Best Books of the 21st Century

Empire's Pick for The Best Books Made By Women in Fiction 2021.WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2014.SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014.WINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARD.WINNER OF THE SALTIRE SOCIETY LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR...

Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2006. Empire's Pick for The Best Books Made By Women in Fiction 2021. Light struck the double glass doors that led to the garden, filtering through the arch that split the kitchen. It rested...

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017, Exit West is a daring, inventive love story. Travelling from the Middle East to London and beyond, Hamid imagines the potential for a world without borders. Nadia and Saeed are two ordinary young people,...

When We Cease to Understand the World shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled minds we are thrust...

'Utterly, agonisingly compulsive ... a masterpiece' -- Liz Jensen, Guardian.Following one woman's journey from a troubled girlhood in working-class Copenhagen through her struggle to live on her own terms, The Copenhagen Trilogy is a...

Gorgeous prose woven into the breakneck pace of a page-turning thriller. Set in Los Angeles among Vietnamese refugees after the fall of Saigon, this is a story steeped in stakes and begging to be read. Don’t miss it. Now an HBO Limited Series...

**Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History**"Extraordinary...a great American biography" (The New Yorker) of the most important African-American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and...

Asle is an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway. His only friends are his neighbour, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The lives of three women—transgender and cisgender—collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2021 SO FAR.Vulture: “Reading this...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • The acclaimed memoir about fathers and sons, a legacy of loss, and, ultimately, healing—one of The New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of the year, winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book...

One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015.One of Jezebel's Favorite Books of 2016.A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin.With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of...

Masterful, Pulitzer-prize winning literary epic about the painful and complex realities of slave life on a Southern plantation. An utterly original exploration of race, trust and the cruel truths of human nature, this is a landmark in modern American...

The Story of the Lost Child concludes the dazzling saga of two women, the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery, uncontainable Lila, who first met amid the shambles of postwar Italy. In this book, life’s great discoveries have been made; its vagaries...

A stunning collection including the story "Sea Oak," from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo and the story collection Tenth of December, a 2013 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction...

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER and an award-winning novel in stories surrounding a young, half-white, half-Puerto Rican boy grappling with life, love, and identity as he comes of age.In this groundbreaking debut, Justin Torres plunges us into the chaotic heart of...

Asle is an aging painter and widower who lives alone on the west coast of Norway. His only friends are his neighbor, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a...

From the New York Times–bestselling author of My Brilliant Friend, this novel of a deserted wife’s descent into despair—and rage—is “a masterpiece” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).The Days of Abandonment is the gripping story of an Italian woman’s...