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Top 100 World Literature Titles

This is one of the 254 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

This novel explores the life of Okonkwo, a respected warrior in the Umuofia clan of the Igbo tribe in Nigeria during the late 1800s. Okonkwo's world is disrupted by the arrival of European missionaries and the subsequent clash of cultures. The story examines the effects of colonialism on African societies, the clash between tradition and change, and the struggle between individual and society. Despite his efforts to resist the changes, Okonkwo's life, like his society, falls apart.

Night by Elie Wiesel

This book is a memoir of the author's experiences during the Holocaust, specifically in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. The narrative focuses on the relationship between a father and son under the most extreme circumstances, the loss of faith in God, humanity, and in each other, and the horrifying reality of the systematic genocide of six million Jews during World War II. The book is a poignant and stark examination of the depths of human evil and the enduring power of hope and survival.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

This novel is a powerful story set against the backdrop of tumultuous events in Afghanistan, from the fall of the monarchy through the Soviet invasion and the rise of the Taliban regime. It follows the life of a wealthy boy and his best friend, a servant's son, their shared love for kite flying, and a terrible incident that tears their lives apart. The narrative explores themes of guilt, betrayal and redemption as the protagonist, now an adult living in America, is called back to his war-torn homeland to right the wrongs of his past.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The narrative follows a man who, after the death of his mother, falls into a routine of indifference and emotional detachment, leading him to commit an act of violence on a sun-drenched beach. His subsequent trial becomes less about the act itself and more about his inability to conform to societal norms and expectations, ultimately exploring themes of existentialism, absurdism, and the human condition.

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

"Cry, the Beloved Country" is a novel about a black Anglican priest from South Africa's rural Natal region who embarks on a journey to Johannesburg in search of his sister and son. The priest grapples with the racial injustice and social inequality of apartheid-era South Africa, while his son becomes involved in political activism and is wrongfully accused of a crime. The novel explores themes of love, fear, and social justice, while highlighting the destructive effects of apartheid on the human spirit and the South African landscape.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

The book tells the story of a man who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect. His transformation causes him to lose his job and become ostracized from his family, who are horrified and repulsed by his new form. As he grapples with his new reality, he becomes increasingly isolated and starts to lose his sense of humanity. The book explores themes of alienation, guilt, and identity, and is a profound examination of the human condition.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

"Siddhartha" is a novel about the spiritual journey of a young man named Siddhartha during the time of Gautama Buddha. Born into an Indian Brahmin family, Siddhartha rejects his privileged life to seek spiritual enlightenment. His journey takes him through periods of harsh asceticism, sensual indulgence, material wealth, and finally, to the simple life of a ferryman on a river where he finds peace and wisdom. The book explores themes of self-discovery, spiritual quest, and the desire for a meaningful life.

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

This novel explores the complex relationships between four Chinese-American mothers and their American-born daughters. The narrative switches between the perspectives of the eight women, revealing their pasts, their struggles with cultural identity, and the misunderstandings that have grown between the generations. The mothers, who all experienced hardship in their native China, want their daughters to have better lives and thus push them to excel in America. The daughters, in turn, struggle to reconcile their American surroundings with their Chinese heritage.

Oedipus the King by Sophocles

"Oedipus the King" is a tragic play that revolves around the life of Oedipus, the king of Thebes, who is prophesied to kill his father and marry his mother. Despite his attempts to avoid this fate, Oedipus unknowingly fulfills the prophecy. When he discovers the truth about his actions, he blinds himself in despair. The play explores themes of fate, free will, and the quest for truth, highlighting the tragic consequences of human hubris and ignorance.

The Odyssey by Homer

This epic poem follows the Greek hero Odysseus on his journey home after the fall of Troy. It takes Odysseus ten years to reach Ithaca after the ten-year Trojan War. Along the way, he encounters many obstacles including mythical creatures, divine beings, and natural disasters. Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, his wife Penelope and son Telemachus fend off suitors vying for Penelope's hand in marriage, believing Odysseus to be dead. The story concludes with Odysseus's return, his slaughter of the suitors, and his reunion with his family.

A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen

This classic play focuses on the life of Nora Helmer, a woman living in a seemingly perfect marriage with her husband, Torvald. However, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Nora has been hiding a significant secret related to their finances. The revelation of this secret, and the subsequent fallout, challenges societal norms and expectations of the time, particularly in regards to gender roles and the institution of marriage. Nora's eventual decision to leave her husband and children in pursuit of her own independence serves as a powerful commentary on individual freedom and self-discovery.

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

The novel tells the story of a young German soldier, Paul Bäumer, and his experiences during World War I. The narrative explores the physical and emotional toll of war, the camaraderie between soldiers, and the disillusionment of a generation thrown into a brutal conflict. The protagonist and his friends grapple with survival, fear, and the loss of innocence, providing a stark and poignant critique of the futility and destructiveness of war.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This novel is a multi-generational saga that focuses on the Buendía family, who founded the fictional town of Macondo. It explores themes of love, loss, family, and the cyclical nature of history. The story is filled with magical realism, blending the supernatural with the ordinary, as it chronicles the family's experiences, including civil war, marriages, births, and deaths. The book is renowned for its narrative style and its exploration of solitude, fate, and the inevitability of repetition in history.

Candide by Voltaire

"Candide" is a satirical novel that follows the adventures of a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism by his mentor. When he is expelled from the paradise for kissing a baron's daughter, he embarks on a journey around the world, witnessing the horrors of war, natural disasters, and human cruelty. Throughout his journey, Candide maintains his optimistic philosophy, despite the constant hardships he faces, ultimately concluding that one must cultivate their own garden, a metaphor for taking control of one's own destiny.

Antigone by Sophocles

This ancient Greek tragedy follows the story of Antigone, a young woman who defies the king's edict in order to bury her brother according to their religious customs. The king, her uncle, sentences her to death for her disobedience, leading to a series of tragic events including his own son's suicide. The play explores themes of loyalty, honor, obedience, and the conflict between the laws of the state and the laws of the gods.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

A young, impoverished former student in Saint Petersburg, Russia, formulates a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker to redistribute her wealth among the needy. However, after carrying out the act, he is consumed by guilt and paranoia, leading to a psychological battle within himself. As he grapples with his actions, he also navigates complex relationships with a variety of characters, including a virtuous prostitute, his sister, and a relentless detective. The narrative explores themes of morality, redemption, and the psychological impacts of crime.

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

In this epic poem, the protagonist embarks on an extraordinary journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso). Guided by the ancient Roman poet Virgil and his beloved Beatrice, he encounters various historical and mythological figures in each realm, witnessing the eternal consequences of earthly sins and virtues. The journey serves as an allegory for the soul's progression towards God, offering profound insights into the nature of good and evil, free will, and divine justice.

The Iliad by Homer

This epic poem focuses on the final weeks of the Trojan War, a conflict between the city of Troy and the Greek city-states. The story explores themes of war, honor, wrath, and divine intervention, with a particular focus on the Greek hero Achilles, whose anger and refusal to fight have devastating consequences. The narrative also delves into the lives of the gods, their relationships with humans, and their influence on the course of events.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

A young Indian boy named Pi Patel survives a shipwreck and finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Over the course of 227 days, Pi uses his knowledge of animal behavior and survival skills to coexist with the tiger, ultimately leading to an unusual and deeply spiritual journey. The story explores themes of faith, survival, and the interpretation of reality.

Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand

"Cyrano de Bergerac" is a classic French play that tells the story of a nobleman named Cyrano, who is a talented poet and swordsman but has a very large nose. Despite being deeply in love with his cousin Roxane, Cyrano doesn't believe she could ever love him because of his appearance, so he helps his friend Christian woo her instead. Cyrano writes love letters to Roxane on behalf of Christian, and Roxane falls in love with the man she believes Christian to be. The story is a tragic tale of unrequited love, selflessness, and the power of inner beauty.

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

Set in early 19th-century France, the narrative follows the lives and interactions of several characters, particularly the struggles of ex-convict Jean Valjean and his journey towards redemption. The story touches upon the nature of law and grace, and elaborates upon the history of France, architecture of Paris, politics, moral philosophy, antimonarchism, justice, religion, and the types and nature of romantic and familial love. It is known for its vivid and relatable characters, and its exploration of societal and moral issues.

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

This classic novel follows the adventures of a man who, driven mad by reading too many chivalric romances, decides to become a knight-errant and roam the world righting wrongs under the name Don Quixote. Accompanied by his loyal squire, Sancho Panza, he battles windmills he believes to be giants and champions the virtuous lady Dulcinea, who is in reality a simple peasant girl. The book is a richly layered critique of the popular literature of Cervantes' time and a profound exploration of reality and illusion, madness and sanity.

Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya

"Nectar in a Sieve" is a tale of an Indian peasant woman named Rukmani who endures the hardships of rural poverty, natural disasters, and personal tragedy, while trying to raise her children and maintain her marriage. The book explores themes of love, hope, and the strength of the human spirit against the backdrop of a rapidly changing India. Despite the constant struggles, Rukmani never loses her faith and hope, symbolizing the resilience and strength of ordinary people in the face of adversity.

Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

This novel is a romantic, magical realism tale set in turn-of-the-century Mexico. It chronicles the life of Tita, the youngest daughter in a traditional Mexican family, who is forbidden to marry due to a family custom that mandates the youngest daughter must care for her mother until death. Tita falls in love with Pedro, who in turn marries her elder sister to stay close to her. The story is uniquely structured around the twelve months of the year, each beginning with a traditional Mexican recipe. The protagonist's emotions become infused with her cooking, leading to strange effects on those who consume her culinary creations.

Epic of Gilgamesh by Unknown

This ancient Mesopotamian epic follows the story of Gilgamesh, a demigod king who rules over the city of Uruk. Unhappy with his reign, the gods create a wild man named Enkidu to challenge him. However, Gilgamesh and Enkidu become close friends and embark on several adventures together, including defeating the demon Humbaba and killing the Bull of Heaven. After Enkidu's death, Gilgamesh becomes obsessed with finding immortality, leading him on a journey to meet Utnapishtim, the only human who has been granted eternal life. The narrative explores themes of friendship, mortality, and the meaning of life.

Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

The novel follows the story of a young boy in New Mexico in the 1940s who navigates the challenges of adolescence, faith, and identity with the guidance of a wise old woman named Ultima. Throughout the narrative, the boy grapples with moral dilemmas, the complexities of his Mexican-American heritage, and the clash between the Catholic faith and the traditional spiritual beliefs of his ancestors. The story is a rich tapestry of folklore, spirituality, and personal growth.

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson , David Oliver Relin

The book tells the true story of a man who, after a failed attempt to climb K2, the world's second highest mountain, is taken in by the people of a small village in Pakistan. Touched by their kindness and noticing their lack of educational facilities, he promises to build them a school. The story follows his journey of fulfilling this promise, which expands into a mission to build schools, especially for girls, in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, despite numerous challenges, including financial struggles, cultural barriers and threats from the Taliban.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary is a tragic novel about a young woman, Emma Bovary, who is married to a dull, but kind-hearted doctor. Dissatisfied with her life, she embarks on a series of extramarital affairs and indulges in a luxurious lifestyle in an attempt to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Her desire for passion and excitement leads her down a path of financial ruin and despair, ultimately resulting in a tragic end.

Mythology by Edith Hamilton

This book is a comprehensive guide to ancient Greek, Roman, and Norse mythologies, providing detailed accounts of various gods, goddesses, heroes, and other mythological creatures. It includes well-known stories like the Odyssey and the Iliad, along with lesser-known tales, and analyzes their significance in the cultures they originated from. The book also delves into the origins of these myths and their influence on later civilizations, offering readers a deep understanding of ancient cultures and their belief systems.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

A young Andalusian shepherd named Santiago dreams of finding a worldly treasure and sets off on a journey across the Egyptian desert in search of it. Along the way, he encounters a series of characters who impart wisdom and help guide his spiritual journey. The novel explores themes of destiny, personal legend, and the interconnectedness of all things in the universe. The boy learns that true wealth comes not from material possessions, but from self-discovery and attaining one's "Personal Legend".

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez

In the Time of the Butterflies is a historical fiction novel that tells the story of the Mirabal sisters who were activists against the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. The narrative is a blend of fact and fiction, presenting the personal lives and political involvement of the sisters, three of whom were assassinated for their roles in the resistance movement. The book explores themes of courage, sacrifice, love, and the power of women in the face of oppressive regimes.

Hiroshima by John Hersey

This book provides a detailed account of the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima during World War II, as experienced by six survivors. The narrative follows the survivors from the moment of the explosion to their lives in the following years. It explores their struggles, their resilience, and the profound physical, emotional, and social impacts of the event, offering a poignant examination of the human capacity to endure and rebuild in the face of unimaginable devastation.

Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane

This autobiography tells the story of a young boy growing up in apartheid-era South Africa. Despite enduring extreme poverty, brutal police raids, and constant racial discrimination, the protagonist manages to escape his harsh reality through education and tennis. His determination and resilience eventually lead him to receive a scholarship to an American university, providing him a chance to escape the oppressive system of apartheid.

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

"The House of the Spirits" is a multi-generational saga that explores the lives of the Trueba family, set against the backdrop of political upheaval in an unnamed Latin American country. The narrative is driven by the family's strong and magical women, including clairvoyant Clara and her granddaughter Alba. The story spans over three generations, weaving together personal, social, and political threads, and is rich in elements of magical realism. The novel explores themes of love, violence, social class, and the struggle for power.

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah

This memoir recounts the harrowing experiences of a young boy forcibly recruited into the Sierra Leonean army during the country's brutal civil war. The narrative follows his journey from an innocent child fascinated with rap music to a hardened child soldier, who is eventually rescued by UNICEF and rehabilitated. The book provides a stark, firsthand account of the horrors of war and the resilience of the human spirit.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

A young sailor, unjustly accused of treason, is imprisoned without trial in a grim fortress. After a daring escape, he uncovers a hidden treasure and transforms himself into the mysterious and wealthy Count of Monte Cristo. He then sets out to exact revenge on those who wronged him, using his newfound power and influence. Throughout his journey, he grapples with questions about justice, vengeance, and whether ultimate power can ultimately corrupt.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

This novel provides a detailed account of a single day in the life of a prisoner, Ivan Denisovich, in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s. The narrative follows Ivan as he navigates the harsh realities of his daily routine, from the moment he wakes up to when he goes to bed. The book provides a stark portrayal of the brutality and inhumanity of the Soviet gulag system while also highlighting the resilience and dignity of the human spirit under such oppressive conditions.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

This novel explores the lives of two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila, who are brought together by war and fate. Mariam, an illegitimate child, suffers from the stigma surrounding her birth and the abuse she faces from her bitter mother. When she is married off to Rasheed, her life becomes a nightmare. Later, she becomes a co-wife to Laila, a beautiful and educated girl who also ends up as Rasheed's wife due to a series of tragic events. Despite their initial rivalry, the two women form a bond and become sources of support for each other in the face of their husband's brutalities and the war-torn world of Kabul.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

The Poisonwood Bible is a novel that follows the experiences of a missionary family in the Belgian Congo during the 1960s. The story is told from the perspective of the wife and four daughters of the Baptist minister who drags his family into the politically volatile Congo on a mission to save souls. The novel explores themes of cultural arrogance, religious zeal, and the clash of Western and African values, as well as the personal growth and self-discovery of the women in the family as they grapple with the harsh realities of their new life and the fallout from their father's single-minded vision.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

This novel tells the story of two teenage boys sent to a remote mountain village for re-education during China's Cultural Revolution. There, they meet a local tailor's daughter, who becomes their friend and the object of their shared affection. The boys discover a hidden suitcase filled with forbidden Western classics in Chinese translation, and their lives are forever changed. The books not only awaken their passion for literature, but also allow them to educate the Seamstress, ultimately leading to a heartbreaking love triangle and a tale of personal freedom against the odds.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

This novel is a semi-autobiographical account of a young man's intellectual and artistic development in late 19th-century Ireland. The protagonist struggles with issues of identity, faith, and nationality, ultimately rejecting the traditional values of his Catholic upbringing to pursue his own path as an artist. The book is renowned for its innovative narrative style and its exploration of themes such as individuality, freedom, and the nature of art.

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

This book is a real-life account of a young Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis during World War II, written in diary format. The girl and her family are forced to live in a secret annex in Amsterdam for two years, during which she writes about her experiences, fears, dreams, and the onset of adolescence. The diary provides a poignant and deeply personal insight into the horrors of the Holocaust, making it a powerful testament to the human spirit.

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

This graphic novel is a memoir that provides a personal account of the author's childhood and young adult years in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution. The story portrays the impact of war, political upheaval, and religious extremism on ordinary people, while also exploring themes of identity, resilience, and the power of storytelling. Despite the harsh realities the protagonist faces, the narrative also includes moments of humor and warmth, providing a nuanced view of life in Iran during this tumultuous period.

The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay

This novel follows the life of a young English boy named Peekay who grows up in South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s. Despite facing bullying, racial segregation, and the hardships of World War II, Peekay remains resilient and determined to follow his dream of becoming a world-class boxer. Along his journey, he encounters various mentors who teach him about survival, love, and the power of one person to make a significant difference in the world.

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung

This memoir recounts the author's experiences as a young girl in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime. She is forced from her home in Phnom Penh to a labor camp in the countryside along with her family, where they face starvation, disease, and brutality. The book details her survival through the genocide, her eventual escape to Thailand, and finally her immigration to the United States. It is a powerful story of resilience, courage, and the human spirit's ability to overcome overwhelming adversity.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Set in a dystopian future, this novel presents a society where women are stripped of their rights and are classified into various roles based on their fertility and societal status. The protagonist is a handmaid, a class of women used solely for their reproductive capabilities by the ruling class. The story is a chilling exploration of the extreme end of misogyny, where women are reduced to their biological functions, and a critique of religious fundamentalism.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Set in 19th-century Russia, this novel revolves around the life of Anna Karenina, a high-society woman who, dissatisfied with her loveless marriage, embarks on a passionate affair with a charming officer named Count Vronsky. This scandalous affair leads to her social downfall, while parallel to this, the novel also explores the rural life and struggles of Levin, a landowner who seeks the meaning of life and true happiness. The book explores themes such as love, marriage, fidelity, societal norms, and the human quest for happiness.

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

This classic work of political philosophy provides a pragmatic guide on political leadership and power, arguing that leaders must do whatever necessary to maintain authority and protect their states, even if it means compromising morality and ethics. The book explores various types of principalities, military affairs, the conduct of great leaders, and the virtues a prince should possess. It is known for its controversial thesis, which suggests that the ends justify the means in politics.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

Set in 19th century China, the novel centers around the lifelong friendship of Lily and Snow Flower. Despite their different social classes, the two communicate through a secret language known as "nu shu" written on a fan. The story explores the rigid societal norms of the time, particularly the practice of foot binding and arranged marriages. As they navigate through the hardships of their lives, their friendship is tested, leading to a devastating betrayal that impacts their relationship.

Persepolis Two by Marjane Satrapi

This graphic novel continues the story of a young girl growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. After being sent to Europe for her safety, she struggles with feeling out of place and longs for her homeland. Eventually, she returns to Iran, only to find it vastly different from the place she remembered. The book explores themes of identity, culture, and the effects of political upheaval on a personal level.

The Aeneid by Virgil

This epic poem tells the story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travels to Italy, where he becomes the ancestor of the Romans. It includes a series of prophecies about Rome's future and the deeds of heroic individuals, and is divided into two sections, the first illustrating the hero's journey and the second detailing the wars and battles that ensue as Aeneas attempts to establish a new home in Italy. The narrative is deeply imbued with themes of duty, fate, and divine intervention.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

This novel is a poignant tale of fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, who navigate through their childhood in Kerala, India, amidst a backdrop of political unrest and societal norms. The story, set in 1969, explores the complexities of their family's history and the tragic events that shape their lives. Their mother's transgression of caste and societal norms by having an affair with an untouchable leads to disastrous consequences, revealing the oppressive nature of the caste system and the destructive power of forbidden love. The novel also delves into themes of postcolonial identity, gender roles, and the lingering effects of trauma.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

The novel tells the story of Saleem Sinai, who was born at the exact moment when India gained its independence. As a result, he shares a mystical connection with other children born at the same time, all of whom possess unique, magical abilities. As Saleem grows up, his life mirrors the political and cultural changes happening in his country, from the partition of India and Pakistan, to the Bangladesh War of Independence. The story is a blend of historical fiction and magical realism, exploring themes of identity, fate, and the power of storytelling.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This novel follows the story of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, who fall passionately in love in their youth. However, Fermina eventually marries a wealthy doctor, leaving Florentino heartbroken. Despite this, Florentino remains devoted to Fermina for over fifty years, patiently waiting for her husband's death to have another chance at her love. The story is set against the backdrop of a cholera epidemic, serving as a metaphor for the transformative power of love and the destructive power of obsession.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

The book is a memoir that takes place in Iran from 1979 to 1997, during the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. The story focuses on a professor who secretly gathers seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western literature in her home. As they read and discuss works by authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, and Vladimir Nabokov, they explore their personal dreams and the losses they suffered due to the political, social, and cultural climate of the time.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Set in Nazi Germany during World War II, the novel follows the story of a young girl who finds solace in stealing books and sharing them with others. In the midst of the horrors of war, she forms a bond with a Jewish man her foster parents are hiding in their basement. The story is narrated by Death, offering a unique perspective on the atrocities and small acts of kindness during this period. The girl's love for books becomes a metaphor for resistance against the oppressive regime.

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid

The novel centers around the coming-of-age story of the protagonist, Annie John, in Antigua. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, she grapples with her complex relationship with her mother, her self-identity, and the colonial influence of the British on her island home. As she matures, her once close bond with her mother becomes strained, and she struggles with feelings of separation and independence. The narrative explores themes of colonialism, gender, and the complexities of mother-daughter relationships.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The novel unfolds as a murder mystery, revealing the planned revenge killing of a young man named Santiago Nasar by the Vicario brothers. They believe Santiago has dishonored their sister, Angela, by taking her virginity before her marriage to another man. Despite the impending murder being common knowledge within the small Colombian town, a series of coincidences and misunderstandings prevent anyone from intervening, leading to Santiago's tragic and foretold demise. The narrative explores themes of honor, fate, and the collective responsibility of a community.

Obasan by Joy Kogawa

The book is a semi-autobiographical novel that tells the story of a Japanese-Canadian woman named Naomi, who reflects on her experiences during World War II. As a child, Naomi was forced into internment along with thousands of other Japanese-Canadians, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The narrative explores the themes of racism, identity, silence, and the power of memory, as Naomi grapples with the trauma of her past and the impact of her cultural heritage on her present life.

Red Scarf Girl by Ji-li Jiang

"Red Scarf Girl" is a memoir of the author's childhood during the Cultural Revolution in China. The story follows a 12-year-old girl from a previously respected family who is labeled a class enemy and forced to turn against her own parents. The book provides a deeply personal account of the extreme political and social upheaval during this period in China's history, highlighting the fear, confusion, and courage of a young girl struggling to reconcile her loyalty to her family and her loyalty to her country.

