I’ve been planning to do some sort of ranking of the best novels of this century for at least four years now, but for a variety of reasons never sat down to actually do it. I think one reason is the constant sense that I haven’t read enough books to make such a list, although that’s probably silly given how much I read, and since nobody, not even full-time book critics (is there such a job any more?), can read absolutely everything. I can’t read every book, play every game, hear every album, or watch every movie before sitting down to decide which ones are my favorites.
The Twitter replies to my comment about The Netanyahus being the worst Pulitzer winner in at least 25 years finally got me back to the spreadsheet I’d started in 2018, although I ended up trashing it and starting over, to prepare for this post. I originally had about 67 books on the list, cut a few, ranked 50, and put ten honorable mentions at the end. Then I started writing the blurbs and moved a few books around the rankings too, which is, coincidentally, how I do player rankings for work as well. Sometimes you put down some words and realize you liked something more or less than you thought you did. It’s good to be flexible.
I’ve written the rankings in reverse order, so we’ll start at 50, with honorable mentions at the end. The hyperlink on each title goes to Bookshop.org, for which I have an affiliate account (so I get a small commission for each book sold through those links). They give 10% of earnings to local bookstores, and allow stores to sell via their site and keep all of the profits. If you can’t buy a book from your local independent bookstore, this is the next best option.
So, here we go – as of June 20, 2022, here are my top 50 books of this century:
50. The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey. Full review. A novelization of an old folk tale, The Snow Child tells the story of a couple who move to Alaska after their infant dies, where a girl, Faina, appears to have come to life from the snowchild they made. Is she real? A fairy? A hallucination? Ivey’s tale of grief, loss, and hope is haunting while balancing the possibilities of life against its inevitable tragedies.
49. The Teleportation Accident, by Ned Beauman. Full review. A madcap romp of sex, devil-worship, and, yes, teleportation, this book runs through multiple genres, both paying homage to them while sending them up, along with slapstick and other lowbrow humor, such as the side character who can’t tell a person from a painting of that person and keeps talking to the portraits of his ancestors as if they’re real.
48. All Our Names, by Dinaw Mengestu. Full review. A love story wrapped in a tale of identity, as we meet two men in an African country on the brink of civil war, with one later fleeing to America, where he falls in love with Helen, a social worker assigned to help him assimilate. Names and dates are left ambiguous or omitted entirely, while the importance of remembering as well as deliberate forgetting hover over both narratives.
47. Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi. Full review. What begins as a straightforward narrative about a high school play and a team-building exercise turns into metafictional, time-shifting story that asks questions about, to borrow a phrase, who lives, who dies, and who tells your story – and specifically who has the right to tell your story.
46. Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff. Full review. A novel in two distinct halves, the first about the husband, the second about the wife, where the second half reveals unseen truths about the first. It’s ambitious yet feels deeply personal, and the surfeit of literary references actually works in favor of the narrative, rather than coming off as showy.
45. Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. Full review. The use of the first-person plural is gimmicky, but there’s a reason for the conceit in this novel that looks at the decline of the American workplace more than ten years before COVID-19 (may have) killed it off for good. There’s a related but distinct short story in the middle of the novel that breaks things up in a suboptimal way, but the two parts that form the shell are compelling and prescient.
44. The Oracle Year, by Charles Soule. Full review. The debut novel from comic book author Soule, this work speculative fiction gives us bassist Will Dando, who wakes up one day with 108 highly specific predictions in his head … and they start to come true. It’s imperfect in some ways but incredibly well-told, witty, and intense.
43. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon. Full review. I do not agree with the critical and, I think, popular consensus that The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is Chabon’s best work; that book is incredibly imaginative and rich with story, but it’s bloated and loses its focus, while this novel, a neo-noir detective story set in an alternate universe where the world’s Jews have been given a homeland in southeastern Alaska, hits similar themes with precision while hewing closely to its target style.
42. Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. Full review. If you’re going to go sixteen years between novels, the return ought to be something special. Piranesi is far shorter than her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but has the same prose, imagery, and sense of wonder as the earlier work. It’s a mystery in a fantasy novel, as the narrator and the reader try to understand exactly where the narrator is, and how he got there. It’s like reading a dream.
