Working with novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers, staff members of The New York Times Book Review published a list of The Best Books of the Year (So Far) and The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century and a list . With all credit to them, I share books from the lists below with a few of my own notes, additions [e.g., list, genre], and comments.
[Best Books of the Year (So Far)]
James by Percival Everett [Historical Fiction]
In this reworking of the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Jim, the enslaved man who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi River, is the narrator, and he recounts the classic tale in a language that is his own, with surprising details that reveal a far more resourceful, cunning and powerful character than we knew.
[The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century]
100. Tree of Smoke (2007) by Denis Johnson [Historical Fiction]
2007 National Book Award Winner for Fiction
Like the project of the title — an intelligence report that the newly minted C.I.A. operative William “Skip” Sands comes to find both quixotic and useless — the Vietnam-era warfare of Johnson’s rueful, soulful novel lives in shadows, diversions and half-truths. There are no heroes here among the lawless colonels, assassinated priests and faith-stricken NGO nurses, only villainy and vast indifference.
If you’ve read and liked it, try: “Missionaries,” by Phil Klay or “Hystopia,” by David Means.
99. How to Be Both (2014) by Ali Smith [Fiction – Coming of Age, Historical Fiction, Women’s Fiction]
Man Booker Prize Finalist
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Ali Smith’s novel How to Be Both is an experiment in combining a modern coming of age narrative with a related, but also separate, historical fiction novella. The Scottish author published the book two different ways: some copies have the modern section first, featuring the story of a young woman named George who is trying to cope with the recent death of her mother; and some have the historical section first, featuring the fictional autobiography of the real historical Italian Renaissance painter Francesco del Cossa. Readers don’t know which version they will get until they open the book to start reading. The stories these two sections tell are interconnected, but the references will mean different things depending on whether they are being read “backward” or “forward.” [How to Be Both Summary | SuperSummary]
If you’ve read and liked it, try: “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi,” by Geoff Dyer or “The Argonauts,” by Maggie Nelson.
98. Bel Canto (2001) by Ann Patchett [Literary Fiction]
This novel is the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, Women’s Prize for Fiction, and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. A famed opera singer is performing for a Japanese executive’s birthday at a luxe private home in South America when a group of young guerrillas swoops in and takes everyone in the house hostage. Patchett’s exquisitely calibrated novel, inspired by a real incident, shines with character development and relationship building.
Comment: My wife and I share books we love with our kids, and after I raved about “Bel Canto” — the voice, the setting, the way romance and suspense are so perfectly braided — I gave copies to my kids, and they all loved it, too. My son was in high school then, and he became a kind of lit-pusher, pressing his beloved copy into friends’ hands. We used to call him the Keeper of the Bel Canto. — Jess Walter, author of “Beautiful Ruins”
If you’ve read and liked it, try: “Nocturnes,” by Kazuo Ishiguro or “The Piano Tuner,” by Daniel Mason.
97. Men We Reaped (2013) by Jesmyn Ward [Memoir]
Men We Reaped has been named a Best Book of the Century by both The New York Times Book Review and New York Magazine. Sandwiched between her two National Book Award-winning novels, Salvage the Bones and Let Us Descend, Ward’s memoir carries more than fiction’s force in its aching elegy for five young Black men (a brother, a cousin, three friends) whose untimely exit from her life came violently and without warning. Their deaths — from suicide and homicide, addiction and accident — place the hidden contours of race, justice, and cruel circumstance in stark relief.
If you’ve read and liked it, try: “Breathe: A Letter to My Sons,” by Imani Perry or “Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir,” by Natasha Trethewey.
96. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019) by Saidiya Hartman [Nonfiction – History]
A National Book Critics Award winner in 2019 in the category ‘Criticism’ and an Amazon Editor’s pick, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals is a beautiful, meticulously researched exploration of the lives of Black girls whom early-20th-century laws designated as “wayward” for such crimes as having serial lovers, or an excess of desire, or a style of comportment that was outside white norms. Hartman grapples with “the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known” about poor Black women, but from the few traces she uncovers in the historical record, she manages to sketch moving portraits, restoring joy and freedom and movement to what, in other hands, might have been mere statistics. — Laila Lalami, author of “The Other Americans”
If you’ve read and liked it, try: “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being,” by Christina Sharpe or “All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake,” by Tiya Miles.
95. Bring Up The Bodies (2012) by Hilary Mantel [Historical Fiction]
Winner of the 2012 Man Booker Prize and the 2012 Costa Book Award for that same year, Bring Up The Bodies is the sequel to Hilary Mantel’s 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller, Wolf Hall. The title comes from an old English legal phrase for summoning men who have been accused of treason to trial; in the court’s eyes, effectively, they are already dead. But Mantel’s tour-de-force portrait of Thomas Cromwell thrums with thrilling, obstinate life: a lowborn statesman on the rise; a king in love (and out of love, and in love again); a mad roundelay of power plays, poisoned loyalties and fateful realignments. It’s only empires, after all.
If you’ve read and liked it, try: “This Is Happiness,” by Niall Williams or “The Western Wind,” by Samantha Harvey.
