12 Award-Winning Books of the 2020s You Need to Read

There are thousands of novels published every year, which can make finding your next great read feel overwhelming. One simple way to narrow down your choices is to look for that little gold, silver, or brightly colored sticker on the cover announcing that a book has won a major literary award.

Winning an award certainly does not guarantee that every reader will love a book. But when a novel wins the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Booker Prize, Hugo Award, Edgar Award, or another prestigious honor, it usually means that a panel of experienced readers, critics, writers, or industry professionals believed there was something exceptional about it.

And the competition is fierce.

Thousands of books may be published in a year, dozens can receive serious award consideration, a small number become finalists, and ultimately only one or occasionally two, walk away with the biggest prize.

For authors, winning a major literary award can transform a career. A relatively unknown book can suddenly appear on bestseller lists, attract international readers, receive adaptation interest, and remain in print for decades. And an author’s name may forever be introduced with the phrase “award-winning author.”

The 2020s have already given readers an incredible collection of award-winning fiction. From devastating historical novels and dark horror stories to experimental literary fiction and hilarious science fiction, there is something here for almost every type of reader.

Here are 12 award-winning books of the 2020s that deserve a place on your reading list.

The Best Award-Winning Books of the 2020s

1. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver— Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
2. Trust by Hernan Diaz   — Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
3. The Rabbit Hutch, by Tess Gunty  — National Book Award for Fiction
4. The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich – Pulitzer Prize for Fiction  
5. The Promise by Damon Galgut — Booker Prize
6. Deacon King Kong by James McBride — Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
7. At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated by Anna Moschovakis — International Booker Prize
8. Network Effect by Martha Wells — Hugo Award and Nebula Award
9. The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones — Bram Stoker Award
10. Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu — National Book Award for Fiction
11. Luster by Raven Leilani — Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
12. Miracle Creek by Angie Kim — Edgar Award for Best First Novel

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead was one of two books to receive the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, sharing the honor with Hernan Diaz’s Trust. The Pulitzer committee described Kingsolver’s novel as a reimagining of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield centered on a boy growing up in Appalachia.

That connection to Dickens may make the novel sound intimidating, but you do not have to read David Copperfield first to appreciate it.

At the heart of Demon Copperhead is a young boy trying to survive poverty, unstable adults, the foster-care system, addiction, and institutions that repeatedly fail the people they are supposed to protect.

What makes this novel work so well is Demon himself.

Kingsolver gives him a memorable narrative voice that can be funny and observant even when his circumstances are heartbreaking. That prevents the novel from becoming relentlessly bleak. Demon is constantly fighting to survive, and you quickly become invested in what happens to him.

The book is also an examination of Appalachia and the opioid epidemic without reducing either subject to stereotypes. Kingsolver gives the setting and its residents complexity, anger, humor, flaws, and dignity.

It is long, emotional, and sometimes difficult to read, but that scope is also what makes the novel feel so rewarding.

Read this if you like: character-driven novels, coming-of-age stories, historical and social fiction, and books such as David Copperfield or The Goldfinch.

Trust by Hernan Diaz

Sharing the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with Demon Copperhead was Hernan Diaz’s fascinating novel Trust. The Pulitzer describes it as a novel exploring wealth, family, ambition, love, and power through multiple interconnected narratives.

The premise is immediately intriguing.

At the center of the story is an extremely wealthy financier and his wife during the early decades of the twentieth century. But instead of simply giving readers one version of their lives, Diaz repeatedly changes the perspective.

The result is a novel that asks an important question: Who gets to control the story?

As you move through the book, earlier assumptions are challenged and seemingly reliable accounts begin to look very different.

That unusual construction makes Trust a great choice for readers who enjoy novels that require some participation. Diaz wants you to question what you are reading rather than passively accept every narrator’s version of events.

Money is obviously central to the novel, but Trust is ultimately just as interested in storytelling, marriage, reputation, and the ways powerful people can shape history.

It is one of the most inventive literary novels of the decade.

Read this if you like: historical fiction, literary mysteries, unreliable narrators, Wall Street stories, and experimental novels.

The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty

Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch won the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction. The National Book Foundation described the novel as a darkly comic, multi-perspective portrait of residents living in a struggling Midwestern apartment complex.

The apartment building gives Gunty the perfect structure for telling several interconnected stories.

Behind every door is another person carrying private disappointments, desires, fears, or obsessions.

But the character at the center of everything is Blandine, a young woman whose intelligence and intensity make her difficult to forget.

The novel is ambitious and sometimes strange. Gunty frequently experiments with style and perspective rather than following a straightforward narrative from beginning to end.

That will not work for everyone.

For the right reader, however, The Rabbit Hutch is exactly the kind of debut novel that makes you excited to see what an author does next.

It explores loneliness, poverty, abandoned communities, youth, religion, exploitation, and the strange ways people’s lives collide.

Read this if you like: unconventional literary fiction, multiple narrators, dark humor, and ambitious debut novels.

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Night Watchman, a novel about a Native American community fighting a U.S. government effort that threatened tribal rights during the 1950s.