Medea by Euripides

"Medea" is a Greek tragedy that tells the story of Medea, a former princess of the "barbarian" kingdom of Colchis, and her husband Jason, who leave her to marry Glauce, the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth. In a fit of rage, Medea decides to take revenge on Jason by killing their children, Jason's new wife, and her father, King Creon. The play explores themes of revenge, women's rights, and the dangers of absolute power.

I Have Lived a Thousand Years by Livia Bitton-Jackson

This memoir tells the harrowing story of a 13-year-old Jewish girl's survival during the Holocaust. The narrative follows her life from her quiet existence in Hungary through the horrors of Auschwitz and other concentration camps, and finally to her liberation and the struggle to rebuild her life in the aftermath of such trauma. The memoir is a powerful testament to human resilience and the will to survive against all odds.

Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland

The novel explores the history of a fictional painting by Vermeer, as it passes through the hands of various owners. The narrative traces back from the present day to the time of the painting's creation, revealing the profound impact it has had on those who possessed it. The painting's subjects, a young girl in a blue dress, also becomes a symbol of beauty, loss, and the enduring power of art. The novel is a series of interconnected stories that together form a rich tapestry of human experience and the power of art to transform lives.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A young prince from a tiny asteroid embarks on a journey across the universe, visiting various planets and meeting their strange inhabitants. Along the way, he learns about the follies and absurdities of the adult world, the nature of friendship, and the importance of retaining a childlike wonder and curiosity. His journey eventually leads him to Earth, where he befriends a fox and learns about love and loss before finally returning to his asteroid.

Living Up The Street by Gary Soto

"Living Up The Street" is a collection of autobiographical essays that explore the experiences of a Mexican-American boy growing up in the barrios of Fresno, California. The book delves into the realities of working-class life, highlighting themes of poverty, violence, and the struggle for identity. The protagonist's journey through adolescence is marked by a series of humorous, tragic, and poignant moments, offering a vivid depiction of life in a Hispanic community in America.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

The novel tells the story of Gogol Ganguli, a second-generation Indian-American, who struggles with his unique name and his dual cultural identity. Born to immigrant parents from Kolkata, India, Gogol is named after the famous Russian author, Nikolai Gogol, a decision that shapes his life in unexpected ways. As he grows up, he finds himself torn between his parents' traditional Indian values and his desire to fit into mainstream American society. This internal conflict is further complicated by his relationships with women of different cultural backgrounds. The book explores themes of identity, cultural assimilation, and the immigrant experience.

Sold by Patricia McCormick

The novel follows a young Nepalese girl who lives in a poor, rural village. When her stepfather sells her into slavery in a brothel in India, she must navigate the horrors of her new life. The narrative explores her struggle for survival, her attempts to escape, and the friendships she forms with other girls in the brothel. Ultimately, the novel is a harrowing exploration of human trafficking and sexual exploitation.

The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad

This book provides an intimate and eye-opening look into the everyday life of an Afghan family. The narrative follows a bookseller in Kabul, who despite the oppressive Taliban regime, courageously continues his trade. The story delves into his family dynamics, the struggles of his two wives, his children's lives, and the societal norms and customs they navigate. It paints a vivid picture of life in Afghanistan, exploring the themes of love, courage, resilience, and the power of literature.

What Is the What by Dave Eggers

The novel is a fictionalized account of a real-life Sudanese refugee, Valentino Achak Deng, who was forced to flee from his village during the Second Sudanese Civil War. The story follows his harrowing journey as a child through Ethiopia and Kenya, his life in various refugee camps, and his eventual resettlement in the United States. The book explores themes of survival, identity, and the power of storytelling, while shedding light on the tragic history and ongoing humanitarian crisis in Sudan.

All But My Life by Gerda Weissmann Klein

"All But My Life" is a poignant memoir of a young woman's six-year ordeal as a victim of Nazi cruelty. The narrative follows her life from a peaceful, upper-middle-class childhood in Bielitz, Poland, through her horrifying experiences and loss during the Holocaust, to her miraculous survival and marriage to an American soldier. It is a story of courage, resilience, and the enduring power of hope.

My Forbidden Face by Latifa

The book is a powerful autobiographical account of a young woman's life under the repressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan. It provides an intimate look at the brutal conditions women had to endure, including the denial of basic human rights, education, and healthcare. The author's courage and resilience shine through as she secretly documents the atrocities and injustices, providing a unique perspective on this dark period in Afghanistan's history.

Before We Were Free by Julia Alvarez

This novel tells the story of a young girl growing up in the Dominican Republic during a time of political turmoil. The protagonist and her family experience the fear and uncertainty of living under a dictatorship, as they are constantly surveilled by the government's secret police. Throughout the book, the protagonist navigates her own coming-of-age while also grappling with the larger issues of freedom, oppression, and resistance.

The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan

This novel explores the complex relationship between a Chinese-American woman and her immigrant mother, who is suffering from dementia. As the mother's condition worsens, her daughter discovers a manuscript written in Chinese that reveals her mother's traumatic past and the true identity of her grandmother - a renowned bonesetter in China. The narrative oscillates between contemporary San Francisco and early 20th century China, illustrating the enduring power of family bonds, the weight of cultural heritage, and the profound impact of past events on present lives.

Dawn by Elie Wiesel

"Dawn" is a poignant novel that explores the moral complexities of the aftermath of the Holocaust through the eyes of a young Holocaust survivor turned freedom fighter. He is tasked with the execution of a British officer in retribution for the British execution of a Jewish prisoner. As he awaits the dawn, the time set for the execution, he grapples with the morality of his actions, the value of life, and the haunting memories of his past. The narrative delves deep into the psychological and emotional turmoil of its protagonist, offering a profound exploration of guilt, responsibility, and the cost of violence.

Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina García

"Dreaming in Cuban" is a multi-generational narrative that explores the lives of several women from a Cuban family, spanning from the 1930s to the 1980s. The story oscillates between Cuba and the United States, reflecting on the Cuban revolution, exile, and identity. Through the perspectives of each character, the novel delves into themes of political turmoil, family dynamics, and personal struggles amidst cultural shifts and geographical displacement.

Falling Leaves by Adeline Yen Mah

"Falling Leaves" is a heartbreaking autobiography that recounts the life of a young girl who grows up in a wealthy but abusive family in 20th century China. Despite being the daughter of a prosperous businessman, she is treated as an outcast and blamed for her mother's death, who died shortly after her birth. The story portrays her struggle for acceptance and love within her family, her journey through the cultural revolution in China, and her eventual success as a physician in the U.S. It's a poignant exploration of the themes of familial bonds, resilience, and the human spirit's ability to overcome adversity.

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo

Set in 15th-century Paris, this novel follows the story of Quasimodo, a deformed and hunchbacked bell-ringer of Notre-Dame Cathedral, who is shunned due to his appearance. Despite his physical deformities, Quasimodo falls in love with the beautiful gypsy girl, Esmeralda. However, his love is unrequited as she is in love with a handsome soldier. The novel explores themes of love, rejection, and the human struggle against fate and societal norms.

In My Hands by Irene Opdyke

This memoir recounts the story of a Polish woman who, during World War II, worked as a housekeeper for a Nazi major while secretly aiding the Jewish resistance. She risked her life by hiding Jews in the basement of the Nazi officer's house, stealing food and supplies for them, and eventually leading them to safety. Despite the constant threat of discovery and the moral complexities she faced, she persevered in her efforts to save lives, demonstrating remarkable courage and resilience.

Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory

This classic work is a compilation of stories and legends about the legendary King Arthur, his knights, and the Round Table. It tells of Arthur's rise to power, his quest for the Holy Grail, and his tragic downfall. The book, written in the 15th century, is considered one of the most influential pieces of Arthurian literature and has significantly shaped the modern perception of Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere, Lancelot, and other iconic characters.

Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

The book is a memoir that recounts the author's experiences and observations living in Kenya, then British East Africa, from 1914 to 1931. It is a lyrical meditation on her life amongst the diverse cultures and wildlife of Africa. The author shares her trials and tribulations of running a coffee plantation, her deep respect for the people and land of Africa, and her intimate understanding of the subtle nuances of African culture and society.

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

The book tells the story of a beautiful soprano at the Paris Opera House named Christine Daaé who becomes the obsession of a mysterious, disfigured musical genius living in the subterranean labyrinth beneath the opera house. Known as the Phantom, he terrorizes the opera company to compel them to keep giving roles to Christine, whom he tutors in secret. The tale unfolds with love, jealousy, and violence, culminating in a dramatic conclusion.

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"Purple Hibiscus" follows the story of a 15-year-old Nigerian girl, Kambili, and her older brother Jaja, who live a privileged life in Enugu. However, their father is a religious fanatic and a domestic tyrant. The siblings are sent to their Aunty Ifeoma's home, a university professor, who provides them a taste of freedom and shows them a different way of life outside their father's oppressive rule. The novel explores themes of colonialism, religious fanaticism, and the post-colonial political situation in Nigeria.

Ties That Bind, Ties That Break by Lensey Namioka

Set in early 20th century China, the book tells the story of a young girl who challenges societal norms by refusing to have her feet bound, a painful tradition that symbolizes beauty and status. This decision leads to her being disowned by her family. She then becomes a servant for a wealthy family, where she learns English and eventually moves to America. The novel explores themes of tradition, gender roles, and the struggle for individuality and freedom.

Waiting by Ha Jin

"Waiting" is a story set in China during the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, revolving around the life of Lin Kong, a military doctor who is torn between his love for two women. He is stuck in an arranged marriage with his traditional wife in the countryside, while he falls in love with a modern, city nurse. The novel explores his 18-year struggle to divorce his wife and marry his lover, depicting the clash between traditional and modern Chinese culture, personal desires, and societal expectations.

Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas

This memoir tells the story of an Iranian family who migrated to America in the 1970s, offering a humorous take on their experiences. The narrative focuses on the author's childhood and adolescence, exploring themes of cultural identity, assimilation, and the immigrant experience in America. It highlights the family's journey of navigating a new country and culture, while still holding on to their Iranian roots. The book showcases the author's ability to find humor in the most challenging situations, making it a heartwarming and amusing read.

A Book of Luminous Things by Czesław Miłosz

"A Book of Luminous Things" is a collection of international poetry, curated by a renowned poet himself. The anthology is divided into thematic sections, each prefaced by a brief introduction from the editor. The poems cover a wide range of themes such as nature, love, history, and the essence of human existence. The book serves as a testament to the power of poetry in illuminating the complexities and beauty of human life.

Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario

"Enrique's Journey" is a poignant narrative about a young Honduran boy who embarks on a perilous journey through Central America and Mexico to reach his mother in the United States. The story, based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper series, explores the harsh realities faced by immigrants, the devastating impact of family separations, and the unyielding determination of a child in search of his mother. It offers a deeply personal and eye-opening perspective on the challenges and perils faced by undocumented immigrants.

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

The book follows the story of Precious Ramotswe, a woman in Botswana who opens the country's first and only female-run detective agency. She uses wisdom, intuition, and her understanding of human nature to solve various cases, from missing husbands to wayward daughters and con men. The story is not just about solving mysteries, but also provides a deep insight into the culture, landscape and people of Botswana.

Retold African American Folktales by David Haynes

This book is a collection of African American folktales that have been retold and adapted for a modern audience. The stories are diverse and filled with magic, wisdom, and humor, reflecting the rich cultural heritage of African American communities. They present a variety of characters and situations, from tricksters outwitting their foes to heroes overcoming great odds, teaching lessons about resilience, courage, and the importance of community.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

"Waiting for Godot" is a play that explores themes of existentialism, despair, and the human condition through the story of two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, who wait endlessly for a man named Godot, who never arrives. While they wait, they engage in a variety of discussions and encounter three other characters. The play is characterized by its minimalistic setting and lack of a traditional plot, leaving much to interpretation.

American Shaolin by Matthew Polly

The book is a captivating memoir of a young American's experience in China where he spends two years studying at the Shaolin Temple, the birthplace of kung fu. The narrative follows his journey as he immerses himself in Chinese culture, learns Mandarin, and trains with the monks, becoming the first American to be accepted as a disciple. The author's transformation, both physically and spiritually, is depicted in a humorous and insightful manner, providing a unique perspective on Eastern philosophy and martial arts.

Apology by Plato

This philosophical text is a dialogue of Socrates' defense in 399 BC against the charges of 'corrupting the young, and by not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other daimonia that are novel.' The dialogue is Socrates' defense at his trial and is his final public statement before his execution. In it, he discusses the moral and philosophical justification for his actions and beliefs, ultimately leading to his conviction and death.

The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov

This collection of short stories explores the complexities of human nature and society in 19th-century Russia. Written by a renowned Russian author, the stories range from humorous to tragic, often focusing on the everyday lives and struggles of ordinary people. The author's keen observation and deep understanding of human nature shine through in these tales, making them timeless classics that continue to resonate with readers today.

Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier

The novel tells the story of an Indian-American teenage girl who struggles with her cultural identity. She feels caught between the traditional Indian values of her parents and the mainstream American culture she experiences every day. As she navigates high school, friendships, and first love, she begins to rediscover her heritage and embrace her Indian-American identity.

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

This novel tells the story of a poor farmer in rural China, who struggles to survive and prosper. Over time, he manages to build a life for himself and his family, eventually becoming a wealthy landowner. However, his newfound wealth and status lead to a moral decline, as he becomes disconnected from the land that gave him everything. The narrative explores themes of wealth, poverty, and the human connection to the earth.

Chanda's Secrets by Allan Stratton

Chanda's Secrets is a poignant story set in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the protagonist, a sixteen-year-old girl, grapples with the harsh reality of AIDS in her community. The novel explores the stigma and fear associated with the disease, as well as the courage and resilience of its characters. The protagonist's unwavering determination to keep her family together, despite societal pressures and personal tragedy, forms the crux of the narrative.

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov

"The Cherry Orchard" is a classic play about an aristocratic Russian woman and her family as they return to their family estate, which includes a large and well-known cherry orchard. The family is on the brink of financial ruin and the estate is slated to be auctioned off. Despite various attempts to save their beloved home and orchard, they are ultimately unable to prevent the sale. The play is a poignant reflection on the changing social order and the decline of the aristocracy in Russia at the turn of the 20th century.

Chinese Cinderella by Adeline Yen Mah

This book is a memoir of a young girl growing up in China during the 1940s and 1950s. The protagonist is considered unlucky by her family after her mother dies giving birth to her. She is mistreated by her stepmother and largely ignored by her father, leading to a lonely and challenging childhood. Despite these difficulties, she finds solace in her academic achievements and her Aunt Baba's support. The story is a testament to the power of hope and perseverance in the face of adversity.

City of the Beasts by Isabel Allende

A 15-year-old boy is forced to move in with his eccentric grandmother after his mother falls ill. Together, they embark on a journey to the Amazon rainforest in search of a legendary, healing beast. Along the way, they encounter various challenges, including dangerous animals, harsh environments, and a group of indigenous people with mystical powers. The boy learns to overcome his fears and prejudices, forming a strong bond with the indigenous people and the rainforest itself.

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson

"Crow Lake" is a compelling novel that explores the dynamics of a rural Canadian family dealing with tragedy. After the death of their parents, the Morrison children struggle to stay together and maintain their family farm. The story is narrated by the youngest daughter, who is now a successful zoologist, reflecting back on her childhood. The narrative delves into themes of love, loss, survival, and the power of education, all set against the backdrop of the harsh, yet beautiful, northern Ontario landscape.

Perfection Learning , 100 Books

The top 100 titles for the world literature classroom, ranked in order of popularity, chosen by literature teachers from across the country.

This list has a weight of 87% . To learn more about what this means please visit the Rankings page .

• Voters: are mostly from a single country/location

If you think this is incorrect please e-mail us at [email protected] .

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The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Under 200 Pages

Or, 50 afternoons well spent.

About a month ago, we published a list of 50 of the best contemporary novels over 500 pages , for those of you who suddenly have a lot of extra time on your hands. But for those of us who suddenly have a lot less  extra time on our hands, or who just can’t really pay attention to anything anymore unless it’s a) short or b) what were we talking about? For us, I present this list of 50 of the best contemporary novels under 200 pages.

For our purposes here, “contemporary” means published (in English) after 1970. NB that I’m not making a distinction between novellas and novels—I’m not sure there really is one—but I’m not including short story collections, or books that include a novella and stories. Finally, as ever, “best” is subjective, and this list is limited by time and space and the literary tastes of this editor. Feel free to add your own favorites in the comments below.

Mary Robison, Why Did I Ever (200 pages)

Probably the best fragment novel on the block: the saga of Money Breton, errant script doctor, mother of two, obsessive obssesser, is funny, irreverent, and weirdly moving. Not for nothing, but this novel is my own personal ultimate coolness test, because yep, I am an adult who judges other people’s coolness, and I do it based on the books they read.

Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation (177 pages)

My other candidate for the best recent fragment novel—not to mention one of the best novels of the decade , full stop—is of course Offill’s luminous, eye-wormy (this is a term I have just now invented for the literary version of ear-wormy, you’re welcome, and sorry), and consistently wise modern classic, which is ostensibly the story of a marriage but is more importantly the story of a mind.

Denis Johnson, Train Dreams (116 pages)

Johnson’s novella is a shibboleth among a certain kind of reader (and, typically, writer). In our list of the best novels of the decade , editor Dan Sheehan described it as “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. . . . 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.”

Han Kang, tr. Deborah Smith, The Vegetarian (188 pages)

The Vegetarian has come under scrutiny for its translation, and the accuracy thereof, but since I can only read English, all I know is that whatever came out of the union of Kang and Smith is very, very good. In our list of the best debut novels of the decade, editor Molly Odintz wrote , “Han Kang’s tale begins with a description of a dutiful wife, unusual only in her refusal to wear a bra, whose sudden decision to stop eating meat sends her partner and family into a spiral of confusion, where forcible consumption of meat quickly becomes a metaphor for violation. The vegetarian begins a slow transformation into vegetable itself—first, she stops eating meat; gradually, she stops eating everything. Her withdrawal from culinary delights is mirrored by her withdrawal from the world. She basks in sunlight, is painted all over with flowers by her sister’s husband (a not-so-successful artist), and for all intents and purposes, attempts to become a plant. Is she onto something, or is she out of her mind? Is she denying the world, or is she fully embracing it? Han Kang leaves the answers to these questions deliberately vague, and the sign of a great work is its ability to be read by many people and interpreted differently by each one.”

Milan Kundera, Slowness (176 pages)

A metafictional meditation on modernity and memory—and on “the dancer,” showing off for the abstracted “everyone,” the concept of which gets more relevant every day.

Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills (192 pages)

Ishiguro’s debut, first published in 1982, takes shape through the recollections of an aging Japanese woman, living in England, now alone after her husband’s death. But as she reflects, the memories become less secure—or at least less restricted to the past. Like everything Ishiguro writes, it’s beautiful, subtle, and not a little shadowy.

Clarice Lispector, tr. Alison Entrekin, Near to the Wild Heart (194 pages)

I register that this is something of a cheat, since Lispector’s first novel was originally published in Brazil in 1943—but considering that it wasn’t translated into English until 1990, I’m going to sneak it in here. After all, it is too glorious to ignore: evidence of a mind on fire. We follow Joana through her life in this short novel, but it’s really the sentences you should read for: sometimes inscrutable, sometimes wild, sometimes transcendent.

Susanna Moore, In the Cut (179 pages)

Okay, I’m hereby warning you: this novel is not for the squeamish. My best friend recommended this book to me not too long ago and didn’t tell me anything about it except that it was amazing, and it was totally a replay of that time she made me go see Hard Candy  with her and told me it was going to be an indie comedy. And look, it is amazing, in the sense that you will have physical reactions reading this book, and in the sense that Moore perfectly captures a range of emotions and impulses rarely committed to paper. But like . . . you’re not going to feel good at the end. So just know that.

Samanta Schweblin, tr. Megan McDowell, Fever Dream (189 pages)

This is a weird and terrifying, almost suffocating novel that kept me up for an entire night. In our list of the best debut novels of the decade , our editorial fellow Eleni Theodoropoulos wrote that in this novel, “detail is dramatized through dialogue, and Schweblin knows just what to pick and what to leave out so that characters and readers alike are obsessed with the story about the poison. Everyone is at the mercy of someone: David is at the mercy of Amanda, Amanda at the mercy of David, and the reader at the mercy of both of them. The only way to find out the truth in Fever Dream  is by trusting someone else’s narrative. Even in being swept away in the horrific progression of the novel, and simultaneously, the disease, the reader identifies with Amanda, a mother who realizes she cannot protect her child. In just under 200 pages, Schweblin has delivered a poignant, tragic tale of a fear come true.”

Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You (191 pages)

If you’ve been reading Lit Hub for any amount of time, you know how much we love Garth Greenwell’s debut (not to mention his latest,  Cleanness ), which is, after all, one of the best debut novels of the decade . It’s an exquisite book, both on the sentence and the story level, a mesmerizing work of art.

Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (181 pages)

I still love Lerner’s debut, which is basically about a poet not writing poetry in Madrid, but is actually very good, despite that. In our list of the best debut novels of the decade, our editor Jessie Gaynor described it as one of the “most subtly hilarious novels around” and wrote that “Lerner invites the reader to laugh with his protagonist as well as with him. The novel feels propulsive rather than meandering, as if the reader is the one whose fellowship is quickly running short.”

Don DeLillo, Point Omega  (117 pages)

DeLillo’s the rare writer who excels in both the long and the short form. This one, his fifteenth, is a destabilizing, compelling portrait of grief refracted through art. According to me, at least—it’s also one of DeLillo’s most polarizing novels, so you might as well read it, at least to have an opinion on the matter.

Thomas Bernhard, tr. Jack Dawson, The Loser (190 pages)

Possibly the best ill-tempered 190 page monologue in contemporary literature, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Danielle Dutton, Margaret the First (160 pages)

This lucid gem is the first-person tale of Margaret Cavendish, a real-life 17th century Renaissance woman and writer whose story would be captivating enough on its own, even without Dutton’s elegant, winking treatment. But the winks do not go unnoticed, of course (nor does that gorgeous cover). In our list of the best novels of the decade , editor in chief Jonny Diamond described the book as a “glinting dagger of novel” and wrote that Dutton “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.”

Leonard Michaels, Sylvia (123 pages)

Michaels’ autobiographical novel is a matter-of-fact retelling of his marriage to his first wife, the “abnormally bright” but depressed and volatile Sylvia Bloch. Reading it feels like looking, through Michaels’ clear eyes, at a moment in his life in his early 20s that has been hermetically sealed, so by the time he tells the story, it’s become a sort of still-water legend. You can discern pretty much right away that this relationship is doomed, but it still feels essential to watch it unfold.

Renata Adler,  Speedboat   (193 pages)

If you’re a certain kind of woman living in a certain kind of city, this is a bible. If you’re a certain kind of writer with a certain kind of sensibility, it’s a bible too. Adler’s wry, discursive novel is a brilliant portrait of New York and of a singular, elliptical mind—the kind of book that, if you’re a certain kind of person, will have you looking at everything around you a little bit more carefully and taking notes like mad.

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (163 pages)

The winner of the 2001 Man Booker prize is a wonderful if melancholic novel about memory, aging, and what it is to live a good (or at least not a bad) life.