94. On Beauty (2005) by Zadie Smith [Literary Fiction]
Consider it a bold reinvention of Howards End, or take Smith’s sprawling third novel as its own golden thing: a tale of two professors — one proudly liberal, the other staunchly right-wing — whose respective families’ rivalries and friendships unspool over nearly 450 provocative, subplot-mad pages. I love this line: “You don’t have favorites among your children, but you do have allies.”
Let’s admit it: Family is often a kind of war, even if telepathically conducted. — Alexandra Jacobs, book critic for The Times.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Crossroads,” by Jonathan Franzen.
93. Station Eleven (2014) by Emily St. John Mandel
Increasingly, and for obvious reasons, end-times novels are not hard to find. But few have conjured the strange luck of surviving an apocalypse — civilization preserved via the ad hoc Shakespeare of a traveling theater troupe; entire human ecosystems contained in an abandoned airport — with as much spooky melancholic beauty as Mandel does in her beguiling fourth novel.
Voted for by ANN NAPOLITANO, novelist. See her full top 10 here.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Severance,” by Ling Ma or “The Passage,” by Justin Cronin.
92. The Days of Abandonment (2005) by Elena Ferrante; translated by Ann Goldstein
There is something scandalous about this picture of a sensible, adult woman almost deranged by the breakup of her marriage, to the point of neglecting her children. The psychodrama is naked — sometimes hard to read, at other moments approaching farce. Just as Ferrante drew an indelible portrait of female friendship in her quartet of Neapolitan novels, here, she brings her all-seeing eye to female solitude.
I LOVE THIS LINE on the book cover: “The circle of an empty day is brutal, and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.”
It so simply encapsulates how solitude can, with the inexorable passage of time, calcify into loneliness and then despair. — Alexandra Jacobs
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Eileen,” by Ottessa Moshfegh or “Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation,” by Rachel Cusk.
91. The Human Stain (2000) by Philip Roth
Set during the Clinton impeachment imbroglio, this is partly a furious indictment of what would later be called cancel culture, partly an inquiry into the paradoxes of class, sex and race in America. A college professor named Coleman Silk is persecuted for making supposedly racist remarks in class. Nathan Zuckerman, his neighbor (and Roth’s trusty alter ego), learns that Silk, a fellow son of Newark, is a Black man who has spent most of his adult life passing for white. Of all the Zuckerman novels, this one may be the most incendiary, and the most unsettling. — A.O. Scott
Voted for by STEPHEN L. CARTER, author and law professor. See his full top 10 here.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Vladimir,” by Julia May Jonas or “Blue Angel,” by Francine Prose.
90. The Sympathizer (2015) by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Penned as a book-length confession from a nameless North Vietnamese spy as Saigon falls and new duties in America beckon, Nguyen’s richly faceted novel seems to swallow multiple genres whole, like a satisfied python: political thriller and personal history, cracked metafiction and tar-black comedy.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Man of My Time,” by Dalia Sofer or “Tomás Nevinson,” by Javier Marías; translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
89. The Return (2016) by Hisham Matar
Though its Pulitzer Prize was bestowed in the category of biography, Matar’s account of searching for the father he lost to a 1990 kidnapping in Cairo functions equally as absorbing detective story, personal elegy and acute portrait of doomed geopolitics — all merged, somehow, with the discipline and cinematic verve of a novel.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy,” by Nathan Thrall, “House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East,” by Anthony Shadid or “My Father’s Fortune,” by Michael Frayn.
88. The Collected Stories (2009) by Lydia Davis
Brevity, thy name is Lydia Davis. If her work has become a byword for short (nay, microdose) fiction, this collection proves why it is also hard to shake; a conflagration of odd little umami bombs — sometimes several pages, sometimes no more than a sentence — whose casual, almost careless wordsmithery defies their deadpan resonance.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Ninety-Nine Stories of God,” by Joy Williams or “Tell Me: Thirty Stories,” by Mary Robison.
87. Detransition, Baby (2021) by Torrey Peters
Love is lost, found and reconfigured in Peters’s penetrating, darkly humorous debut novel. But when the novel’s messy triangular romance — between two trans characters and a cis-gendered woman — becomes an unlikely story about parenthood, the plot deepens, and so does its emotional resonance: a poignant and gratifyingly cleareyed portrait of found family.
WHY I LOVE IT: Peters’s sly wit and observational genius, her ability to balance so many intimate realities, cultural forces and zeitgeisty happenings made my head spin. It got me hot, cracked me up, punched my heart with grief and understanding. I’m in awe of her abilities, and will re-read this book periodically just to remember how it’s done. — Michelle Tea, author of “Against Memoir”
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition,” by Lucy Sante or “Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta,” by James Hannaham.
86. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018) by David W. Blight
It is not hard to throw a rock and hit a Great Man biography; Blight’s earns its stripes by smartly and judiciously excavating the flesh-and-bone man beneath the myth. Though Douglass famously wrote three autobiographies of his own, there turned out to be much between the lines that is illuminated here with rigor, flair and refreshing candor.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family,” by Kerri K. Greenidge or “Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865,” by James Oakes.
