Best Fiction Books of the Century (So Far)

“Time's a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” It’s a fact of life that the goon always wins—time only moves in one direction—but the inevitability doesn’t make it any easier for us or Jennifer Egan’s characters to accept. An aging punk rocker turned record producer and his assistant, a young woman in the classic pretty-but-she-has-issues mold, are at the heart of this formally inventive novel-in-stories, but it’s the side-quests and supporting characters who fill in their histories that seal the deal. Life may be devastatingly short; books like this make it bearable.

This portrait of a nascent marriage undone when a man is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit asks readers to sit with so many uncomfortable truths, about everything from racism and the American justice system to what we owe the people in our lives, including the ones we’ve made vows to, when we’re changed by an unthinkable set of circumstances. Jones is in my personal pantheon of writers who’ll wreck you as much with the words they put on the page as the ones they leave out. This book puts that particular skill set on full, achingly poignant display, and it’s no wonder it’s the book that made her a household name.

Audition is a novel in two acts, related to each by character and theme, but not necessarily….reality? The main character meets someone claiming to be her son, though she refuses that as a possibility, though it seems to rattle her and seeps into growing cracks in her sense of self. Then, and I don’t want to say too much here, the book shifts into another…possible world. Kitamura’s mastery of tone allows her great latitude for the disorientation readers will feel as the book proceeds, which somehow both lessens and heightens a sensation of weird possibility. It’s an unforgettable, singular reading experience from a modern master.

Beartown is a book about hockey, but not really. In a tiny forest town in Sweden, hockey is everything. Dreams and glory of the past weigh on the shoulders of the junior hockey league as the town’s economy is failing. After the semi-final match, one of the players commits a violent act that creates a ripple effect throughout the town. Amongst tension and violence, there is hope. Translated from Swedish, the Beartown trilogy explores the complexities of humanity within a tightknit community.

No matter what she writes, when Ann Patchett releases a new book, readers clamor for it. That's in no small part due to this novel's impact. Bel Canto is a story about the power of music and art to forge bonds, even in the unlikeliest of circumstances. Its lush and evocative prose ferries readers through a story about crisis and humanity. In addition to the book's suite of literary honors–the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Orange Prize, and glowing praise from critical outlets–the book was adapted into a 2018 film starring Julianne Moore and Ken Watanabe. Start here to discover what makes Patchett's work beloved by readers and critics.

An Oprah's Book Club pick, with multiple awards, I’ll note that it also won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction in 2021 which made James McBride the first, and only writer, to win the prize twice. Set at the end of the '60s, McBride breathes so much life into his novel through exceptionally written residents of a housing project in Brooklyn. We get to know the community through the fallout of Sportcoat—an old church deacon—shooting off another resident’s ear. How interesting are the residents? McBride even briefly follows Colombian ants (as in the actual insects)! And the audiobook is narrated by Dominic Hoffman from A Different World.

Demon Copperhead earned Barbara Kingsolver the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. It was an Oprah's Book Club selection, a bestseller, and it dominated Best Of lists. The story set in southern Appalachia and following a boy raised by a young single mom in poverty is widely viewed as a contemporary classic. It's no small feat to dance with a literary great like Charles Dickens and produce your own masterpiece about childhood poverty, rural America, and the power of story.

With Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk wraps an exploration of existentialism in a wintry mystery set in a remote Polish village. It's there that Janina—a William Blake-translating, astrology-studying local who prefers animals to humans—takes care of the many homes that are empty during the off-season. But this year is different. A neighbor has been found dead, and soon there are others. Not only that, but Janina is sure she knows who is responsible. Tokarczuk's fluid writing is steeped in philosophical musings that take its reader on a ride.

Celeste Ng's bestselling and award-winning debut novel has been overshadowed by her follow-up, Little Fires Everywhere, but this is the book that made her a name to watch in literary fiction. It follows a Chinese American family after their daughter Lydia drowns in a lake. As they try to piece together what happened to Lydia, we get insight into the struggles and secrets of each family member, exploring sexism, racism, immigration, and the quiet compromises that define a life. This is such a finely drawn portrait of a family in under 300 pages, making it a perfect pick for book club or classroom discussion.