41. HHhH, by Laurent Binet. Full review. Winner of France’s Prix Goncourt Prize, this historical novel has a metafictional element, combining a fictionalized telling of the assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942 with a story about the difficulty of telling that very story. It’s bold and ambitious, not entirely successful, but highly compelling, and of course there’s some satisfaction in reading about the successful assassination of one of the principal architects of the murders of 8 million Jews, Roma, gays, and other minority peoples.
40. From a Low and Quiet Sea, by Donal Ryan. Full review. A scant novel that tells the stories of three men, with no apparent connection, struggling with grief and sadness, until another catastrophe brings them together in the brief, final section. The novel took some criticism for its portrayal of Farouk, a Syrian refugee, in too-generic terms, but Ryan’s tremendous empathy for his characters ruled the day for me.
39. Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi. Full review. A daring structure that follows ten generations of a family through two separate lines takes the reader from west Africa and the enslavement of its people to modern-day American and back to Ghana where the story began. Gyasi’s debut novel manages to develop and humanize its many characters in just a few pages each, allowing the story to build and grow even with this tenuous framework.
38. The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett. Full review. I thought this deserved the Pulitzer in 2021 rather than Louise Erdich’s fine but not award-worthy The Night Watchman. Inspired by Nella Larson’s novella Passing, which was the basis for the superb film directed by Rebecca Hall, this novel covers a pair of sisters, one of whom chooses to pass for white while the other does not, while exploring critical themes of race and identity in our modern society.
37. All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders. Full review. Such a clever concept for a novel – All the Birds gives us two related, intertwined narratives, one from modern fantasy and one from hard science fiction, bringing them together, pulling them apart, and allowing the two main characters to show their flaws as they develop while heading towards a surprising resolution in a world not too far off from our own late-stage capitalist dystopia.
36. Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday. Full review. Halliday takes her romantic relationship with Philip Roth, who was over forty years her senior, and fictionalizes it in this wonderful, multi-part novel that revels in the asymmetry of that affair while giving Halliday’s stand-in, Alice, an unusual agency for the situation. That portion of the novel is followed by an absurdist section on a man with dual Iraqi-US citizenship who gets caught in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic trap at a London airport, a story with no apparent connection to the first one until the coda brings them together.
35. Blackout/All Clear, by Connie Willis. Full review. Published as two novels but sharing a continuous narrative, this time-travel story, sending historians from future Oxford back to World War II, where they get stuck (as often happens in Willis’s time-travel stories) and involved in the action in ways they shouldn’t, is grand, emotional, and evocative of the great British literature of the era it depicts.
34. Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. Full review. Diminishing returns set in quickly with its sequels, but Gilead, which was Robinson’s first novel in over twenty years when it was published, is a marvel of simplicity. It’s an epistolary novel, written as letters from its protagonist, a dying clergyman named John Ames, to his seven-year-old son for the child to read when he’s older. It’s a meditation on forgiveness and our limited capacity to understand the plights of others.
33. Grief is the Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter. Full review. I’m stretching the qualifications here, as this novella – it’s too short to properly call it a novel – is a marvel of wordplay and empathy, poetry in motion on the pages of a book. The Crow visits a father of two whose wife has died suddenly, and who is paralyzed by grief just as his sons need him most. Porter does not shy away from the man’s grief, but the Crow is there for a purpose, and the way Porter plays with language to advance the story is utterly extraordinary.
32. No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood. My favorite book of 2021, Lockwood’s novel is extremely online – or at least her main character is, and it’s not going well, so when something bad happens IRL, she’s not ready to handle it. The novel varies in style from stream-of-consciousness to poetry to standard prose, jumping around in perspective and playing with language in ways that earned the book comparisons to the experimental novels of Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Nabokov.
31. The White Tiger, by Aravind Ariga. Full review. A dark comedy and satire of the upwardly mobile culture of contemporary Indian cities, The White Tiger gives us one of the great anti-heroes of the century in Balram, who rises from poverty through his own determination and a convenient lack of scruples to prosperity – but not without leaving some bodies behind him, figuratively and eventually literally.
30. The Sellout, by Paul Beatty. Full review. The first American-authored novel to win the Booker Prize, The Sellout is a vicious satire that’s also completely bonkers. The narrator, a Black man who lives in an “agrarian ghetto” in Los Angeles County, stands trial for trying to bring back slavery – the conclusion of a series of ill-conceived attempts to resegregate the area so that his unincorporated town, Dickens, will return to the map.
29. An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon. Full review. Set on a massive spaceship with its own highly structured, race-based caste society, this dystopian novel upends conventions of the child-hero genre while exploring racial power dynamics as well as how elites maintain their grip on society through fear and myth.
28. Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid. Full review. From the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist comes a light sci-fi novel where refugees can flee through special portals that appear as actual doors and allow passage through to other places on the globe. The story follows a couple fleeing war in an unnamed country in southeast or south Asia through a series of those doors, allowing them to experience the poor treatment and mistrust refugees face across the world, a journey that also tests their feelings for each other.
27. Bowlaway, by Elizabeth McCracken. Full review. McCracken is Ann Patchett’s primary editor, and there’s some similarity in their fiction as both authors show deep empathy and understanding for their characters. Set in a small town outside Boston, Bowlaway follows a cast of characters through multiple generations, starting with the strange woman who appeared in the town’s graveyard with no memory of where she’d been, after which she founds a candlepin bowling alley and hires a couple of the town’s (many) eccentrics.
26. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. Full (but short) review. Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle remains my favorite of his works, with this follow-up novel second for me thanks to similar themes and literary techniques – notably his extensive use of magical realism in a context beyond that seen in the Latin American or African traditions of magical realism.He doesn’t write women well at all, though, a failing that has become more apparent in his novels since this one.
25. Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee. Full review. I’ll quote my own review: “If Dickens or Eliot had written a novel about Koreans living as part of the underclass in Japan, it would probably look a lot like Pachinko.” An epic work of fiction set among the pachinko parlors of Japan, the novel explores themes of alienation and isolation by looking at Koreans living and working in a foreign country that has always viewed them as an inferior minority.
24. The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin. Full review. Jemisin won the Hugo Award for each of the books in her Broken Earth trilogy, but this book, her first after that series ended, is her best so far. Six people find themselves transformed so that each of them is a borough of New York City or the city entire – not metaphorically, but physically, in a sort of transubstantiation, and their personalities match the character of the geographies they have become.
23. Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon. Full review. I have read several Pynchon novels, but none made me laugh like this one did – it’s a sort of slacker noir, a detective novel set in drug-addled California in the 1970s, with a detective who’s seldom sober enough for the job. It is far, far more accessible than Gravity’s Rainbow, and doesn’t require esoteric knowledge to understand it like The Crying of Lot 49.
22. Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. Full review. As ambitious a work of fiction as any I’ve read this century, Cloud Atlas contains six nested novellas, five of them split into two parts (so that the novella that starts the book also finishes it), with one element tying each one to the next. Each novella has a unique style – I’m partial to “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery,” a detective story – and Mitchell moves so deftly from one to the next that the whole work remains cohesive.
21. Lush Life, by Richard Price. Full review. Price has written for The Wire and The Night Of, as well as authoring nine novels, including 1992’s Clockers and this one, a broad, gritty piece of highly realistic fiction that follows a broad ensemble of characters through the ramifications of what appears to be an ordinary (if awful) street crime.
20. The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton. Full review. Another novel with a complex structure, this epic work follows a prospector who arrives in a New Zealand mining town, only to walk into a set of mysteries including a dead hermit, a prostitute who may have attempted suicide, stolen claims, and much more. The structure itself relates to the twelve signs of the zodiac and to the planets in the solar system, although I don’t think you need to see or follow that to appreciate its incredible story and rich characterization.
19. The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson. Full review. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction’s guidelines say it is for a work “by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” Johnson is American, but this remarkable novel definitely does not deal with American life – it is about North Korea, and opens a window on to that most isolated nation, following a young boy in a North Korean orphanage through his military service, time in a prison mine, and then a fantastical life after prison that puts him in the crosshairs of the Dear Leader himself.
18. The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. Full review. A novel that finds hope in hopelessness, giving us Leo Gorsky, perhaps the most ill-fated man in the universe, a Holocaust survivor whose lover thought he was dead and married someone else while carrying Leo’s baby. His story intertwines with two others around a book within the book, also called The History of Love, leading to a deeply emotional, unlikely-but-not-impossible conclusion.
17. The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. Full review. One of the most acclaimed books of the last twenty years (I think), this book reimagines the network of people, including Quakers, free Blacks, and other abolitionists who helped slaves escape the antebellum South as an actual subterranean railroad that served the same purpose – but that exposes the fleeing slaves of the book to the horrors of multiple Confederate states before they get close to freedom.
