulsive brother Charlie, it unfolds slowly as they head from Oregon to California to kill a prospector-alchemist named Hermann Kermit Warm at the behest of a shady figure known as the Commodore. Eli doesn’t exactly love what they do for a living (he’d rather work in a shop, he thinks), while Charlie doesn’t question it. As they make their way south, in a picaresque-fashion they stumble from one (often gritty) misadventure to the next, and eventually wind up teaming up with Warm when they finally find him. The best part of the novel is the narration—Eli is the ambivalent moral compass normally absent from Westerns, a kind of extreme normalcy and humanity amidst a desolate and unforgiving landscape and livelihood. He is ever-loving towards his cruel and reckless brother, a little anxious about his weight, and gets extremely excited when he purchases a toothbrush for the first time. Charlie, on the other hand, is scary—and you’ll spend pages worrying that the complicated, loving bond between them will be Charlie’s to selfishly, stupidly break. Eli’s sincerity is what keeps everything afloat, as well as makes it all feel so precarious.

His considerate, soft-spoken-ness is jarringly interrupted by unsettling (usually gruesome, sometimes disgusting) moments of gore—sometimes violence, sometimes other nauseating things. The imagery is stunning—there are passages here and there, both horrifying and not, that have stuck with me since I read it. There is, I should warn you, some extremely tough, hard-to-read violence against horses (usually something that will compel me to burst into tears and stop reading/watching the thing at hand, but I was so interested in the story that still cried but plugged on). It’s elements like this that recall how, for all its creativity and charm,  The Sisters Brothers is actually extremely sad: a wrenching evocation of a bitter moment in the history of mankind, as it tries and fails to make progress. On a different note, it also has the single best title of a fictional work, possibly ever. In my opinion. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Claire Messud,  The Woman Upstairs   (2013)

“How angry am I? You don’t want to know,” begins Claire Messud’s novel, in a sure hook if I’ve ever seen one. If I could, I would quote the entire first page because it establishes one of the most powerful and memorable feminist voices I have ever read in fiction: urgent and chillingly true. The quietly seething protagonist of The Woman Upstairs, Nora Eldridge, is a teacher who has sidelined her art, because she is a rule-follower who fears risk and uncertainty. She is unmarried, single, without kids; intelligent, experienced, and incisive enough to pierce societal facades and expose the enduring gender conventions, stereotypes, and pressures that imprison women. Thus, Messud’s titular allusion to Bertha Mason, the first “madwoman in the attic.” Nora’s predictable life is enlivened by the arrival of the worldly Shahids, a family of famous Italian artist Sirena, Lebanese academic and intellectual Skandar and young, well-mannered Reza. In each of the Shahids Nora glimpses the revival of a life she thought to be long lost. With their flattery and tacit permission she returns to her art, sharing a studio with Sirena who is preparing for an upcoming art show in Paris; she engages in intellectual discussion with Skandar (though he talks and she mostly listens); and as she gets to know Reza, finding him the perfect child, she wishes she were his mother. She is filled with promise, until they betray her. Messud yields Nora’s confessional, vehement voice from beginning to end, lending the novel the pacing and tension of a psychological thriller. In The Woman Upstairs Messud’s signature intellectual tone is invigorated by the unmoored passion of her protagonist, who grapples with the choices of her past and the promise of her future, burdened with the question of determinism as she is tormented by self-doubt and the sense of having no control to alter her fate. Messud has struck the finest balance between showing and telling: she has delivered one version of the tale of the modern woman that no one can ignore. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Kathryn Davis,  Duplex   (2013)

It’s difficult to explain the phenomenon of reading this novel for the first time, though Lynda Barry does it as well as anyone could in the opening of her review for The New York Times :

The chapter is called “Body-­without-Soul,” the book is called Duplex , and you’ve lived in a duplex so you think, “Oh, I know what this book is about.” . . . And then you read this: “The car was expensive and silver-gray and driven by the sorcerer Body-without-Soul.” And you find out not only does Miss Vicks know him, they are romantically involved, and he can make things vanish or “vibrate at unprecedented frequencies,” including her privates, he can sow fear inside anything, and then you read that he can fit his entire hand inside her. Time stutters. What? His entire hand what?

You read the phrase four times, trying to catch up, the way you tried to catch up when you were a kid and Henry, the teenager from next door, told a bunch of you a story about his finger and a girl. Finger? Girl? What? Then a flood of understanding horrified you, shamed and excited you, trailed you back into the house to the kitchen where dinner was ready, where your chicken potpie was waiting to be pierced with your fork and you stared at it.

Because the thing is, you don’t know what this book is about. I could not tell you what this book is about, because this book is an experience—closest to a dream, maybe, or a memory. An enchantment. Tom Bissell called it “a coming-of-age-meets-dystopian-fantasy-meets-alternate-reality novel, or maybe an Ionesco-meets-Beckett-meets-Oulipo novel.” It is deadpan, episodic, unrelentingly bizarre, continually surprising, and gorgeously written. It considers teenage girls deadly serious, and deadly seriously. It is a suburban American fantasy of the highest order—though Davis herself might balk at this description. “I hope that what I write is about as “realistic” as a piece of writing ever can be, though maybe “true to life” is more like what I want to say here,” she said in an interview . “I think The Metamorphosis is the most realistic autobiography ever written, and I hope Duplex aspires on some level to such lofty heights.” It does. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,  Americanah (2013)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s third novel is many things at once: part social satire, part coming-of-age, part romantic comedy, part immigration story. It is expansive and engaging and deeply enjoyable. It insists on the multiplicity of immigrant experiences, including the idea that an immigrant who has found success in the US might return to her country of origin, as its female protagonist Ifemelu does. Born in Nigeria, Ifemelu comes to the US for college, and struggles to earn money, unhappily doing sex work at one point, but ultimately thrives as a writer, winning a fellowship at Princeton and writing a popular blog about her experience of race in the US as a black African. When the novel opens, she is preparing to return home. Ifemelu’s childhood friend and later boyfriend (then ex-boyfriend)—and the novel’s second narrator—Obinze, travels to England and similarly faces money struggles, though his result in deportation. Americanah does not shy away from either social critique or pure, satisfying romance. It is about identity, in both the capital and lowercase senses, and it succeeds in its precise drawing the humanity of its characters as well as the nuances of its cultures. –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Ben Lerner,  10:04   (2014)

Considering his reputation, it’s actually a little jarring to remember that Ben Lerner has published all three of his novels (and one poetry collection) in the last decade. For those ready to jump down to the comments to tell me that actually, Lerner’s a poet —I know, dudes. Yes, he’d published two books of poetry before this decade (2006’s Angle of Yaw was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry), and he published another in 2010, but there’s really no denying that Lerner rose to general prominence with 2011’s slim, semi-autobiographical novel Leaving the Atocha Station , and that since then, he’s become a major name in the literary world primarily on the strength of his novels. Them’s the facts.

I reread both Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 recently, so as to better contextualize Lerner’s latest, The Topeka School , and found them both to still be pleasantly over-intellectual, funny, and flawed books—but 10:04 held up rather better, even with its “mild lacrimal events.” Yes, in 2019 the fact that he dropped a New Yorker story into his novel wholesale isn’t as charming as it was in 2014, but who cares? And sure, the novel is mostly just a series of Ben Lerner’s observations about art and people and the world, but who cares, and actually that’s exactly what I love about it, because Ben Lerner’s observations are better than most people’s, and because if a book makes me sit around and think deeply about the world I live in and the connections between phenomena, then I’m more than satisfied. Plus, it has a truly hilarious masturbation scene. Really, you can’t beat it. (No pun intended!!!!!!!) –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Rabih Alameddine,  An Unnecessary Woman   (2014)

Of course I was going to love this book. This is a book about books. It has four (4) epigraphs. W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz is mentioned on page three. Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is mentioned on page six. That’s only the tip of the iceberg . Plus, it’s about an introverted, deliciously sardonic, relentlessly stubborn woman who hates pretty much everyone, but loves literature, and spends all her time hiding in her Beirut apartment, secretly translating all her favorite novels into Arabic. She’s been doing this for 50 years. No one has ever read any of them. Honestly, I can’t think of a book better suited to my temperament.

And that’s just the flashy headline. This is also a novel about the Lebanese Civil War, and about how we treat people who live at the margins, particularly women, particularly older women. This is also a novel about loneliness, and about grief, and about how language can help us negotiate these, and the limits of that negotiation.