I know it’s embarrassing to fawn over Jonathan Safran Foer in the year 2026. But at Book Riot, we get one free pass for our literary Jonathan of choice, and he’s mine. Published in 2005, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was one of the first major novels to confront 9/11. Much like COVID fiction today, people complained that it was too soon. But Safran Foer’s experimental use of the page — sometimes heaped with overlapping text, sometimes blank but for a single word, ending with a flip-book animation of someone jumping from the towers — expresses a pain too deep to describe in words alone. Written from the perspective of a nine-year-old boy seeking answers about his father who died in the attack, it’s a gut-wrenching and gorgeous encapsulation of our collective grief.

Lauren Groff took the “two sides to every story” trope and dialed up the intensity in this story of a 24-year marriage and creative partnership between Lotto, an aspiring actor turned celebrated playwright and golden boy, and the gorgeous, enigmatic, and mysterious Mathilde. Told first from his perspective and then from hers with elements of Greek Tragedy, the truths revealed in Mathilde’s turn dissolve all the glamour so carefully laid before the shift. It’s a novel about marriage and secrets, but also art and privilege and rage. Full of razor-sharp insight and exquisite prose, Fates established Groff as a force in literary fiction.

Not much happens in this award-winning novel, but it is about everything. Approaching the end of his life in a small town in Kansas in the 1950s, an aging pastor reflects on faith, family, community, connection, and the beauty of simply being alive. As Reverend John Ames writes to his young son, the product of an unexpected, late-in-life marriage to a woman decades his junior, we feel him—and Robinson—exorting us to, as Mary Oliver instructed, “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” The rare work of fiction that offers an encounter with real wisdom, Gilead is a book that will change you if you let it.

Girl, Woman, Other is a rich and vivid portrait of 12 people, most of them women and Black. From a lesbian playwright to a nonbinary influencer and a white-passing schoolteacher, the characters’ stories are connected by their shared identities and experiences across decades of life in the United Kingdom. The fast-paced novel is written entirely in lowercase, allowing the prose to flow almost lyrically as it examines Britain’s complicated colonial history. It won Evaristo the Booker Prize in 2019, making her the first Black woman to win that prize.

We love a debut that appears out of the blue to blow our minds, and that's what Homegoing did. This stunning multigenerational saga tracing diverging family branches from 18th century Africa to contemporary times gives life to a full cast of characters. Gyasi expertly illustrates the long reach of the slave trade and colonization from generation to generation. Her skillful storytelling earned her multiple awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, and launched her book onto the international bestsellers list.

Erasure widened Percival Everett's name recognition through its adaptation, American Fiction, but James racked up the awards, letting it be known that the established author is a literary force. The novel resetting the story of Jim, Huck Finn's companion in the classic Mark Twain story, focuses the perspective on Twain's Black, enslaved character. In Everett's reimagining, Jim is James, a code-switching intellectual working to rescue himself and his family from enslavement. Everett's defining work won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Award.

In this beautifully written novel, Jonny is an Indigiqueer person returning to the reservation to attend his stepfather's funeral. In the week that follows, he tries to reconcile his life in the city with his life on the rez, including the complex relationship he has with his family. Jonny Appleseed came out in 2018 and was one of the first traditionally published books with a Two-Spirit main character. It was nominated for the biggest literary awards in Canada, including the Governor General's Awards and the Giller Prize, and it won a Lambda Literary Award. It also won the 2021 Canada Reads competition.

"I am of the nature to die. How, then, should I live?" This question from Buddhism's "Five Remembrances" could also be the log line for George Saunders's Booker Prize-winning novel about souls trapped in a state between life and death. While President Abraham Lincoln visits his son Willie’s grave, the spirits of the dead look on, considering what it would take to come to terms with the reality that they are dead and finally move on to the afterlife. The regret and longing that hold them back are deeply human even if they no longer are, making this, like Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, a ghost story that isn’t really about the ghosts at all.

Collecting numerous honors including the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Kirkus Prize, Leilani’s electric debut follows 23-year-old Edie, a painter living in Bushwick, who becomes entangled with Eric. The 40-something archivist has an open marriage with Rebecca, and they have adopted 12-year-old Akila, the only Black person in their New Jersey neighborhood. Delving into art, class, desire, and race, this story, which I devoured in three days, shattered my heart, made me cackle, and had me underlining everything from phrases to entire passages. Really, open this book to any page to appreciate the beauty of a well-crafted sentence.

Rufi Thorpe writes with such humor and emotional depth. Her characters feel real and relatable with all of their messy, endearing, and terrible qualities brought to life. While all of her books are exceptional, this book in particular has made a noteworthy impact this century. It received many honors, including the L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize, and it got adapted into an Emmy Award-winning TV series starring Elle Fanning, Nick Offerman, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Something I love most about Thorpe’s writing is her social commentary on parenthood, and single motherhood especially gets a much-needed spotlight in this story.

