Trying to choose the best books written in the 21st century is already becoming an impossible task.
We are only a little more than a quarter of the way through the century, yet readers have already been given novels that feel destined to become classics. Some have completely changed their genres. Others have won almost every major literary award possible, become international phenomena, or influenced an entire generation of writers and readers.
And then there are the books that simply refuse to leave your mind after you finish them.
For this list, I wanted to go beyond simply choosing the most critically acclaimed literary novels. I love literary fiction, but some of the greatest books of this century have also come from fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, mystery, and nonfiction.
That makes this a deliberately broad list.
These aren’t ranked from best to worst because comparing a dystopian novel like The Road with an epic historical novel like Wolf Hall or a fantasy masterpiece like The Fifth Season doesn’t make much sense. Instead, these are 26 books that I believe represent some of the very best writing published since 2000.
Here are the 26 best books of the 21st century so far.
1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Few post-apocalyptic novels are as bleak, or as moving, as The Road.
Cormac McCarthy follows a father and his young son traveling through the ruins of civilization after an unspecified catastrophe has destroyed much of the world.
There are monsters in this world, but they aren’t supernatural. They are desperate human beings.
What makes The Road unforgettable isn’t simply its depiction of civilization collapsing. It is the relationship between the father and son and the tiny amount of hope they somehow carry through a world where almost everything good has disappeared.
McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel, and it has become one of the defining American books of the century.
2. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
Fantasy has produced countless incredible books since 2000, but few feel as revolutionary as The Fifth Season.
The novel takes place on a continent called the Stillness, where catastrophic geological disasters repeatedly destroy civilizations. Certain people known as orogenes can manipulate seismic energy, but their abilities make them both valuable and feared.
Jemisin combines ambitious worldbuilding, unusual narration, climate catastrophe, oppression, family, and enormous twists into something unlike almost anything else in modern fantasy.
Even more remarkably, all three novels in Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy won the Hugo Award for Best Novel.
That alone tells you how special this series is.
Buy The Fifth Season on Amazon
3. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go initially feels like a quiet boarding-school novel.
It isn’t.
Kathy H. remembers growing up at Hailsham alongside her friends Tommy and Ruth. Slowly, readers discover that the students are being prepared for a disturbing purpose far beyond anything resembling a normal childhood.
Ishiguro could have written this as straightforward dystopian science fiction. Instead, he creates something far sadder and more intimate.
The novel asks uncomfortable questions about mortality, love, memory, and how easily society can accept injustice when it benefits everyone else.
4. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Historical fiction doesn’t get much better than Wolf Hall.
Hilary Mantel retells the rise of Thomas Cromwell during the reign of Henry VIII, transforming a historical figure frequently presented as a villain into one of modern literature’s most fascinating protagonists.
The political maneuvering is incredible, but Cromwell is what makes the novel work.
He observes everything.
He remembers everything.
And he understands how power actually operates better than almost everyone around him.
Wolf Hall won the Booker Prize, as did its sequel Bring Up the Bodies, making Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy one of the defining achievements in historical fiction this century.
5. The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
Science fiction is supposed to make you think bigger.
The Three-Body Problem certainly does that.
Liu Cixin begins with China’s Cultural Revolution before expanding into a story involving scientific mysteries, extraterrestrial civilizations, physics, technology, and ultimately the future of humanity.
What begins as a strange mystery gradually transforms into an enormous science-fiction saga.
The scope only becomes more ambitious as the trilogy continues.
For readers who love big ideas in science fiction, The Three-Body Problem is essential reading.
Buy The Three-Body Problem on Amazon
6. Atonement by Ian McEwan
One decision can destroy multiple lives.
That idea sits at the center of Ian McEwan’s Atonement.
In 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis misunderstands a series of events involving her older sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner. Her interpretation ultimately leads to an accusation with devastating consequences.
McEwan then carries the story into World War II and beyond.
Atonement is about guilt, memory, storytelling, and whether fiction can ever repair something that happened in reality.
Its ending makes you reconsider almost everything you have just read.
7. The Known World by Edward P. Jones
Edward P. Jones’s The Known World explores one of the complicated and less frequently discussed aspects of slavery in America: a Black man who owns enslaved people.
Henry Townsend was once enslaved himself before eventually becoming a landowner and slaveholder in Virginia.
From that starting point, Jones constructs an enormous network of characters and moral contradictions.
The novel refuses to simplify its subject matter, which is exactly why it is so effective.
The Known World won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and deserves to be discussed alongside the greatest works of American historical fiction.
8. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
There are plenty of novels about civilization ending.
Station Eleven is much more interested in what people choose to preserve afterward.
After a pandemic devastates the global population, a group of actors and musicians known as the Traveling Symphony moves between settlements performing Shakespeare.
That premise alone immediately separates the book from traditional post-apocalyptic fiction.
Emily St. John Mandel’s novel moves through different timelines and interconnected characters while asking an important question: Is survival enough?
The book’s answer is essentially no.
Art, stories, friendships, and human connection matter too.
9. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Donna Tartt doesn’t release novels very often, which makes each one feel like an event.
The Goldfinch follows Theo Decker after a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art kills his mother. In the chaos following the explosion, Theo leaves with a priceless painting: Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch.
That decision follows him for years.
Tartt combines a coming-of-age story with crime fiction, grief, obsession, friendship, art, and morality.
The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and remains one of the century’s most ambitious literary novels.
10. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Six stories.
Six different eras.
Six completely different styles.
Somehow, David Mitchell makes all of them part of the same larger story.
Cloud Atlas moves from the nineteenth century to a distant post-apocalyptic future, with each narrative connected to another.
It’s the type of novel that demonstrates just how flexible fiction can be.
The structure might initially seem intimidating, but watching Mitchell connect these seemingly unrelated stories is part of the fun.
11. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead takes a historical metaphor and makes it literal.
In The Underground Railroad, the network used to help enslaved people escape actually becomes a functioning underground railway.
Cora escapes from a Georgia plantation and travels through different states, each representing a different version of racism and oppression in America.
The result combines historical fiction, magical realism, and alternate history.
Whitehead won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for the novel.
Buy The Underground Railroad on Amazon
12. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Great family sagas allow us to watch history unfold through ordinary people.
Few modern novels accomplish that better than Pachinko.
Min Jin Lee follows multiple generations of a Korean family living in Japan, beginning in the early twentieth century.
The characters experience poverty, discrimination, war, ambition, sacrifice, and enormous social change.
But the novel never loses sight of the individuals living through that history.
If you enjoy sprawling historical fiction about families trying to survive forces much larger than themselves, Pachinko is essential.
13. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend begins one of the most acclaimed literary series of the century.
The novel follows Elena Greco and Raffaella “Lila” Cerullo as they grow up in a poor neighborhood in Naples.
Their friendship is loving, competitive, jealous, supportive, and occasionally cruel.
In other words, it feels real.
Ferrante uses that relationship to explore class, education, gender, ambition, family, and social change in postwar Italy.
And once you finish the first book, there’s a good chance you’ll want to read the rest of the Neapolitan Novels immediately.
Buy My Brilliant Friend on Amazon
14. The Overstory by Richard Powers
Trees are essentially the main characters in The Overstory.
That description shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does.
Richard Powers follows several people whose lives become connected through forests, environmental activism, science, and their relationships with the natural world.
The book changes the scale on which readers think about time.
Human lives suddenly seem incredibly short compared with trees that can exist for centuries.
The Overstory won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is one of the most ambitious environmental novels ever written.
15. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
Oscar de León is an overweight Dominican teenager obsessed with fantasy novels, science fiction, comic books, and finding love.
But his story is also intertwined with his family’s history under Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.
Junot Díaz blends pop culture, history, family tragedy, humor, immigration, and magical realism into a novel that sounds completely unlike most fiction around it.
The result won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Buy The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao on Amazon
16. The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Spy novels usually ask readers to figure out which side someone is on.
The narrator of The Sympathizer is on both.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s protagonist is a South Vietnamese military officer secretly working as a communist spy.
After the fall of Saigon, he escapes to the United States while continuing to report to his handlers.
The novel examines war, colonialism, immigration, identity, politics, and America’s cultural depiction of Vietnam.
It’s funny, disturbing, intelligent, and frequently unpredictable.
17. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Modern fantasy doesn’t always need to move quickly.
Sometimes you want to disappear into a massive world for hundreds of pages.
Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell imagines an alternate nineteenth-century England where magic once existed but has largely disappeared.
Then two magicians bring it back.
The novel combines fantasy with history, mythology, footnotes, war, folklore, and very British humor.
There really isn’t another fantasy novel quite like it.
Buy Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell on Amazon
18. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Some great novels rely on elaborate plots.
Gilead barely needs one.
The novel takes the form of a letter written by aging minister John Ames to his young son.
Knowing he may not live long enough to watch his child grow up, Ames writes about his family, his faith, his regrets, and the complicated history of the people around him.