85. Pastoralia (2000) by George Saunders
An ersatz caveman languishes at a theme park; a dead maiden aunt comes back to screaming, scatological life; a bachelor barber born with no toes dreams of true love, or at least of getting his toe-nubs licked. The stories in Saunders’s second collection are profane, unsettling and patently absurd. They’re also freighted with bittersweet humanity, and rendered in language so strange and wonderful, it sings.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Swamplandia!,” by Karen Russell or “Friday Black,” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.
84. The Emperor of All Maladies [2010] Siddhartha Mukherjee
The subtitle, “A Biography of Cancer,” provides some helpful context for what lies between the covers of Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, though it hardly conveys the extraordinary ambition and empathy of his telling, as the trained oncologist weaves together disparate strands of large-scale history, biology and devastating personal anecdote.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End,” by Atul Gawande, “Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery,” by Henry Marsh or “I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life,” by Ed Yong.
83. When We Cease to Understand the World [2021] Benjamín Labatut; translated by Adrian Nathan West
You don’t have to know anything about quantum theory to start reading this book, a deeply researched, exquisitely imagined group portrait of tormented geniuses. By the end, you’ll know enough to be terrified. Labatut is interested in how the pursuit of scientific certainty can lead to, or arise from, states of extreme psychological and spiritual upheaval. His characters — Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, among others — discover a universe that defies rational comprehension. After them, “scientific method and its object could no longer be prised apart.” That may sound abstract, but in Labatut’s hands the story of quantum physics is violent, suspenseful and finally heartbreaking. — A.O. Scott
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality,” by William Egginton, “The Noise of Time,” by Julian Barnes or “The End of Days,” by Jenny Erpenbeck; translated by Susan Bernofsky.
82. Hurricane Season [2020] Fernanda Melchor; translated by Sophie Hughes
Her sentences are sloping hills; her paragraphs, whole mountains. It’s no wonder that Melchor was dubbed a sort of south-of-the-border Faulkner for her baroque and often brutally harrowing tale of poverty, paranoia and murder (also: witches, or at least the idea of them) in a fictional Mexican village. When a young girl impregnated by her pedophile stepfather unwittingly lands there, her arrival is the spark that lights a tinderbox.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice,” by Cristina Rivera Garza or “Fever Dream,” by Samanta Schweblin; translated by Megan McDowell.
81. Pulphead [2011] John Jeremiah Sullivan
When this book of essays came out, it bookended a fading genre: collected pieces written on deadline by “pulpheads,” or magazine writers. Whether it’s Sullivan’s visit to a Christian rock festival, his profile of Axl Rose or a tribute to an early American botanist, he brings to his subjects not just depth, but an open-hearted curiosity. Indeed, if this book feels as if it’s from a different time, perhaps that’s because of its generous receptivity to other ways of being, which offers both reader and subject a kind of grace.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Sunshine State,” by Sarah Gerard, “Consider the Lobster,” by David Foster Wallace or “Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It,” by Geoff Dyer.
80. The Story of the Lost Child [2015] Elena Ferrante; translated by Ann Goldstein
All things, even modern literature’s most fraught female friendship, must come to an end. As the now middle-aged Elena and Lila continue the dance of envy and devotion forged in their scrappy Neapolitan youth, the conclusion of Ferrante’s four-book saga defies the laws of diminishing returns, illuminating the twined psychologies of its central pair — intractable, indelible, inseparable — in one last blast of X-ray prose.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “The Years That Followed,” by Catherine Dunne or “From the Land of the Moon,” by Milena Agus; translated by Ann Goldstein.
79. A Manual for Cleaning Women [2015] Lucia Berlin
Berlin began writing in the 1960s, and collections of her careworn, haunted, messily alluring yet casually droll short stories were published in the 1980s and ’90s. But it wasn’t until 2015, when the best were collected into a volume called “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” that her prodigious talent was recognized. Berlin writes about harried and divorced single women, many of them in working-class jobs, with uncanny grace. She is the real deal. — Dwight Garner, book critic for The Times
I love this line from the book: “I hate to see anything lovely by myself.” It’s so true, to me at least, and I have heard no other writer express it. — Dwight Garner
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “The Flamethrowers,” by Rachel Kushner or “The Complete Stories,” by Clarice Lispector; translated by Katrina Dodson.
78. Septology [2022] Jon Fosse; translated by Damion Searls
I had not read Fosse before he won the Nobel Prize, and I wanted to catch up. Luckily for me, the critic Merve Emre (who has championed his work) is my colleague at Wesleyan, so I asked her where to start. I was hoping for a shortcut, but she sternly told me that there was nothing to do but to read the seven-volume “Septology” translated by Damion Searls. Luckily for me, I had 30 hours of plane travel in the next week or so, and I had a Kindle.
Reading “Septology” in the cocoon of a plane was one of the great aesthetic experiences of my life. The hypnotic effects of the book were amplified by my confinement, and the paucity of distractions helped me settle into its exquisite rhythms. The repetitive patterns of Fosse’s prose made its emotional waves, when they came, so much more powerful. — Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Armand V,” by Dag Solstad; translated by Steven T. Murray.
77. An American Marriage [2018] Tayari Jones
Life changes in an instant for Celestial and Roy, the young Black newlyweds at the beating, uncomfortably realistic heart of Jones’s fourth novel. On a mostly ordinary night, during a hotel stay near his Louisiana hometown, Roy is accused of rape. He is then swiftly and wrongfully convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison. The couple’s complicated future unfolds, often in letters, across two worlds. The stain of racism covers both places.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Hello Beautiful,” by Ann Napolitano or “Stay with Me,” by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀.
76. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow [2022] Gabrielle Zevin
The title is Shakespeare; the terrain, more or less, is video games. Neither of those bare facts telegraphs the emotional and narrative breadth of Zevin’s breakout novel, her fifth for adults. As the childhood friendship between two future game-makers blooms into a rich creative collaboration and, later, alienation, the book becomes a dazzling disquisition on art, ambition and the endurance of platonic love.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Normal People,” by Sally Rooney or “Super Sad True Love Story,” by Gary Shteyngart.
75. Exit West [2017] Mohsin Hamid
The modern world and all its issues can feel heavy — too heavy for the fancies of fiction. Hamid’s quietly luminous novel, about a pair of lovers in a war-ravaged Middle Eastern country who find that certain doors can open portals, literally, to other lands, works in a kind of minor-key magical realism that bears its weight beautifully.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida,” by Shehan Karunatilaka or “A Burning,” by Megha Majumdar.
74. Olive Kitteridge [2008] Elizabeth Strout
When this novel-in-stories won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009, it was a victory for crotchety, unapologetic women everywhere, especially ones who weren’t, as Olive herself might have put it, spring chickens. The patron saint of plain-spokenness — and the titular character of Strout’s 13 tales — is a long-married Mainer with regrets, hopes and a lobster boat’s worth of quiet empathy. Her small-town travails instantly became stand-ins for something much bigger, even universal.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Tom Lake,” by Ann Patchett or “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” by Alice Munro.
73. The Passage of Power [2012] Robert Caro
The fourth volume of Caro’s epic chronicle of Lyndon Johnson’s life and times is a political biography elevated to the level of great literature. His L.B.J. is a figure of Shakespearean magnitude, whose sudden ascension from the abject humiliations of the vice presidency to the summit of political power is a turn of fortune worthy of a Greek myth. Caro makes you feel the shock of J.F.K.’s assassination, and brings you inside Johnson’s head on the blood-drenched day when his lifelong dream finally comes true. It’s an astonishing and unforgettable book. — Tom Perrotta, author of “The Leftovers”
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century,” by Beverly Gage, “King: A Life,” by Jonathan Eig or “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.
72. Secondhand Time [2016] Svetlana Alexievich; translated by Bela Shayevich
Of all the 20th century’s grand failed experiments, few came to more inglorious ends than the aspiring empire known, for a scant seven decades, as the U.S.S.R. The death of the dream of Communism reverberates through the Nobel-winning Alexievich’s oral history, and her unflinching portrait of the people who survived the Soviet state (or didn’t) — ex-prisoners, Communist Party officials, ordinary citizens of all stripes — makes for an excoriating, eye-opening read.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: Try “Gulag,” by Anne Applebaum or “Is Journalism Worth Dying For? Final Dispatches,” by Anna Politkovskaya; translated by Arch Tait.
71. The Copenhagen Trilogy [2021] Tove Ditlevsen; translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman
Ditlevsen’s memoirs were first published in Denmark in the 1960s and ’70s, but most English-language readers didn’t encounter them until they appeared in a single translated volume more than five decades later. The books detail Ditlevsen’s hardscrabble childhood, her flourishing early career as a poet and her catastrophic addictions, which left her wedded to a psychotic doctor and hopelessly dependent on opioids by her 30s. But her writing, however dire her circumstances, projects a breathtaking clarity and candidness, and it nails what is so inexplicable about human nature.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “The End of Eddy,” by Édouard Louis; translated by Michael Lucey.
70. All Aunt Hagar’s Children [2006] Edward P. Jones
Jones’s follow-up to his Pulitzer-anointed historical novel, “The Known World,” forsakes a single narrative for 14 interconnected stories, disparate in both direction and tone. His tales of 20th-century Black life in and around Washington, D.C., are haunted by cumulative loss and touched, at times, by dark magical realism — one character meets the Devil himself in a Safeway parking lot — but girded too by loveliness, and something like hope.
“It was, I later learned about myself, as if my heart, on the path that was my life, had come to a puddle in the road and had faltered, hesitated, trying to decide whether to walk over the puddle or around it, or even to go back.”
The metaphor is right at the edge of corniness, but it’s rendered with such specificity that it catches you off guard, and the temporal complexity — the way the perspective moves forward, backward and sideways in time — captures an essential truth about memory and regret. — A.O. Scott
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “The Office of Historical Corrections,” by Danielle Evans or “Perish,” by LaToya Watkins.