Jenny Erpenbeck, tr. Susan Bernofsky, Visitation (150 pages)

This is another book that I feel like I carp on about all the time on this website, but I don’t actually feel too sorry about that. As I wrote in our list of the best translated novels of the decade , this is a book about a house on a lake outside of Berlin—a house that is as much the subject, as a place in time, as the people who move through it. “There are little human dramas within this grander and colder scheme, ones that secretly hook us in, however minor they seem, so that we are devastated when time passes, so that we mourn the ones we barely knew, for their fixations, their tragedies, their trying. Elegiac, often astoundingly gorgeous, sometimes strikingly brutal, this is one of the most wonderful novels of any sort that you could hope to read.”

Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman, Signs Preceding the End of the World (128 pages)

As I wrote in our list of the best translated novels of the decade , this book “is almost fable-like, both in length and tone: when you begin reading it, you’re not sure (or at least I wasn’t) whether you’re in our world or another—it begins with a sinkhole, a curse, and a quest. Soon it becomes clear that this  is  our world, or almost, sliced by the border between Mexico and the United States. Borders in this novel—between worlds, between words, between people—are both dangerous and porous, messages meaningless and profound in equal measure. It is an intense, indelible book, an instant myth of love and violence.”

Marguerite Duras, The Lover (117 pages)

I love this novel so much I once made a playlist for it . And I’m not the only one who is obsessed with this assured, severe book, which Duras originally planned as an annotated photo album of her youth. “Through the years, I have come to think of The Lover as a lake without a bottom, or perhaps more accurately with a bottom that is ever-shifting: each dive yields an altered and enriched understanding of the topography, and there is the sense that you could dive forever and never grasp that topography absolutely,” wrote Laura van den Berg . “In every reading, I have been stunned still by language that is at once crystalline and enigmatic: ‘The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue.'”

Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban (125 pages)

I think at this point, every single person on the Literary Hub staff has read Mrs. Caliban —the deceptively simple tale of a housewife who falls in love with a mysterious creature escaped and on the run from a government lab—after its reissue by New Directions during the Autumn of Sea Monsters , we just kept passing it around, one to the other. Our editor Dan Sheehan, who interviewed Ingalls before her death, described it as “an intoxicating mix of sensuality, sorrow, and supernatural horror, and a damn-near perfect novella.”

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (101 pages)

The forever classic of a girl growing up in Chicago.

Sayaka Murata, tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori,  Convenience Store Woman   (176 pages)

A dry, funny novel about, well, a woman who works in a convenience store. In our list of the best translated novels of the decade , editor Jessie Gaynor writes that “it reads, by turns, like a love story (woman meets store), an unusually charming employee handbook, and a psychological thriller—but somehow, it never feels disjointed. It was interesting to read this novel in the midst of a glut of English books about the dehumanizing nature of underemployment.  Convenience Store Woman  doesn’t, in my reading, take a stance on the Value of Work. Instead, it presents Keiko in all her glorious strangeness, and invites the reader to delight in it.”

Edward St. Aubyn, Never Mind (197 pages)

A harrowing work of genius—and for the uninitiated, consider this the entry point for many, many hours of literary enjoyment.

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (149 pages)

Carson’s novel in verse, a retelling of a classic Greek myth, is one of those books that retrains your mind, erasing all the rules about what novels should—or even can—be. Ocean Vuong lists it among the books he needed to write his celebrated debut  On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous , writing “perhaps what’s most inspiring to me about this book is Carson’s refusal to enact her protagonist’s development via a false and forced inhabitation of heteronormative ideals. Geyron, a quiet, small, artistic mama’s boy, does not become a masculinist hero in order to “solve” his outcast position. Instead, he bravely embodies his otherness, or “monstrosity,” as Carson writes, through emotionally-informed aesthetic vision. It’s a book that insists on the necessity of alterity as agency instead of succumbing to the readily assimilative.”

Donald Antrim, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World (164 pages)

Antrim’s stucco-pink, subtropic suburban nightmare concerns a town gone mad and the schoolteacher determined to get everything back to normal—albeit with highly suspect methods. This surreal mini-masterpiece is one of my favorite novels of all time, and one of the funniest, in the darkest possible way.

Fleur Jaeggy, tr. Tim Parks, Sweet Days of Discipline (101 pages)

An actually perfect novel, which elsewhere I ranked as the fourth best campus novel of all time (give me a book, I’ve ranked it somewhere). It’s set in a boarding school in the Appenzell; when disdainful, mysterious new girl Frédérique, our narrator is enthralled—and determined “to conquer her.” Everly line is ice cold in its deliberation, and yet the whole thing feels hot. Which is not even to mention the incredible new cover designed by Oliver Munday, who I daresay agrees with me about the merits of the book .

Sara Levine, Treasure Island!!! (172 pages)

A truly insane novel about a young woman who decides to live her life by the principles of Robert Louis Stevenson’s  Treasure Island , those principles being Boldness, Resolution, Independence, and, of course, Horn Blowing. One of the most fun reading experiences I can remember.

César Aira, tr. Chris Andrews, Ghosts (141 pages)

Many of Aira’s books could be candidates for this list—Ghosts is a personal favorite: a builder’s family squats in an unfinished apartment building, also populated, for those who can see them, by ghosts. That said, Mark Haber also makes a very good argument for  Ema the Captive here . We can just call this the Aira spot.

Elena Ferrante, tr. Ann Goldstein, The Days of Abandonment (188 pages)

Psst. This is the  real  Ferrante. I mean, look, I love the Neapolitan series as much as everybody (well probably not as much as everybody but I admit they’re good), but in my opinion, this short novel about a woman unraveling is her true masterpiece.

Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine (145 pages)

Baker’s hilarious, cerebral debut takes place over the length of a single escalator ride, but turns out that a single escalator ride can actually contain multitudes. It is about as packed as a book can be with witty observations, cultural criticism, and human behavior. And milk cartons. (Sorry, but this is one of those books you can’t explain to people, you just have to trust me and give it a try.)

Andrés Barba, tr. Lisa Dillman,  Such Small Hands   (94 pages)

It is my solemn duty to proselytize this vicious little book—in which a girl is sent to an orphanage after her parents are killed in a car crash, and I can’t tell you anymore—everywhere I go. My latest victim was our editor Katie Yee, who wrote in our list of the best translated novels of the decade that the book “reads like logic breaking, like a melon dropping on the ground. It is the unexpected word choice (the seatbelt had become  severe !) that makes this work simultaneously sinister and a joy to read. . . . At only 94 pages,  Such Small Hands is a cruelly quick read that makes you feel, in the best way, like the walls of language are closing in on you.”

Susan Steinberg, Machine (149 pages)

Steinberg is an undersung genius, and her elliptical novel about one tragic summer—a girl, a drowning—should be a modern classic in the vein of Jenny Offill and Maggie Nelson.

Julie Otsuka,  The Buddha in the Attic (144 pages)

Otsuka elegantly employs the first person plural to tell the story of a group of Japanese “picture brides” who come  to California to meet their husbands. In our list of the best novels of the decade , our editor Katie Yee writes that “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. . . . 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.”

Paula Fox, Desperate Characters (180 pages)

Scraping through with a 1970 pub date, one of my all-time favorite novels about a woman who may or may not have rabies.

William Maxwell,  So Long, See You Tomorrow   (145 pages)

Though he’s better known for being the fiction editor of The New Yorker during its glory days, Maxwell also wrote short stories and several novels—the last of which, a slim autobiographical novel which won a National Book Award in 1982, was shortest and greatest.

Toni Morrison, Sula (192 pages)

Morrison’s  Sula  features one of the most enduring (and convincing) female friendships/rivalries ever committed to literature: that of Sula and Nel, living in “the Bottom” in Ohio. As Mira Jacob put it , “what I particularly love about  Sula is the full complexity of her female characters. It’s like reading those characters when I was younger was seeing, for the first time, who centered dark women. Who centered, who whole-heartedly said this story is hers, and hers, and hers, and they—we are allowed to be as complex as we need to be, and hold the ground in the story.  . . . This is the book that I keep by my bed because when things don’t make sense, I will turn to a single paragraph and just meditate on it. Because I feel like everything is very deftly placed, but even within that, I feel a sense of wonder in here. A real curiosity about people and how they work and what they’re willing to settle for and what they’re not willing to settle for, and the real friction of what that looks like.”

Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (160 pages)

A sly little historical fairy tale, in which a web-footed Venetian pickpocket named Villanelle has lost her heart (literally) to a noblewoman, and a stumbling soldier named Henri will try to get it back.

James Welch, Winter in the Blood (160 pages)

In Welch’s brutal, celebrated first novel, our unnamed narrator, a young man living on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana, seeks both connection—to his tribe, his history, his culture, his fractured family—and independent self-actualization. As Reynolds Price wrote in The New York Times Book Review , “the story it tells, the knowledge it contains, has as much to say of the bone‐deep disaffection and bafflement, the famous and apparently incurable psychic paralysis of several million Americans of varied origins now in their twenties, early thirties, as of any smaller group. Permafrost in the blood and mind—why and how and what to do?”

Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (128 pages)

A lovely, surrealist novel, and one of the most convincing stories about grief I have ever read.

Valeria Luiselli, tr. Christina MacSweeney, Faces in the Crowd (162 pages)

Though she’s published a lot of wonderful work since then, I’m still partial to Luiselli’s debut novel, originally published in 2011 and translated into English in 2014, a fresh and compelling portrait of the artist as a young translator taken askance and doubled back on itself.

Tobias Wolff, Old School (195 pages)

An unnamed senior, an unnamed boarding school, a literary world so close you could almost offend it. As Michael Knight put it last year, this is the perfect campus novel (I ranked it twelfth on my list of the best ), both fulfilling and transcending the expectations of the genre. “Here we have the musty but beautiful buildings, the arcana of campus customs, the rivalries and ambitions of the students at his all-male academy, all rendered in Wolff’s spare and lucid prose. We even have a plagiarism case, hardly exotic to the genre. The novel is rich in familiar ways throughout, but it’s not until Wolff shifts point of view in the last section, away from first person and into third, away from student life to an English teacher burdened by a secret of his own, that the book lifts up and out of the boarding school tradition and into something altogether more devastating.”

Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (160 pages)

In Moore’s indelibly observed, sneakily devastating second novel, a discontented woman on a trip to Paris with her husband looks back at the summer she was 15, dragged along by her luminous friend Sils, when everything was still possible and exciting—but soon, like all things, to end.

Penelope Fitzgerald,  The Bookshop   (118 pages)

A perfect jewel of a novel about a woman who opens a bookstore in a small town in Suffolk, fights with a local bigwig, and ultimately (spoiler alert) gets evicted.

Stephen Graham Jones, Mapping the Interior (112 pages)

Jones is an extraordinarily prolific writer, and he’s an expert at genre manipulation; no surprise then that Mapping the Interior is both a coming-of-age story and a horror story, a book about menace, memory, and hope.

Ron Hansen,  Mariette in Ecstasy (192 pages)

Hansen’s gorgeous, precise little novel is set in a Roman Catholic convent in upstate New York in 1906. In The Times , Patricia Hampl called it “a novel whose language is so exquisite that the book runs the danger of being praised only for its diamondlike prose, which is often as pleasing as the most crystalline poetry. And yet Mariette in Ecstasy  is not solely a novel of sensibility, a mere esthete’s exercise. For while its descriptions dazzle, they never preen or degenerate into overblown virtuoso riffs. The greatest beauty—and the fundamental success—of this gripping novel is that its author has managed to find a voice that is entirely at the service of its strange and elusive subject.”

Grace Krilanovich,  The Orange Eats Creeps   (172 pages)

I remember reading this novel when it came out in 2010, and gasping audibly at the audacity of its rule-breaking: this was a novel unlike any I had read before, and boy was it fun, and weird, and gross, and punk. I never hear people talking about it these days, but they should be: it’s a careening, side-elbowing nightmare of a book that you should definitely read if you liked Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream .

Justin Torres, We the Animals (125 pages)

Another skinny novel that made our list of the best debuts of the decade —a barbaric yawp of a book that celebrates and sings boyhood in all its grimy glory.

Marie Redonnet, tr. Jordan Stump, Hôtel Splendid (113 pages)

Allow me to use this space to recommend not just Hôtel Splendid , a weird and charming novel about three sisters maintaining a hotel that seems determined to sink back into the earth, but the whole of the loose trilogy of which it is a part, the other two books being  Forever Valley , in which a teenage girls digs holes looking for the dead, and Rose Mellie Rose , in which another young girl in a decaying landscape tries to outline her life.

Ottessa Moshfegh, McGlue (160 pages)

Moshfegh’s debut novella won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award, but it still seems like no one has read it—a shame, but understandable. Rather than explain, I’ll direct you to the opening of the review that made me want to pick it up, which goes like this : “Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel reads like the swashbuckled spray of a slit throat—immediate, visceral, frank, unforgiving, violent, and grotesquely beautiful. McGlue, a transient drunk with a crack in his head, beats (at times quite literally) against his own possibility with overconsumption, nihilism, self-destructiveness, and utter depravity.” You’re either into that kind of thing or you aren’t.

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Emily Temple

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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

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The 21 Best Classical Literature Books of All Time

Here’s my list of the 21 best classical literature books of all time, in no particular order.

• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy – Often called the best novel ever written. Dozens of characters, stretching from Muscovite peasants all the way to Napoleon himself. The modern epic.
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy – A hundred years ahead of its time, Tolstoy’s investigation of the silent, stifling life of women is an all-time great.
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert – A classic of 19th century realism. A cautionary tale about romanticism.
• The Iliad by Homer – The classic Greek epic and possibly the oldest story of western civilization.
• The Odyssey by Homer – Samesies.
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky – A character study of a man driven to murder for no rational reason and the aftermath. Russian novelists tend to be psychological and this may be the most psychological of all the Russian classics.
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky – A grand and beautiful portrait of a frayed family–three brothers struggling to understand and accept each other.
• Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes – Considered the first novel ever written. Cervantes’ classic story tells of a man who imagines himself a night, heroically defending the land.
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens – One of the most universally loved novels in the English language, it’s still revered today.
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens – The best-selling English language novel of all time and a historical fiction about an English doctor who finds himself caught up in the French Revolution and Reign of Terror.
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte – The coming of age of a young woman, this is considered the first book to ever follow a single person’s psychological and spiritual growth throughout their lives from the first person.
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen – The timeless classic about love, romance, money, class, and family. Still as relevant as ever.
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte – A shockingly dark and twisted book critical of the stifling morals of 19th century England. Published posthumously, the book came under heavy attack at the time, but is considered prescient now.
• In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust – The longest novel ever written, clocking in at an astounding 4,200 pages. You really will search for your lost time if you make it through this whole thing.
• Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain – Another candidate for the “Great American Novel,” Huck Finn is about an homeless boy who befriends an escaped slave. An odd yet powerful friendship emerges.
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf – A novel that challenged and broke all traditional forms and expectations for what a novel should be. Part philosophical musings, part emotional meanderings, part story, the book defined a style of its own.
• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka – An investigation into the absurd. A man wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant beetle. His family is… not supportive.
• Candide by Voltaire – A satirical classic of a wealthy young man, brought up to be naive and optimistic about the world, is repeatedly confronted with harsh truth after harsh truth.
• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo – Before Hugh Jackman danced around singing it, Hugo’s classic was a brooding investigation into the nature of law, society, love and family.
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas – A modern adventure epic written on the scale of one of the ancient Greek or Roman poems. Not only is it readable but it’s impossible to put down at times.
• Oedipus the King by Sophocles – The most famous Greek tragedy. Even today, reading it is unforgettable.

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10 of the Best Books about Literature

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

What are the best books about there  about literature – whether trivia books, introductions to English literature , or handy guides to some of the most pressing questions about the study of literature? Well, look no further than this list of ten of the best books about English literature – and other literatures, for that matter.

Disclaimer: as an Amazon Associate, we get commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

We’ll admit we’re kicking off with a rather partisan choice, since Tearle is the founder-editor of  Interesting Literature . But  The Secret Library  is a treasure-trove of trivia for the literature-lover.

Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories . 

A monumental, weighty tome that shows how all fictional narratives from folk tales to novels and films follow essentially seven basic plot forms, such as ‘overcoming the monster’ ( Beowulf , Jaws ). Riddled with typos, but if you can put up with them, this book is illuminating and entertaining.

Gary Dexter,  Title Deeds: The Hidden Stories Behind 50 Books .

An engaging book full of fascinating information about some of the world’s classic books, and the stories behind how they came to be called what they’re called. (We’d also recommend  Why Not Catch-21?: The Stories Behind the Titles ,  an earlier book on the same theme as  Title Deeds and just as much fun.)

B. Ifor Evans, A Short History Of English Literature .

Now sadly out of print, this delightful little Pelican paperback from 1950 is available via Amazon from second-hand sellers. It runs through poetry, drama, fiction, and non-fiction prose from the Middle Ages to the present day in chronological chapters. Great if you want to get a brisk overview of English literature in all its many forms. Sadly, owing to its publication date, it stops in the mid-twentieth century; but we can hardly blame Evans for that.

Terry Eagleton,  The English Novel: An Introduction .

If you’re more specifically interested in the history of the novel and how this form has developed in English literature, this is an engagingly written and frequently very witty introduction to the English novel, from Defoe to James Joyce.

Eagleton sticks to the canonical figures of English fiction – Daniel Defoe , Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen , Sir Walter Scott , Charles Dickens , and so on – but has something illuminating to say about each novelist, and does a good job of summarising often very disparate aspects of the novels he discusses. Eagleton also features in our pick of the best books offering an introduction to literary theory .

Michael Schmidt, The Lives Of The Poets .

A vast book, which provides some useful information about most major poets since the Middle Ages. It’s a biography of several hundred individuals, and majestically grand in scale, but very readable. It does have some glaring omissions – no Edward Lear? – and Schmidt is fond of making provocative statements about certain poets, but somehow that makes it all the more fun.

John Sutherland, Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives . 

A huge compendium of miniature biographies about writers of fiction from John Bunyan to the present day,  Lives of the Novelists  is entertaining, surprising, amusing, and often gripping – as when Sutherland is telling us about the curious and rather disgusting origins of the title of Jacqueline Susann’s  Valley of the Dolls , or giving us a whistle-stop tour of Stephen King’s career, or telling us about how prolific (and successful) Edgar Rice Burroughs was.

Packed full of biographical trivia, this book is a very diverting way to spend a week learning about the lives of some of Anglophone fiction’s most famous names. John Sutherland is one of the best authors of books about literature, so he actually features on this list twice…

John Sutherland, The Literary Detective: 100 Puzzles in Classic Fiction (Oxford World’s Classics) . 

This is Sutherland’s trilogy of ‘puzzle’ books, in which he asks interesting questions about the more troubling aspects of the plots of classic novels, and then proceeds to find solutions to them. The titles of the three books in this original trilogy give a sense of the sort of questions Sutherland likes to ask: Is Heathcliff a Murderer?: Great Puzzles in Nineteenth-century Fiction (World’s Classics) , Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?: More Puzzles in Classic Fiction (Oxford World’s Classics) , and   Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? (Oxford World’s Classics) .

Sutherland has since written several more such books – the one on Shakespeare co-authored with Cedric Watts,  Oxford World’s Classics: Henry V, War Criminal?: and Other Shakespeare Puzzles , is also worth checking out.

Christopher Fowler, The Book of Forgotten Authors . 

This recent book introduces us to a range of authors, including many popular novelists, whose names may once have been well-known to the reading public, but are now largely forgotten. Who knew that Thomas Burke, the British author of the collection of short stories  Limehouse Nights , also published a book called  For Your Convenience  (1937), which included a map of London’s public urinals, ‘noting in particular their sexual possibilities’?

Or that Keith Waterhouse, who is now remembered solely for  Billy Liar , also worked on a doomed musical of  Andy Capp ?  The Book of Forgotten Authors  is a mine of interesting and amusing literary trivia of this sort, as the title implies. You’re likely to finish reading Fowler’s entertaining and enlightening jaunt through the bookshelves of yesteryear with a significantly enlarged ‘to read’ list – if you can still track down any of these out-of-print wonders.

James Wood,  How Fiction Works .

An accessible introduction to key aspects of fiction from one of the most celebrated living critics of the novel. It includes chapters on narrative voice, realism, and character, among others.

Wood is particularly good at saying  why a piece of fiction is good (and why other pieces of fiction aren’t good), and his gentle but informed focus on the technical details of writing prevents his value-judgments from ever reading too much like ‘This is good because I like it.’ Wood is also a mean finger-drummer, as demonstrated in this video .

If you enjoyed this pick of the best books about books and literature, check out our pick of the best books about Shakespeare  and our eight best books about language and words . We’ve also picked our must-have poetry anthologies here.

15 thoughts on “10 of the Best Books about Literature”

Reblogged this on cjheries .

All wonderful suggestions. Thanks so much for sharing! If you’re ever interested in some great book reviews and musings, be sure to follow! Thanks!!!

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Reblogged this on Kentucky Mountain Girl News and commented: KMGN: This is a very interesting article. I put a link to my Delicious account. Hope it is helpful to you.

Reblogged this on First Draft and commented: I got James Wood, “How Fiction Works” on the way from my public library, because of this article.

I want the second and last ones!

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Ordered the Eagleton book. Thanks for the information! His seems to be quite the prolific polymath.

Great list! I love reading books about books. Foster’s How to Read Novels like a Professor was great as well.

Reblogged this on Zezee with Books .

I haven’t read any of these before, but The Library Detective looks really interesting. I’m going to look into it as soon as possible.

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As a companion of sorts to James Wood’s book, I would recommend Charles Baxter’s “The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot”.

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A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon

A panel of critics tells us what belongs on a list of the 100 most important books of the 2000s … so far..

Okay, assessing a century’s literary legacy after only 18 and a half years is kind of a bizarre thing to do.

Actually, constructing a canon of any kind is a little weird at the moment, when so much of how we measure cultural value is in flux. Born of the ancient battle over which stories belonged in the “canon” of the Bible, the modern literary canon took root in universities and became defined as the static product of consensus — a set of leather-bound volumes you could shoot into space to make a good first impression with the aliens. Its supposed permanence became the subject of more recent battles, back in the 20th century, between those who defended it as the foundation of Western civilization and those who attacked it as exclusive or even racist.

But what if you could start a canon from scratch? We thought it might be fun to speculate (very prematurely) on what a canon of the 21st century might look like right now. A couple of months ago, we reached out to dozens of critics and authors — well-established voices (Michiko Kakutani, Luc Sante), more radical thinkers (Eileen Myles), younger reviewers for outlets like n+1 , and some of our best-read contributors, too. We asked each of them to name several books that belong among the most important 100 works of fiction, memoir, poetry, and essays since 2000 and tallied the results. The purpose was not to build a fixed library but to take a blurry selfie of a cultural moment.