But probably the best argument for this book as one of the greatest of the decade is this: Aaliya’s is one of the best narratorial voices I have ever read. She is unusual, contemplative, critical, complex, candid, rude and tender. She’s absurdly compelling. If the truly great novels are those that invent and maintain a unique quality of mind (and for me, they are), this is one of the greatest. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Lauren Groff,  Fates and Furies   (2015)

Things were pretty good in 2015—Obama was president, the Paris Agreement was drafted, the Supreme Court affirmed same sex marriage (plus a little website called Lit Hub launched). And Lauren Groff’s third novel, Fates and Furies , was published. A finalist for the National Book Award, the book was a sensation, garnering positive reviews from everyone (including Obama, who said it was his favorite book of 2015). The novel begins on the day a young couple Lancelot (Lotto) Satterwhite and Mathilde Yoder marry, a mere two weeks after they meet. The way their love grows is told in the first half of the book, following Lotto’s mythic-hero story (born during a hurricane to a theme-park mermaid mother) he struggles as an actor before transforming into a brilliant playwright. He is a man touched by fate, who doesn’t question his successes. The second half of the novel turns the story on its head, Mathilde revealing herself as the catalyst for Lotto’s good fortune. As the story is retold and reshaped from her perspective, not only are gaps filled, but are secrets revealed. In an interview for Lit Hub, Groff said the novel is a “conversation about marriage, but also about privilege and background and our personality and how we deal with the world.” Fates and Furies takes a fairy tale marriage and probes its deepest darknesses and psychological depths with perfect, lyrical prose. If somehow you missed it when it was first published, this is your alarm to pick it up now. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Paulette Jiles, News of the World   (2016)

A magnificently vivid and thoroughly heartwarming odd couple adventure tale set in the aftermath of the Civil War, in which Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd—an elderly (but still spry) widower and veteran of three wars who roams the towns of Northern Texas, spreading the good word that the 15th Amendment has just been ratified and reading newspaper stories from distant lands to town halls full of rapt locals—finds himself tasked with delivering a young orphan girl (the delightfully quarrelsome former Kiowa “captive” Johanna) across 400 miles of unsettled territory to her relatives in San Antonio. As I have detailed at excruciating length to anyone who’ll listen over the past three years, I love everything about this tender gem of a novel: the way Jiles textures her Old West landscape with Kidd’s tersely poetic observations and ironic musings, the old-fashioned getaway and gunsmoke thrills over which she allows her mismatched protagonists to bond, her masterful blending of humor and suspense, and the pleasure she takes in detailing a disappearing way of life. It’s an exquisite portrait of two wary, worn-out souls, starved of love and unmoored from the worlds they knew, finding unlikely solace in one another. What begins as a hilariously combative battle of wills between this unlikely pair of malcontents becomes, by the close, something altogether more poignant, more precious. If I’m making this sound treacly and sentimental, forgive me, for it is neither. There’s nothing cheap, nothing unearned about the warmth that radiates from its closing pages, the sweet sorrow we feel at their journey’s end. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Mike McCormack,  Solar Bones   (2016)

The flap copy on my edition of Solar Bones gives away the ending, or at least the kicker. I’m going to give it away again, now, so look away if you’re one of those people who clutches their pearls at “spoilers,” as if one could spoil great literature by detailing any point of its plot. So: Marcus Conway is dead. And in this exceptional, strange novel, whose present action is no more than a few hours on All Souls’ Day, Marcus sits at his kitchen table and recounts the day of his death—and much of the life that came before it—in one book-length sentence, an incantatory ode to small town life in western Ireland. But the experimental formatting isn’t even the most impressive feature of the novel—I mean, before this I never would have imagined that I could be so enchanted by a book largely about the daily habits and various relationships and minor work dramas of a middle-aged civil engineer. What magic is that?

And ultimately, that’s what is so profound about this novel: it takes something quite straightforward—a regular person’s life—and presents it so carefully, so lyrically and specifically, that it can’t help but become cosmic, philosophical, a whole world to wonder at. This is why the ending—whether you know it’s coming or not—is so gutting. It’s an apocalypse, a small one, and you feel it, even as the cars continue to stream by outside your bedroom window. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Samantha Hunt,  Mr. Splitfoot   (2016)

Mr. Splitfoot , Samantha Hunt’s third novel, is her creepiest, and maybe her saddest. It is about two preteens—orphans—Ruth and Nat, who live in desolate upstate New York at the Love of Christ! Foster Home, Farm, and Mission, a terrible place run by a greedy religious psychopath. Ruth is in love with Nat, while Nat is enamored of his own skills—somehow, he can speak to the dead. He can summon the deceased parents of the children who live in the home. It’s during one of his séances that they are interrupted by a new character—a charismatic charlatan named Mr. Bell who wants to help Nat profit financially from his talent. This interloper is obviously bad news—but the sense of foreboding around him and their whole enterprise is gravely augmented by the fact that every other chapter of the novel takes place many years later. Ruth, now an adult, is there, and Nat is nowhere to be found. This older Ruth also does not talk at all now, but she is determined to help a young woman, her niece Cora, escape something dangerous.

Hunt’s novels, in general, are tremendously atmospheric, but Mr. Splitfoot  might take the cake—here, she is a veritable cinematographer. The ambiance she designs is exceptionally vivid: alternately shadowy and garish, extremely lonely and damp. It’s weird that the novel’s setting is so real and ordinary (just outside Troy, New York) because the story is so otherworldly, so metaphysical, so much a sinister fairy tale. The novel conjures its hair-raising, skin-crawling pulse from grotesque Christian iconography, dank forests, and smoky ghosts that might resemble what mothers look like (though, among the very motherless ensemble, no one knows for sure). Mr. Splitfoot  is rich in symbolism, which might feel too-thickly applied for some readers, but I think it fits the overall generousness of her storytelling. Hunt doesn’t just write fiction; like the magical waifs at the center of her story, she truly brings things to life—though to put it this way might be laying things on a bit thick, as well. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Yaa Gyasi,  Homegoing   (2016)

Homegoing , Yaa Gyasi’s sweeping narrative of the slave trade’s toll on a family lineage across three centuries, begins with two half-sisters in 18th-century Ghana: Effia, whose marriage to the British governor of Cape Coast Castle furnishes her with security and wealth, and Esi, who is kidnapped and sold into bondage, waiting for passage to the Americas in the packed, rank dungeons under the fortress where Effia lives in luxury. Each chapter is told from the perspective of one of their descendants, unfolding the effects of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic: in West Africa, families and villages are torn apart by war and kidnappings; in America, the inhuman brutality of American slavery, rumors of which provoke horror among those who remain in Africa, leads into the era of Jim Crow apartheid and torture. In the book’s earlier scenes, some of its most vivid, Isabel Wilkerson wrote for The New York Times that Gyasi “walks assuredly through the terrain of Alex Haley, Solomon ­Northup and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her intimate rendering of the human heart battered by the forces of conquest and history.” Some critics contended that the book’s later scenes, in the modern-day US, relied on stereotypes that were “sometimes unquestioningly imported, rather than combatted, subverted, and complicated,” Kate Osana Simonian wrote for The Kenyon Review . Regardless, this book is an astonishing testament to survival and a witness to the ancestral wisdom and ingenuity that made survival possible. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Danielle Dutton, Margaret the First (2016)

I have been recommending this slim, glinting dagger of novel since it came out in 2016, to anyone who will listen, and I’m not going to stop now. Look, “best of” lists like this one should be messy and idiosyncratic and unexpected, reflections of long and heated arguments by people who care a lot about books and are always reading—what they shouldn’t be is calibrated to please everyone. Having said that—and aside from my love of Danielle Dutton’s miraculous first-person inhabitation of 17th-century Renaissance woman Margaret Cavendish—I would like this book to serve as representative evidence of all the short novels that might not be epic in length, but are so in scope, that are too often left off lists like this one because they don’t immediately register as monumental. But back to the book.