69. The New Jim Crow [2010] Michelle Alexander
One year into Barack Obama’s first presidential term, Alexander, a civil rights attorney and former Supreme Court clerk, peeled back the hopey-changey scrim of early-aughts America to reveal the systematic legal prejudice that still endures in a country whose biggest lie might be “with liberty and justice for all.” In doing so, her book managed to do what the most urgent nonfiction aims for but rarely achieves: change hearts, minds and even public policy. If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America,” by James Forman Jr., “America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s,” by Elizabeth Hinton or “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent,” by Isabel Wilkerson
68. The Friend [2018] Sigrid Nunez
After suffering the loss of an old friend and adopting his Great Dane, the book’s heroine muses on death, friendship, and the gifts and burdens of a literary life. Out of these fragments a philosophy of grief springs like a rabbit out of a hat; Nunez is a magician. — Ada Calhoun, author of “Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me”
“The Friend” is a perfect novel about the size of grief and love, and like the dog at the book’s center, the book takes up more space than you expect. It’s my favorite kind of masterpiece — one you can put into anyone’s hand. — Emma Straub, author of “This Time Tomorrow”
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Autumn,” by Ali Smith or “Stay True: A Memoir,” by Hua Hsu.
67. Far From the Tree [2012] Andrew Solomon
In this extraordinary book — a combination of masterly reporting and vivid storytelling — Solomon examines the experience of parents raising exceptional children. I have often returned to it over the years, reading it for its depth of understanding and its illumination of the particulars that make up the fabric of family. — Meg Wolitzer, author of “The Interestings”
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us,” by Rachel Aviv or “NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity,” by Steven Silberman.
66. We The Animals [2011] Justin Torres
The hummingbird weight of this novella — it barely tops 130 pages — belies the cherry-bomb impact of its prose. Tracing the coming-of-age of three mixed-race brothers in a derelict upstate New York town, Torres writes in the incantatory royal we of a sort of sibling wolfpack, each boy buffeted by their parents’ obscure grown-up traumas and their own enduring (if not quite unshakable) bonds.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Shuggie Bain,” by Douglas Stuart, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” by Charles Blow or “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” by Ocean Vuong.
65. The Plot Against America [2004] Philip Roth
What if, in the 1940 presidential election, Charles Lindbergh — aviation hero, America-firster and Nazi sympathizer — had defeated Franklin Roosevelt? Specifically, what would have happened to Philip Roth, the younger son of a middle-class Jewish family in Newark, N.J.? From those counterfactual questions, the adult Roth spun a tour de force of memory and history. Ever since the 2016 election his imaginary American past has pulled closer and closer to present-day reality. — A.O. Scott
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Biography of X,” by Catherine Lacey or “The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family,” by Joshua Cohen.
64. The Great Believers [2018] Rebecca Makkai
It’s mid-1980s Chicago, and young men — beautiful, recalcitrant boys, full of promise and pure life force — are dying, felled by a strange virus. Makkai’s recounting of a circle of friends who die one by one, interspersed with a circa-2015 Parisian subplot, is indubitably an AIDS story, but one that skirts po-faced solemnity and cliché at nearly every turn: a bighearted, deeply generous book whose resonance echoes across decades of loss and liberation.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “The Interestings,” by Meg Wolitzer, “A Little Life,” by Hanya Yanagihara or “The Emperor’s Children,” by Claire Messud.
63. Veronica [2005] Mary Gaitskill
Set primarily in a 1980s New York crackling with brittle glamour and real menace, “Veronica” is, on the face of it, the story of two very different women — the fragile former model Alison and the older, harder Veronica, fueled by fury and frustrated intelligence. It’s a fearless, lacerating book, scornful of pieties and with innate respect for the reader’s intelligence and adult judgment.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “The Quick and the Dead,” by Joy Williams, “Look at Me,” by Jennifer Egan or “Lightning Field,” by Dana Spiotta.
62. 10:04 [2014] Ben Lerner
How closely does Ben Lerner, the very clever author of “10:04,” overlap with its unnamed narrator, himself a poet-novelist who bears a remarkable resemblance to the man pictured on its biography page? Definitive answers are scant in this metaphysical turducken of a novel, which is nominally about the attempts of a Brooklyn author, burdened with a hefty publishing advance, to finish his second book. But the delights of Lerner’s shimmering self-reflexive prose, lightly dusted with photographs and illustrations, are endless.
“Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance.”
“10:04” is filled with sentences that cut this close to the bone. Comedy blends with intimations of the darkest aspects of our natures, and of everyday life. Who can shave anymore without recalling this “Sweeney Todd”-like observation? — Dwight Garner
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.,” by Adelle Waldman, “Open City,” by Teju Cole or “How Should a Person Be?,” by Sheila Heti.
61. Demon Copperhead [2022] Barbara Kingsolver
In transplanting “David Copperfield” from Victorian England to modern-day Appalachia, Kingsolver gives the old Dickensian magic her own spin. She reminds us that a novel can be wildly entertaining — funny, profane, sentimental, suspenseful — and still have a social conscience. And also that the injustices Dickens railed against are still very much with us: old poison in new bottles. — A.O. Scott
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “The Unsettled” by Ayana Mathis or “Loved and Missed” by Susie Boyt.
60. Heavy [2018] Kiese Laymon
What is the psychic weight of secrets and lies? In his unvarnished memoir, Laymon explores the cumulative mass of a past that has brought him to this point: his Blackness; his fraught relationship to food; his family, riven by loss and addiction and, in his mother’s case, a kind of pathological perfectionism. What emerges is a work of raw emotional power and fierce poetry.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Men We Reaped,” by Jesmyn Ward or “Another Word for Love,” by Carvell Wallace.