16. Wizard of the Crow, by Ng?g? wa Thiong’o. wa Thing’o is a revered Kenyan author, playwright, and Fanonist dissident who was imprisoned in the 1970s for writing a play that criticized the government. He’s written only two novels in the last 30 years, but one of them, 2004’s Wizard of the Crow, is an epic work of magical realism, satire, and scathing political commentary. Set in a corrupt African dictatorship, where allegiances change with the wind, a new power emerges in the form of an inadvertent charlatan calling himself the Wizard of the Crow, who threatens the country’s Ruler in the days after the end of colonialism.
15. Among Others, by Jo Walton. Full review. I first read this book because it won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for its year, but that may undersell it, because it’s far from just a genre book – this is a beautiful if somewhat dark coming-of-age novel with just a hint of fantasy in the setting. Calling it a fantasy novel might deter some people from reading it; this isn’t swords and sorcery, or knights and damsels, just a damn good story about growing up when one of the people who should love and protect you turns out to be an evil witch.
14. Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Adichie. Full review. Adichie has received more attention for her novel Americanah and her non-fiction writing, including We Should All Be Feminists (which, yes, we should), but this is her best work to date – a novel set during the Nigerian Civil War, when the Nigerian government blockaded the secessionist state of Biafra, causing a famine that killed two million people. I don’t see any particular parallels to anything happening today, though. Adichie follows five characters, including two couples, from before the war began through the depths of the conflict, through personal losses and the collapse of what had been a reasonably prosperous society.
13. Empire Falls, by Richard Russo. Full review. Russo is one of the funniest writers I’ve read, but in this, his best novel, he also works in wry commentary on how economic declines hit blue-collar American towns (this one in New England, like most of his settings) and affect the people in them at a deeply personal level. His characters are well-built and contribute to the sense of a specific place – you may not live in this town, but you understand it, and picture it, and have your favorites among the people in it. And when the big plot point finally comes in this book, one that could easily happen in a novel set today, you’re affected because the characters you care about are affected.
12. All The Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr. Full review. One of the best-plotted novels I’ve ever read, All The Light runs about 500 pages, yet I read it in two days on a work trip because I absolutely could not wait to see how the novel’s twin storylines would come together – and they do, in almost miraculous fashion, as two children, a blind French girl and a true-believer German boy, navigate the closing windows of Europe on the brink of war.
11. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, by Honorée Fannone Jeffers. Full review. I’m trying to avoid recency bias here, but this is the best book I’ve read in a few years – if we’re just going off this list, I think it’s the best I’ve read in about five years. Jeffers’ debut novel covers centuries of history through the lens of one Black family, from their ancestors in slavery to the contemporary struggles of three sisters, focused on one named Ailey Pearl, to cope with the weight of their racial history and a very personal trauma that has affected all of them. The prose is beautiful and the characters are rich and compelling, even many of the secondary ones.
10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Full review. Gaiman takes forgotten gods from religions around the world and brings them back to modern-day America in a complex fight for the soul of the country. For some reason, this centers on Shadow, a man just out of prison, who runs into Odin incarnate on the flight home. The book also spawned a related work, Anansi Boys, which is also excellent but not as ambitious as this tour de force, which seems to twist the fantasy genre inside-out along with a wildly exciting, action-packed story.
9. Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett. Full review. Inspired by the takeover of the Japanese Embassy in Lima, Peru, by the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, Bel Canto paints a rich portrait of a huge ensemble of characters, both hostages and terrorists, who become a village of sorts, learning about each other as we do, facing their fears and weaknesses, falling in love, becoming oblivious to the outside world. Patchett is always a beautiful writer who creates complex characters and shows empathy for even the worst of them, and her skills were most on display here, a novel she has indicated was inspired by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
8. Station Eleven, by Emily St. John. Full review. How is one of the most lyrical novels I’ve ever read set during a global pandemic that wipes out a huge portion of the planet’s population and leads to the complete collapse of civilized society? Perhaps because St. John focuses so much on the humanity within the crisis, and sees the good and the bad that come about when people are pushed beyond their limits. There’s also a small plot strand that doubles as an ode to the enduring power of great stories to entertain and enrich us.
7. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Full review. Ishiguro wrote two of the best novels I’ve ever read – this one and Remains of the Day, written in 1989. Never Let Me Go starts out like a work of classic British literature, perhaps a coming-of-age drama in the vein of Brideshead Revisited, but then the novel’s big secret is revealed and it turns into a Greek tragedy that confronts impossible questions of identity, ethics, and sacrifice.