Of noble station, Margaret Cavendish—aka “Mad Madge—was a real person, a writer of plays, poetry, philosophical treatises, scientific theories, and more. The first woman ever invited to the Royal Society in London, Cavendish did, indeed, achieve the intellectual fame she’d long sought; unsurprisingly, her accomplishments were diminished at every turn, as many claimed her books must have been written by her husband. Dutton (who founded Dorothy: A Publishing Project) realizes the outsize ambitions of this remarkable book with virtuosic efficiency, braiding first- and third-person perspectives with passages from Cavendish’s original writing. I will be recommending this book for the next decade.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Elif Batuman,  The Idiot   (2017)

The Idiot is one of those books that expanded my understanding of what a novel could look like. It is meandering, but it meanders with such gusto that I never doubted that Elif Batuman knew exactly where she was leading me. The Idiot is a campus novel, telling the story of its protagonist’s first year at Harvard. She—Selin—has a romantic interest (their relationship is sort of one-and-a-half-sided—their courtship mostly takes place in the then-nascent medium of email), but mostly she bobs along. That’s part of it, the bobbing. Selin is something of a buoy in a world of torpedoes. If this sounds tiresome, consider the profound power of the incredibly funny, linguistically virtuosic narrator. The Idiot is occasionally baggy, but its voice is so thoroughly charming that I could have read volumes of it. Selin is, if occasionally bewildered, also full of wonder, without any of the tweeness with which that word is sometimes unfairly burdened. The Idiot is a novel of ideas, a novel of fascination. And it’s just so damn funny. Of the novel’s humor, Cathleen Schine writes , “Language is the medium and language is the comedian, language is the star and the prop, Chaplin and the globe he balances, the hungry fellow and the shoe he dines on.” The Idiot is, for all its shaggy bits, a perfectly self-contained world. –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Jesmyn Ward,  Sing, Unburied, Sing   (2017)

Jesmyn Ward is a MacArthur genius grant recipient, a two-time National Book Award winner, and a former TIME 100 honoree, as well as the author of one of the  most powerful and affecting memoirs  of the last ten years, so why does it still feel like she’s under-read? Granted, Ward is not one of the book world’s Very Online Authors, nor does she qualify as a literary  wunderkind  (though I’d argue that winning two National Book Award by the still-young age of forty is pretty damn  wunder ful), and she and her work have never really been subjected to the kind of breathless op-ed assault that can, as a silver lining, serve to raise awareness of a title, but still… All that throat-clearing is to say that if you haven’t yet gotten around to reading Ward’s work, you really,  really  should. She is a truly magnificent writer and one of the most poetic and humane chroniclers of the trauma that generations of systemic racism has inflicted upon the contemporary black American family. Her finest (and most harrowing) work to date,  Sing, Unburied, Sing  is an intimate, mystical portrait of a fractured Mississippi Gulf Coast family and the painful histories and buried secrets that plague its members as they embark upon a journey to the State Penitentiary. As she does in 2011’s  Salvage the Bones , Ward infuses this devastating Southern realist tale with a sort of mythic grandeur. Her language is lyrical, hypnotic, haunted by a deep and profound sorrow as her characters are haunted by the ghosts of young men brutally and prematurely wrenched out of the world. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Ottessa Moshfegh,  My Year of Rest and Relaxation   (2018)

If I were to choose one word to describe my experience reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest novel, the word would be delight . It’s just so goddamn fun, and weird, and, well, mean in a way you’re not allowed to be, usually, either in literature or in life, which made me love it (look, she’s not hurting anybody, everyone is fictional, let me have this).

Like many readers (and writers) I know, I first fell for Moshfegh via her stories in the Paris Review , and 2017 her collection Homesick for Another World . My Year of Rest and Relaxation picks up some of her stories’ elements—horrible people, anger, dissociation between reality and interiority—while feeling like a much bigger, better, complex work. Well, it’s a novel, after all, and it’s a good one.

As you may know, the book centers on an unnamed narrator (rich, she tells us, and pretty) living in New York City, whose parents have recently died, and who would like to take a “year of rest and relaxation” via a drug stupor, waking only every three days to eat. She is sometimes stymied by Reva, her “best friend,” but eventually more or less succeeds, and wakes in the summer of 2001, slowly readjusting to her life before she’ll have to readjust all over again.

And not for nothing, the latter half of this decade has made me extremely sympathetic to the quest to spend a year asleep. As long as I’d still be able to vote (absentee ballot?), I would happily agree to be unconscious for 2020. Just think of all the bullshit I’d miss. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Sally Rooney,  Normal People   (2018)

Just popping in to introduce you to a book you’ve definitely never heard anything about, an underappreciated novel I like to call Normal People . Just kidding! I’m sure you know all about it. I’m sure it’s the first thing you see when you walk into your local indie. I’m sure you probably tried to go to the Books Are Magic event that so many people RSVP’d to that they had to move it to a local church (and it was still packed!). You are probably also pumped for the TV adaptation —right? There is good reason for the hype, friends. From Sally Rooney, celebrated author of Conversations With Friends and heralded as “the first great millennial writer” comes the story of Connell and Marianne. Connell is your quintessential cool kid (popular, star of the football team, etc.), while Marianne lives a more solitary and private high school existence. His mother works for her family. One day, when Connell comes to pick his mother up from Marianne’s house, an unlikely connection grows between the two teenagers. Through Sally Rooney’s masterfully controlled prose, we follow them through the halls of their high school, where they pretend not to know each other. We follow them as they outgrow the place, shed friendships, move away from home. We follow them to university. We see them thrive and wilt, ebb and flow. There is something about Sally Rooney’s writing that is so certain, that makes us trust the feelings of the characters. She cuts to the core of them. Normal People is a biting portrait of an intimate relationship as a living, breathing thing. But in the periphery, through some details of circumstance, it also examines socioeconomic class (Sally Rooney has said she wants to write “a Marxist novel”) in a way that reads like George Eliot’s Middlemarch for the modern age. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse   (2018)

Most of us (I hope) are at least intellectually aware of the centuries of colonial violence meted out by European settlers upon the Indigenous nations of North America, and though we don’t need to feel something to grasp its injustice, art is here to remind us of the specific human cost of systematized theft and racism.

The late Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse (first published in Canada in 2012, but released in the US by Milkweed in 2018) recounts the all too familiar story of Indigenous children stolen from their parents to be (re)educated in the ways of Christian empire. In this case, that story happens in one of Canada’s notorious “residential schools,” church-run boarding schools that were effectively prisons, in which all traces of First Nations’ culture were forbidden (language, first and foremost), and where neglect, abuse, and even murder, were tragically commonplace. Though the material is necessarily grim, Wagamese doesn’t fetishize despair, and allows his main character, Saul, the chance to feel something like joy as he discovers a preternatural talent for hockey. And though the sport might only represent a brief respite for Saul, from a lifetime of pain and loss, these sections contain the best writing about a sport I have ever read.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Téa Obreht,  Inland   (2019)

You’d be forgiven, if you read Téa Obreht’s 2011 debut The Tiger’s Wife (ahem, see above), for having high expectations for her sophomore effort, especially considering it’s been 8 years in the making.

You’d be forgiven, and you wouldn’t be disappointed. This is a lush, wide-ranging, and fully American novel, a revisioning of a classic Western, imbued, as all the best revisionings are, with many of the satisfactions of the trope, but presented alongside a set of new and better ones.

For instance, for a Western, it’s not particularly violent—or not as violent as you’d expect, though what is there was so well-written as to make me gasp—and instead we get the aftermath: the ghosts. Ghosts are everywhere in this novel, reminding us that every place and time has its own history, its own victims, its own way of self-consideration. Both Nora and Lurie see them, though it’s not always clear that they both believe them. We believe them, though: such is the compelling texture of Obreht’s prose.

There are two stories at play here: as the novel opens, Nora, a frontierswoman in the Arizona Territory in the late 19 th century, waits more or less patiently for her husband and two eldest sons to return, as her water runs out and her youngest son begins to see monsters in the underbrush; then there’s Lurie, the outlaw and immigrant who joins the United States Camel Corps (yes, this is a thing) and begins a long trek.