59. Middlesex [2002] Jeffrey Eugenides
Years before pronouns became the stuff of dinner-table debates and email signatures, “Middlesex” offered the singular gift of an intersex hero — “sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome!” — whose otherwise fairly ordinary Midwestern life becomes a radiant lens on recent history, from the burning of Smyrna to the plush suburbia of midcentury Grosse Pointe, Mich. When the teenage Calliope, born to doting Greek American parents, learns that she is not in fact a budding young lesbian but biologically male, it’s less science than assiduously buried family secrets that tell the improbable, remarkable tale.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “The Nix,” by Nathan Hill, “The Heart’s Invisible Furies,” by John Boyne or “The Signature of All Things,” by Elizabeth Gilbert.
An unlikely college friendship — Ken loves preppy polo shirts and Pearl Jam, Hua prefers Xeroxed zines and Pavement — blossoms in 1990s Berkeley, then is abruptly fissured by Ken’s murder in a random carjacking. Around those bare facts, Hsu’s understated memoir builds a glimmering fortress of memory in which youth and identity live alongside terrible, senseless loss.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Truth & Beauty: A Friendship,” by Ann Patchett, “The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions,” by Jonathan Rosen or “Just Kids,” by Patti Smith.
57. Nickel and Dimed [2001] Barbara Ehrenreich
Waitress, hotel maid, cleaning woman, retail clerk: Ehrenreich didn’t just report on these low-wage jobs; she actually worked them, trying to construct a life around merciless managers and wildly unpredictable schedules, while also getting paid a pittance for it. Through it all, Ehrenreich combined a profound sense of moral outrage with self-deprecating candor and bone-dry wit. — Jennifer Szalai, nonfiction book critic for The Times
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Poverty, by America,” by Matthew Desmond or “The Working Poor: Invisible in America,” by David K. Shipler.
56. The Flamethrowers [2013] Rachel Kushner
Motorcycle racing across the arid salt flats of Utah; art-star posturing in the downtown demimonde of 1970s New York; anarchist punk collectives and dappled villas in Italy: It’s all connected (if hardly contained) in Kushner’s brash, elastic chronicle of a would-be artist nicknamed Reno whose lust for experience often outstrips both sense and sentiment. The book’s ambitions rise to meet her, a churning bedazzlement of a novel whose unruly engine thrums and roars.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “City on Fire,” by Garth Risk Hallberg or “The Girls,” by Emma Cline.
55. The Looming Tower [2006} Lawrence Wright
What happened in New York City one incongruously sunny morning in September was never, of course, the product of some spontaneous plan. Wright’s meticulous history operates as a sort of panopticon on the events leading up to that fateful day, spanning more than five decades and a geopolitical guest list that includes everyone from the counterterrorism chief of the F.B.I. to the anonymous foot soldiers of Al Qaeda.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001,” by Steve Coll or “MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman,” by Ben Hubbard.
54. Tenth of December [2013] George Saunders
For all of their linguistic invention and anarchic glee, Saunders’s stories are held together by a strict understanding of the form and its requirements. Take plot: In “Tenth of December,” his fourth and best collection, readers will encounter an abduction, a rape, a chemically induced suicide, the suppressed rage of a milquetoast or two, a veteran’s post-traumatic impulse to burn down his mother’s house — all of it buffeted by gusts of such merriment and tender regard and daffy good cheer that you realize only in retrospect how dark these morality tales really are.
WHY I LOVE IT: Nobody writes like George Saunders. He has cultivated a genuinely original voice, one that is hilarious and profound, tender and monstrous, otherworldly and deeply familiar, much like the American psyche itself. With each of these stories, you feel in the hands of a master — because you are. — Matthew Desmond, author of “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City”
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories,” by Lauren Groff, “Oblivion: Stories,” by David Foster Wallace or “The Nimrod Flipout: Stories,” by Etgar Keret, translated by Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston.
53. Runaway [2004] Alice Munro
On one level, the title of Munro’s 11th short-story collection refers to a pet goat that goes missing from its owners’ property; but — this being Munro — the deeper reference is to an unhappy wife in the same story, who dreams of leaving her husband someday. Munro’s stories are like that, with shadow meanings and resonant echoes, as if she has struck a chime and set the reverberations down in writing.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Homesickness,” by Colin Barrett or “The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore.”
52. Train Dreams [2011] Denis Johnson
Call it a backwoods tragedy, stripped to the bone, or a spare requiem for the American West: Johnson’s lean but potent novella carves its narrative from the forests and dust-bowl valleys of Spokane in the early decades of the 20th century, following a day laborer named Robert Grainier as he processes the sudden loss of his young family and bears witness to the real-time formation of a raw, insatiable nation.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “That Old Ace in the Hole,” by Annie Proulx or “Night Boat to Tangier,” by Kevin Barry.
51. Life After Life [2013] Kate Atkinson
Can we get life “right”? Are there choices that would lead, finally, to justice or happiness or save us from pain? Atkinson wrestles with these questions in her brilliant “Life After Life” — a historical novel, a speculative novel, a tale of time travel, a moving portrait of life before, during and in the aftermath of war. It gobbles up genres and blends them together until they become a single, seamless work of art. I love this goddamn book. — Victor LaValle, author of “Lone Women”
I LOVE THIS PASSAGE:
“‘Fox Corner — that’s what we should call the house. No one else has a house with that name and shouldn’t that be the point?’