Any project like this is arbitrary, and ours is no exception. But the time frame is not quite as random as it may seem. The aughts and teens represent a fairly coherent cultural period, stretching from the eerie decadence of pre-9/11 America to the presidency of Donald Trump. This mini-era packed in the political, social, and cultural shifts of the average century, while following the arc of an epic narrative (perhaps a tragedy, though we pray for a happier sequel). Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections , one of our panel’s favorite books, came out ten days before the World Trade Center fell; subsequent novels reflected that cataclysm’s destabilizing effects, the waves of hope and despair that accompanied wars, economic collapse, permanent-seeming victories for the once excluded, and the vicious backlash under which we currently shudder. They also reflected the fragmentation of culture brought about by social media. The novels of the Trump era await their shot at the canon of the future; because of the time it takes to write a book, we haven’t really seen them yet.

You never know exactly what you’ll discover when sending out a survey like this, the results of which owe something to chance and a lot to personal predilections. But given the sheer volume of stuff published each year, it is remarkable that a survey like this would yield any kind of consensus—which this one did. Almost 40 books got more than one endorsement, and 13 had between three and seven apiece. We have separately listed the single-most popular book; the dozen “classics” with several votes; the “high canon” of 26 books with two votes each; and the rest of the still-excellent but somewhat more contingent canon-in-utero. (To better reflect that contingency, we’ve included a handful of critics’ “dissents,” arguing for alternate books by the canonized authors.)

Unlike the old canons, ours is roughly half-female, less diverse than it should be but generally preoccupied with difference, and so fully saturated with what we once called “genre fiction” that we hardly even think of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road , Colson Whitehead’s zombie comedy Zone One , Helen Oyeyemi’s subversive fairy tales, or even the Harry Potter novels as deserving any other designation than “literature.” And a whole lot of them are, predictably, about instability, the hallmark of the era after the “end of history” that we call now.

At least one distinctive new style has dominated over the past decade. Call it autofiction if you like, but it’s really a collapsing of categories. (Perhaps not coincidentally, such lumping is better suited to “People Who Liked” algorithms than brick-and-mortar shelving systems.) This new style encompasses Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels; Sheila Heti’s self-questing How Should a Person Be? ; Karl Ove Knausgaard’s just-completed 3,600-page experiment in radical mundanity; the essay-poems of Claudia Rankine on race and the collage­like reflections of Maggie Nelson on gender. It’s not really a genre at all. It’s a way of examining the self and letting the world in all at once. Whether it changes the world is, as always with books, not really the point. It helps us see more clearly.

Our dozen “classics” do represent some consensus; their genius seems settled-on. Among them are Kazuo Ishiguro’s scary portrait of replicant loneliness in Never Let Me Go ; Roberto Bolaño’s epic and powerfully confrontational 2666 ; Joan Didion’s stark self-dissection of grief in The Year of Magical Thinking . They aren’t too surprising, because they are (arguably as always, but still) great.

And then there’s The Last Samurai , Helen DeWitt’s debut: published at the start of the century, relegated to obscurity (and overshadowed by a bad and unrelated Tom Cruise movie of the same name), and now celebrated by more members of our panel than any other book. That’s still only seven out of 31, which gives you a sense of just how fragile this consensus is. Better not launch this canon into space just yet.

— Boris Kachka

The Best Book of the Century (for Now)

By Christian Lorentzen

The Last Samurai , by Helen DeWitt (September 20, 2000)

Ask a set of writers and critics to select books for a new canon, and it shouldn’t come as a shock that the one most of them name is a novel about the nature of genius. It is also, more precisely, a novel about universal human potential.

Like many epics, Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai charts the education of its hero and proceeds by means of a quest narrative. A boy undertakes rigorous training and goes in search of his father. What makes it a story of our time is that the boy lives in an insufficiently heated London flat with a single mother. What makes it singular is that his training begins at age 4, when he starts to learn ancient Greek, before quickly moving on to Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Finnish, etc. That’s not to mention his acquisition of mathematics, physics, art history, music, and an eccentric taste for tales of world exploration.

Is this boy, Ludo, a genius? Sibylla, his mother, is of two minds about it. She recognizes that she’s done something out of the ordinary by teaching the kid The Iliad so young, following the example of J.S. Mill, who did Greek at age 3. She knows he’s a “Boy Wonder” and she encourages him in every way to follow his omnivorous instincts. But she also believes that the problem with everybody else — literally everybody else — is that they haven’t been properly taught and have gone out of their way, most of the time, to avoid difficult things, like thinking. Otherwise we’d be living in a world of Ludos.

So a novel that appears on the surface to be elitist — concerned as it is with great works of art, scientific achievement, and excellence generally — is actually profoundly anti-elitist at its core. DeWitt’s novel is infused with the belief that any human mind is capable of feats we tend to associate with genius. But the novel’s characters, especially Sibylla, are aware that youthful talent can be thwarted at any turn. She knows it happened to her parents — a teenage-whiz father who was accepted to Harvard but made to go to seminary by his Christian father; and a musical prodigy mother who never went back to Juilliard for a second audition — and to herself. Whatever the world had in store for Sibylla changed forever the night Ludo was conceived.

• SEE THE FULL ESSAY

The 12 New Classics

Per our panel.

The Corrections , by Jonathan Franzen (September 1, 2001) | 6 votes Arriving in bookstores ten days before the September 11 attacks, The Corrections recounts the tragicomic breakdown of a 20th-century American dream of middle-ness: midwestern and middle-class. The Lamberts, with their mentally disintegrating patriarch, Christmas-obsessed mother, and grown siblings tackling depression, professional failure, adultery, and celebrity chefdom, may not seem as universal as they once did, but the sensation of certainties evaporating as we pitch headlong into this still-young century has only gotten stronger. —Laura Miller

DISSENT: Freedom (August 31, 2010) I prefer this in large measure because it focuses on a feature of human life that has gotten less fictional coverage than family and love: male friendship. Sure, it’s a love story between Patty and Walter and then between Patty and Richard, but it’s also a love story between Walter and Richard, two friends fiercely at odds and no less fiercely close. To say that the emotional high-note, and the real shocker, of this nearly 600-page novel is a gift that one man makes for his friend is to say that Franzen, who too many people say gets too much credit, doesn’t get enough for what he actually manages to do : reveal the tender, unexpected workings of human animals. —Wyatt Mason

Never Let Me Go , by Kazuo Ishiguro (March 3, 2005)  | 6 votes You can think of this as Ishiguro’s The Road — his haunting masterpiece. The ratio of taut plot to ghastly subject matter is disturbingly effective. Kathy H.’s multidimensional but methodical storytelling of this adolescent Gothic horror show is indelible (and difficult to review without spoiling). The questions it raises are perfectly of-our-century. Never Let Me Go is a prime example of an author with impeccable taste in ideas and the control to execute them. Most authors are lucky if they have one of those things going for them. This novel is a rare symphony of both. —Sloane Crosley

How Should a Person Be? , by Sheila Heti (September 25, 2010)   |  5 votes Heti doesn’t get enough credit from her advocates for being funny or from her critics for being serious. Slipping imperceptibly from ironic to earnest, challenging to chatty, her voice is sui generis and ideally suited to capturing the experience of making art — and decisions — in the modern world. The concerns of her breakout work of autofiction include sex, self-documentation, aesthetics, and friendship, as well as the titular question. The title is a perfect joke, a mission statement of deranged grandiosity, straight-faced and self-aware. Isn’t this what every book, ever, wants (in its own way) to ask? —Molly Fischer

The Neapolitan Novels, by Elena Ferrante (2011-2015) | 5 votes Elena Ferrante’s Italy is where the personal is political, the male gaze is visceral, and the past clings to the present with potent force. Across four books and over the lifetimes of its two unforgettable main characters, the Neapolitan quartet explores female rage, agency, and friendship with a raw power. (All that over a decade when women have begun to express their anger and agency in new ways.) Lila and Elena grow up inured to the violence and corruption that defines their hometown of Naples in the 1950s, even as they yearn for something better: beauty amidst the ugliness, and intellectual fulfillment, which can be as heady as romantic love. Ferrante fever struck readers all over the world, captivated by Lila and Elena’s complicated relationship. —Maris Kreizman

The Argonauts , by Maggie Nelson (May 5, 2015) |  5 votes Around the time it was published, Maggie Nelson read aloud the opening of this book — an extremely graphic and surprising sex scene, awkwardly lighting up that New York room and clanging a bell that people had just not heard before. Her 21st-century classic is structurally just that kind of awoke re-shuffling. It’s not that you don’t know about anal sex, childbirth, or even about a partner’s transition or a parent dying, but Nelson puts each next to the other in a manner that changes our perception of each and all. I’m always glad to have never had a baby, yet Maggie has writ birthing so deeply that I’m grateful to say I’ve missed nothing in this life, thanks to this uncanny saint of a book. —Eileen Myles

2666 , by Roberto Bolaño (November 11, 2008) | 4 votes Bolaño’s final legacy to the world before his death in 2003 is a labyrinthine mystery taking in three continents and most of the 20th century. Its playful first part might make you think you are stepping into a steady old-fashioned cruise ship of a novel, à la Victor Hugo, but the tone shifts as abruptly as the locale. At its center is the book-length fourth part, a mercilessly clipped recital of some of the hundreds of femicides in Ciudad Juárez, which is both integral to the story and a direct confrontation with the reader. The book is a world: teeming, immeasurable, unplumbable, materially solid but finally enigmatic. —Luc Sante

DISSENT: The Savage Detectives (March 4, 2008) I have always preferred this precursor to 2666 , which is its closest (though much slimmer) competitor in scope. The polyphonic tour de force is peak Bolaño, the purest distillation of its author’s disparate obsessions: the collision of the Old World with the New, mezcal , road trips, Surrealism, sacrifice in lifelong pursuit of art (and the authoritarian urge seeded in creative failure), fraudulence, unrecognized genius, and the maddening and fleeting allure of youth. —Thomas Chatterton Williams

The Sellout , by Paul Beatty (March 3, 2015) |  4 votes It takes a master of language, culture, and comic timing to create a satire that excoriates contemporary American life, with jokes coming at a furious pace, almost line by line. The novel takes on the idea of living in a “post-racial” society, which even during the Obama administration was ridiculous. The Sellout details the trials of a black man charged with reinstating slavery and segregation in his California hometown, in a voice that is unabashedly profane; so unflinchingly silly and smart that it’s impossible to look away. —Maris Kreizman

The Outline Trilogy ( Outline , Transit , and Kudos ), by Rachel Cusk (2014–2018) |  4 votes In its basic contours, Cusk’s trilogy is a masterpiece of rigorous denial: The books, mostly plotless, follow a British writer named Faye about whom we learn little. Yet Faye is less a protagonist than a character-shaped black hole, pulling stories and confessions out of everyone she encounters as if by inexorable gravitational force. Their disclosures allow Cusk to examine the ways we try (and fail) to make meaning out of life. The result is fiction like ice water, cold and clear, a mirror of our time. —Molly Fischer

Atonement , by Ian McEwan (September 2001) |  3 votes At once a war story, a love story, and a story about the destructive and redemptive powers of the imagination, Atonement pivots around a terrible lie told by a 13-year-old girl that will shatter her family. At the same time, the novel opens out into a deeply moving portrait of England careerning from the quiescent 1930s into the horrors of World War II. A bravura account of the 1940 Allied retreat from Dunkirk stands as one of the most indelible combat scenes in recent literature, slamming home the confusion, terror, and banality of war with visceral immediacy. It is only the most memorable sequence in a brilliantly orchestrated novel that injects many of the author’s favorite themes — the hazards of innocence, the sudden intrusion of bad luck into ordinary lives, the blurring of lines between art and life — with a new resonance and depth. —Michiko Kakutani

The Year of Magical Thinking , by Joan Didion (September 1, 2005) |  3 votes This is often referred to as Didion’s “departure” — the underbelly everyone always longed to see after reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem and thinking: But surely she’d pick me. Surely we’d live happily ever after, observing the world with our cool eyes. In short: No, she wouldn’t. And The Year of Magical Thinking is actually not her “personal” anomaly. It’s the Didion that’s been there all along — funny, humane, trenchant — transformed by tragedy and grief. The 21st century is young, but this one will be on this list 50 years from now. There’s something so reassuring about a bar that can never be surpassed. —Sloane Crosley

Leaving the Atocha Station , by Ben Lerner (August 23, 2011) |  3 votes When our alien overlords want to know what was new in the novel in the first quarter of the 21st century, give them Atocha Station . Some will contend that Lerner’s second novel, 10:04 , is a more mature work, but this one is leaner and shapelier, and more directly explores the disconnect between our hopes for art and our actual experience of it. The narrator, a self-loathing stoner American poet on a fellowship in Madrid, is a privileged jackass trying to appear deep. The trick, of course, is that he’s brilliant, and his anxious stream of thought is philosophically rich. What is the average person’s role in history? How can we live with our own fraudulence? Why should we make art, and what kind of art can we make now? To all these questions Atocha Station is an answer. —Christine Smallwood

DISSENT: 10:04 (September 2, 2014) 10:04 is the story of a poet and novelist (the author of a book very much like Leaving the Atocha Station ) as he contemplates in vitro uncoupled parenthood, radical politics, fleeting love, and a looming, potentially lethal arterial condition. Lerner moves from touristic escapism and the question of artistic fraudulence to the deeper burdens of settling, reproducing, and creating something great. On top of that he gives the much bemoaned Brooklyn novel a good name. —Christian Lorentzen

The Flamethrowers , by Rachel Kushner (April 2, 2013) |  3 votes This fever-dream of the 1970s would make a spectacular movie — if anyone had the budget to make a picture that takes in speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats, vast street riots in Rome, escapes through the Alps, and intrigue in the international art world. Kushner sets her heroine, Reno, in the middle of all of it, usually astride her battered Moto Valera; passionate, vulnerable, relentlessly curious, and only a little bit compromised. The book is a feminist action-adventure, a love note to the last decade before neoliberalism choked the world, and a monument to sheer gumption. —Luc Sante

The High Canon

Books endorsed by two panelists.

Erasure , by Percival Everett (August 1, 2001) The University of Southern California English professor has published some 30 volumes, mostly fiction, and Erasure is among his best. A comic romp through academic pieties and perversities, it centers on a literary hoax gone bad, in ways that predicted our current higher-educational climate. Everett is always, in a sense, writing about race, and always not. (He also writes about himself — and not — with a Hitchcock-like cameo in the form of a derelict-in-his-duty, wastrel of a literature professor by the name of Percival Everett.) —Tom Lutz

Middlesex , by Jeffrey Eugenides (September 4, 2002) “Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome,” proclaims Cal/Calliope Stephanides, Middlesex ’s pseudo-hermaphroditic protagonist, recounting his family’s long hereditary slide towards her mixed-up gender identity. And then: “Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That’s genetic, too.” Eugenides packs so much richness into this Classical saga-cum-bildungsroman-cum–paean to the American Dream that Dickens would be proud. Starting with the burning of Smyrna and winding its way through Prohibition to the 1967 Detroit race riots, Middlesex does what any viable candidate for the Great American Novel should; it broadens the definition of “American.” —Hillary Kelly

Platform , by Michel Houellebecq (September 5, 2002) Houellebecq’s second novel (after his incendiary debut, The Elementary Particles ) is full of loathsome, corrosive wit; it continues his savagely pessimistic project exploring the future of France (and, by extension, Europe and the West), caught between the distractions of late capitalism and the amorality of a post-1968 society. Houellebecq is abrasive, offensive, and in many ways obviously wrong, but his grim outlook on globalization and his anger at his parents’ generation make him one of the essential European novelists of the 21st century. —Jess Row

Do Everything in the Dark , by Gary Indiana (June 1, 2003) A working title for this novel was “Psychotic Friends Network.” Composed in 74 short sections, it follows a group of loosely bound friends — artists, actors, writers, and careerless people who once had other plans — into the damaged state of middle age. Downtown Manhattan is their center of gravity, but these characters have been scattered, before waking up to find themselves so much human debris in the wake of personal failures, betrayals, and AIDS. A literary descendant of Renata Adler’s Speedboat and a forerunner of recent autofiction, Do Everything in the Dark concludes on the weekend before 9/11, and demonstrates that American wreckage wasn’t something invented on that sunny Tuesday morning. —Christian Lorentzen

The Known World , by Edward P. Jones (August 14, 2003) This intimate portrait of the great national nightmare of slavery comes disguised in the britches and mourning dresses of an antebellum historical novel. It was widely praised upon publication for revealing an obscure chapter of American history — free people of color who owned slaves — but the history itself was largely invented. The Virginian county of Henry Townsend’s plantation, the reference citations, and many of the period details are made up. Having denied the consolations of historical distance, The Known World forces a reckoning with a moral horror that lives still. —Nathaniel Rich

The Plot Against America , by Philip Roth (September 30, 2004) It can be easy to forget that The Plot Against America , which today reads as a parable for Trump’s America, was widely received as an allegory for W.’s — an interpretation that Roth encouraged by insisting the opposite. The novel begins in a buzz of fear and the pitch increases steadily, unbearably. But it’s Roth’s doomed hero, Walter Winchell, whose speeches have the uncanny urgency of prophecy: “How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds by the fascist fifth column of the Republican right marching under the sign of the cross and the flag?” —Nathaniel Rich

DISSENT: The Human Stain (April 2000) This was the first Roth title that came to mind, which surprised me because I wouldn’t list it if the parameters were widened from “21st century” to “ever.” But it’s really a marvel of racial politics and suspense. And who doesn’t love Nathan Zuckerman? Don’t answer that. —Sloane Crosley

The Line of Beauty , by Alan Hollinghurst (October 1, 2004) Sometimes a book just feels monumental. The Line of Beauty follows a young gay man, Nick, who lives with the family of a Tory MP under Thatcher — who makes an unforgettable cameo appearance. This is the story of two initiations. It’s about a loss of innocence coinciding with social success, but also about a coming in of sorts: Nick’s entrance into London’s gay subculture. He is always seduced by beauty, but as AIDS looms — along with the threat of discovery by his conservative hosts — Nick can’t outrun the politics of his aesthetics or the contradictions in the social structures to which he clings. —Alice Bolin

Veronica , by Mary Gaitskill (October 11, 2005) Like her first novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991), Gaitskill’s second revolves around a friendship between two women. Alison Owen, a former model living with hepatitis C, reflects on her complex closeness with Veronica Ross, a woman we learn died alone with AIDS. How we care for people in pain is at the heart of this moving, unsentimental look at our fragility, written with remarkable metaphorical and lyrical power. In a book not about living through hardships but about living in their aftermath, Gaitskill’s Alison is indelible, as is her memory of her lost friend. —Wyatt Mason

The Road , by Cormac McCarthy (September 26, 2006) Here is the author of Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men still trafficking in his primordial themes — good vs. evil — but locating it tenderly within the relationship between a father and son (as they journey through a post-Apocalyptic hellscape). The father knows he is dying and, in a world overrun by cannibalism and violence, he’s trying to teach his son how to tell the “good guys” from the bad. This is McCarthy at his most restrained, and consequently most resonant. There is no fiction subject more trendy (and more urgent) than the multifarious possible ends of the world; McCarthy led the way, and might be impossible to surpass. —Edward Hart

Ooga-Booga , by Frederick Seidel (November 14, 2006) “The title is Kill Poetry , / And in the book poetry kills.” The poems in Frederick Seidel’s 12th collection, Ooga Booga , don’t kill but they come awfully close. Some poets are easy to love; Seidel is so good you revere him despite yourself. Born in 1936 and still living in New York, he’s the heir to a family coal fortune, a famously dapper dresser, and a writer of odes to Ducati motorcycles. He also captures the absurd melancholy of modern existence in dark, crystalline stanzas. “The poet the 20th century deserved” is how one critic put it, and it’s not clear if that’s a compliment or not, or if it matters. At 82, he’s the poet the 21st century deserves, too, and still desperately needs. —Adam Sternbergh

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , by Junot Díaz (September 6, 2007) Junot Díaz’s first novel not only affirmed the vitality and the talent displayed in his first book, Drown , in a resounding way, it expanded the idea of what is possible, and what American literature could be. It could be written for an audience in ascendancy, told in vernacular but expertly formed and composed. It could concern the intensely personal, but telescope out to the historic and the political. The astounding Oscar Wao did all of that, leaving us with a lasting understanding of the American experience as encompassing lives beyond our blinkered borders. —Oscar Villalon

Wolf Hall , by Hilary Mantel (April 30, 2009) Any writer could have done the research that informs this remarkable historical novel. But only genius, gimlet-eyed, wicked Hilary Mantel could have created the animating intelligence at the heart of it: Thomas Cromwell, adviser to Henry VIII, antagonist to Thomas More, brilliant and ambitious, heartbroken and ruthless. “As some men have an eye for horseflesh or cattle to be fattened,” Mantel writes, “he has an eye for risk,” and as a novelist she shares this quality, taking unlikely narrative leaps that always pay off. No book this learned should be so wildly entertaining. —Dan Kois

The Possessed , by Elif Batuman (February 16, 2010) The best essay collections are about the writer’s strange and hungry mind groping around the contours of the world, but this one is also a hilarious book on a famously grave subject: Russian literature. Batuman creates a memoir of her time in Stanford’s PhD program obliquely, writing about authors first and herself second. She mimics the forms of fiction — a Sherlock Holmes–style detective story in “The Murder of Leo Tolstoy,” an old-school travelogue of studying abroad in Uzbekistan — to better comment on them. The Possessed and Batuman’s novel, The Idiot , together form a body of work that queries the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction — and between books and their readers. —Alice Bolin

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake , by Aimee Bender (June 1, 2010) All of Bender’s stories are written in a mode that is not quite fantasy, certainly not realist, and somewhat fairy-tale-ish (in other words a style that is all her own), offering beautiful, profound stories about, for instance, a six-inch-tall man who lives in a bird cage in his wife’s house; or, as in the title of another collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. It really doesn’t matter which of her books you pick up first; you’ll be immediately hooked and read them all. —Tom Lutz

Mr. Fox , by Helen Oyeyemi (June 1, 2011) Not since Angela Carter has a writer subverted classic fairy-tale tropes the way Helen Oyeyemi does, to transformative effect. Mr. Fox is perhaps the first brilliant work of romantic metafiction, a novel that tells the story of a few characters over and over again in pitch-perfect iterations that reveal volumes about love and loneliness and violence. Undeniably clever — but not so clever as to obscure the sentiment embedded in Oyeyemi’s shrewd structure — Mr. Fox has the brains and the heart to win over both those who enjoy unraveling how fiction works and those who just seek pure enjoyment. —Maris Kreizman

Lives Other Than My Own , by Emmanuel Carrère (September 13, 2011) The sui-generis French author of fiction, nonfiction, and works that bridge the two has published many excellent books, among them the true-crime account The Adversary (2000) and The Kingdom (2014). My favorite by a nose is Lives Other Than My Own , a book that defies tidy summary, but which, though preoccupied with the very saddest human experiences — the deaths of a young child and a sibling — is also believably a book about happiness, one which earns its happy ending. —Wyatt Mason

DISSENT: The Kingdom (August 29, 2014) I left the Catholic Church at 13 and have not spent much time thinking about religion since then. But this book kept me pinned to its pages until the end. It is personal and rigorous, skeptical and open, casual and profound, and its speculative portrait of Saint Luke is as compelling as any fictional life I’ve read lately. —Luc Sante