These two stories eventually converge, in a way I didn’t see coming at all—though in retrospect it was perfectly orchestrated, inevitable, really. Maybe it was my level of immersion that kept me from noticing Obreht’s deft use of time and space between and within the two narratives. Suffice it to say, if this is a new American myth, I’ll take it. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Emma Donoghue, Room  (2010) · Jonathan Franzen,  Freedom  (2010) · Tana French, Faithful Place (2010) · Maaza Mengiste, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2010) ·  Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake  (2010) · Brady Udall, The Lonely Polygamist (2010) ·  Attica Locke, Black Water Rising (2010) · Jaimy Gordon,  Lord of Misrule  (2010) · Chang-rae Lee,  The Surrendered  (2010) · Paul Murray,  Skippy Dies (2010) · Tom Rachman,  The Imperfectionists  (2010) · Nadifa Mohamed,  Black Mamba Boy  (2010) · Andrea Levy,  The Long Song  (2010) · Helen Oyeyemi,  Mr. Fox  (2011) · Nicholson Baker,  House of Holes  (2011) · Ann Patchett,  State of Wonder  (2011) · Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (2011) ·  Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia  (2011) · Justin Torres,  We the Animals  (2011) · Teju Cole,  Open City  (2011) · Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time (2011) ·  Eleanor Henderson, Ten Thousand Saints  (2011) · Kevin Wilson,  The Family Fang  (2011) · Francisco Goldman,  Say Her Name  (2011) · Colson Whitehead,  Zone One  (2011) · Karen Russell,  Swamplandia!  (2011)  · José Saramago, Cain (2011) ·  Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending  (2011) · Ben Lerner,  Leaving the Atocha Station  (2011) · Adam Johnson,  The Orphan Master’s Son  (2012) · Edward St. Aubyn,  At Last  (2012) · Barbara Kingsolver,  Flight Behavior  (2012) · Sheila Heti,  How Should a Person Be?  (2012) · Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles (2012) ·  Louise Erdrich, The Round House  (2012) · Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds (2012) ·  Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl  (2012) · G. Willow Wilson,  Alif the Unseen  (2012) · Amanda Coplin, The Orchardist (2012) ·  Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies  (2012) · Zadie Smith,  NW (2012) · Andrew Miller, Pure (2012) ·  Orhan Pamuk, Silent House  (2012) · Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins (2012) ·  Amelia Gray, Threats  (2012) · Kevin Barry,  City of Bohane  (2012) · Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (2012) ·  James Salter, All That Is  (2013) · Edwidge Danticat,  Claire of the Sea Light  (2013) · James McBride,  The Good Lord Bird  (2013) · Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) · Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (2013) ·  Philipp Meyer, The Son  (2013) · J. M. Ledgard,  Submergence  (2013) · Anthony Marra,  A Constellation of Vital Phenomena  (2013) · Alissa Nutting,  Tampa  (2013) · Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam (2013) ·  Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie  (2013) · Donna Tartt,  The Goldfinch  (2013) · William H. Gass, Middle C (2013) ·  Kate Atkinson, Life After Life  (2013)  · Eleanor Catton,  The Luminaries  (2013) · Jim Harrison, Brown Dog (2013) ·  NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names  (2013) · Laila Lalami,  The Moor’s Account  (2014) · Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life (2014) ·  Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing  (2014) · Lily King, Euphoria (2014) ·  Akhil Sharma, Family Life  (2014) · Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (2014) · Dinaw Mengestu, All Our Names (2014) ·  Marilynne Robinson, Lila  (2014) · Anthony Doerr,  All the Light We Cannot See  (2014) · Marlon James,  A Brief History of Seven Killings  (2014) · Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper (2014) ·  Catherine Lacey, Nobody is Ever Missing  (2014) ·   Chang-Rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea (2014) ·  Jeffery Renard Allen, Song of the Shank  (2014) · Nell Zink,  The Wallcreeper  (2014) · Celeste Ng,  Everything I Never Told You  (2014) · Merritt Tierce,  Love Me Back  (2014) · Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World (2014) · Tom McCarthy, Satin Island (2015) ·  Angela Flournoy, The Turner House  (2015) · Alexandra Kleeman,  You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine  (2015) ·  Ali Smith,  How to Be Both  (2015) · Sara Nović,  Girl at War  (2015)  · Scarlett Thomas,  The Seed Collectors  (2015) · Nell Zink,  Mislaid  (2015) · James Hannaham, Delicious Foods (2015) ·  Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond  (2016) · Jane Alison, Nine Island (2016) ·  Nicole Dennis-Benn, Here Comes the Sun  (2016) · Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2016) ·  Imbolo Mbue, Behold the Dreamers  (2016) · Tony Tulathimutte,  Private Citizens  (2016) · Emma Cline,  The Girls  (2016) ·  Deborah Levy, Hot Milk (2016) ·  Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief  (2016) · Brit Bennett,  The Mothers  (2016) · Garth Greenwell,  What Belongs to You  (2016) · Jade Sharma, Problems (2016) ·  Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone  (2016) · Esmé Weijun Wang, The Border of Paradise (2016) · Victor LaValle,  The Changeling  (2017) · Jon McGregor, Reservoir 13 (2017) · Andrew Sean Greer,  Less  (2017) · Katie Kitamura,  A Separation  (2017) · Scott McClanahan, The Sarah Book (2017) · Gabe Habash, Stephen Florida (2017) ·  George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo  (2017) · Mohsin Hamid,  Exit West  (2017) · Hari Kunzru, White Tears (2017) ·  Omar El Akkad, American War (2017) · Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Kintu (2017) ·  Min Jin Lee, Pachinko  (2017) · Sally Rooney,  Conversations With Friends  (2017) · Fiona Mozley,  Elmet  (2017) · Amelia Gray,  Isadora  (2017) · Julie Buntin,  Marlena  (2017) · Tayari Jones,  An American Marriage  (2018) · Sigrid Nunez,  The Friend  (2018) · Madeline Miller,  Circe  (2018) · Nico Walker,  Cherry  (2018) · R. O. Kwon,  The Incendiaries  (2018) · Tommy Orange,  There There  (2018) · Gina Apostol, Insurrecto (2018) ·  Daisy Johnson, Everything Under  (2018) · Dan Sheehan,  Restless Souls  (2018) · Tara Isabella Burton,  Social Creature  (2018) · Chandler Klang Smith,  The Sky is Yours  (2018) · Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers (2018) ·  Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon  (2018) · Chloe Benjamin,  The Immortalists  (2018) · Akwaeke Emezi,  Freshwater  (2018) · Ling Ma,  Severance  (2018) · Lisa Halliday,  Asymmetry  (2018) · Wayétu Moore, She Would Be King (2018) ·  Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous  (2019)  · Helen Phillips, The Need (2019) ·  Maurice Carlos Ruffin, We Cast a Shadow  (2019) · Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall (2019) ·  Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure  (2019) · Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein (2019) · Lucy Ellman, Ducks, Newburyport (2019) ·  De’Shawn Charles Winslow, In West Mills  (2019) · Sandra Newman,  The Heavens  (2019) · Colson Whitehead,  The Nickel Boys  (2019) · Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway (2019) ·  Kathleen Alcott, America Was Hard to Find  (2019).

Emily Temple

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These 30 Binge-Worthy Netflix Series Were Adapted From Books

Fun fact: Henry Cavill loved The Witcher novels so much, he fought hard for his role on the show.

Our product picks are editor-tested, expert-approved. We may earn a commission through links on our site. Why Trust Us?

Team Books or Team TV—why not be both? Over the years, Netflix has brought some of the most dramatic and exciting adaptations to the small screen. Stars like Henry Cavill, Sienna Miller, and Neil Patrick Harris have all taken characters from your favorite pages into the real world. Murder mysteries, haunted homes, and incredibly tense chess matches have all taken the streaming service by storm. Grab your popcorn and buckle up, because it's time to trade in your bookmark for the remote.

The Lincoln Lawyer

Based on the book Lincoln Lawyer , t his isn't your ordinary courtroom drama. It's about a man who runs his entire practice from the back of his Lincoln Town Car. Fans of Ugly Betty will recognize two of its stars: Becki Newton and Christopher Gorham. WATCH THE SHOW

The Witcher

Henry Cavill took on the lead role of monster hunter Geralt of Rivia in this gripping fantasy show, based on the book series by the same name . Cavill reportedly asked Netflix for a meeting when he heard about the 8-book series adaptation, before being rejected and then eventually hired. The actor called the part a " dream come true ," and underwent intense sword training before filming.