‘Really?’ Hugh said doubtfully. ‘It’s a little whimsical, isn’t it? It sounds like a children’s story. The House at Fox Corner.’
‘A little whimsy never hurt anyone.’
‘Strictly speaking, though,’ Hugh said, ‘can a house be a corner? Isn’t it at one?’
So this is marriage, Sylvie thought.”
“Her brilliant ear. Her humor. Her openness. Her peculiar gifts. Some of her books are perfect. The rest are merely superb.” — Amy Bloom, writer
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Light Perpetual,” by Francis Spufford or “Neverhome,” by Laird Hunt.
50. Trust [2022] Hernan Diaz
How many ways can you tell the same story? Which one is true? These questions and their ethical implications hover over Diaz’s second novel. It starts out as a tale of wealth and power in 1920s New York — something Theodore Dreiser or Edith Wharton might have taken up — and leaps forward in time, across the boroughs and down the social ladder, breathing new vitality into the weary tropes of historical fiction. — A.O. Scott
WHY I LOVE IT: Be prepared for some serious mind games! Set in New York City in the 1920s and ’30s, the story of a Manhattan financier and his high-society wife is told through four “books” — a novel, a manuscript, a memoir and a journal. But which version should you trust? Is there even one true reality?
As we sift our way through these competing narratives, Diaz serves us clues and red herrings in equal measure. We know we are being gamed, but we’re not sure exactly which character is gaming us. While each reader will draw their own conclusion when they reach the end of this complex and thrilling book, what is never disputed is the ease with which money and power can bend reality itself. — Dua Lipa, singer and songwriter behind the Service95 Book Club
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “This Strange Eventful History,” by Claire Messud or “The Luminaries,” by Eleanor Catton.
49. The Vegetarian [2016] Han Kang; translated by Deborah Smith
One ordinary day, a young housewife in contemporary Seoul wakes up from a disturbing dream and simply decides to … stop eating meat. As her small rebellion spirals, Han’s lean, feverish novel becomes a surreal meditation on not just what the body needs, but what a soul demands.
I LOVE THIS LINE: “I want to swallow you, have you melt into me and flow through my veins.”
“The Vegetarian” is a short novel with a mysterious, otherworldly air. It feels haunted, oppressive … It’s a story about hungers and starvation and desire, and how these become intertwined.” — Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of “Mexican Gothic”
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: Try “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” by Ottessa Moshfegh or “Convenience Store Woman,” by Sayaka Murata; translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
48. Persepolis [2003] Marjane Satrapi
Drawn in stark black-and-white panels, Satrapi’s graphic novel is a moving account of her early life in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and her formative years abroad in Europe. The first of its two parts details the impacts of war and theocracy on both her family and her community: torture, death on the battlefield, constant raids, supply shortages and a growing black market. Part 2 chronicles her rebellious, traumatic years as a teenager in Vienna, as well as her return to a depressingly restrictive Tehran. Devastating — but also formally inventive, inspiring and often funny — “Persepolis” is a model of visual storytelling and personal narrative.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Martyr!,” by Kaveh Akbar or “Disoriental,” by Négar Djavadi; translated by Tina Kover.
47. A Mercy [2008] Toni Morrison
Mercies are few and far between in Morrison’s ninth novel, set on the remote colonial land of a 17th-century farmer amid his various slaves and indentured servants (even the acquisition of a wife, imported from England, is strictly transactional). Disease runs rampant and children die needlessly; inequity is everywhere. And yet! The Morrison magic, towering and magisterial, endures.
If you’ve read it and like it, try: “Year of Wonders,” by Geraldine Brooks or “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois,” by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.
46. The Goldfinch [2013] Donna Tartt
For a time, it seemed as if Tartt’s vaunted 1992 debut, “The Secret History,” might be her only legacy, a once-in-a-career comet zinging across the literary sky. Then, more than a decade after the coolish reception to her 2002 follow-up, “The Little Friend,” came “The Goldfinch” — a coming-of-age novel as narratively rich and riveting as the little bird in the Dutch painting it takes its title from is small and humble. That 13-year-old Theo Decker survives the museum bombing that kills his mother is a minor miracle; the tiny, priceless souvenir he inadvertently grabs from the rubble becomes both a talisman and an albatross in this heady, haunted symphony of a novel.
If you’ve read it and like it, try: “Freedom,” by Jonathan Franzen or “Demon Copperhead,” by Barbara Kingsolver.
45. The Argonauts [2015] Maggie Nelson
Call it a memoir if you must, but this is a book about the necessity — and also the thrill, the terror, the risk and reward — of defying categories. Nelson is a poet and critic, well versed in pop culture and cultural theory. The text she interprets here is her own body. An account of her pregnancy, her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge and the early stages of motherhood, “The Argonauts” explores queer identity, gender politics and the meaning of family. What makes Nelson such a valuable writer is her willingness to follow the sometimes contradictory rhythms of her own thinking in prose that is sharp, supple and disarmingly heartfelt. — A.O. Scott
If you’ve read it and like it, try: “My 1980s and Other Essays,” by Wayne Koestenbaum, “No One Is Talking About This,” by Patricia Lockwood or “On Immunity,” by Eula Biss.