Zone One , by Colson Whitehead (October 6, 2011) In a century marked by the erosion of the high-low divide that once separated “literature” from genre fiction, Zone One is the exemplary hybrid, the paragon of what each mode offers the other. Whitehead’s post-apocalyptic experiment — a zombie novel that’s also a 9/11 meditation that’s also a cultural satire — delivers both moving psychological realism and satisfying gore. (The moment when hero Mark Spitz discovers his undead mother feasting on his dad’s corpse will stay with me until the day a zombie chows down on mine.) Whitehead has written terrific novels that more directly address the horrors of American history, but never one that more accurately portrays the horrors of the American present. —Dan Kois

DISSENT: Sag Harbor (April 28, 2009) This thoroughly uneventful but linguistically dazzling autobiographical account of an upper-middle-class black holiday enclave accomplishes what very few books attempt: to remove the contemporary black experience from the realm of extremes. Unlike the more zeitgeisty Underground Railroad , this is neither a lament about subjugation nor a tale of individual escape. It neither denies the persistence of racism nor revels in the lingering wound. In this book as in real life, anti-blackness is but a single facet of the black experience. It is genuinely fresh. —Thomas Chatterton Williams

Gone Girl , by Gillian Flynn (May 24, 2012) Six years, a film adaptation, and many, many imitators later, it can be difficult to recall why Flynn’s third thriller was such a genre game-changer. But I’ll never forget how loudly I gasped at the now-infamous mid-novel narrative twist, as audacious as Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (both of these play fair with the reader, by the way). Flynn’s writing, always Ginsu-sharp, leveled up here, especially on the stress of a marriage under strain in the wake of 2008’s economic collapse. We’re playing by Gone Girl rules now. —Sarah Weinman

NW , by Zadie Smith (August 27, 2012) Zadie Smith is maybe the most important British novelist of the 21st century (yeah, I said it). She unpacks layered cultural identities in the tradition of Dickens, Eliot, and Austen. If Smith was in E.M. Forster mode in the wonderful On Beauty , she went full Virginia Woolf in NW , her fourth and maybe her best novel, undertaking a Mrs . Dalloway– esque journey through London. NW is not only about the intersecting lives of characters who grew up together in a Northwest London housing project, but also leveraging the complexity of the modernist project to ask difficult questions about race and social status. —Alice Bolin

White Girls , by Hilton Als (January 1, 2013) En route to the airport, I ask one of my boyfriends to tell me, in his own words, why White Girls belongs here. As it happens, the boyfriend has, stored on his phone, favorite lines from the book. Here are some: “Other people are always our parents.” “I cannot bear to imagine unraveling my mother, her hair, her retribution.” “Nowadays, no one leaves the house without some kind of script.” “I’d like to fuck some truth into Suicide Bitch, if I could get it up.” “We hate white girls because we are white girls and that’s what white girls do.” —David Velasco

My Struggle: A Man in Love , by Karl Ove Knausgaard (May 13, 2013) What was it about this thoroughly Gen-X Norwegian man that caused so many readers to plunge into his struggle — an epic stretching over nearly 4,000 pages — as if it were their own? Was it the agony of his relationship with his alcoholic father? Was it the tribulations of parenthood, so many hours at kiddie parties and not the writing desk? Or was it the passion that seized him when he first met his future second wife and cut up his face when she rejected him? With its digressions within digressions, A Man in Love — book two of My Struggle — is the most formally thrilling in the series. In its pathetic way, it’s also the funniest. —Christian Lorentzen

The Goldfinch , by Donna Tartt (September 23, 2013) Tartt seems to have inhaled the complete works of Charles Dickens and magically exhaled them into a thoroughly original narrative that reinvents the old-fashioned social novel, while capturing our anxious post-9/11 age with uncommon fervor and precision. Like Great Expectations, it concerns the sentimental education of an orphan as well as a mysterious benefactor. The story takes young Theo from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a bomb kills his mother, to sojourns in Las Vegas and Amsterdam and dangerous encounters with drug dealers, mobsters, and other sinister types. In the hands of a lesser novelist, such developments might feel contrived, but Tartt writes with such authority and verve and understanding of character that her story becomes just as persuasive as it is suspenseful. —Michiko Kakutani

Dept. of Speculation , by Jenny Offill (January 28, 2014) If the novel exists to help readers reconcile themselves to the disappointments of adulthood, Dept. of Speculation ranks up there with Balzac’s Lost Illusions . Its narrator is a type relatively new in literature — a female writer who is also a mother. (The book is written in fragments, reflecting the temporality of motherhood and depression, that are alternately wry, bereft, tender, furious, despairing, and joyful.) Before having a baby, she had dreamed of being an “art monster.” But this book is proof that great art does not require a spouse who licks your stamps. It requires only what Offill possesses in abundance, and what her narrator knows is the highest wisdom: “attention.” —Christine Smallwood

All My Puny Sorrows , by Miriam Toews (April 11, 2014) There have been bigger, splashier novels featuring suicidal characters published in the 21st century, but none so resonant as Toews’s stunner — the story of two sisters, one of whom is kind of miserable while the other is accomplished, talented, and determined to kill herself. A profoundly tender love story about deep despair, Sorrows also brims with jokes that are real and plentiful and well-earned, as well as a keen sense of what joy looks like even in the darkest of times. —Maris Kreizman

Citizen: An American Lyric , by Claudia Rankine (October 7, 2014) Rankine’s compilation of lyric poems, micro-essays, snatches of cultural commentary, and startlingly direct descriptions of her everyday experiences as a black woman became the essential literary complement to Black Lives Matter and probably the most important work of American poetry in the 21st century. Fiercely eccentric, refusing any easy resolutions, Citizen ’s success represents a redefinition of the conventions of American literature. —Jess Row

consent not to be a single being , by Fred Moten (2017–2018) At a time when both theory and criticism are frequently and convincingly attacked as exhausted forms, Moten’s trilogy has reinvented both. Reading hip-hop and jazz musicians through and against philosophers and visual artists, he interrogates aesthetic, political, and social phenomena through analyses of blackness. He offers a profusion of arguments and deconstructions to create a coherence that nonetheless remains open to active reading and interpretation. In its mixture of theoretical complexity and disarming directness, Moten’s beautifully written trilogy offers the sheer pleasure of art. —Lidija Haas

The Rest of the (Premature, Debatable, Arbitrary, But Still Illuminating) Canon

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay , by Michael Chabon (September 19, 2000) The star creation of the comic-book whiz kids Joe Kavalier and Sammy Klayman is the Escapist, a superhero cloaked in a midnight-blue costume emblazoned with a golden key. The Escapist lacks physical might, but like the novel, he possesses a shrewd intelligence, courage, and an insatiable appetite for adventure. As Clay puts it, the Escapist doesn’t just fight crime, “he frees the world of it. He frees people, see?” In this novel of Houdinis, femme fatales, and comic book villains (including Adolf Hitler) — a novel about the American genius for self-invention, in all its glorious and hideous manifestations — Michael Chabon proves that the strongest superpower of all is the ability to tell a great story. —Nathaniel Rich

The Amber Spyglass , by Philip Pullman (October 10, 2000) The concluding volume of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy takes its teenaged heroes, Lyra and Will, across universes, up to heaven, and deep into the shadowlands of the dead. But intertwined with their epic tale is the quiet, odd story of physicist Mary Malone, one of the greatest of Pullman’s creations, who uses the rational tools of the scientist to untangle the trilogy’s cosmological mysteries. The Harry Potter series may have launched children’s books into the commercial stratosphere, but it was this book — a stew of Milton and Blake, rich with allusion, kind and fierce — that made clear the imaginative and literary heights to which books for young people could ascend. And the ending: Oh! The ending! My heart breaks again just thinking of it. —Dan Kois

True History of the Kelly Gang , by Peter Carey (January 9, 2001) There isn’t a novelist alive shy of Toni Morrison who can forge sprung poetry from the speech of mere mortals quite like Carey. In True History of the Kelly Gang , which won him a second Booker Prize in 2001, he conjured the clang and twang of Australia’s infamous bushranger, Ned Kelly, telling his life story from beyond the grave to a daughter he left behind. Here’s all the adventure of robbing banks to give to the poor, but also the shame and rage of a convict long gone turned into eternal narrative. An ecstatic and furious book. —John Freeman

The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos , by Anne Carson (February 6, 2001) Among the most immediate, most poignant, and funniest of Carson’s works, Beauty tells the story of a marriage to a vampiric, manipulative narcissist, and explores some of her favorite themes: frustration over what cannot be understood or communicated; power struggles enacted through language; erotic longing. The sharp, fragmentary collision of essay, poetry, fiction, and memoir is arguably becoming a dominant form in 21st-century literature so far, and Carson created a compelling template for it that won’t be easily surpassed. —Lidija Haas

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse , by Louise Erdrich (April 3, 2001) In our age of fake presidents and wished-for miracles, I’ve begun to long for a rediscovery of Erdrich’s novel. The book tells the tale of Father Damien, a woman who for 50 years disguises herself as a man so she can serve an Ojibwe congregation. Damien’s anguished, searching voice is the book’s oaken rudder, as she steers through currents of moral dilemma. Is a lie a sin if it preserves her work? Should she instigate against a false prophet, or dedicate herself to highlighting humans’ capacity for good? Perhaps the last question is eternal, but Erdrich makes it feel freshly so. —John Freeman

Austerlitz , by W.G. Sebald (October 2, 2001) Austerlitz bears all of Sebald’s hallmarks: a saturnine narrator, a love of archives and depositories, and a series of chance encounters with someone who has a story to tell. That someone, Jacques Austerlitz, was brought to England aboard a kindertransport as an infant, and he is in the process of recovering the truth about his parents — he first learns that his mother, an opera singer, was killed at Theresienstadt. The sweep of European cultural history is laid out like an enormous map in order to precisely locate the circumstances of the crime. The sentences are long, the paragraphs cyclopean, the pacing leisurely, and yet it’s all hypnotically gripping. —Luc Sante

Fingersmith , by Sarah Waters (February 4, 2002) You know a twist is coming. About ten million friends have hinted about the twist. “You haven’t read Fingersmith ?” they said. “Oh man, that twist.” But it doesn’t matter that you know the twist is coming because when it arrives in this page-turner about a shifty ladies’ maid and her neurotic, beautiful lady, you will still cackle with glee. I myself threw the book to the ground, shouting, “Holy shit!” You have never had a reading experience quite as propulsive and enjoyable as barreling through Sarah Waters’s sordid, sexy saga of swindlers and smut-peddlers screwing each other all across Victorian England. —Dan Kois

The Time of Our Singing , by Richard Powers (October 3, 2002) Powers revisits the civil rights struggles of the last century from an unexpected angle, illuminating some of the deepest rifts and tensions in American life via an often exhilarating meditation on time and music. The novel follows a German Jewish physicist; his African-American wife, whose ambitions as a singer are thwarted early; and their children, two of whom become classical musicians. Few writers have captured the experience of listening to music the way Powers does, and his evocations of historical events have the same vividness. The book’s scope and grandeur make clear that the realist novel can still embody ideas as few other forms can. —Lidija Haas

The Book of Salt , by Monique Truong (April 7, 2003) Based on a passing reference to a Vietnamese cook in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, Truong’s first novel reimagines the domestic life of Gertrude Stein and Toklas through the eyes of Binh, whose rich and caustic voice makes him one of the great fictional narrators of the last quarter-century. It’s a miraculous paradox — a novel that lovingly reproduces the atmosphere of European modernism in order to reveal its racist and imperialist underpinnings. —Jess Row

Mortals , by Norman Rush (May 27, 2003) A novel of adultery and conspiracy, of Americans in Africa on the morning after the end of the Cold War, Mortals follows a CIA agent (and Milton scholar) in Botswana in 1992. Rush is the most politically committed and engaged of contemporary American novelists, and Mortals is the most sustained and well-informed fictional account of U.S. meddling in countries that rarely feature in our headlines. The human story of a faltering marriage merges with the geopolitical in the form of a boiling civil conflict. Rush is Joseph Conrad’s heir in the era of globalization. —Christian Lorentzen

Home Land , by Sam Lipsyte (February 16, 2004) What would a Gen-X Notes from Underground look like? In Lipsyte’s version, it comes in the form of letters written to a high-school alumni newspaper, confessing to the nightmare of the American meritocracy: “I did not pan out.” Lipsyte’s Underground Man has a name and a nickname, both of which mark him as pathetic. Lewis “Teabag” Miner is the embodiment of the loser under late capitalism. Location: New Jersey, a place just across the river from the precincts of power, but in fact a wasteland of strip malls, fast food, dive bars, and work-from-home content-generation jobs. Teabag has graduated into a world of bullshit, and what he has to tell his high-school classmates is that they were living in a land of bullshit all along. —Christian Lorentzen

Oblivion , by David Foster Wallace (June 8, 2004) Oblivion was the final book of fiction Wallace published before his life was cut short by suicide. Although a great writer of nonfiction, Wallace’s idea of fiction was of another order of magnitude. As Oblivion showcases, one of the things that made Wallace so necessary was his insistence on formal inventiveness: None of the eight stories in Oblivion resembles any other, each a kind of experiment that never has the whiff of the lab. Rather, these stories attempt to find new ways of getting at the deep, dark difficulty of being a modern human, a predicament so funny it could make you weep, as these stories themselves are likely to make you do: in rage, in sorrow, in gratitude. —Wyatt Mason

Honored Guest , by Joy Williams (October 5, 2004) Joy Williams is one of the contemporary masters of the American short story, and her 2004 collection Honored Guest finds her at her most bizarre and profound. It is easy to be wrapped up in Williams’s sentences, in lines of dialogue like, “‘I’m Priscilla Dickman and I’m an ex-agoraphobic. Can I buy you a drink?’” But Honored Guest is much more than its delightful surface. These are stories of lonely characters on the rim of tragedy — a girl living with her terminally ill mother, a woman whose boyfriend is gravely injured in a hunting accident — probing the eternal with hilarious detachment and moving, sorrowful confusion. —Alice Bolin

Suite Française , by Irène Némirovsky (October 31, 2004) Enough time has passed that the astounding story of this posthumous, unfinished novel — which Némirovsky wrote in secret in Nazi-occupied France and was discovered by her daughters six decades after she was killed at Auschwitz — can cede center stage to the book itself. And what a marvel Suite Française is, an incisive, heartbreaking portrait of a small French town under seige, and the people trying to survive, even to live, as Hitler’s horrors march closer and closer to their doors. Even incomplete, it’s a masterpiece of observation and character study, a standout of Holocaust literature. —Sarah Weinman

The Sluts , by Dennis Cooper (January 13, 2005) Once upon a time, in the prelude to the plague years, gay male desire invented its most mesmeric and unbearable object: the twink. Blond, white, underweight, and user-friendly, he was a plastic icon of inverted, Aryan masculinity. As AIDS destroyed a population, as the internet quickened and anarchized our pornographies, the twink took off. Dennis Cooper hit this crepuscular intersection of web and death with effortless genius. A series of online rent-boy reviews describe the discovery, torture, and maybe murder of a barely-legal, no-limits hustler named Brad. Call it the twink cri de coeur — all surface, and so, perversely impenetrable. It is a dangerous fantasia, slipping so easily into the mouths and minds of homophobes. But go ahead, let them taste it. They want it as much as anyone. —David Velasco

Voices From Chernobyl , by Svetlana Alexievich (June 28, 2005) The Belarusian Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in 2015, ostensibly trades in oral history. Her books do not, however, bear much resemblance to the form as it is usually practiced. Here the accounts of witnesses and victims are orchestrated, arranged in counterpoint and as fugues and descants, with purposeful ellipses and repetitions, and edited to make every voice sound like a poet. Alexievich is clear about the extent to which she reshapes her material, and her books are only nominally about facts — they are concerned with impressions and feelings, and they remain in your ear long after you’ve turned the last page. —Luc Sante

Magic for Beginners , by Kelly Link (July 1, 2005) Any collection of Kelly Link’s stories will do. They shimmer in the borderlands of myth, genre, and literature. A convenience store caters to the mild-mannered zombies who emerge from a nearby gorge and clumsily attempt to shop. A group of teenagers bond over an elusive TV series. A suburban family becomes slowly and methodically alienated from every possession they own. Link’s stories can make you shudder, then laugh, then feel like a god has just walked past your window. —Laura Miller

The Afterlife , by Donald Antrim (May 30, 2006) A book of fierce love and heartbreaking shame, Antrim’s memoir of his mother, written in the wake of her death from lung cancer, was a radical departure from his wild comic novels of the 1990s. It was also an artistic breakthrough. Antrim’s mother was an alcoholic. Her marriage to his father, an English professor who left her for another woman and returned years later, was happy in neither of its incarnations. The emotions in this book are raw, the writing exquisite, and the family pain shattering. —Christian Lorentzen

Winter’s Bone , by Daniel Woodrell (August 7, 2006) Can a film adaptation be too good? I worry that Jennifer Lawrence’s breakout performance in the 2010 film has overshadowed this outstanding novel, which features what one critic called “the character of a lifetime.” The story of 16-year-old Ree Dolly trying to save her Ozark family is at once intimate and mythic. Woodrell’s language has a spiky beauty, he also uses localisms carefully. His depictions of violence are first-rate, vivid, and essential to the story. Oh, and it’s a glancing look at the methamphetamine scourge, largely forgotten but far from gone as the country now focuses on opioids. —Laura Lippman

Wizard of the Crow , by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (August 8, 2006) Thiong’o, often talked about as a Nobel Prize contender, was among the first celebrated post-independence African writers, along with Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. Imprisoned and then exiled from Kenya, he has been writing his memoirs and is now on his fourth volume. Wizard of the Crow , a fantastic (in all senses of the word) novel written in his native Kikuyu, is his masterpiece, published when he was 68. No novel has ever so profoundly mixed oral tradition, novelistic gamesmanship, serious political critique, literary meta-analysis, and every genre under the sun, from farce to tragedy. —Tom Lutz

American Genius, A Comedy , by Lynne Tillman (September 25, 2006) A modernist adventure for a new century: You spend the novel roaming around inside the mind of a woman who has taken refuge in a Magic Mountain–style sanatorium-cum–artists’ colony. Her compulsive digressions and recurring preoccupations mostly take the place of a conventional plot, and Tillman’s beautifully constructed sentences create their own propulsion, able to take a reader in any direction at any moment. From the opening pages, a singular consciousness emerges, both porous and radically isolated, and by stripping out most other elements, the book confirms the ultimate primacy of literary voice, of which this is a rare triumph. —Lidija Haas

Eat the Document , by Dana Spiotta (November 28, 2006) If Don DeLillo is a sage of 20th-century American politics and popular culture, Dana Spiotta is the author who has carried the torch into the 21st. Her prose is as catchy and melodic as the music she describes in so many of her novels with the insight of a rock critic, and her fiction often illuminates the way we distort our memories. Eat the Document is the story of a woman who goes underground in the 1970s after participating in violence with a radical group, and her son who uncovers her past in the 1990s, when the ideals of the leftist movement have been romanticized and perverted. —Maris Kreizman

The Harry Potter novels, by J.K. Rowling (1997–2007) With her seven Harry Potter novels, J.K. Rowling has created a fictional world as fully imagined as Oz or Narnia or Middle Earth. Each volume grows progressively darker, and as more responsibilities are heaped on Harry’s shoulders, the Boy Who Lived becomes the leader of the Resistance. Grounding his story in the mundane Muggle world, with its ordinary frustrations and challenges, even as she conjures a wildly inventive magical realm, Rowling has crafted an epic that transcends its classical sources as effortlessly as it leapfrogs conventional genres. In doing so, she created a series of books that have captivated both children and adults — novels that hold a mirror to our own mortal world as it lurches into the uncertainties of the 21st century. —Michiko Kakutani

Sleeping It Off in Rapid City , by August Kleinzahler (April 1, 2008) August Kleinzahler is such a good poet, such a master of English vernaculars and a variety of modernisms, with such a gift for observational detail, that I think he gets overlooked or underpraised, partly for his consistency. Sleeping It Off in Rapid City is one of the great collections of American poetry, from the opening title poem, which exudes the bleak vastness and kitsch of midwestern landscapes, to the various blues lyrics and seemingly offhand evocations of San Francisco weather, as classical as the Tang Dynasty greats they recall. —Nikil Saval

The White Tiger , by Aravind Adiga (April 22, 2008) The White Tiger promised “you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed in this, the glorious 21st century of man,” launching a relentless attack on the myth of a “new” capitalism, and not just in India. Adiga’s comic monologue and many-voiced testament follows Balram Halwai, naïve servant and caged spirit, to the climactic “act of entrepreneurship”: braining his master with an empty bottle of Johnny Walker Black in Delhi, then stealing his bag of politicians’ bribes to conquer the tech world of Bangalore. Spiritually the equal of Wright’s Native Son and Balzac’s Père Goriot , this Booker Prize–winning debut was how a major writer announced himself — in fury. —Mark Greif

The Lazarus Project , by Aleksandar Hemon (May 1, 2008) A fictional Bosnian writer (and Hemon doppelgänger of sorts) travels to Eastern Europe to retrace the footsteps of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant who survived a pogrom only to be gunned down in the home of Chicago’s police chief in 1908, while in alternating chapters Averbuch’s story unspools. Hemon transmogrifies the smallest details into strangely vivid prose: Gunsmoke moves slowly “like a school of fish” while a character hears “straw crepitating” in her pillow. Hemon’s verbal effects accumulate into a haunting portrait of immigrant life. Hemon is Nabokov’s heir, in a more perilous time for American newcomers. —Edward Hart

Home , by Marilynne Robinson (September 2, 2008) Grace suffuses this novel, and not just its prose. Twenty-four years after her debut, the magnificent Housekeeping , Robinson returned to fiction with Gilead , winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. But its sequel, Home , is the more sublime realization of her vasts gifts, the masterpiece of what’s so far a trilogy (Robinson’s Lila appeared in 2014). A retelling of the prodigal-son parable set in 1950s Iowa, Home is also something rare in American literature these days: a meditation on Christian transfiguration. It derives its power from family pain and the radical nature of forgiveness. —Christian Lorentzen

DISSENT: Gilead (November 4, 2004) Marilynne Robinson’s writing through the lens of religious faith can make even the most unspiritual reader feel blessed. Yes, both Home and Gilead are set within the same time and place, but I’m loyal to the latter because it came out first — and the first discovery of grace is the most thrilling. —Maris Kreizman

Fine Just the Way It Is , by Annie Proulx (September 9, 2008) The short story is often offered the kiddie table when seated beside the novel. Annie Proulx the novelist is and will remain one of America’s greatest, but here she elevates story to a category that tips over the word fiction . Proulx’s Wyoming is a brutal, raw life and landscape, characters battered and isolated; and she is so unafraid of the dark that these stories become like religious parables not just of a region or nation, but of existence. Add to that her pitch-black humor — she got the chuckles writing these gigantic stories. —Dagoberto Gilb