WATCH THE SHOW

Altered Carbon

The futuristic crime series follows a prisoner who returns to life in a new body—250 years later. In order to gain full freedom, he must first solve a murder. The show was originally supposed to be a film, but producers found the book trilogy it was based on to be " too dense " to squeeze into just two hours. WATCH THE SHOW

People can't get enough of Penn Badgley's terrifying portrayal of stalker-turned-serial-killer Joe Goldberg. Even Cardi B is a fan! The hit show started as a three-book series by Caroline Kepnes , but some things have been changed for the series—including a major character's death . WATCH THE SHOW

Anatomy of a Scandal

The 2022 miniseries, based on the best-selling mystery novel by Sarah Vaughan , featured a star-studded cast, including Sienna Miller, Rupert Friend, and Michelle Dockery. It's loaded with suspense and will leave you guessing who the villain is until the very end. WATCH THE SHOW

Dear White People

This Netflix show was based on an award-winning movie that was based on a book . The dramedy follows a group of Black college students attending a predominantly white Ivy League college. "The show, it's about college kids, but it's really about all of us. It's a microcosm, but it's about America," author and director Justin Simien told SPIN . WATCH THE SHOW

The Queen's Gambit

The hit miniseries is based on a 2003 novel by Walter Tevis , an avid chess competitor himself, who wanted to bring his love of the game to life. Unlike other adaptations, almost everything was the same as in the book, except for minor changes, like introducing a new supporting character named Cleo. WATCH THE SHOW

Shadow and Bone

The fantasy series took Netflix viewers by storm when it premiered in 2021. Supernatural powers like controlling wind and fire—combined with a Game of Thrones -like war—makes for an addictive show. The book trilogy came first, though, and has some stark differences . WATCH THE SHOW

The Haunting of Hill House

You're not going to want to watch this one at night. The horror series is loosely based on the novel of the same name by author Shirley Jackson. Keep your eyes peeled while watching, because producers hid ghosts in the wide-shots of Hill House —sometimes in the form of hands, shadows, and faces. WATCH THE SHOW

The Haunting of Bly Manor

If Victoria Pedretti didn't scare you enough in The Haunting of Hill House , this one should do the trick. It's filled with everything that makes a horror series good—ghosts, creepy children, and murder. The show is based on a set of short stories that dates all the way back to the late 1800s. WATCH THE SHOW

Learn the origin story of the notorious Nurse Ratched from 1962's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in this heart-pounding prequel. The Ryan Murphy-produced series stars Sarah Paulson, and involves a lot of character deaths— 17 of them , to be exact.

The Last Kingdom

Based on the historical novels by Bernard Cornwell , this Vikings-era series—which has been called "like Game of Thrones , but real" —follows the story of Alfred the Great. Although the show takes place in England, it was filmed almost entirely in Hungary .

In this gritty Western—based on an 18-book series by Craig Johnson —a Wyoming sheriff tries to grieve the loss of his wife, while still protecting his small town. It quickly became a hit, especially after the streaming service picked up the show from A&E in 2014 and produced it as a Netflix Original for three more seasons. WATCH THE SHOW

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Neil Patrick Harris took on many different characters during his two-year stint on A Series of Unfortunate Events , based on the best-selling books by Lemony Snicket . Netflix went all in on production, spending a lot on the sets. "Every new book, it's so unique. And it must be so expensive, but every new book is a new location. Not just a room but an environment," Harris told Observer . WATCH THE SHOW

House of Cards

Though the show is based on the BBC miniseries of the same name, it was a 2014 book trilogy by Michael Dobbs first . There's one huge difference, though: The political drama is set in present day, while the books are set back in the late '80s. WATCH THE SHOW

Another medieval fantasy series that viewers couldn't get enough of is 2020's Cursed , starring Katherine Langford. It tells the legend of King Arthur and his magical sword, through Langford's character's eyes. In a very rare move, the show began filming before the book was even published —which made for some big differences between the two. WATCH THE SHOW

Orange Is the New Black

The Emmy Award-winning series about a woman's eye-opening time in prison was inspired by a 2011 memoir by Piper Kerman . Did you know Katie Holmes almost played the lead role, which eventually went to Taylor Schilling?

Behind Her Eyes

If you're a fan of psychological thrillers, you'll love reading (and watching) this intense story. The mind-blowing ending is something you'd never expect—but it remains pretty close to the conclusion of Sarah Pinborough's book . WATCH THE SHOW

The Stranger

The Stranger, in which a mysterious man unravels the secrets of a close-knit community, packs the drama. The show is based on author Harlan Coben's best-selling novel of the same name. Coben's daughter wrote the fifth episode of the show!

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6 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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This week’s recommended books include two memoirs by writers recalling their parents: “The Whole Staggering Mystery,” by Sylvia Brownrigg, digs into her father’s secret history, and “Did I Ever Tell You?,” by Genevieve Kingston, aims to capture her lost mother on the page. We also recommend two books about Mexico (a history and a journalistic exposé), along with a look at the neurological effects of climate change and a novel that puts U.S. immigration policy front and center. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

THE WEIGHT OF NATURE: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains Clayton Page Aldern

Aldern, a science journalist, asks us to consider the impact of climate change on our brains: According to this alarming book, a warming planet and natural resource depletion will mean everything from angrier, more anxious people to dolphins with Alzheimer’s disease. The litany, he writes, is almost “comically apocalyptic.”

“Aldern is the rare writer who dares to ask how climate change has already changed us.”

From Nathaniel Rich’s review

Dutton | $30

THE WHOLE STAGGERING MYSTERY: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found Sylvia Brownrigg

When Brownrigg’s remote and enigmatic father, Nick, died, his children were left with a key to his past in the form of a mysterious scrapbook. What they found was wilder than they could have possibly guessed: This hippie dropout, seemingly without family, was in fact heir to a British title and had a complex history that included colonial postings, mysterious deaths, lost novels and unexplained estrangements. Brownrigg sets out to discover what, exactly, happened — and does so with style and sensitivity.

“Gets at … the way in which, over generations and in the face of good intentions, family bonds can loosen and die. It’s dreadfully sad, and yet through Brownrigg’s sleuthing, something touching is redeemed.”

From Emma Brockes’s review

Counterpoint | $34.99

AMERICAN ABDUCTIONS Mauro Javier Cárdenas

In his new novel, Cárdenas considers the devastating effects of U.S. immigration policy on Latin American families, using expansive, pages-long sentences full of references to art, mysticism and ominous technologies. The main narrative involves an ailing Colombian man, recently deported from Califorrnia, and the painful choices facing his American-born daughters.

“Cárdenas creates what I’ll call an art-polemic — a melding of play with political purpose. From it, the cruelty of American immigration policy emerges: How else to capture such surreal inhumanity?”

From Gina Apostol’s review

Dalkey Archive | Paperback, $17.95

HABSBURGS ON THE RIO GRANDE: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire Raymond Jonas

Jonas vividly recounts the story of Maximilian I of Mexico, the delusional Austrian archduke who tried to establish an enlightened monarchy on America’s southern border in the midst of the U.S. Civil War. “May my blood end the misfortunes of my new country,” he said as he stood before a republican firing squad, in 1867. “Viva Mexico!”

“Vividly reconstructs how Maximilian’s power was forged and maintained by the sharp end of a French bayonet. … Jonas is astute and judicious in navigating the kaleidoscope of contradictory political ideologies that came together in the Second Mexican Empire.”

From Natasha Wheatley’s review

Harvard University Press | $35

THE WAY THAT LEADS AMONG THE LOST: Life, Death, and Hope Among Mexico City’s Anexos Angela Garcia

An investigation of Mexico’s makeshift drug rehab centers for the poor, Garcia’s book combines anthropological field work with personal history, delivering an unvarnished chronicle of desperate patients, brutal treatment regimes and her own struggles with depression and a traumatic past.

“Offers a view of the war on drugs that differs from the familiar one. … The characters who populate Garcia’s pages reside on the periphery of urban life, and of the conflict itself.”

From Azam Ahmed’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $29

DID I EVER TELL YOU? Genevieve Kingston

In this heartfelt memoir, Kingston reflects on her mother’s death, in her late 40s, from breast cancer and the carefully cataloged notes and gifts she left for her children to open when she was gone. Kingston opens each on schedule, while reflecting that “the person I needed … was not the smiling, gentle mother wrapping birthday gifts” but “all of my mother, not only the softest pieces.”

“Wrenching. … Helped Kingston see the rage and terror her mother had papered over, as well as the steely will she’d summoned to keep going.”

From Kim Hubbard’s review

Marysue Rucci Books | $28.99

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

As book bans have surged in Florida, the novelist Lauren Groff has opened a bookstore called The Lynx, a hub for author readings, book club gatherings and workshops , where banned titles are prominently displayed.

Eighteen books were recognized as winners or finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, in the categories of history, memoir, poetry, general nonfiction, fiction and biography, which had two winners. Here’s a full list of the winners .

Montreal is a city as appealing for its beauty as for its shadows. Here, t he novelist Mona Awad recommends books  that are “both dreamy and uncompromising.”

The complicated, generous life  of Paul Auster, who died on April 30 , yielded a body of work of staggering scope and variety .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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35 Best Movies Based on Books That Are Actually Worth Watching

By Anna Moeslein

There are a lot of movies based on books. There are very few good movies based on books.