6. The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes. Full review. I read this and The Orphan Master’s Son back-to-back in the summer of 2013, finishing this slim novel in just two days; it was such a great week of reading that I still remember it clearly, with two books that were so great, so compelling, that I was just lost in them. The Sense of an Ending gives us Tony Webster, now retired, divorced, living alone, first remembering a period from his school days with his girlfriend Veronica and his precocious friend Adrian. When Veronica’s mother dies, leaving Tony a bit of money, he reconnects with Veronica, and the edifice in his memory starts to crumble as he learns things he never knew about his own past.
5. In the Light of What We Know, by Zia Haider Rahman. Full review. Rahman’s lone novel to date is a knockout, combining the U.S.’s failed war in Afghanistan and the 2007-08 financial crisis in a story that ranges from delving into the roots of one man’s personal crises to blistering attacks on the power of global elites. It’s postcolonial literature through an entirely different, diasporic lens, and the story moves at a brisk pace despite a lack of traditional action. When the ending hits, it is a metaphorical bomb on the page, and throws everything that has come before into question.
4. Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders. Full review. Saunders is a master of the short story, winning awards for his collection Tenth of December, but didn’t publish his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, until he was 59, and all that book did was win the Booker Prize. Set mostly over the course of a single night in the bardo, a Tibetan term for the Buddhist concept of a state between life and rebirth, and follows Abraham Lincoln through his grief over the death of his son Willie, who died at age 11 of typhoid fever, just a year into his father’s first term as President, while working in snippets from real and fictional news stories of the time. It’s a profound look at parenthood and the unendurable loss of a child, from one of our greatest contemporary prose writers.
3. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Full review. Harrowing, dark, and unforgettable in so many ways, The Road is the most powerful book I have ever read on what it is like to be a parent and be willing to give up everything, including yourself, for your child. Set in a post-apocalyptic America where society is gone and humanity may be headed for extinction, The Road follows the Man and the Boy as they walk down abandoned interstates towards the sea and an unknown, possibly nonexistent, hope. It is graphic and horrifying, often difficult to read for its content, but it is the exemplar of how fiction can illuminate core truths about life.
2. White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. Full review. Out of the 1200+ novels I’ve read in my life, this is the one about which I have most changed by opinion from my initial reading. I was so unused to Smith’s incredible storytelling style, dubbed “hysterical realism” by critic James Wood in his review, that my first response was rather negative – but that’s because I was used to very specific styles of literature. The more I thought about the book after finishing, over days and months, the more I realized the incredible genius of it. So much literature of this century owes a debt to Smith and White Teeth and Hortense’s many root canals. It will defy your expectations for a novel in all of the best ways and its themes are both very much of its moment and utterly timeless.
1. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. Full review. A fantasy novel, yes, but so much more, and the fastest 1000-page novel I’ve ever read. (The Executioner’s Song was close, but it’s also not really a novel.) The two characters of the title are magicians in 19th century London, the latter an older, curmudgeonly man who proves that magic still exists centuries after its decline in England, and the former a younger upstart who becomes Norrell’s pupil. The two clash over magic’s use and end up engaged in a public battle of philosophies, while Norrell’s bargain with an underworld fairy known as “the gentleman with the thistle-down hair” has brought curses upon many within London, including Strange’s wife, Arabella. It is a work of stupendous imagination, written very much in the style of literature of that period, but with the very modern touch of fabricated footnotes that contain much of the book’s great wit. The book was also adapted into a seven-part BBC series that contained one of my favorite TV lines ever, and that hewed closely to the story and characters from the original text. Clarke has created a world like ours and yet so very unlike it, with two of the most memorable characters I’ve ever encountered, and uses fantasy as her vehicle but not her raison d’être (d’écrire?): Magic just lets her tell this majestic story of two men and their egos, fighting each other over philosophy while the world around them burns. It is gripping right until the end, and will leave you wanting more.
Honorable mentions, in alphabetical order:
- A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki (full review)
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz (full review)
- In a Perfect World, by Laura Kasischke (full review)
- The Magicians, by Lev Grossman (full review)
- Magpie Murders, by Anthony Horowitz (full review)
- The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa
- Persecution, by Alessandro Piperno. (full review)
- Redshirts, by John Scalzi (full review)
- Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde (full review)
- The Shadow King, by Maaza Mengiste (full review)