44. The Fifth Season [2015] N.K. Jemisin
“The Fifth Season” weaves its story in polyphonic voice, utilizing a clever story structure to move deftly through generational time. Jemisin delivers this bit of high craft in a fresh, unstuffy voice — something rare in high fantasy, which can take its Tolkien roots too seriously. From its heartbreaking opening (a mother’s murdered child) to its shattering conclusion, Jemisin shows the power of what good fantasy fiction can do. “The Fifth Season” explores loss, grief, and personhood on an intimate level. But it also takes on themes of discrimination, human breeding and ecological collapse with an unflinching eye and a particular nuance. Jemisin weaves a world both horrifyingly familiar and unsettlingly alien. — Rebecca Roanhorse, author of “Mirrored Heavens”
If you’ve read it and like it, try: “American War,” by Omar El Akkad or “The Year of the Flood,” by Margaret Atwood.
By the time this book was published in 2005, there had already been innumerable volumes covering Europe’s history since the end of World War II. Yet none of them were quite like Judt’s: commanding and capacious, yet also attentive to those stubborn details that are so resistant to abstract theories and seductive myths. The writing, like the thinking, is clear, direct and vivid. And even as Judt was ruthless when reflecting on Europe’s past, he maintained a sense of contingency throughout, never succumbing to the comfortable certainty of despair. — Jennifer Szalai
If you’ve read it and like it, try: “We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland,” by Fintan O’Toole, “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” by Timothy D. Snyder or “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918,” by Adam Hochschild.
42. A Brief History of Seven Killings [2014] Marlon James
“Brief”? For a work spanning nearly 700 pages, that word is, at best, a winky misdirection. To skip even a paragraph, though, would be to forgo the vertiginous pleasures of James’s semi-historical novel, in which the attempted assassination of an unnamed reggae superstar who strongly resembles Bob Marley collides with C.I.A. conspiracy, international drug cartels and the vibrant, violent Technicolor of post-independence Jamaica.
If you’ve read it and like it, try: “Telex From Cuba,” by Rachel Kushner or “Brief Encounters With Che Guevara,” by Ben Fountain.
41. Small Things Like These [2021] Claire Keegan
Not a word is wasted in Keegan’s small, burnished gem of a novel, a sort of Dickensian miniature centered on the son of an unwed mother who has grown up to become a respectable coal and timber merchant with a family of his own in 1985 Ireland. Moralistically, though, it might as well be the Middle Ages as he reckons with the ongoing sins of the Catholic Church and the everyday tragedies wrought by repression, fear and rank hypocrisy.
WHY I LOVE IT: This is the book I would like to have written because its sentences portray a life — in all its silences, subtleties and defenses — that I would hope to live if its circumstances were mine. It’s never idle, I guess, to be asked what we would give up for another. — Claudia Rankine, author of “Citizen”
If you’ve read it and like it, try: “The Rachel Incident,” by Caroline O’Donoghue or “Mothers and Sons,” by Colm Tóibín.
40. H Is for Hawk [2015] by Helen Macdonald
I read “H Is for Hawk” when I was writing my own memoir, and it awakened me to the power of the genre. It is a book supposedly about training a hawk named Mabel but really about wonder and loss, discovery and death. We discover a thing, then we lose it. The discovering and the losing are two halves of the same whole. Macdonald knows this and she shows us, weaving the loss of her father through the partial taming (and taming is always partial) of this hawk. — Tara Westover, author of “Educated”
I LOVE THIS PASSAGE: “There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer.” Chosen by Tara Westover.
If you’ve read it and like it, try: “The Friend,” by Sigrid Nunez or “Braiding Sweetgrass,” by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
39. A Visit From the Goon Squad [2010] Jennifer Egan
In the good old pre-digital days, artists used to cram 15 or 20 two-and-a-half-minute songs onto a single vinyl LP. Egan accomplished a similar feat of compression in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a compact, chronologically splintered rock opera with (as they say nowadays) no skips. The 13 linked stories jump from past to present to future while reshuffling a handful of vivid characters. The themes are mighty but the mood is funny, wistful and intimate, as startling and familiar as your favorite pop album. — A.O. Scott
If you’ve read it and like it, try: Try “Girl, Woman, Other,” by Bernardine Evaristo, “Doxology,” by Nell Zink or “Telegraph Avenue,” by Michael Chabon.
38. The Savage Detectives [2007] Roberto Bolaño; translated by Natasha Wimmer
“The Savage Detectives” is brash, hilarious, beautiful, moving. It’s also over 600 pages long, which is why I know that my memory of reading it in a single sitting is definitely not true. Still, the fact that it feels that way is telling. I was not the same writer I’d been before reading it, not the same person. Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, the wayward poets whose youth is chronicled in “Detectives,” became personal heroes, and everything I’ve written since has been shaped by Bolaño’s masterpiece. — Daniel Alarcón, author of “At Night We Walk in Circles”
If you’ve read it and like it, try: “The Old Drift,” by Namwali Serpell or “The Literary Conference,” by César Aira; translated by Katherine Silver.