That's not a knock on Hollywood–it can be challenging to fit a novel's worth of plot and character development into a few hours of entertainment. That's why the best films based on books often feel more like a companion piece than a true retelling of a best-selling paperback. Some, like the 2019 movie adaptation of Little Women , play with the story or add in new scenes to appeal to a modern audience. Others benefit from the glitz and glam that Hollywood brings. Netflix's film version of To All the Boys I've Loved Before , for example, comes with an engaging soundtrack that elevates the romance onscreen.

Below you'll find some of the best movies based on books available for streaming right now. We also included the real-life novels that inspired them so you can add to your reading list. No chance of boredom here. (Need more? We've also got a guide to the best movies based on romance novels .)

All products featured on Glamour are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

1. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (2022)

The book: Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence's novel about an affair between a gamekeeper and an upper-class woman is notorious for its explicit descriptions of sex—so much so that the book was banned for obscenity in several countries. Onsreen, stars Emma Corrin and Jack O'Connell have a natural chemistry that only adds to the steaminess.

Available to stream on Netflix

2. Pride and Prejudice (2005)

The book: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Jane Austen's classic story of love and bad first impressions has been adapted many times over. But this film version, starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, takes a more realistic approach than other film versions. As a result, enemies turned lovers Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy come to life onscreen.

Available to rent on Amazon Prime Video

3. If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)

The book: If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

James Baldwin's 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk , about a young woman trying to clear the name of her boyfriend after he was wrongfully accused of a crime in New York, is an incredible read. So only someone with a vision like Barry Jenkins, who wrote and directed this adaptation, could bring it to the big screen. The Oscar-nominated film received numerous awards, including a best supporting actress win for Regina King's performance.

Available to stream on Hulu

4. The Wizard of Oz

The book: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

What can be said about The Wizard of Oz that you don't already know? The 1939 classic starring Judy Garland enhances L. Frank Baum's children's fantasy novel through its innovative use of Technicolor, memorable performances, and a beloved score that includes “Over the Rainbow.”

Available to stream on Amazon Prime Video

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By Sarah Y. Wu

5. Little Women (2019)

The book: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

There's a reason Little Women has been adapted for film seven times. Louisa May Alcott's semiautobiographical novel about sisters Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy has stood the test of time, and it's still just as relatable now as it was in 1868, when it was published. The most recent remake stars Laura Dern, Meryl Streep, and Saoirse Ronan and is arguably the best interpretation of Alcott's story.

Available to buy on Amazon Prime Video

6. Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

The book: Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

Where do we even begin with this one? The fashion! The romance! The drama! Constance Wu and Henry Golding lead the romantic comedy about a Chinese American woman who travels to Singapore to meet her boyfriend's family. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. His family is one of the richest and well-known families in the country, and his mother is not exactly welcoming of her son's new romance.

Available to stream on HBO Max

7. Gone Girl (2014)

The book: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

We could write a dissertation about Gone Girl, and it still wouldn't be long enough to dive into the complicated issues tackled in the movie. Here's what you need to know: The David Fincher–directed mystery movie is about a husband who becomes a suspect in his wife's disappearance. The thriller tackles parenting, manipulation, misogyny, and most of all, marriage. When it comes to movie adaptations of books, this is near the top of the list.

8. A Simple Favor (2018)

The book: A Simple Favor: A Novel by Darcey Bell

Nothing's simple about A Simple Favor . Perhaps the best part of the crime thriller is Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick's odd yet enthralling dynamic. You'll be scratching your head from start to finish as you try to figure out what exactly is going on in the film.

9. Sense and Sensibility (1995)

The book: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Another Jane Austen movie makes the list because…well, there are just so many good adaptations of her work. Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet lead this film about a sensible and reserved older sister, Elinor, and her romantically inclined and eagerly expressive younger sister, Marianne.

10. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

The book: The Devil Wears Prada: A Novel by Lauren Weisberger

Meryl Streep plays the coldest, scariest, most intimidating boss at the fictional fashion magazine Runway . Anne Hathaway's character is clueless and unfashionable, and fancies herself a serious journalist. Their characters clash yet somehow find a way to work together. The movie is elevated by the performances, and you might find yourself surprisingly moved at the end.

11. The Color Purple (1985)

The book: The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The story of Celie (played by Whoopi Goldberg) is one that will stay with you. The movie is based on the novel of the same name by Alice Walker and portrays the problems Black women faced during the early 20th century, including domestic violence, poverty, racism, and sexism. Celie's journey spans a 40-year time period.

12. The First Wives Club (1996)

The book: The First Wives Club by Olivia Goldsmith

We love everything about this movie: the acting, the humor, and the friendship of three reunited friends. The film follows the women, played by Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn, and Diane Keaton, deciding to get revenge on their ex-husbands after the death of a close friend.

13. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018)

The book: To All the Boys I've Loved Before by Jenny Han

Laura Jean and Peter Kavinsky's romance is sure to go down as one of this generation's most popular love stories. The trilogy of teen romantic comedy books by Jenny Han turned Netflix movies are popular for a reason. Yes, there are some common tropes used in the plot. However, the film adaptations somehow still feel fresh, unique, and effortlessly heartwarming.

14. The Harry Potter series (2001–2011)

The book: The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

Who could have known that the boy who lived would start an international phenomenon? Readers and audiences of all ages have been obsessed with the Wizarding World for decades, and it's easy to see why: The friendship, the magic, the excitement and the humor are as enthralling in the movies as they are in the books.

Available to stream on Peacock

15. Hidden Figures (2016)

The book: Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly

If you're in the mood for a feel-good movie, then look no further. Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe star in this movie about the three Black women who worked at NASA during the early years of the space program. They were an integral part of launching astronaut John Glenn into orbit. This true story is most likely not one you learned about in school.

Available to stream on Disney+

16. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

The book : The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

Anthony Hopkins plays Hannibal Lecter, who famously asks Jodi Foster's character, “Well, Clarice…have the lambs stopped screaming?” If you don't know what that means, there's only one way to find out: Queue up the classic thriller for movie night.

17. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

The book: The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

This sexy classic is actually part of a series about the Tom Ripley, a social-climbing mimic who will lie, cheat, and even murder his way up the ranks of wealthy midcentury Manhattanites. The movie features Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, and Jude Law at their golden, glowy, youthful best, and a striking performance from the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.

18. It (2017)

The book: It by Stephen King

This chilling horror classic has terrified generations. In a small New England town, a group of unlikely friends find themselves caught in the clutches of a mysterious shape-shifting killer who takes the form of whatever you fear most.

19. The Princess Diaries (2001)

The book: The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot

The ultimate glow-up! Mia Thermopolis is an awkward, nerdy high school outcast who discovers she's actually royalty in this modern twist on the Cinderella story. Peppered with observations about friendship, love, and growing up, the books are as funny as the movie. The young adult book series, written like a diary, will make you fall even more in love with Mia than the film adaptation did. Don't be surprised if you find yourself wanting to wear Doc Martens after reading.

20. The Joy Luck Club (1993)

The book: The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

The Chinese American immigrant experience is explored in detail in this adaptation of Amy Tan's novel, which follows a group of women living in San Francisco's Chinatown as they support one another through heartbreak and triumph.

21. The Princess Bride (1987)

The book: The Princess Bride by Willam Goldman

This beloved classic is like five fairy tales combined into a sparkling family comedy that's much easier to follow than the book it's based on. Featuring a host of quirky character actors and quotable lines, this is essentially a meme factory from before there was such a thing. Don't fight Grandpa; it's time for a love story (you'll get that reference once you watch the movie).

22. Election (1999)

The book: Election by Tom Perrotta

This dark comedy about the ruthlessness of politicians features a breakout performance from a young Reese Witherspoon and taught a generation to recognize the Tracy Flicks in their lives. It's become a catchword often hurled unfairly at women with ambition, but it also accurately describes the kind of earnest yet hollow striving we see in so many people, no matter their gender, today.

23. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

The book: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King

The highest-rated movie on IMDb, this classic is parodied (and homaged) all over the place, a favorite of both fans and critics. It's a drama, to be sure, but as far as prison stories go, watchable and even a little hopeful.

24. Atonement (2007)

The book: Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan

Beware: This story is a bummer. Though famous for its library sex scene and the debut of a young Saoirse Ronan, Atonement is mostly a war story, and a devastating one at that. No one gets away clean in this tale of love, loss, lies, and regret.

25. Jurassic Park (1993)

The book: Jurassic Park: A Novel by Michael Crichton

This blockbuster keeps getting rebooted for a reason: It's just cool to watch dinosaurs chase people! Yes, there's a lesson here about overstepping the bounds of science and hubris in the face of nature, but mostly, T-Rex go chomp-chomp.