Martyr!, poet Kaveh Akbar’s remarkable debut novel, is the kind of book that forever alters your brain chemistry. It stars Cyrus, a queer Iranian American poet who grew up in the shadow of his mother’s death from a senseless act of violence. Cyrus has grown obsessed with the concept of martyrdom and what it means to die with purpose. As he works on a manuscript about martyrs, he encounters an Iranian artist with a terminal cancer diagnosis whose insights reshape Cyrus’s perspective. Although the story deals with heavy topics like death, grief, and war, Akbar writers with a sense of playfulness and whimsy that shines a warm light on the darkest corners of the human psyche. It’s a phenomenal first novel from an author we’re sure to still be talking about at the end of the century.

The worldwide success of the Neapolitan Quartet, a series about two best friends and their intertwined lives in Naples, led to a new focus on translated literature in the U.S. But that aside, Ferrante's vivid writing about the lives of Lila and Lena positions her as the Jane Austen of our time, unfolding the social, emotional, and internal lives of women with a descriptive and personal touch. The prose should be thick but is instead endlessly compelling as the women's conflicted, loving, and often tortured friendship unfolds over the course of decades, all beginning with this first, roiling coming-of-age tale that took the world by storm.

Irish author Sally Rooney writes in such a frank and introspective style. She creates raw and emotional characters dealing with complicated feelings about family, friendship, love, mental health, identity, social class, politics, and more. This coming of age story really immerses you within the heads of her protagonists Connell and Marianne and their tangled friendship and romance during their school years. The book won multiple awards, as well as a Booker Prize Finalist honor, while the TV series adaptation starring Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones received a number of accolades as well, cementing its impact this century.

In this stunner of a debut, Nuyorican siblings attempt to achieve the American Dream. Olga is a wedding planner for New York’s 1%, Prieto a congressman with pure intentions but not as much political savvy. Both have big plans to do big things their way, but come up against the limitations of capitalism, corruption, and their activist mother’s legacy. What might sound like a familiar “all that glitters is not gold” story is a unique and layered tale of family, politics, and identity, and a sharply observed portrait of Nuyorican culture, the struggle for Puerto Rican independence, and Brooklyn’s sociopolitical scene.

Strout’s masterwork feels even more relevant these days because of how artfully she addresses the concept of aging. With everyone afraid to get old, Olive’s eventual embrace of her new stage of life is even more touching. The characters in the small Maine town of Crosby are full of grievances, affection, and small joys. Olive herself is a fixture of the town, and as a former schoolteacher, she has interacted with basically everyone. Strout gives us insight into the internal lives of all of these people because no one exists in isolation, no matter how difficult and flinty they can be (like Olive). It’s a beautiful piece of literature.

Ocean Vuong's debut novel takes the form of a letter written by a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother, recounting their family history as well as the fraught relationship between the two of them. It explores trauma, war, masculinity, abuse, and grief. Vuong is a poet, and that shines through in the sumptuous language. It won the Publishing Triangle Award as well as the Stonewall Book Award, and we're not the only ones who think it's one of the best of the century: it was also a New York Times Readers Pick for the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, and it was one of Kirkus's Best Books of the 21st Century (So Far).

If there has been a better multi-generational family epic published in the last 20 years, I don’t know what it is. Spanning about 80 years, Pachinko follows a family from a small village in Korea, whose world is upended by the Japanese annexation of 1910. Sunja is the linchpin of the saga, who sees her fortunes rise, fall, and extend out into the later 20th century and across the Pacific ocean to her descendants. Lee manages to weave the interpersonal drama of the characters of Pachinko with the turnings of the wider world.  Even for readers (like this one) who know little of the long history of Koreans in Japan can feel the frustrations, heartbreak, and search for something like self-determination.

The campus novel is perennially popular, and Sittenfeld's debut is not only a worthy addition to the canon, but it marked her as an author whose career would span decades. Prep centers on a teen protagonist dropped off at an elite prep high school, following her highs and lows, balancing friendship, challenging teachers, and obsession with classmates whose lives look wholly different from hers. It is a character-driven story about observation, and it's one that not only holds up a mirror to our adolescent protagonist. It also holds that mirror up to the institution–and to our culture more broadly.

