Best Books of the 21st Century

A darkly humorous and touching study in grief and companionship, Nunez’s award-winning novel follows a woman who unexpectedly loses her mentor and best friend and inherits his huge, bereaved Great Dane. A moving story of love, friendship, grief,...

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...

The second novel by Donna Tartt,  bestselling author of The Goldfinch (winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize),  The Little Friend  is a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence and evil. The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi,...

Middlesex is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides—the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and...

'Fiercely intelligent, very funny and unlike anything else I've ever read' -- MARK HADDON'Original...witty...playful...a wonderfully funny book' -- JAMES WOOD'A triumph - a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form' -- A. S. BYATTEleven-year-old Ludo is...

A perfectly poised Rubik’s Cube of a novel that explodes ideas of what the form can achieve, Cloud Atlas travels through a buccaneering past and a chill dystopian future to interweave six fragmentary but eminently credible narratives into a stunningly...

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2023. Asle is an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway. His only friends are his neighbour, Asleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city...

WINNER OF THE 2023 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE.New York Times Editors' Choice.Longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize. “Fosse’s fusing of the commonplace and the existential, together with his dramatic forays into the past, make...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic, beloved novel of two boy geniuses dreaming up superheroes in New York’s Golden Age of comics, now with special bonus material by the author—soon to...

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...

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize• Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award• One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.“Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority.”...

If you believe in a thing called love (in all of its forms), hop into this journey across time and distance (and pixels) and dig into the universal importance of friendship, human connection, and beyond.NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • Sam and...

WINNER OF THE 2009 MAN BOOKER PRIZE.WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION.A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be...

WINNER OF THE 2012 MAN BOOKER PRIZE.  The sequel to Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller, Bring Up the Bodies delves into the heart of Tudor history with the downfall of Anne Boleyn...

Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel 2018. The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women. Essun has inherited the phenomenal power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to...

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...

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...

Essun's missing daughter grows more powerful every day, and her choices may destroy the world in this "magnificent" Hugo Award winner and NYT Notable Book. (NPR)The season of endings grows darker, as civilization fades into the long cold night.Essun —...

An "official" record that focuses solely on battlefields and political speeches and the passage of legislation presents an incomplete picture of our history; this is an accessible, entertaining story of social change from an overlooked quarter of our...

One of a handful of graphic novels that elevate the form into an intensely personal artistic statement, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s astonishing visual memoir of growing up in Iran. Intertwining the intimate with the political and compelling drama...