26. The Godfather trilogy (1972–1990)

The book: The Godfather by Mario Puzo

The greatest achievement in the history of American cinema? This crime epic has been praised for its performances, filmmaking, quotable lines, and archetypal characters. It's rich with symbolism and history, but actually a straightforward and pleasant watch. Never meandering or slow, the story is gripping, if devastating.

27. The White Tiger (2021)

The book: The White Tiger: A Novel by Aravind Adiga

This film adaptation of Aravind Adiga's 2008 novel follows a man named Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav, in his first leading role) who was born into poverty and uses his wit and cunning to build a successful career as an entrepreneur.

28. The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021)

The book: Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari

Andra Day was nominated for an Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal of legendary singer Billie Holiday in this biographical film, which was based in part on Johann Hari's book about the history and impact of drug criminalization.

29. Room (2015)

The book: Room by Emma Donoghue

Both the book and the film adaptation of this intense story follow a kidnapped young woman and her son, who we learn was born in captivity. When they finally escape their abuser, the child gets to experience the outside world for the first time in his life.

30. Emma (2020)

The book: Emma by Jane Austen

Jane Austen's novel, about a spoiled heiress who amuses herself by meddling in the lives of her neighbors, has been adapted to film before. But the 2020 version, starring Anya Taylor-Joy in the titular role, is one of the best thanks to its excellent casting, whimsical costume and set design, and modern approach to the source material.

31. Clueless (1995)

Yes, Emma again! One of Jane Austen’s best books, it also inspired this coming-of-age teen comedy starring Alicia Silverstone, Stacey Dash, Brittany Murphy, and Paul Rudd. Says screenwriter and director Amy Heckerling, “I loved [ Emma ] when I read it in college—it’s the most modern story with the most perfect character, the most lovable, flawed person that you’re rooting for. Then I looked at what could make the bones for the present day high school teenagers, and if I ever thought like, wait, how would this happen, I would just go back to Emma and there were the answers.”

32. The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)

The book: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Movie adaptations across all genres exist, and that includes YA Emma Watson, Ezra Miller, and Logan Lerman lead this coming-of-age drama about a shy teenager experiencing the many highs and lows of freshman year of high school.

33. The Lord of the Rings series (2001–2003)

The book: The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Epic fantasies naturally translate well to the big screen, but nobody does it like this movie series . And now you can follow up your rewatch by diving into Rings of Power, a new TV show that's set thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings .

34. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

The book: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by Wang Dulu

Directed by Ang Lee, this epic was a critical and commercial success with 10 Oscar nominations, including one for best picture and a win for best foreign language film.

35. The Paddington movies (2014, 2017)

The book: The Paddington books by Michael Bond

We didn't think Paddington, a beloved fictional character in children's literature, could get any cuter—and then we saw him on the big screen. In fact, Paddington 2 ranks among our favorite movie sequels of all time. If you can watch it without crying…how?

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What are 'the kids' thinking these days? Honor Levy aims to tell in 'My First Book'

Leland Cheuk

What are the kids thinking these days? That seems be to the question behind the publication of My First Book , the buzzy debut story collection by Honor Levy.

The 26-year-old writer was the subject of a viral profile in The Cut , earlier this month, in which she described the praise she received for her story "Good Boys" on The New Yorker website as "not undeserved" and demurred when asked whether she's the voice of her generation. Social media discourse and the inevitable backlash aside, Levy's first book is an amusing, if uneven, take on growing up white, privileged, and Gen Z, the first generation to completely be born after the existence of the internet.

Readers won't find meticulously plotted story arcs, fleshed-out characters, emotional epiphanies, or any other earmarks of conventional literary fiction. Most of Levy's stories run fewer than 12 pages and feel like very long flash fiction, written in a voice dense with the chaotic patois of the internet. In her strongest stories, Levy channels the blitzkrieg of contradictory micro-observations we absorb from social media, video games, and doomscrolling to create the absurd, incomprehensible cacophony that anyone born after 1997 had to grow up enduring. These stories seem to ask: How can anyone expect a well-adjusted adult to rise from all this noise?

In "Internet Girl," the main character is 11 and very online, and Levy's portrayal of her narrator's interiority is both compellingly satirical and frighteningly plausible. She writes:

"It's 2008, and my dad gets laid off and everything is happening all at once. All at once, there are two girls and one cup and planes hitting towers and a webcam looking at me and me smiling into it and a man and a boy and a love and a stranger on the other end. All at once, there are a million videos to watch and a million more to make. All at once it's all at once. It's beginning and ending all at once all the time. I'm twenty-one. I'm eleven. I'm on the internet. I'm twenty-one."

Another strong piece is "Love Story," the collection's opener, which is about a boy and a girl having an online relationship that seems to consist entirely of texting and sending pics of their bodies to each other. Levy poignantly captures the girl's vulnerability. "Little girl lost can't even find herself," Levy writes. "Pictures of her naked body are out there everywhere, in the cloud floating, and under the sea, coursing through cables in the dark. It's so dark."

Levy smartly skewers late capitalism in "Halloween Forever," about a young woman trying to survive a surreal and drug-filled Halloween night in Brooklyn. She meets a "boy from Stanford dressed as a cowboy," who, when sufficiently coked-up, muses about the romance of the Wild West and how "The West was freedom...just like the internet originally was!" The narrator is skeptical:

"Freedom is the stuff of dreams and nightmares only and our free market doesn't make us free people, but the cowboy doesn't care. Silicon Valley must have burrowed itself deep into his brain underneath that hat. He is probably afraid of blood, or social media, or something stupid. My drink is seventeen dollars."

As the collection progresses, the unique blend of the satirical and the poignant gives way to a more essayistic approach to storytelling. In "Cancel Me," which is about cancel culture, the characters — a young woman and two "Ivy League boys with kitten-sharp teeth and Accutane-skin," all of whom have experienced cancellation for murky reasons — gradually fade into a series of observations about wokeness that aren't much different or more insightful than what one might find on X or Reddit.

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"Z Was For Zoomer," which runs more than 50 pages, seems to be a continuation of "Cancel Me," except the two male "edgelords" — someone on an internet forum who deliberately posts about controversial or taboo topics to appear edgy — are named Gideon and Ivan instead of Jack and Roger. Just as in "Cancel Me," the narrator's relationship with the men is never defined and doesn't progress. Character-driven narrative takes a back seat to dashed-off, inch-deep lines like "Identity is a Swedish prison, comfortable but you still can't leave."

It should also be mentioned that these stories won't pass the most permissive of racial Bechdel tests. The number of non-white references in this 200-page book won't go past one hand, unless you count the few references to anime and the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. The milieu of Honor Levy's fiction is undeniably white and privileged, but her best stories exaggerate that milieu to great satirical effect. Perhaps her second book will contain more of them.

Leland Cheuk is an award-winning author of three books of fiction, including the latest No Good Very Bad Asian . His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Salon , among other outlets.

Western Sydney's Cumberland City Council votes to overturn ban on same-sex parenting books in libraries

A Western Sydney council has voted to reinstate same-sex parenting books in its libraries after they were controversially banned earlier this month. 

Cumberland City Council passed the motion with 12 members for and two against on Wednesday evening, after more than four hours of debate.

Outside protesters clashed outside the council chambers in Merrylands, with people yelling "go back to Newtown" and "leave our kids alone".

On the other side, supporters were chanting "bigots are not welcome here".

Six police officers and two council security guards were stationed inside the chambers.

Several members of the gallery were ejected for heckling as the heated arguments from both sides continued late into the evening.

One man, who was wearing a crucifix, yelled: "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve."

Councillor Steve Christou, who initiated the ban saying "distraught" parents had complained to him about a children's book, shook the man's hand as a security guard escorted him from the room.

Caroline Staples, a resident of the Cumberland area and a grandmother in a rainbow family, addressed the meeting and tabled a petition with more than 42,000 signatures of people calling for the ban to be rescinded.

"The destruction and censoring of libraries is a weapon of war," Ms Staples told the council.

Ms Staples called for "elementary kindness", after which a woman in the gallery yelled, "keep your kindness to yourself".

'I can't enforce my belief on someone else'

Councillor Mohamad Hussein voted for the original ban, saying he could not "in good conscience" support something that went against his religious beliefs.

But on Wednesday night, he ultimately voted to rescind the book ban.

Earlier in the night, Cr Hussein said he worked with many LGBT+ healthcare professionals and that he and his colleagues respected each other's beliefs.