The story carries additional emotional weight because Erdrich drew inspiration from the experiences of her grandfather, who fought against termination policies affecting Native tribes.

Instead of turning that history into a dry political novel, Erdrich fills the book with memorable characters and everyday life.

We follow Thomas Wazhashk, a night watchman trying to organize opposition to government policy, alongside Pixie Paranteau, a young woman whose personal journey eventually takes her far beyond her home.

Their lives give readers different ways into the larger story.

There is politics here, but also family, romance, work, friendship, boxing, humor, danger, and community.

That balance is what makes The Night Watchman such a strong novel. It teaches readers about an important piece of American history while still functioning first and foremost as a compelling story.

Read this if you like: historical fiction, family sagas, Native American literature, and novels based on real events.

The Promise by Damon Galgut

Damon Galgut’s The Promise won the 2021 Booker Prize for Fiction.

Set in South Africa, the novel follows members of the Swart family across several decades as the country itself undergoes enormous political and social change.

The title refers to a promise made concerning Salome, a Black woman who has worked for the family for years.

That promise remains unresolved.

As years pass, family members die, relationships change, and South Africa moves out of apartheid, the family’s failure to fulfill its obligation becomes increasingly significant.

Galgut uses one family to examine much larger questions involving ownership, race, inheritance, guilt, morality, and historical responsibility.

The narrative style can take some time to adjust to because the point of view moves fluidly between characters and observations. Once you settle into the rhythm, however, it becomes part of what makes the novel distinctive.

The Promise is not always a comfortable book, but it is an intelligent and powerful one.

Read this if you like: literary family sagas, political fiction, international literature, and morally complicated characters.

Deacon King Kong by James McBride

James McBride’s Deacon King Kong won the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. The American Library Association praised the novel’s portrayal of a multicultural Brooklyn neighborhood in 1969.

The story begins with one unforgettable act.

Cuffy “Sportcoat” Lambkin, an aging church deacon, walks up to a young drug dealer and shoots him.

From there, McBride expands outward.

The shooting affects residents, church members, criminals, police officers, neighborhood figures, and other people whose lives are connected in ways they may not initially realize.

This could easily have become an extremely dark crime novel.

Instead, Deacon King Kong is frequently hilarious.

McBride understands how to use humor without minimizing the serious subjects underneath the story. He writes about drugs, racism, poverty, changing neighborhoods, religion, organized crime, and community while creating characters who feel larger than life.

New York City novels often succeed because the city itself becomes a character, and that is definitely true here.

This is Brooklyn in all of its chaotic, funny, dangerous, frustrating, and beautiful glory.

Read this if you like: New York novels, crime fiction, historical fiction, ensemble casts, and books that mix humor with serious themes.

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop

David Diop’s At Night All Blood Is Black, translated into English by Anna Moschovakis, won the 2021 International Booker Prize. The novel follows Senegalese soldiers fighting for France during World War I.

This is easily one of the darkest books on the list.

After experiencing a devastating loss in the trenches, soldier Alfa Ndiaye begins descending psychologically into the violence surrounding him.

Diop does not romanticize war.

The battlefield becomes surreal, horrifying, repetitive, and psychologically destructive. Readers experience much of that transformation through Alfa’s increasingly disturbed state of mind.

The novel is short, but that makes it even more intense.

There is very little wasted space. Diop repeatedly returns to images and ideas until they begin to feel almost hypnotic.

If you enjoy historical fiction but want something different from the sprawling war epic, this is worth reading.

Read this if you like: World War I fiction, psychological novels, short literary fiction, and dark historical stories.

Network Effect by Martha Wells

Science fiction fans should already recognize Murderbot.

Martha Wells’s Network Effect, the first full-length Murderbot novel, won both the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Murderbot is a security unit that has hacked its own control system and would generally prefer watching entertainment to interacting with humans.

Unfortunately, danger keeps interfering.

That basic setup gives Wells the ability to combine fast-paced science fiction action with one of the funniest and most relatable artificial-intelligence characters in modern fiction.

Murderbot is sarcastic, awkward, highly competent, uncomfortable with emotions, and increasingly attached to people despite insisting otherwise.

Network Effect expands the world and relationships established in the earlier Murderbot novellas while giving the character a larger adventure.

You should ideally start with All Systems Red, but readers who become invested in the series have a fantastic full-length novel waiting for them.

Read this if you like: artificial intelligence, space adventures, sarcastic protagonists, found family, and fast science fiction.

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones won the 2020 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel for The Only Good Indians.

If you want horror on your award-winning reading list, this should be near the top.

The novel follows four Blackfeet men who are haunted by something connected to an event from their youth.

Jones combines supernatural horror with guilt, identity, friendship, tradition, revenge, and the consequences of decisions that refuse to stay buried.

The horror can be brutal.

But the novel has much more on its mind than simply frightening readers.

Jones uses the supernatural elements to explore questions about cultural identity and the complicated relationship between past and present.

The result is a book that feels both like a modern horror story and something much older.

It is unsettling, unpredictable, and impossible to easily categorize.