Marilynne Robinson turns a quiet man’s reflections into something profound.
It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has become one of the century’s most respected literary novels.
19. The Sellout by Paul Beatty
Satire is difficult.
Great satire is even harder.
Paul Beatty somehow makes The Sellout hilarious, uncomfortable, absurd, and politically incisive at the same time.
The novel follows a Black narrator from the fictional California town of Dickens who attempts to restore his town’s identity through increasingly outrageous actions—including reintroducing segregation.
The premise is deliberately provocative.
Beatty uses it to examine race, history, hypocrisy, and American identity.
The Sellout became the first novel by an American writer to win the Booker Prize.
20. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie died in 1862.
George Saunders takes that historical tragedy and turns it into one of the strangest and most original novels of the century.
Lincoln in the Bardo imagines Willie existing in a liminal state populated by ghosts who don’t fully understand that they are dead.
The novel is told through a chorus of voices, creating a reading experience unlike a conventional historical novel.
Beneath all of its experimentation is a devastating story about grief and a father losing his child.
Buy Lincoln in the Bardo on Amazon
21. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Some books stay with you because of their characters.
Others stay with you because of their world.
The Night Circus does both.
A mysterious circus called Le Cirque des Rêves arrives without warning and opens only at night.
Behind its magical attractions is a competition between two young illusionists, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood for a contest they barely understand.
Morgenstern’s imagery makes the circus feel like somewhere you could actually visit.
Few fantasy novels this century have created an atmosphere quite as memorable.
Buy The Night Circus on Amazon
22. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Madeline Miller takes one of the oldest stories in Western literature and makes it feel completely new.
The Song of Achilles retells the story of Achilles through Patroclus, focusing on the relationship between the two men as the Trojan War approaches.
Readers may already know how the story ends.
That doesn’t make it hurt any less.
Miller combines mythology, romance, war, destiny, and tragedy in a novel that helped inspire the modern boom in mythological retellings.
Buy The Song of Achilles on Amazon
23. The Vegetarian by Han Kang
The Vegetarian is relatively short, but there is a lot happening beneath the surface.
Han Kang’s novel begins when Yeong-hye decides to stop eating meat after experiencing disturbing dreams.
Her seemingly simple decision triggers increasingly extreme reactions from the people around her.
The novel becomes a disturbing exploration of autonomy, desire, violence, control, conformity, and the human body.
It won the International Booker Prize and helped introduce an enormous international readership to Han Kang’s work.
24. Educated by Tara Westover
One of the most remarkable nonfiction books published this century is Tara Westover’s Educated.
Westover grew up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho and did not receive a conventional education.
Her pursuit of learning eventually took her from an isolated childhood to universities including Cambridge.
But describing Educated simply as a story about education misses what makes it powerful.
It’s also about family, memory, identity, loyalty, and the enormous emotional cost of changing your life.
25. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns documents the Great Migration, during which millions of Black Americans left the South for cities elsewhere in the United States during the twentieth century.
Rather than simply presenting the history through statistics, Wilkerson focuses heavily on individual lives.
That approach gives the migration a human scale.
It is history told through people who had to make enormous decisions about their families, communities, careers, and futures.
For anyone interested in American history, this is one of the most important nonfiction books published in the 21st century.
Buy The Warmth of Other Suns on Amazon
26. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by S.A. Chakraborty
I’m including one newer fantasy novel that I believe deserves much more attention when people discuss the best books of the century so far.
Amina al-Sirafi has almost everything I want from a fantasy adventure: pirates, mythology, monsters, magic, history, and a protagonist who isn’t a teenager discovering her powers for the first time.
Amina is already an experienced pirate when circumstances force her back into the dangerous life she thought she had escaped.
S.A. Chakraborty builds a fantasy world inspired by the medieval Indian Ocean while delivering the kind of adventure that is simply fun to read.
It has quickly become one of my favorite modern fantasy novels.
Buy The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi on Amazon
What Is the Best Book of the 21st Century?
There probably isn’t one correct answer.
If I had to narrow this list down to a few books that feel especially representative of the century so far, I’d choose The Road, The Fifth Season, Never Let Me Go, Wolf Hall, Pachinko, and The Three-Body Problem.
But that’s also what makes discussing great books fun.
Someone who primarily reads literary fiction will create a completely different list from someone who loves fantasy, science fiction, mysteries, or historical fiction.
And with decades still remaining in the century, this list will inevitably change.
That’s a good problem to have.
We have already gotten an incredible number of books since 2000 and some of the defining novels of the 21st century probably haven’t even been written yet.
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