Scenes From a Provincial Life: Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime , by J.M. Coetzee (1997–2009) In this autobiographical trilogy, Coetzee forged a clinical way of writing about the self and raised the meta stakes. Are these memoirs or novels? (The last one kills off the author, among other departures from the facts.) Boyhood presents a detached account of growing up an English-speaking Afrikaner in apartheid South Africa, a sickly boy with imaginings of greatness and a mounting sense of shame about his cruel society. Youth moves to London, where Coetzee worked as a programmer for IBM, and plumbs the anguish of the aspiring, exiled poet. The form is broken in Summertime , which combines diary fragments and a fictional biographer’s interviews of the dead writer’s acquaintances. The self-portrait that emerges from these (very funny) books is pitiless and unforgettable. —Christian Lorentzen

Notes From No Man’s Land , by Eula Biss (February 3, 2009) Biss’s insanely good collection has been instrumental in fostering a new generation of essayists. She writes poignantly on racism, gentrification, home, and identity, probing the proximity of white and black in America. She also forges new styles for the personal essay, braiding literary quotations, academic research, ironic anecdotes, and scenes from her own life to construct arguments that are complex and profound. The medium is the message here: The title essay connects Laura Ingalls Wilder, a gentrifying Chicago neighborhood, and swimming in Lake Michigan to understand the American fixation on — and fear of — borders and frontiers. —Alice Bolin

Spreadeagle , by Kevin Killian (March 1, 2010) Killian is a poet as well as perhaps the most experienced society novelist of the gay demimonde since John Rechy, but Spreadeagle is like Rechy meets Robert Walser. It’s both comically droll and ardently, deeply noir. The plot feels kind of British fin de siècle — a menage involving a confused young art student and an older couple, one an activist and the other a gay pulp-novelist, all of whom collide with a pair of pornographers and drug dealers, the entirety taking place under the shadow of AIDS. It’s a quintessentially California novel as well as simply an occasion for Killian’s flawless poet’s ear to roll out for us pages of the most memorably dank, swift, and knowing gay dialogue I’ve ever read. —Eileen Myles

Super Sad True Love Story , by Gary Shteyngart (July 27, 2010) Gary Shteyngart’s best novel (so far) virtually invented its own literary category — near-dystopian satire — and it has indeed proved shockingly accurate. It’s set in a future New York where the dollar is pegged to the Chinese yuan, inequality has transformed Central Park into a protest camp, and phone apps display your potential date’s credit score. But the real key to the novel is the hopeless relationship between its protagonists, Lenny Abramov and Eunice Park, whose relatively small age gap — Lenny is in his late 30s, Eunice her mid-20s — measures the difference between the last generation to grow up before the internet and the first generation to grow up saturated in it. —Jess Row

Seven Years , by Peter Stamm (March 22, 2011) Whatever it is that flattens so much American MFA fiction is blissfully missing from this Swiss novelist’s haunting European realism. Seven Years employs strong and supple sentences evocative of Camus to tell the all-too-recognizable story of a successful man, Alex, who ought to be happily married to his beautiful and accomplished wife, Sonia, but is silently exploding. Through Stamm’s deft strokes of observation and insight, the bizarre affair Alex pursues with a woman who physically repulses him somehow seems not only plausible but revelatory — shedding light on the extent to which we can never really figure out another person or even, maybe, ourselves. —Thomas Chatterton Williams

The Sense of an Ending , by Julian Barnes (August 4, 2011) This is an elegant, deceptively simple little novel, a quietly devastating, deftly plotted moral mystery that hinges on the unreliable juncture of memory, time, and history, with aging and remorse thrown in. Its title invites dual interpretations — the feeling that something has ended, and making sense of an ending. The story centers on a retired divorcé for whom an unexpected bequest leads to a reassessment of his memories and a painful recognition of how much he’d gotten wrong. “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” —Heller McAlpin

1Q84 , by Haruki Murakami (October 25, 2011) Murakami’s magnum opus (though probably not his very best novel — I would still vote for The Wind-up Bird Chronicle ) brings together a haunting love story with the sinister manipulations of a personality cult not unlike Aum Shinrikyo. Like many writers of his generation, Murakami is preoccupied with the aftereffects of the 1960s, and though on the surface 1Q84 appears concerned with the mundane lives of disappointed and awkward lovers, the novel represents something like a Grand Unified Theory of Japanese life over four decades. —Jess Row

The Gentrification of the Mind , by Sarah Schulman (January 7, 2012) Sarah Schulman is a first-class thinker who upholds our duty to preserve the marginal, the complicated history. This memoir maps out how the razing, via AIDS, of queer, diverse communities in New York and San Francisco paved the way for “urban transformations” that in fact led to suburbanized experiences and cramped intellectual lives. She protests sophistry and demonstrates the saneness of radical notions. When she points out that “very few children actually grow up to make the world a better place,” you may feel not only doubtful about reproducing, but also sorry you yourself were born. It’s unforgettable — which is the point. —Sarah Nicole Prickett

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk , by Ben Fountain (May 1, 2012) No novel better captures the first decade of this century in a certain sector of America — pro-Bush, pro–Iraq War, pro–free-market capitalism, and steeped in evangelical Christianity and Fox News — than Fountain’s satire of heartland jingoism and the one-percenter cynicism that exploits it. It’s seen through the eyes of a young but increasingly disillusioned soldier being honored for heroism in a football stadium extravaganza. Both savagely funny and heartbreaking, Billy Lynn scrutinizes a facet of the American character that has since slid into an unsatirizable sump of excess, but like all great novelists, Fountain was able to locate the humanity in it all the same. —Laura Miller

Capital , by John Lanchester (June 11, 2012) In a world where people write porny fan-fiction about the Property Brothers — no, seriously, they do — why aren’t there more great novels about real estate? Capital has a simple set-up, telling the interconnected stories of a single block in South London in 2008, where house prices are going up, up, up, and residents find themselves receiving mysterious postcards stating, “We Want What You Have.” Lanchester employs a bird’s-eye view that sweeps in for dazzling close-ups, then swoops out again, until you see not only the entirety of Pepys Road, but the city, the world — and the economy that’s crumbling under the weight of everyone’s aspirations. —Laura Lippman

The MaddAddam Trilogy ( Oryx and Crake , The Year of the Flood , and MaddAddam ), by Margaret Atwood (2003-2013) “Speculations about what the world would be like after human control of it ended had been — long ago, briefly — a queasy form of popular entertainment.” Queasy, yes, but exhilarating too. The human beings and humanoids of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy lose control of the natural world, then of themselves, in a bloody wonderland of mutant raccoons, endangered-species luxury couture, and ethereal beings with genitalia that turns blue at times of sexual arousal. But Atwood herself never loses control. The trilogy is the rare work of literature in which dread and joy exist in equal — and extreme — measure. —Nathaniel Rich

DISSENT: The Blind Assassin (September 2, 2000) She may be the queen of dystopia, but I have always been drawn to Atwood’s more realistic storytelling. In this novel, we get a little of both. It’s the literary equivalent of a Russian nesting doll, with layers of detective noir, sci-fi, and romance opening up to reveal the tiniest doll and the ultimate mystery — one of the heart. —Maris Kreizman

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena , by Anthony Marra (May 7, 2013) This extraordinary debut novel set in war-torn Chechnya is a feat of empathetic imagination. It makes a compelling case for what literature — and so-called cultural appropriation — can do to transcend our personal experience and reduce the blind spots in our lives. Tolstoyan in its ambition, breadth, and deep humanity, Marra’s portrait of a nation devastated by war — and of a terrified man who risks his life to save a young girl — is harrowing and heartrending, but also brightened by humor and transcendent hopefulness. Taking its title from a medical dictionary’s definition of life, the novel is a constellation of six interwoven points of view — all vital and phenomenally moving. —Heller McAlpin

Taipei , by Tao Lin (June 4, 2013) Lin came to fame as a blogger and poet with a notoriously blank style. His was the language of the digital native, and when he started writing novels, his detractors saw his attempts to turn the vernacular of the internet into literature as a sort of fraud. With Taipei , his fifth work of fiction, his style evolved into something undeniably sophisticated and often beautiful; he translated the consciousness of a life lived largely online into a new way of describing the world IRL, as mediated by an almost relentless (and relentlessly quantified) intake of pills and powders. One of the book’s central repeated images is a crucial image for our times: the narrator lying on his back and dropping his phone on his own face. —Christian Lorentzen

Men We Reaped , by Jesmyn Ward (September 17, 2013) Yes, I rate Jesmyn Ward’s 2013 memoir above her two novels, Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing , that won National Book Awards. It’s that good, that important. Well into its third century, the United States has yet to reckon with the death rate of young African-American men, an epidemic hiding in plain sight. Ward, who lost five family members and friends in a four-year span, harnesses her incandescent prose to make a deeply personal story universal. Part of the book’s genius is its nonlinear structure; her peripatetic journey amplifies the doggedness of grief and rage. —Laura Lippman

Family Life , by Akhil Sharma (April 7, 2014) Shortly after the Mishra family emigrates from Delhi to Queens, their older son dives into a swimming pool and becomes brain dead. The narrator is a young child when the accident occurs, and must navigate the embarrassments of being a recent immigrant as well as the grief that deforms his family. Sharma possesses a rare understanding of psychology and an unsentimental, bleakly comic sensibility. (“You’re sad?” the father says. “I want to hang myself every day.”) Every detail has been burnished and floats precipitously over depths of feeling, while the plot zooms ahead. The point is not to wring meaning out of suffering — Sharma never does — but to bear witness to it. —Christine Smallwood

How to Be Both , by Ali Smith (August 28, 2014) Scottish writer Ali Smith’s furious yet-to-be-completed seasonal quartet may turn out to be her crowning achievement, but its predecessor, How to Be Both , stands out for its ingeniousness and heart. There’s more than meets the eye in this structurally innovative, two-part novel that encompasses a mother-daughter relationship truncated by unexpected death, a gender-bending Renaissance artist, and a moving exploration of time, mortality, and the consolations of unconventional love, friendship, and art. Smith’s literary double-take models how to be both complex and inviting, linguistically playful and dead serious, mournful and joyous, brainy and tender. —Heller McAlpin

A Brief History of Seven Killings , by Marlon James (October 2, 2014) A Brief History is a sweltering chorus of voices, all constellating around the Jamaican musician Bob Marley and an attempt to assassinate him in 1976. James is a brilliant ventriloquist, whether speaking through an angry young woman, a feckless gangster, or a jaded American spy. Like Père Goriot and Our Mutual Friend , this is one of the great city novels, even if not all of it is set in Kingston. It makes the city rise in the reader’s imagination like a leviathan conjured out of talent, desperation, desire, grief, and an unstoppable life force. —Laura Miller

Preparation for the Next Life , by Atticus Lish (November 11, 2014) America’s brutal wars and the inhumanity of its immigration policies come together in this novel, but its real achievement is a transformative vision of New York City. Seen through the eyes of an immigrant from Western China and a traumatized American veteran, the city, especially Queens, comes to seem less the glistening metropolis of the Bloomberg imaginary than a brick-and-mortar wasteland constantly encroached by dust and weeds but possessed of its own strange beauty. It’s a beauty these two still perceive in the face of poverty, hunger, violence, and fear of incarceration because theirs is also a love story. And that may be the most radical thing about Lish’s magnificent novel. —Christian Lorentzen

The Sympathizer , by Viet Thanh Nguyen (April 7, 2015) Viet Thanh Nguyen’s recent first novel comes after a career as a leading scholar of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian culture. It is part thriller, part the “Empire Writing Back,” part revenge tragedy, part screed against Apocalypse Now , and the best novel about the Vietnamese diaspora. The form — a series of confessions forced on the narrator by his shadowy prison warden — turns his stories from self-revelation to more complex utterances, adding a level of second-guessing for readers. An exquisite examination of the psyche under duress. —Tom Lutz

The Light of the World , by Elizabeth Alexander (April 21, 2015) After her husband, Ficre Ghebreyesus, dies unexpectedly just days after turning 50, poet and essayist Alexander writes, “Now, I know for sure the soul is an evanescent thing and the body is its temporary container, because I saw it. I saw the body with the soul in it, I saw the body with the soul leaving it, and I saw the body with the soul gone.” In this exquisite account of marriage and widowhood, written with the magical simplicity of a fairy tale, Alexander meditates on her husband’s life as a refugee, an immigrant, an artist, an African man, a father, a son, a husband. —Kate Tuttle

The Broken Earth trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin (2015-2017) Jemisin, the first black writer to win sci-fi’s prestigious Hugo Award for best novel, made history again last month, becoming the first author ever to win the prize for each book in a trilogy. Her Broken Earth series, about a warring mother and daughter who each possess the power to incite, or quell, a world-destroying earthquake, is about institutional racism, climate change, and the terrible things the powerful will do to stay powerful. If that sounds a little too close to home, take heart: You’ve never been anywhere quite like the Stillness, a continent scattered with floating crystal obelisks and people who eat stone. Beautifully written, with epic magical battles and earthquakes, these books are literally groundbreaking. —Lila Shapiro

What Belongs to You , by Garth Greenwell (January 19, 2016) One of the most exquisite prose performances of the past decade, Greenwell’s first novel partakes in autofiction and the novel of trauma, and his writing about sex eschews the transgressive in favor of an elegiac mode. An American teacher of high school English in Sofia, Bulgaria, narrates a passionate affair with a young man he met in a public toilet. A phone call informs him that, back in Kentucky, his estranged father is dying, prompting a dreamlike series of memories that return him to the awakening of his sexuality in the homophobic heartland. Greenwell is a poet, and his sinuous sentences seem to come from another time. Since it can’t be the past, it must be the future. —Christian Lorentzen

Collected Essays & Memoirs (Library of America edition), by Albert Murray (October 18, 2016) Murray — renaissance man, blues philosopher, resolute non-victim — was almost criminally overlooked in the previous century. Perhaps this was because he was constitutionally incapable of suffering fools of any complexion and insisted on pointing out the most elemental truths: “The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multicolored people,” Murray notes in his masterpiece, The Omni-Americans . We are in desperate need of such lucidity. If the arc of the intellectual universe also bends towards justice, then the Library of America’s canonization will resituate Murray alongside contemporaries James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. —Thomas Chatterton Williams

The Needle’s Eye , by Fanny Howe (November 1, 2016) Fanny Howe is a poet, a novelist, a memoirist, and one of America’s deepest, most whimsical and emotionally grounded writers. Here she takes the energy of a song like Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy” (“There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy …”) and guides us into a meditation on youth and its proclivity to wander and find itself. Moving on that tack, she animates the story of the Boston bombers, two Kyrgyz -Americans whose fraught road to self-knowledge took a turn that killed three people and seriously maimed more than a dozen. It’s a tiny masterpiece, this book, and a gloriously weird read. —Eileen Myles

Ghachar Ghochar , by Vivek Shanbhag (February 7, 2017) Written with an economy of means — on just over 100 pages — that puts most nation-spanning epics to shame, Ghachar Ghochar conjures a South Indian family transformed by money in a narrative voice at once inimitable, funny, and filled with dread. The level of effortless glancing detail with which it draws minor characters — like a waiter in a Bangalore coffee house who acts as everyone’s therapist — is extraordinary. That it is one of the few novels translated (beautifully) from Kannada, a language spoken by millions and with its own literary tradition, to be published in the United States says a lot about our literary world’s myopia when it comes to the Indian novel. —Nikil Saval

The Hate U Give , by Angie Thomas (February 28, 2017) No crossover novel has proven the vitality of YA fiction as an art form more than Angie Thomas’s debut about one teenage girl’s entry into the Black Lives Matter movement. Taking its name from a Tupac Shakur acronym about the ills of systemic racism, The Hate U Give , or, THUG , explores the consequences of police violence against young men of color with more nuance, charm, and levity than you might imagine possible . THUG doesn’t offer easy answers, nor does it portray any of its diverse cast in binary terms, and the fact that it’s been banned in areas of the U.S. just shows how much it has hit a nerve. —Maris Kreizman

All Grown Up , by Jami Attenberg (March 7, 2017) One of the toughest bars to clear in fiction is the novel of connected stories, beautiful parts that add up to a gorgeous whole — and Jami Attenberg soared over it with her sixth book. The protagonist, Andrea, is a person who happens to be a woman who happens to be single who happens to live in Brooklyn. “Why is being single the only thing people think of when they think of me?” Andrea asks her therapist, who instructs her to list the other things she is. “In my head I think: I’m alone. I’m a drinker. I’m a former artist. I’m a shrieker in bed. I’m the captain of the sinking ship that is my flesh. To my therapist I say, ‘I’m a brunette.’” It’s the kind of novel I keep handy, like a pocket flask, taking little nips to get me through the day. —Laura Lippman

The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir , by Thi Bui (March 7, 2017) “How much of ME is my own and how much is stamped into my blood and bone, predestined?” Posed at the end of Thi Bui’s graphic memoir, this is the persistent, yearning question underlying this quietly heartbreaking book. Thi Bui chronicles her family’s journey from Vietnam to America, as well as her own transformation from daughter to mother. Stunningly self-assured, this is epic, intimate history rendered in understated words and images. —Kate Tuttle

Tell Me How it Ends , by Valeria Luiselli (March 13, 2017) This extraordinary little book is a powerful glimpse of how we extract stories in exchange for safety and belonging in America today. As a volunteer interpreter for migrant children fleeing poverty and violence, Luiselli describes 6- and 7-year-olds asked to perform and interpret their pain for an immigration system that sees a hard border—a border where, for most of Luiselli’s clients, the troubles have just begun. Cycling between her own life in the U.S. as a semi-documented American and mother, the lives of children she helps, and the questionnaire, Luiselli has woven an essential moral text for an age of migration. —John Freeman

Priestdaddy , by Patricia Lockwood (May 2, 2017) This poet’s memoir is the story of Lockwood’s adult return home when her husband temporarily loses his sight and the couple can no longer pay the rent. They are hipsters exiled to the heartland. Lockwood’s father is a clergyman and a conservative, but the resemblance to his bohemian poet daughter is unmistakable. The family dog is named Whimsy. Priestdaddy is the funniest book yet written about millennial–boomer culture clash. It is also moving in its accounts of Lockwood’s loss of faith, her teenage suicide attempt, and the pain that came with giving up her first love — singing — and then rediscovering herself as a writer. —Christian Lorentzen

Red Clocks , by Leni Zumas (January 16, 2018) This book follows a handful of female narrators in the Northwest in a future only slightly pushed from now (except for one, a polar explorer who is the biographical subject of one of the narrators) and, in prose that tingles with life and perversity and research and attitude and authenticity, brings them all to life. It’s political speculative fiction in an America where women have lost rights over their bodies and go to Canada to get abortions, crossing what’s come to be known as “the Pink Wall.” It’s brilliant stuff, and the woods surrounding the witchy herbalist character are both glittering and informed. To read this is to feel Leni Zumas knows everything. —Eileen Myles

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden , by Denis Johnson (January 16, 2018) Once upon a time a hard-living man, Johnson didn’t survive to see the publication of his final collection of stories, but it’s the near equal and spiritual cousin of his immortal Jesus’ Son . These stories flash through unforgettable images (notably a woman leaning in to kiss an amputee veteran’s stump) of men and women wounded by their own wildness. The beauty in Johnson’s stories is the beauty of the broken wing. Elvis and 9/11, junk and jail, hangovers and halfway houses — Johnson was a searcher in a lowlife America that’s largely vanished from our literature. —Christian Lorentzen

Asymmetry , by Lisa Halliday (February 6, 2018) On one hand, it would be unfair to consider Asymmetry only through the lens of Philip Roth. Lisa Halliday’s debut novel is bracing and brilliant entirely on its own terms, engrossing as a coming-of-age story and astute in exploring the project of fiction. On the other hand, not to consider it also through the lens of Philip Roth — who was once involved with Halliday and maps readily onto the novel’s Ezra Blazer — is to ignore a clue to what makes Asymmetry so exhilarating. Halliday considers the 20th-century canon from an intimate vantage: She sees not some abstract patriarchy but the patriarchs themselves, with their bypass scars and their tired pick-up lines. She demonstrates that power is never as simple as the familiar binaries of “privilege” might lead you to believe, at least not when it comes to art. —Molly Fischer

Contributors

Alice Bolin , essayist Sloane Crosley , author, most recently of Look Alive Out There Molly Fischer , senior editor, the Cut John Freeman , author, editor of Freeman’s Dagoberto Gilb , author of several short-story collections Mark Greif , author, Against Everything Lidija Haas , New Books columnist, Harper’s Edward Hart , senior editor, New York Michiko Kakutani , former chief book critic, the New York Times Hillary Kelly , critic and essayist Dan Kois , editor of the Slate Book Review Maris Kreizman , book critic and essayist Laura Lippman , crime novelist Christian Lorentzen , book critic, New York Tom Lutz , editor-in-chief, Los Angeles Review of Books Wyatt Mason , contributing writer, The New York Times Magazine Heller McAlpin , book reviewer for the Washington Post , NPR, and others Laura Miller , books and culture columnist, Slate Eileen Myles , poet Sarah Nicole Prickett , critic for Artforum , Bookforum , et al. Nathaniel Rich , author, most recently, of King Zeno Jess Row , novelist and critic Luc Sante , critic and author of Low Life Nikil Saval , co-editor, n+1 Lila Shapiro , culture journalist Christine Smallwood , critic and writer Adam Sternbergh , contributing editor, New York Kate Tuttle , president, National Book Critics Circle David Velasco , editor-in-chief, Artforum Oscar Villalon , editor and critic Sarah Weinman , author, The Real Lolita Thomas Chatterton Williams , contributing writer, The New York Times Magazine

Every editorial product is independently selected. If you buy an item through our links, Vulture may earn an affiliate commission.

*A version of this article appears in the September 17, 2018, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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Blog – Posted on Tuesday, Nov 03

The 60 best romance novels to sweep you off your feet.

Romance is a perennial favorite for readers everywhere, and it isn’t hard to see why. A good love story has drama, intrigue, laughs, and, if you’re lucky, a little heat; while the very best romance novels can feel just like falling in love — intimate and personal, yet huge and life-changing all at once. 

We’ve compiled a list of our all-time favorite romance novels, from historical regency romance to contemporary novels tackling love in the digital age. So whether you’re searching for a how-to guide or cautionary tale (and there are plenty of those), you’re hungry to read the next rom-com blockbuster before it hits Netflix, or you just want to lose yourself in timeless romance tropes, we’ve got you covered! 💘

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great romance novels out there, why not take our 30-second quiz to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized romance book recommendation?

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The Classics

1. jane eyre by charlotte brontë.

Though Jane Eyre might be ‘poor, obscure, plain and little’, her love story is anything but. One of the authoritative classics of the genre, Jane Eyre’ s enduring popularity is testament to the power of its central romance. Jane, a destitute young orphan, arrives at the home of the mysterious Mr Rochester in search of employment, but finds far more than she bargained for. The naïve and uncertain Jane is magnetically drawn to her brooding employer, but will the twisted secrets lying at the heart of Thornfield Hall undermine their budding relationship? Written at a time when most romantic heroines were preternaturally pretty, the headstrong, wilful, yet utterly average Jane is a subversive breath of fresh air — or should we say Eyre?