Read this if you like: supernatural horror, revenge stories, Indigenous fiction, psychological horror, and novels that get increasingly strange.

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction.

The novel is written partly like a screenplay and centers on Willis Wu, a man accustomed to being cast in stereotypical background roles.

His dream is to become “Kung Fu Guy.”

That description alone tells you this is not a conventional novel.

Yu uses the language and structure of television to examine how Asian Americans have historically been represented in American popular culture.

The satire is often funny, but the ideas underneath it are serious.

What happens when society constantly assigns people roles before learning who they actually are?

And what happens when those stereotypes become so familiar that people begin viewing themselves through them?

Interior Chinatown manages to be experimental without losing sight of the human story at its center.

It is one of those novels where the unusual structure is not simply a gimmick—the structure is essential to what the novel wants to say.

Read this if you like: satire, experimental fiction, books about Hollywood, cultural criticism, and inventive storytelling.

Luster by Raven Leilani

Raven Leilani’s debut novel Luster won the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and received several other honors.

The novel follows Edie, a young Black woman living in New York whose life becomes entangled with an older married man and eventually with his entire family.

Things become uncomfortable very quickly.

That discomfort is part of the appeal.

Leilani writes characters who make terrible decisions, misunderstand each other, hurt each other, and continue moving forward anyway.

Edie is especially compelling because she is allowed to be messy. She is not designed to fit neatly into the role of a likable protagonist.

The book examines work, sex, race, art, loneliness, ambition, money, and the exhausting uncertainty of trying to build an adult life.

Leilani’s prose is sharp and often funny even when the situations are painful.

For readers who enjoy modern literary fiction focused on complicated people rather than elaborate plots, Luster is an excellent choice.

Read this if you like: messy characters, contemporary literary fiction, dark comedy, New York stories, and complicated relationships.

Miracle Creek by Angie Kim

Angie Kim’s Miracle Creek won the 2020 Edgar Award for Best First Novel.

Of all the books on this list, this may be the easiest recommendation for mystery and thriller readers.

The novel revolves around an explosion at a treatment facility and the resulting courtroom case.

But figuring out exactly what happened becomes increasingly complicated.

Kim moves between different characters, gradually revealing secrets, resentment, guilt, lies, and information that changes how readers interpret earlier events.

That makes Miracle Creek the type of mystery where the characters are just as important as the solution.

The courtroom framework creates suspense, but Kim is also interested in immigration, parenting, disability, family expectations, marriage, and the desperate choices ordinary people make when placed under enormous pressure.

The best mysteries do more than answer “Who did it?”

They make you understand why almost everyone involved had something to hide.

Miracle Creek does exactly that.

Read this if you like: courtroom dramas, mysteries, family secrets, multiple perspectives, and character-driven thrillers.

What Makes an Award-Winning Book Worth Reading?

Literary awards are useful because they can push readers toward books they might otherwise overlook.

A science fiction reader may discover literary fiction because it won the Pulitzer Prize. A historical fiction fan might try horror after seeing the Bram Stoker Award sticker. And a reader who usually sticks with bestselling American novels may discover translated fiction through the International Booker Prize.

That is where award lists are most valuable.

They are not rules telling you what you have to enjoy.

They are discovery tools.

The books on this list demonstrate just how broad the category of “award-winning fiction” can be. Network Effect gives us sarcastic artificial intelligence and space battles. The Only Good Indians delivers supernatural horror. Miracle Creekoffers a courtroom mystery. Demon Copperhead is a sweeping coming-of-age story. Interior Chinatown plays with screenplay conventions. At Night All Blood Is Black takes readers into the horrors of World War I.

There is no single formula for an award-winning novel.

And that is exactly why these books are worth exploring.

Which Award-Winning Book Should You Read First?

If you are trying to decide where to start, consider the type of books you normally enjoy.

For an emotional, sweeping literary novel, start with Demon Copperhead.

For historical fiction, try The Night Watchman or At Night All Blood Is Black.

For mystery readers, Miracle Creek is the obvious choice.

Science fiction readers should dive into Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries before reaching Network Effect.

Horror fans should pick up The Only Good Indians.

If you enjoy unusual literary novels that experiment with structure, choose Trust, Interior Chinatown, or The Rabbit Hutch.

And if you want a big, funny ensemble novel filled with memorable characters, Deacon King Kong is hard to beat.

Conclusion

A literary award is never a guarantee that you will love a book. Reading is too personal for that.

But major book prizes remain one of the best ways to discover ambitious novels, exciting new authors, and stories you might never have picked up otherwise.

The 2020s have already produced an impressive collection of winners, and these 12 novels show just how diverse award-winning fiction can be.

From Barbara Kingsolver’s unforgettable Demon Copperhead and Hernan Diaz’s inventive Trust to Martha Wells’s hilarious Network Effect and Stephen Graham Jones’s terrifying The Only Good Indians, there is something here for almost every reader.

The only difficult part is deciding which one to read first.

How many of these award-winning books have you read? And which award-winning novel from the 2020s deserves to be added to the list? Let us know in the comments!

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