"This is not a war on you guys, and this is not a war on myself," he said.

Auburn ward councillor Sabrin Farooqui spoke in favour of rescinding the ban.

"As a follower of Islam, I can say that no-one is stopping me from following my religion in Australia," she said.

"Similarly, I can't enforce my belief on someone else. Australia is a secular country."

Cr Farooqui said she wanted her son to read the book.

"If it is classified as a children's book, why shouldn't it be in the children's book section?"

Cr Christou and Paul Garrard both tried to amend the new motion to move the children's book Same-Sex Parents by Holly Duhig to the adult section of libraries, but the two attempts were voted down.

The council resolved to "take immediate action to rid same-sex parents books/materials in Council's library service" at its last meeting on May 1.

The ban was introduced as an amendment to a motion for the council to adopt a three-year library strategy.

The Granville ward councillor claimed the book sexualised children and was inappropriate for his "very religious" community, despite later admitting he had not read it.

The amendment sparked a heated debate, with councillor Diane Colman likening it to "book burning".

Only 11 of 15 councillors were present for the vote, the amendment passing narrowly six to five.

NSW Arts Minister John Graham warned the decision could have funding consequences, urging the council to reconsider the resolution "with haste".

In a letter to the council, Mr Graham said the book ban contravened freedom of access to information guidelines under the Library Act 1939.

The guidelines state that materials not subject to federal or state restrictions "should not be excluded from a public library on moral, political, racial, religious, sexist, language, or other grounds".

Councils declare to operate public libraries in accordance with the act when applying for state government funding.

Subsidies for Cumberland City Council's eight libraries increased to $743,130 this financial year, according to the minister's letter.

Premier labels 'culture wars' a 'joke'

Damien Nguyen attended the rally and said he grew up in the local area, and frequently visited its libraries. 

He said he was opposed to the "culture wars" and the "extremely homophobic behaviour" weaponised by Councillor Christou.

"The same story was told about Marrickville a decade ago, the same story is always consistently told again and again in migrant communities," he said.

"But I have always lived in Western Sydney, members of our community have always lived here, we are queer and we are all here."

The removal of the books has been criticised by leaders on both sides of state politics, with Premier Chris Minns last week describing the decision as a "joke".

Ahead of the vote Opposition Leader Mark Speakman said the book ban should be reversed, adding that the move is "what happens in totalitarian countries".

"This is a liberal democracy where people generally should be free to read what they choose," Mr Speakman said.

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‘law & order’ season 23 finale does not address camryn manheim’s exit, breaking news.

• Here Are ‘Bridgerton’ Season 3’s Biggest Differences from the Book

By Dessi Gomez

Dessi Gomez

More stories by dessi.

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• Here Are All The String Covers In ‘Bridgerton’ Season 3

Based on Julia Quinn’s Romancing Mister Bridgerton Season 3 of Netflix and Shondaland’s Bridgerton watches the friends-to-lovers romance between Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton) and Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) bloom. While their book comes fourth in the series after Benedict’s love story, the show has moved their installment up in the order of Bridgerton sibling romances. Francesca’s (Hannah Dodd) love story also intertwines more significantly in the expanded two-part season, with Part 1 releasing May 16 on Netflix and Part 2 June 13.

Other scenes and lines of dialogue transferred from Quinn’s pages to script and eventually screen, but changes have also been made to character plotlines, backstories, marriage statuses and more. Even those hovering around Lady Whistledown’s identity include different characters than Quinn’s book.

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Here are the biggest differences between Bridgerton Season 3 and Julia Quinn’s Romancing Mister Bridgerton :

Eloise doesn’t know that Penelope is Lady Whistledown

Eloise (Claudia Jessie) remains unaware of Penelope’s covert column-writing as the infamous author Lady Whistledown throughout the majority of Julia Quinn’s book Romancing Mister Bridgerton . Colin even nurses the suspicion that Eloise could be the woman behind the gossip-mongering quill.

Cressida Cowper is already married

Penelope and Eloise have way more marriage mart seasons under their belts

At the age of 28 in Quinn’s novel, Penelope predicts a fate of spinsterhood for herself, and she has unsuccessfully taken on many more marriage market seasons in the years since she met Colin versus her embarking upon her third round in the show. Eloise, though held back a year unlike Penelope, has also gone through more seasons than in the show.

Colin is 33, which is an age fit for a man to marry in the books, though not so dramatically exaggerated as “old” like it would be for a woman his age. After falling in love with him upon first sight mixed with a stray bonnet that resulted in Colin’s falling off a horse into mud, a decade passes before any action in the way of friends to lovers takes place in the book.

RELATED: Here Are All the String Covers in ‘Bridgerton’ Season 3

There is a fourth Featherington sister

In addition to Prudence, Philippa and Penelope, a fourth Featherington sister — Felicity — exists in the books, where she is best friends with Hyacinth, similarly to the bond Eloise and Penelope share.

Francesca’s story doesn’t overlap as much

Francesca, who was first portrayed by Ruby Stokes in Seasons 1 and 2, was recast for the third season of Bridgerton . Hannah Dodd took on the mantle for the sixth Bridgerton child and third daughter in the family for Season 3. Francesca gets a separate book — When He Was Wicked — to herself for her story, but her debut in the marriage mart overlaps with Penelope and Colin’s romance in the show’s third installment.

Colin doesn’t offer to help Penelope find a suitor

Colin does return from a long stint of traveling in Romancing Mister Bridgerton , but he doesn’t offer to teach Penelope charm and help her find a suitor. The part where Penelope overhears Colin say he would never court her is slightly different in the books because he says he would never marry her. His brothers Anthony and Benedict were present for this moment in the book too.

There is also no Lord Debling (Sam Phillips) in Quinn’s novel.

Lady Danbury’s brother doesn’t come to town, the Mondrich’s storyline also doesn’t expand

Bridgerton Season 3 sees Lady Danbury’s brother, Lord Marcus Anderson, come to town. He is not in Romancing Mister Bridgerton , nor is the plotline in which Will Mondrich (Martins Imhangbe) and his wife Alice (Emma Naomi) learn that their son has inherited the title of Baron of Kent.

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Jeffrey Epstein's 'little black book' is now for sale

• One of Jeffrey Epstein's "little black books" is for sale.
• Business Insider first reported about the 1997 address book belonging to the disgraced financier.
• The book contains entries for 349 people and reveals a snapshot of his social circle.

An address book belonging to the late sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein is going up for sale.

The "little black book" — which was first revealed by Business Insider reporters — is on auction for the first time, according to Maryland auction house Alexander Historical Auctions.

"The history of this criminal relic is fascinating!" the auctioneers say on the book's listing page .

As BI reported in 2021 , the book contains hundreds of names connected to Epstein's social circle dating to October 1997. A majority of the 349 people referenced in this address book are not mentioned in a later book from the aughts — one that was unearthed by the FBI as part of investigations into Epstein.

Among the names in the 1997 book are financier Carl Icahn; Donald Trump ally and supermarket mogul John A. Catsimatidis; Suzanne Ircha, the wife of New York Jets owner Woody Johnson and a reportedly close friend of Melania Trump ; Cristina Greeven, the wife of former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo.

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The book also contains names referenced in the later address book, such as Donald Trump himself and Alan Dershowitz. It also includes a listing for the White House's main information line; Bill Clinton was president at the time.

A woman in Manhattan's East Village told BI she found the book on the sidewalk and later sold it on eBay to a graduate student in Vermont. BI hired a forensic document examiner to authenticate the document as part of a monthslong investigation.

Bidding on the little black book is now live and will remain open until June 15, Alexander Historical Auctions wrote. The auctioneers said they reserve the right to reveal how much someone paid for the book, but won't disclose the buyer.

The auction house's owner, Bill Panagopulos, told the New York Post that he estimates the book could sell for $200,000 or more.

"There are NO comparables, nothing so far-reaching in its effects on politics, society, royalty, finance … it goes on and on," Panagopulos said, according to the Post.

Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from an underage girl in 2008 after getting a cushy deal from prosecutors at the time, serving just over a year in jail.

Years later, federal investigations began probing Epstein's dealings, and he was arrested in 2019 on charges of running a sex trafficking ring. Epstein was taken into custody but died in prison months later ; his death was ruled a suicide, and a later Department of Justice report revealed jail officials botched security that could have prevented his death.

Epstein's associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, was also arrested, tried, and convicted on sex trafficking charges . She was sentenced to 20 years in prison .

Watch: The 10 most challenged books in the US

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