2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

A sprawling epic that takes readers across continents in the name of love, Anna Karenina is one of the longest books on this list, coming to an intimidating 800+ pages. But those who persevere with this colossus of a novel are richly rewarded. In what is considered by many to be the best romance novel of all time (and, we think, one of the best books to read in a lifetime ), Tolstoy tells the story of an extramarital affair and its fallout in Imperial Russian society.  When Anna runs away with the handsome Count Vronsky, excitement gives way to paranoia, isolation, and regret, as we witness the unravelling of their relationship, and of Anna herself. As much a cautionary tale as it is a romance novel, Anna Karenina is a richly imagined portrait of both the agonies and ecstasies of love.

3. Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club) by Gabriel Garcia Márquez

Florentino Ariza has been waiting for 50 years for his true love to return. That’s not to say he’s been bored: he’s passed the time by having no fewer than 622 love affairs, which he has painstakingly recorded in his notebooks. Despite his dalliances and the passing of decades, when the man who married his childhood sweetheart dies, a now elderly Florentino seizes the opportunity to declare his love once more. An astonishing exploration of devotion and reunions, and the unrealistic expectations we place on those we love, Love in the Time of Cholera doesn’t just ask whether the hero will get the girl — it asks whether he should. They don’t just hand out the Nobel Prize for Literature to anyone, so it’s safe to say we’re in good hands with Gabriel Garcia Márquez.

4. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

This classic fish-out-of-water tale follows Margaret, a nineteen-year-old girl whose life is turned upside down when her family relocates from a sleepy village to Darkshire — a rough and restless industrial town in the north of England. Margaret finds a new calling, advocating for the poor and disenfranchised, but it brings her into direct conflict with imposing mill owner John Thornton. Can the two find any common ground, or will misunderstanding keep them at odds? Heart-warming and ahead of its time, North and South isn’t just a beautiful romance, it also has a lot to say on politics, gender, and religion, so one for the history buffs, too!

5. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any list of the best romance novels must be in want of at least one Jane Austen title (we’ve gone for three!). And Pride and Prejudice is by far the English humorist’s most famous story. It’s a tale as old as time: boy meets girl; boy and girl bicker and declare their contempt for one another; boy and girl realise over time that there is, in fact, more to one another than meets the eye — but has this realisation come too late? It might now be a rom-com trope, but Pride and Prejudice is one of the oldest and greatest examples of the thin line between love and hate. Elizabeth and Darcy’s romance is as honest as it is unexpected, and Austen’s characters are so vividly realised and so utterly believable that you’ll be gasping, cringing, and crying along with them.

6. Emma by Jane Austen

Austen once set out in a letter the perfect subject for a novel — “Three or four families in a country village” — and the description fits Emma well. The glue that holds these families together (and our beloved heroine) is Emma Woodhouse. Clever, rich, beautiful, and utterly deluded, she’s determined to meddle with the hearts of her neighbours, but sees no need to find a husband herself. The novel bends narration through the distorting lens of our protagonist, making for a genius coming-of-age story and a work of comic brilliance. No matter who plays them, in what adaptation , her characters never fail to be laugh-out-loud funny!

7. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

The third and final instalment in our ode to romance titan Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility is a novel of lies, secrets, and seduction. Following two sisters — one wild and impulsive, the other quiet and sensible — it brilliantly portrays a world of money and status, gossip and innuendo, where rigid social convention governs the impulses of the heart. Through their parallel experiences of love and heartbreak, will these two young women learn to strike a balance between wearing your heart on your sleeve and concealing your true feelings?

8. Maurice by E.M. Forster

The brave and passionate tale of a young man’s sexual awakening, this intensely personal novel was written by Forster in 1914, when homosexual relationships were not only stigmatised, but illegal. Languishing in a drawer for fifty-seven years, Maurice was published after the author’s death, and quickly celebrated as a powerful, moving, beautifully-written love story. It chronicles the experiences of a privileged but modest young man, who comes up against unrequited love, heartbreak, and society politics on his journey to self-discovery. If you’re scouring this list for brilliant LGBT books , look no further!

9. The Princess Bride by William Goldman

As Goldman himself writes in the introduction, “dollars to donuts you’ve seen the movie”. But if you haven’t read the book that inspired the cult hit, you’ve missed a trick. A spoof fairy tale, a sharp satire, and a rocket-powered fantasy , all brilliantly disguised as a love story — there’s absolutely nothing fluffy about The Princess Bride . In fact, though there’s plenty to giggle about in the story of Buttercup and Prince Humperdink, you might also call this novel a tightly-plotted thriller. So if you’re of a nervous disposition, maybe stick to fairy tales meant for kids. 

10 . Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Reading Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is an affecting experience that will stay with you for a lifetime. Its heroine, Tess Durbyfield, is so beautifully and sympathetically drawn that you cannot help but feel crushed as the world conspires against her; betrayed by men who exploit her, a society that casts her out, and by the callousness of her religion. As the seasons change, and Tess changes with them, it’s clear that she identifies most with the natural world — and it is here that the intensity of Hardy’s imagination comes into its own. His lush and evocative descriptions, metaphors, and parallels make this tragic romance novel a poetic masterpiece. 

11. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The first and only novel by an elusive icon, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights plunges headfirst into an exploration of the violence of doomed romance. Amid the bleak and feral atmosphere of the Yorkshire moors, the novel revolves obsessively around the tempestuous course of Cathy and Heathcliff’s self-destructive love affair. A gothic novel of intense passion, betrayal, and bitter vengeance — underpinned by the quiet beauty of Brontë’s lyricism — Wuthering Heights is an iconoclastic masterpiece that has inspired film-makers, novelists, poets, and song-writers for generations.

12. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

The quintessential love story that has spawned countless retellings and inspired who knows how many writers, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet —  the story of two star-crossed lovers from rival houses — wrote many of the rules of tragic romance. From iconic scenes like the balcony soliloquy, to legendary one-liners (“A plague o’ both your houses”, anyone?), and the ending that defined the romantic tragedy genre, any aspiring romance connoisseur should get this one under their belt.

13. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

A dark, twisted tale told almost exclusively as a flashback, Rebecca follows the nameless protagonist and her speedy marriage to a mysterious but charming stranger, Maxim de Winter, whom she meets on a business excursion. Things quickly become unsettling, as the protagonist learns of the troubling questions surrounding Maxim’s previous wife, Rebecca, whose spectre haunts their relationship. As Maxim’s carefully curated image — and their relationship — unravels further, the protagonist falls deeper into the shadow of Rebecca’s legacy. If you’re one who enjoys indulging in dark romance plots with thriller or mystery elements, du Maurier’s novel may be one for you. 

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Historical Romance

14. gone with the wind by margaret mitchell.

Spoiled Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara only ever had to worry about her love life, until poverty threatened to wipe out her family’s plantation. Doing everything she can to save their fortunes, Scarlett embarks on a series of unexpected adventures, traversing burning cities and bandit-filled forests. Despite her new priorities, Scarlett quickly finds that she cannot leave affairs of the heart behind completely, as she is torn between her beloved Ashley and the dashing but dangerous Rhett. A controversial presentation of Civil-War era America, Gone With the Wind explores the complexities of both romantic and platonic love. If you’ve seen the incomparable Vivien Leigh bring her to life on screen, it’s time to meet Scarlett on the page.

15. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough

The Thorn Birds explores the tangled web of three generations of one Australian Outback family, carefully tracking their loves and losses over the course of 50 years. The emotional heart of the novel lies in the illicit relationship between Meggie, the daughter of the family, and Ralph, a priest in the local parish. Their attraction is dangerous, forbidden — and difficult to resist. Will they ever be together, or will the seemingly insurmountable obstacles between them keep them apart? This sweeping panorama of life in a rural sheep station from 1915 to 1969 is an Aussie cultural mainstay — it’s the best-selling book in Australian history!

16. The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks

The story of Noah and Allie is captured in three intertwined snap-shots: their teens, their early thirties, and old age. As our mysterious, elderly narrator unpacks these nesting dolls, we gradually learn about the love affair between our protagonists. The universe appears to have conspired to keep these childhood sweethearts apart: with meddling families, possessive fiancés, and World War II thrown into the mix, will they ever find their way back together? Some might dismiss it as chick-lit, but The Notebook is a guaranteed tear-jerker — every time. Who would have thought the words "if you’re a bird, I’m a bird" could pack such an emotional punch?

17. A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks

Popular and outgoing class president Landon doesn’t think he has much in common with the preacher’s daughter Jamie, until circumstance forces them together. A last-ditch effort to get a date to the high school dance leads to an unexpected romance in A Walk to Remember, Nicholas Sparks’ follow-up to smash hit The Notebook. As Landon and Jamie slowly find common ground, and an appreciation for one another, A Walk to Remember proves that love can be found in surprising places. It’s a charming and sweet read, but, be warned — it’s another Sparks tear-jerker. How does he always get us?

18. Indigo by Beverly Jenkins

A member of a wealthy, free Black family, Galen Vachon has a lot to lose when he decides to become a member of the Underground railroad network, and join the effort to free enslaved Southerners. His risky lifestyle catches up with him when, attacked and injured, he is forced to seek sanctuary in the basement of a stranger. That stranger is Hester Wyatt, a former slave. Despite agreeing to nurse Galen back to health, their clashing personalities lead Hester to wonder whether she can keep her promise — not to mention the hostile forces that have started to come looking for him. Equal parts history and romance, this novel from NAACP nominee Beverly Jenkins will keep you on the edge of your seat.

19. Ross Poldark by Winston Graham

If you’re a die-hard fan of the television phenomenon Poldark , you’ll be delighted to hear that there are twelve (yes, twelve) novels to consume. A rich Cornish broth of love, rivalry, and discontent, Graham’s novels conjure up the lashing rains, the wild winds, and the crashing seas of 18th century Cornwall as his plots roar along the coastline. If you start with book one (a sensible choice) you’ll meet Ross Poldark as he returns from war in America. A Mr Darcy-come-Robin Hood hero, he rescues an urchin girl from a brawl and employs her as his maid — an act which will alter the course of his life for the next twelve books. Did I mention there are twelve?

20. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

The best historical romance novels must all make great TV, because here’s another one that inspired a super sexy series. Before it became an epic costume drama, Gabaldon’s time-travelling novel introduced us to former British combat nurse, Claire Randall, and her roguish young love interest, Scotts warrior Jamie Fraser. There’s only one thing keeping this gorgeous couple apart…several centuries. On a trip to the Highlands with her husband Frank, Claire tumbles back in time to 1743, and finds herself caught between two very different lives, and two very different men. If you’re looking for a best-selling romance novel that’s got it all — passion, intrigue, danger, and time travel — Outlander is your one!

21. A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

A recent release that’s already considered vintage Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea is suffused with a vibrant sense of time and place as it traces its story through forty years of authoritarian rule in Spain. Allende’s novel begins when pregnant widow, Roser, and her brother-in-law, Victor, flee fascist Spain aboard a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda. Arriving in Chile, they immediately embroil themselves in a tangled web of characters connected by love and tragedy. A Long Petal of the Sea is a masterful historical romance novel, tinged with Allende’s hallmark magical realism . Don’t sleep on this one!

22. Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

Living a quiet life and working in her family’s seafood restaurant in late 19th century England, Nan King is happy just the way she is — that is until Kitty Butler, a male impersonator and performer, whirls into her line of sight. Enchanted by her performances, Nan finally manages to meet Kitty and ends up becoming her dresser. The two head for big cities that Nan has never even dreamed of — and a passionate romance unfurls backstage that rivals the action onstage. For fans of historical fiction and lesbian romance, this rollercoaster of a novel will take you on exhilarating ride, filled with titillating insight into the raunchy underbelly of 1890s England and the thrill of forbidden love.

23. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

Beginning during WWI and spanning three generations, Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong is an epic novel about the power of war to strip everything from you, whether that be home, family, dignity — or love. With a few key couples dominating the pages in the style of Anna Karenina , we see the action through their eyes and feel their struggle to maintain hope after endless sacrifices. For those inspired by stories of love in the time of war, Birdsong evokes classics like War and Peace , wrapping wartime drama in a healthy coating of romance, intrigue, and sacrifices for the greater good.

Contemporary Romance

24. call me by your name by andré aciman.

A long, hot Italian summer provides the backdrop to an equally steamy romance in Call Me by Your Name , the story of a young man’s romance with his family’s lodger. As tender and heartfelt as it is intense and passionate, Elio and Oliver’s love affair begins awkwardly, slowly, and tacitly, before building to unprecedented heights as the summer draws to a close. A modern classic of LGBT+ literature, this exploration of first love and sexual awakening is vividly realised, and astonishingly honest. The second you’re through reading, you’re sure to be clamouring for more. Luckily for you, Aciman released a sequel last year — so you won’t have to say goodbye to Elio and Oliver just yet.

25. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

When Henry and Clare bump into one another at the local library, it’s a classic meet-cute. Except, it’s not. Because Clare and Henry have met each other before —  in fact, she’s known him her whole life. As it turns out, Henry’s a time traveler, and Clare is his future wife. A rare genetic condition causes Henry to jump uncontrollably along the timeline of Clare’s life. They decide to give things a shot after their ‘first meeting’, but, despite their deep love for one another, they face  lots of challenges along the way; after all, it’s hard to keep up a relationship when one party is constantly dropping in and out of reality. Niffenegger’s touching novel is sure to pull at your heartstrings, as she leads us to consider how free will and destiny combine to determine who we end up loving.

26. The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang

Stella loves logic. The problem is, love isn’t logical. A highflying mathematician, she’s never put much thought into finding a romantic partner. But when she decides it’s finally time to settle down, Stella comes up with a characteristically pragmatic plan: she’ll hire someone to teach her how to do it. Enter Michael, a handsome escort, who usually doesn’t do repeat customers. When he agrees to give Stella lessons in love, he finds himself drawn deeper into her life; suddenly, Stella isn’t the only one who’s learning. A charming and affectionate portrayal of the love life of a neurodivergent woman, The Kiss Quotient is a breath of fresh air — we doubt you’ll have read a romance quite like this before.

27. When Katie Met Cassidy by Camille Perri

When Katie Met Cassidy is every inch the classic Nora Efron-style rom-com, with one simple difference — both our protagonists are women. Katie is a small town girl, reeling from the breakdown of her engagement. Cassidy is a high powered businesswoman, living and thriving in New York’s gay scene. A chance meeting is enough to cement their fate, and the two women are drawn uncontrollably to one another. Joyous, hilarious, and deeply sexy, Perri’s novel is not just an exploration of sexuality and gender nonconformity, but a sparkling subversion of the romantic comedy form.

28. Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

Will Traynor is living a lonely life. Recently left quadriplegic by a motorcycle accident, his formerly fast-paced life has ground to a halt. Enter Lou; bubbly, funny sunshine in human form. Will’s mother has hired her to help care for Will, in the hopes of lifting his perpetually dour mood, but the intrusion is not a welcome one — at least at first. Over time, the two come to understand one another a little better, though Will remains insistent on keeping Lou at arm’s length, while she struggles to understand what he’s so afraid of. Will she be able to break down his walls? You’ll shed a tear or two, but you won’t be able to resist falling in love with Me Before You.

29. Something Borrowed by Emily Giffin

Emily Giffin’s best-selling romance novel is for every woman that’s been the sidekick in a lopsided friendship. In this story, it’s Rachel White: hard-working attorney, consummate good girl, and diligent maid of honour to her dazzling best friend Darcy — who happens to be marrying the man that Rachel is in love with. Yeah, that wasn’t part of the plan. ( Well , she did set them up, but what are best friends for?) Things start to spiral out of control when Rachel drunkenly confesses her feelings to Darcy’s fiancé, and is both delighted and devastated to hear he feels the same way. It might be a classic romance trope , but this knotty love triangle will have you on the edge of your seat to the very end.

30. Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

Probably the best romance novel of 2019, Casey McQuiston’s queer, royal love story didn’t just take the New York Times bestseller list by storm, it broke the internet. A kaleidoscope of popular influences, dripping in internet lingo, Ariana Grande references, and memes aplenty, Red, White & Royal Blue is the book we were screaming for. It’s set in an alternate reality where in 2016, a Democrat became the first female president of the US, and follows First Son Alex — a twenty-something, biracial, modern-day Kennedy. The action begins at a royal wedding, when Alex is told to play nice with his childhood nemesis, the Prince of Wales. As the famous pair fake a bromance for the cameras, behind the scenes… well , you know where this is going.

31. The Hating Game by Sally Thorne

Lucy Hutton doesn’t dislike Joshua Templeman. She doesn’t reluctantly tolerate him. She hates him. And she has to sit across from his joyless, infuriatingly handsome face every day . To be fair to Joshua, the feeling’s mutual. Lucy’s a people pleaser — the kind who wears yellow to work — and she pushes all his buttons. Now they’re up for the same promotion, and this bitter workplace rivalry is about to reach boiling point. But when tensions run high, you know what they say: there’s a thin line between love and hate. Sally Thorne’s The Hating Game is an unmissable treat for anyone who loves a rom-com about that undeniable spark between nemeses.

32. Normal People by Sally Rooney

Sally Rooney was recognised as both a gifted writer and a perceptive and nuanced observer, when she released her debut novel Conversations With Friends . In Normal People, she captures the zeitgeist with the same subtlety and skill. It’s an intimate love story of deceptive simplicity: Marianne and Connell are two mismatched young people —unlikely friends, unlikely lovers — who share a profound understanding. However, as their small town lives in rural Ireland are eclipsed by the heady and confusing world of student Dublin, the ways in which they mould each other reveal a universal truth about the lasting impact that one person can have on another. Dripping with longing and regret, and steered by two deeply vulnerable characters, this novel remains immensely readable — one of the best romance novels of the 21st century.

33. Beach Read by Emily Henry

Henry’s smart and steamy page-turner, Beach Read, gave us all a sizzling slice of the summer romance we missed out on in 2020. In an effort to crack a crippling case of writer’s block, January, a hopeless romantic, and Gus, who thinks happy endings are for fairy tales, don’t swap numbers, but genres. Before the summer is out, January must write the next great work of literary fiction , while Gus has to pen a bestselling romance novel. Two writers, two beach huts, and plenty of whipcrack banter — let’s hope Henry is an author with a soft spot for happily-ever-after.

34. It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover

Everything in Lily’s life seems to be falling into place. She’s got a new place in Boston, her own business, and she’s convinced gorgeous neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid to break his “no-dating” rule. Her old life in small-town Maine certainly seems a long way behind her. But as questions about her new relationship, and Ryle’s stubborn aversion to dating, begin to overwhelm her, Lily can’t help but wonder about Atlas Corrigan — her first love, and a link to the world she left behind. So when Atlas appears in Boston, everything she has with Ryle is suddenly thrown into question. This unforgettable tale is as heartbreaking as it is thrilling; prepare yourself for a rollercoaster ride of emotions.

35. The Proposal by Jasmine Guillory

A New York Times bestselling romance novel and a favorite among book clubs and celebrity book-lovers alike, The Proposal is a fun and flirty novel about a second chance at love. Guillory kicks off with a man on one knee; it’s not the usual way to start a love story, but this proposal isn’t followed by happily ever after. When Nik’s boyfriend asks her to spend the rest of her life with him, saying no isn’t the hard part (the guy can’t even spell her name right!) — it’s doing it in front of a stadium full of disappointed baseball fans. Luckily, handsome doctor Carlos is there to sweep her away from the frenzy and into an epic rebound of food, fun, and fantastic sex. But how serious can their glorified hookups get before someone slams on the brakes?

36. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Part tragic romance, part coming-of-age, part war trauma — Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a heart-wrenching, expansive look at a lot of hard truths. Little Dog, a Vietnamese refugee in the U.S. and protagonist of this semi-autobiographical novel, tries to find solace in the small comforts of his life in the working class town of Hartford, Connecticut but realizes that he wants to grow beyond his current horizons. The reader follows Little Dog as he chases the American Dream, pursues a growing romance with a farm boy who’s struggling with his family’s homophobia, and questions how to be happy in the shadow of grief and trauma. A raw, poetic, and dark experience, if you enjoy a large helping of hardship and identity crises with your romance, this might be your cup of tea.

37. Kiss an Angel by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Go to jail or marry the mystery man her father has set her up with — headstrong Daisy Devreaux chooses the latter. Her new husband, Alex Markov, is a deadpan grade-A jerk who seems to have no patience for Daisy’s bourgeois tastes and flights of fancy. But as they work on restoring a rundown traveling circus, their growing influence on each other becomes impossible to ignore. Fans of stubborn romantic leads (à la Annie and Frank from Annie Get Your Gun ), quirky settings, and the time-tested city-girl-in-the-country trope may find a winner in Kiss An Angel .

38. Vision in White by Nora Roberts

Mackensie Elliott is head of her own wedding planning business and firmly believes she’s better at capturing other people’s special days than she would be at experiencing her own. But when Mackensie hits it off with the seemingly humdrum Carter Maguire, a high school English teacher who’s definitely not her type, her friends encourage her to make the first move. What begins as a casual fling becomes something more, and Mackensie has to ask herself if she’s willing to step out from behind her cool and collected facade and seize her own happiness. Readers looking for a tentative slow burn and a strong female lead will find a perfect match in Roberts’ charming Vision in White .

Young Adult Romance

39. twilight by stephenie meyer.

It’s faced more than its fair share of backlash, derision, and parody, but it’s impossible to deny that few books have influenced the cultural zeitgeist as much as Twilight . It’s the book that led a generation of teenage girls to genuinely debate whether vampires or werewolves were hotter, and that launched an entire renaissance of paranormal romance books . No matter what the critics say, it’s the definitive high school romance turned struggle against a vampiric death cult — so why not revisit Twilight mania, and see what all the hype was about? Oh, and P.S., we’re totally team Edward.

40. Forever . . . by Judy Blume

‘Sybil Davison has a genius IQ and has been laid by at least six different guys’. So begins Judy Blume’s Forever… Is it any wonder that this YA book has been a favorite under-the-covers read ever since its release in the 70’s? This refreshingly honest presentation of teenage sexuality was deeply controversial because of its raunchy subject matter — it’s even been banned from several libraries — but it remains a classic. Katherine and Michael’s high school romance is a charming coming-of-age story that’s sure to have you laughing and cringing in equal parts.

41. To All the Boys I've Loved Before by Jenny Han

Imagine if all your high school crushes suddenly knew every embarrassing thought you’ve ever had about them. That’s what happens to Lara Jean, a sixteen-year-old girl whose life is turned upside down when letters she’s written to all the boys she’s ever loved — letters that the recipients were never supposed to see — are sent. Naturally, the fallout is chaotic. Jenny Han’s sugary sweet novel not only spent 40 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, it was also adapted into a blockbusting movie. If there’s one thing you should take away from this one, it’s to keep your top secret love letters under lock and key.

42. The Selection by Kiera Cass

Fans of dystopian novels (think The Hunger Games ) will find a lot to love in The Selection, the first in Kiera Cass’ Selection series. After being selected to compete for the heart of a Prince, America is forced to leave behind her home and the boy she secretly loves but cannot be with. What she doesn’t expect is to start falling for the handsome prince. With a Netflix adaptation in the works, now’s your chance to get ahead of the hype and join this YA series’ cult following before it’s cool.

43. Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

An internet phenomenon that has a special place in the hearts of superfans everywhere, Rainbow Rowell’s young adult romance is as charming as it is candid. Cath is a fanfiction-writing, premiere-attending, card-carrying fangirl. Her twin sister Wren used to be the same, But now they’re in college, Wren has lost interest in geeky pursuits — she’s far too busy partying, making friends, and being cool. She’s also lost interest in Cath. Without her sister for the first time, Cath is forced to navigate the confusion and loneliness of being a freshman all alone. Will the cute guy in her creative writing class be a welcome distraction? How about her new roommate’s friendly ex-boyfriend...?

44. Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Another Rainbow Rowell novel met with critical acclaim, Eleanor & Park is an urgent, breathless, gut-punch of a love story about two teen misfits and one life-changing school year. It’s 1986 when Eleanor arrives in her new town, all chaotic red hair and mismatched clothes. She takes a seat on the school bus and finds herself next to Park — quiet, understated, and impossibly cool. Carefully yet wholeheartedly, over late night phone calls and countless mix tapes, Eleanor and Park fall in love. It’s that pure, fear-laced, heartbreaking kind of love you only experience when you’re sixteen — and trust us, your heart will melt.

45. Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

When Anna’s father ships her off to boarding school in Paris, she’s less than thrilled to be leaving behind her friends in Atlanta — especially that cute guy she works with at the multiplex. But all is forgiven (and cute coworkers forgotten) when she meets Etienne St. Clair. He’s charming, smart, gorgeous...and tragically taken. But hearts have a way of coming together in the City of Love. So if Anna plays her cards right, her senior year might just end with the perfect first kiss. Relive the flutters of first love in Perkins’ wonderfully cheesy tale of crushes, complications, and croissants.

46. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

It’s 1987 and a hot summer’s day in El Paso, Texas, when Ari and Dante meet at a swimming pool. On the face of things, they have nothing in common. Ari is guarded, angry, and struggling to feel like he belongs. Dante is an open-hearted know-it-all, still figuring out who he is. But, as they spend the summer learning about each other, and discovering themselves, a friendship floods the lives of these two loners like a golden light. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is a tender and lyrical reminder that love in all its many forms should be open, deep, and without shame.

47. Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

High school junior Simon has a lot on his mind; but when a stray email falls into the wrong hands and he’s blackmailed by class clown Martin, he’s forced to play along — or he’ll be outed as gay, along with his increasingly flirtatious pen pal. As his friend group starts to fray and the situation becomes increasingly tenuous, Simon will have to keep up with the pace of change, or risk the life he knows crashing down around his ears. Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda is a gay romance filled with warm fuzzies, dry humor, and supportive friendships. Albertalli’s feel-good novel is still able, however, to flirt with some bigger questions about homophobia and the experience of being a closeted teen in the American South.

48. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

In this romantic retelling of a perennial Classics favorite, Homer’s Iliad , Madeline Miller casts Patroclus as the awkward but lovable ancient Grecian nerd to Achilles’ jock. As the unlikely duo fight in battle, quarrel, and form a bond that grows deeper every day, their conflicting beliefs about the Trojan War threaten to tear them apart. Miller, a classics teacher herself, takes up Homer’s thread of lyrical prose while adding her own unique style and story elements. If you’re partial to Rick Riordan (who, incidentally, gave this book a glowing review !) and his ancient mythology series, but wished they had a more mature and romantic tone, look no further than The Song of Achilles.

49. More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera

Sixteen-year-old Aaron Soto is trying to recover from a family tragedy, supported by his friends and his girlfriend Genevieve. But when Aaron starts spending his time almost exclusively with new boy Thomas, he quickly comes to a number of realizations that he’s not altogether thrilled with. At the same time, a slot opens up for a memory-alteration procedure at the Leteo Institute, and Aaron has the choice of wiping the things he’d rather not dwell on out of his head forever. A grittier take on young adult romance, More Happy Than Not goes deep into themes of depression, homophobia, and suicide, while exploring the scientific possibilities of the not-too-distant future .

50. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

For three years, Hazel’s life has been nothing but terminal. Diagnosed with incurable cancer at the age of thirteen, she’s never had the chance to experience the thrilling awkwardness of being a teenager. In an attempt to find kids who understand, Hazel’s mother forces her to attend a truly miserable cancer support group. Enter: Augustus Waters. A charming, and unremarkably handsome amputee with an alarming optimism for life, Gus is a much-needed plot twist in the story of Hazel Grace. Bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our Stars is a witty tour de force about the thrilling and tragic business of being alive, and a heartbreaking (but never depressing) story about a love that lasts ‘forever, within the numbered days.’

Regency Romance

51. the grand sophy by georgette heyer.

When Sophia Stanton-Lacy is dropped on her aunt’s doorstep by her diplomat father, she’s not quite what any of her extended family were expecting. Self-assured, confident, and more than a touch rebellious, the beautiful and charismatic Sophy sweeps through London like a breath of fresh air. In the opinion of her stern cousin Charles, however, that fresh air feels more like a hurricane. This witty, sophisticated tale of societal intrigue and domestic dramas has a lot to offer Austen fans, and Heyer’s pacy comedy-of-manners is served with a generous helping of heart-stopping romance.

52. Secrets of a Summer Night by Lisa Kleypas

Annabelle needs a rich husband, and fast. Her family are in dire financial straits, and she must use every tool at her disposal to save them. There’s one major issue, however — her most tenacious suitor, entrepreneur Simon Hunt, has no interest in marrying her. As Annabelle struggles to resist his advances and keep her head in the game, Simon finds the chase even more exciting. This steamy regency romance is the first book in Kleypas’ mega-popular Wallflowers series, so once you’ve devoured this one (and we bet you will) there’s plenty left to enjoy.

53. Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale

A devilishly debonair womanizer is suddenly interred in an insane asylum, having suffered a stroke. The sheltered and naïve Maddy, fascinated by his scandalous reputation, is tasked with his care. Despite her Quaker upbringing and the brutality of their surroundings, the unlikely pair find themselves swept up in a passionate and intense love affair. As she grows closer to the Duke of Jervaux, Maddy begins to realise his playboy facade conceals hidden depths. New York Times bestseller Kinsale reminds us there’s often much more than meets the eye in this gripping, steamy, and desire-drenched novel.

54. Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase

Lord of Scoundrels may be the third in its series, but we can’t resist including it on this list. One of the most well-known and well received historical romance novels of all time , this regency read has had readers seriously hot under the starched collar for 25 years. When the independent and beautiful Jessica Trent rolls into town to save her brother from the influence of the caddish Sebastian, the two engage in a fierce battle of wits. When the tension between them reaches fever pitch, they’re caught in a compromising situation at a society party. Will Sebastian do what’s right to save Jessica’s reputation, or is he really as unscrupulous as she always suspected?

Erotic Romance

55. fifty shades of grey by e. l. james.

You’ve probably already read Fifty Shades — it was the biggest selling book of the 2010’s, after all. But if the pop culture phenomenon somehow passed you by, it’s never too late to give this kinky thriller a try. The story of hunky, troubled billionaire Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele, a naïve student who (quite literally) falls headfirst into his life, started out as self-published Twilight fanfiction. Who could have imagined that this steamier-than-a-sauna novel would go on to sell over 125 million copies!

56. Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin

If there’s one thing more exciting than erotic fiction, it’s vintage erotic fiction. If you’re looking for retro erotica with a disarming feminist twist , look no further than Delta of Venus, a collection of 15 short stories written by Anais Nin in the 1940s. In sexy bitesize chunks, Nin regales us with stories of torrid love affairs and passionate trysts, told in what Nin herself refers to as ‘women's language, seeing sexual experience from a woman's point of view’. It’s as gorgeous as it was groundbreaking.

57. Twice In A Lifetime by Clare Lydon

Would you take a second chance at first love? This is the dilemma that Sally and Harriet face in Twice in a Lifetime . Teenage sweethearts, they broke up when Harriet moved away to college, breaking Sally’s heart. But a chance luggage mix-up at the airport brings them crashing back together. The sexual tension is heavy — but the emotional baggage is, too. Is it worth another shot? Scorching sex scenes are balanced out by genuine warmth and deeply likeable main characters in this LGBTQ+ erotic novel.

58. Rush by Maya Banks

Forbidden desire takes center stage in Rush, the first book in bestselling author Maya Banks’ Breathless trilogy, which follows the exploits of three very handsome, very successful, and very debauched business partners. Rush focuses on Gabe, who finds himself in a tight spot when he lays eyes on his best friend’s younger sister for the first time in several years. The attraction is instant. But will he get what he wants, or will outside forces intervene? Raunchy and compulsively readable, you’ll be rushing (pun intended) to find out what happens next in this erotic page-turner.

59. Bared to You by Sylvia Day

Another self-publishing success story in the vein of Fifty Shades of Grey, Sylvia Day’s Bared to You boasts a similarly devoted fan base — and a similarly intense love story. It’s often heartwarming, and always hot, but Bared to You is much more than just titillating. The story of Eva, a sexual assault survivor navigating her way to a healthy romantic life is surprisingly heartfelt. You’ll find you can’t help but root for our heroine as she finds love with the charismatic and equally complicated Gideon.

60. On Dublin Street by Samantha Young

Scotland’s answer to Fifty Shades of Grey , this erotic romance novel is much more than just “innocent young graduate meets gorgeous billionaire and dot, dot, dot” . Jocelyn and Braden — the innocent young graduate and gorgeous billionaire, respectively — are exquisitely written characters, engaged in a captivating and bittersweet love story. They meet when Jocelyn moves to Edinburgh and takes up an apartment in a building owned by Braden. He immediately feels an intense attraction, but, knowing Jocelyn’s past has left her guarded, Braden proposes a ‘no-strings-attached’ arrangement. Witty dialogue and steamy sex scenes ensue, but how long can the fun last before they want more than just mind-blowing passion?

Developed a taste for fiery love stories? Why not check out our guide to New Adult books and their sleek, steamy collegiate romances?

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The 25 Most Common Themes in Literature and Why They Matter

by Sue Weems | 0 comments

If you've ever survived a high school English class, you've likely been asked to consider the most common themes in literature. What are they and why do they matter for readers and writers? Let's take a look.

Literature's first job is to entertain. But at the same time every novel has a kernel of truth in it, or perhaps several kernels, ideas about how life works or philosophies on the best way to live or some gesture to the broader meaning of life. 

Taken together, these ideas may combine into a “theme.” 

I say “may” because theme is more a tool of interpretation than creativity. The writer may come into the story with an idea of what their story is about. This understanding of what their story is “about ” may even help add focus and depth to their story.

Once a book is published, though, the audience owns theme, and they may depart with a totally different message than the author intended.

Which is all to say, as a writer, theme may or may not be helpful to you. 

As a reader, though, you can use theme to unlock the deeper truths both in the story and in life. Let's look at what theme is, why it matters for readers and writers, how to identify them, and some common examples of theme in literature. 

Why trust Sue on theme? I'm one of those annoying English teachers who helps students analyze literature. Students ask me why we do it, and I'll tell you the secrets I share with them: analyzing literature helps us understand our humanity and world– from the misuse of power to the meaning of life.

Secondly, learning to look at a part of something and understand how it functions in the whole (AKA analysis) is a skill that transcends literature. It's a low-stakes way to practice life skills. 

Want to skip ahead? Click on the topic that best answers your question. 

Table of Contents

What is a literary theme? Why does theme matter for a reader? How do you identify theme in a story? Types of story: a shortcut to theme Common themes in literature with examples Why theme matters for writers Practice  

What is a literary theme?

A literary theme is a universal concept, idea or message explored in a story or poem. It's often a moral, lesson, or belief that the writer wants to convey to readers.

Think of theme as the underlying message that shapes the story. It’s not always obvious at first glance – sometimes it takes some close reading and analysis to identify what’s going on beneath the surface.

A universal theme is one that transcends time and place. For example, the popular theme “love conquers all” shows up in old romances such as The Epheseian Tale from 2-50 AD to Disney's Robin Hood from 1973 to Nicholas Sparks' novel The Notebook from 2004. 

Why does theme matter for a reader?

You can certainly enjoy a story without knowing the theme explicitly, but most stories are about something beyond the character's actions. And we want them to be about something more. 

Stories are the way we build meaning—the way we understand human life, the way we process and confront controversial ideas, the way we sometimes relate to each other on a universal level. 

When someone asks you what a book you're reading is about, you likely give a sentence or two about the character, their goal, and the conflict, but you're just as likely to identify an abstract idea that the book is about. That idea is a touchpoint for our humanness. 

I may not be into a book about a boy wizard who is swept into a world where he must overcome his fears and insignificance to defeat a formidable foe, but I can certainly understand what it means to belong, what it means to find your way through inadequacy, what it means to defeat your fears. 

That's the power of theme. It points to deeper meaning, connecting me to a story and to other readers like me.

How do you identify theme in a story?

If you are a student or a writer trying to identify theme, it sometimes feels like trying to crack a secret English major code. But here's a trick I teach my students. 

1. Find the big idea

First, ask yourself about the big ideas or concepts that seem important throughout the entire story. These may feel abstract, such as love, beauty, despair, justice, or art. Sometimes the main character has very defined beliefs (or misbeliefs!) about the idea. 

2. Ask what the story suggests about the idea

Once you have one or two overarching central ideas that seem important for the story, then ask yourself this question: What does the story seem to say about this idea?

For example, if I'm reading Shirley Jackson's chilling short story “The Lottery,” I might identify that the story is about community and tradition. If I wanted to be a little more specific I'd say tradition in the vein of conformity. 

Quick summary of the story (spoiler alert!): The story opens on a summer day when an entire community participates in their annual lottery. Each family in town draws a paper until a single community member has been selected. The end of the story shows the town stoning the “winner” in a barbarous act of solidarity to maintain community traditions.

Now, to identify the central theme, I'd ask myself, what does Jackson's story seem to say about community or tradition or conformity? 

Some communities are willing to maintain their traditions (or conformity) at any cost.

3. Support the theme or message with examples

If I wanted to support the central theme I identified, I would pull quotes or examples from the story that support it. In this case, I could look at the children who are willing to participate, the contrast of the summer day and the dark deed, the insistence that the stoning will keep them prosperous, even though there is no evidence of such. 

Are there other possible themes? Sure. There are no wrong answers, only themes that can be defended from the texts and those that don't have enough support. It takes a little practice, but try this technique and see if it doesn't help. 

Types of Story: a shortcut to finding theme in a story

As a part of his book The Write Structure , Joe has identified several types of story that help writers plan and execute their books. The detailed post is here. 

In short, Joe argues that all stories are built on six values frameworks, regardless of genre. The values are directly related to the human condition and identify base needs we have for moving through the world. 

Knowing your story types and the value scale can be a short cut to identifying themes in books and stories, because those universal ideas are tucked inside the values. 

Here are the values in each type of story:

• Survival from Nature > Life vs. Death
• Survival from Others > Life vs. Fate Worse than Death
• Love/Community > Love vs. Hate
• Esteem > Accomplishment vs. Failure
• Personal Growth > Maturity vs. Immaturity
• Transcendence > Right vs. Wrong

The types can help you identify the central ideas that the story speaks into because you know that the values will be key. Your question then is what does the story seem to say about this value? Or more specifically, what does the story seem to say about the way this particular character pursues this value? 

For example: If you are reading a Jack London short story or novel, you know that the protagonist is going to be facing survival from nature. The value is life versus death. So to determine the theme we ask what does the story say about life vs death or survival?

In Jack London's short story “To Build a Fire,” an arrogant man trying to survive the Yukon wilderness makes a series of novice mistakes from traveling alone to getting wet with no way to get warm and dry. Spoiler alert, he dies. 

What is the theme of this story? My students usually shout out something like, “Don't be a dummy and travel alone with no way to make a fire!” And they're not wrong. The ideas here are life, death, nature, and humanity. Here are a number of ways you could frame the theme with specific support from the story:

• Nature is indifferent to human suffering. 
• Human arrogance leads to death.
• There are limits to self-reliance. 

As you can see, the theme is what the story suggests about the story value. 

Common themes in literature with examples

James Clear collected a list of the best-selling books of all time on his website . Let's start with some of those fiction titles.

Disclaimer: I know many of these summaries and themes are vastly oversimplified and most could be fleshed out in long, complicated papers and books. But for the sake of time, let's imagine my list as limited examples of theme among many that could be argued. 

Disclaimer 2: I tried to get ChatGPT to help me write the one sentence summaries for these titles even though I've read all but two of the listed books. The summaries ChatGPT wrote were weak or too general for our purposes. So if there are errors below, they are all mine—I can't blame the bots today. Let's look at the list: 

1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605) summary: Aging nobleman Don Quixote deludes himself into thinking he's a knight and takes on a satirical quest to prove his honor by defending the helpless and defeating the wicked. 

theme: Being born a nobleman (or any class) does not automatically determine your worth. 

2. Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859) summary: In this sprawling novel of swapped (or reconstructed) identities and class warfare during the French Revolution, characters navigate the nature of love, betrayal, justice, and the possibility of transformation. 

theme: Transformation is possible for enlightened individuals and societies.

3. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954) summary: An unlikely hobbit and his diverse team set out to find and destroy a powerful ring to save Middle-earth and defeat the dark lord Sauron. 

theme: Good can defeat evil when people (or creatures) are willing to sacrifice for the common good. 

4. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1943) summary: A prince visits various planets and discovers the importance of curiosity and openness to emotion.

theme: The most important things in life can't be seen with the eyes but with the heart. 

5. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling (1997) summary: An unsuspecting orphan attends a wizard school where he discovers his true identity, a dark foe, and the belonging he craves. 

theme: Love and friendship transcend time and space. 

6. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939) summary: Seven guests gather at a house on an island where they are killed off one-by-one as they try to discover the murderer. 

theme: Death is inevitable, justice is not.  

7. The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cat Xueqin (1791) summary: In this complex family drama, a nobleman's son is born with a magic jade in his mouth, and he rebels against social norms and his father resulting in an attempted arranged wedding and illness rather than reinforce oppression.

theme: Social hierarchies maintained by oppression will eventually fall. 

8. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (1937) summary: Timid hobbit Bilbo Baggins is called by a wizard to help a band of dwarves reclaim their land from a terrible dragon, Smaug.

theme: Bravery can be found in the most unlikely places.

9. She: A History of Adventure by H. Rider Haggard (1886) summary: An professor and his ward seek out a lost kingdom in Africa to find a supernatural queen.

theme: Considering the imperialism of the time as well as worry about female empowerment, the themes here are varied and problematic, but perhaps one theme might resonate: Be careful what you seek, for you may find it. 

10. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (1950) summary: Four children venture through a wardrobe into a magical kingdom where they must work together to save Narnia, meet Aslan, and defeat the White Witch. 

theme: Evil is overwhelmingly tempting and can only be defeated through sacrifice. 

11. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951) summary: An expelled prep school student, Holden Caulfield, has a number of coming-of-age misadventures on his way home for the holiday break.

theme: Innocence can only be protected from the risks of growing up for so long. 

12. The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho (1988) summary: A Spanish shepherd named Santiago travels to Egypt searching for treasure he saw in a dream. 

theme: Anyone can make the world better if we are willing and courageous.

13. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967) summary: This circle of life novel covers seven generations of the Buendia family as they build a small dysfunctional utopia in a swamp amidst a changing political and social Latin American landscape.

theme: Solitude is an inevitability for humankind. 

14. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery (1908) summary: An orphan finds her place with the Cuthbert siblings, and she brings her peculiar and delightful blend of imagination and optimism to their lives and community.

theme: Every human desires and deserves belonging. 

15. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White (1952) summary: Wilbur the pig and his unconventional spider friend Charlotte join forces to save Wilbur's life from the slaughterhouse. 

theme: Friendship can be found in the most unlikely places.

And let's throw in a few additional well-known stories and notable examples to see how their themes stack up:

16. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (1597) summary: Two teens from warring families fall in love and die rather than be kept apart from their families feud. 

theme: Passion is costly.

17. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818) summary: An ambitious scientist creates a monster without considering the larger implications. Chaos ensues.

theme: Knowledge can be dangerous when coupled with unbridled ambition.

18. Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987) summary: Formerly enslaved mother Sethe and her daugher Denver are haunted by the ghost of Sethe's oldest daughter who died when she was two-years-old. 

theme: The physical and psychological effects of slavery are damaging and long-lasting. 

19. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005) summary: In this dystopian novel, people are cloned and held in preparation to be life-long organ donors for others. 

theme: Freedom is a basic human desire. 

20. Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (1959) summary: The Younger family grapples with identity and dreams in the wake of the death of their patriarch. 

theme: Dignity and family are worth more than money. 

The 5 most common themes in literature

You may have been asked to define universal themes as a part of a school assignment. Universal themes are those that transcend time and cultures, meaning they are often found to be true in real life no matter who you are or where you live. 

Granted, I haven't read all the books across time and space (yet), but there's a pretty good bet that one of these major themes might apply to what you're reading regardless of time period, genre, or culture: 

• Love conquers all.
• Things are not always what they seem.
• Good triumphs over evil.
• Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. 
• Blood (family) is thicker than water. 

Which other larger themes would you list here as some of the most common in literature? Share your theme examples in the comments . 

Why theme matters for writers

Why do themes matter for writers though? After all, isn't it enough to write an entertaining story? It can be, but exploring universal themes can help take your work to the next level. You don't have to identify a theme for your story and write everything to that end—in fact that might work against you. But when done well, it can enhance your story.

Here are a few reasons you may want to think about theme in your writing:

1. Coherence

Theme can bring together the various parts of a story, including plot and subplot, characters, symbols, and motifs. Readers can feel the variations on a theme laced throughout your story and done well, it's engaging and satisfying.

If your theme is love conquers all, then you likely have two people who over come incredible odds to be together. What are the other elements that subtly underscore it? Maybe there's a house that was built with love in the setting or maybe a secondary character is failing at love because they keep putting their work first. If it's subtle, those small details reinforce the main storyline.  

2. Significance

As we discussed, universal themes will resonate with readers, even when they haven't experienced the same events. Many of the works we've listed above are remembered and revered due in part to their lasting themes about human experience.

3. Expression

Theme is an opportunity to weave together your world view, experiences, perspective, and beliefs with artistic and creative possibilities. Theme serves as a unifying element as you express your vision. Try playing with theme in a story or other creative work to see how it pushes boundaries or got beyond the expected. 

In summary, theme can serve as the backbone of a story, giving it structure, depth, and resonance. It can help convey the writer's intended message and engage readers on multiple levels, making it a crucial element of literary and creative expression. 

Which other larger themes would you list as the most common in literature? Share your theme examples in the comments .

Set your timer for 15 minutes . Choose one of the common themes above and create a character who has strong beliefs about that theme. Now, write a scene where an event or person challenges that belief. How will the character react? Will they double-down and insist on their worldview? Or will they soften and consider alternatives? Will shock at the challenge plunge them into despair? Play with their reaction. 

Once you've written for 15 minutes, post your practice in the Pro Practice Workshop and leave feedback for a few other writers. 

Sue Weems is a writer, teacher, and traveler with an advanced degree in (mostly fictional) revenge. When she’s not rationalizing her love for parentheses (and dramatic asides), she follows a sailor around the globe with their four children, two dogs, and an impossibly tall stack of books to read. You can read more of her writing tips on her website .

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