While ruminating on loss, mythology, nature, and secrets, Ward’s moving second book and first National Book Award win examines the complications and beauties of life in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. Fourteen-year-old Esch lives in “the Pit,” her maternal grandmother’s acreage, with her three brothers, father, a beloved pit bull, and a litter of puppies. As Katrina forms then strengthens over the Gulf of Mexico, the family prepares for the hurricane: “We ain’t had one come straight for us in years, time enough to forget how many jugs of water we need to fill, how many cans of sardines and potted meat we should stock, how many tubs of water we need.”

In this book about a troubled mother, two young siblings, and their beloved grandparents, ghosts take center stage, connecting the present of the narrative back to the grandfather's time at Parchman prison, and the harsh realities of the history of chain gangs and forced labor. Ward is one of the most important writers of our time, painting the cruel realities and old stories of the Black experience in the American South in rich, bold language and subtle, gorgeous metaphor. She won the National Book Award for this unflinching story of generational trauma, institutionalized racism, and the strength it takes to survive.

A book that was tragically ahead of its time and was part of the greatest Pulitzer injustice of the century, Karen Russell’s debut novel epitomized weird girl lit years before BookTok made it trendy. The story of a 13-year-old girl coming of age in her family’s alligator wrestling-themed amusement park and grieving the loss of her father could go awry in several ways, and in a lesser writer’s hands, it would. But Russell has full control, which allows readers to let go and enjoy the ride. And what a ride it is! Swamplandia! announced Russell as a wildly imaginative writer unafraid to take a big swing, and it remains a joy to read.

This Lambda Award-winning collection of stories about queer Black women is going to live in my head for a long time. If you love Carmen Maria Machado's work, you need to pick this up. Both authors excel at writing feminist, fabulist/magical realist stories that get under your skin. These stories explore intense, undefined relationships between women; the horror of having a body (especially a racialized, sexualized body); and the strange paths grief can lead you down. Visceral, evocative, and thought-provoking, these are stories that benefit from discussion and deep reading. This collection deserves to be recognized as a new classic.

Hailed by critics as the first Great American Novel of the 21st century, Jonathan Franzen’s breakout novel has only gotten better with time. In his hands, familiar themes of growing up, selling out, and turning into your parents—or overcorrecting to disastrous effect in an attempt to avoid doing so—feel electric and alive. Idiosyncratic references (Schopenhauer; obscure indie rock bands) and unforgettable turns of phrase (“jismic grunting butt-oink”) combine to produce a totally singular text—this is a book only Jonathan Franzen could have written—about ideas and experiences almost all of us will encounter.

From the title alone, we know early on that Vivek, who the story is centered around, dies. Despite this, Emezi's poetic writing grips you and propels you forward. Readers are moved through time—from when Vivek is born in Nigeria to an Indian mother and Nigerian father, through his middle-class upbringing, and finally to his dissociative episodes. Vivek finds community in the daughters of foreign-born women and his cousin, and finally begins to step into his queerness when tragedy strikes. Here is a transcendent story of queerness and love in Nigeria—a modern classic.

Although Sigrid Nunez’s work has sometimes flown under the radar, her National Book Award-winning 2018 novel The Friend formally announced her brilliance to the world. It tells the story of an unnamed narrator grieving the loss of her mentor-turned-best-friend, a writer who died by suicide. His enormous Great Dane is also grieving, and our narrator agrees to take him into her tiny Manhattan apartment where pets are forbidden. As she tries to comfort the dog and not get evicted, the narrator and Great Dane forge a unique bond that helps them confront their shared sorrow. Nunez has a unique talent for spare, seemingly simple prose that takes readers on a surprising journey through big existential questions, and this slim 200-page book packs a life-changing punch.

Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize, The Goldfinch is one of the most polarizing books of the 21st century. It happens to be my favorite book, but it’s not one I usually recommend. It’s dense by design. The Goldfinch follows the Dickensian adventures of Theo Decker from age 13 when he loses his mother in a terrifying accident in an art museum. From the museum, Theo liberates a tiny painting that becomes a token for his own grief. Tossed from the home of a classmate to the Las Vegas home of his absent father, Theo attempts to understand his place in the world. Haunting and beautifully crafted,The Goldfinch is a study in obsession.

Afghan-American writer Hosseini's debut took the world by storm, bringing a powerful story of friendship, tragedy, violence, and father-son relationships set in Afghanistan to a global audience. The Kite Runner saw widespread acclaim, named a Book of the Year and a Book of the Decade by a range of outlets. The book inspired a successful film adaptation, and it brought even more of Hosseini's writing to mainstream readers. The Kite Runner is widely read in high school classrooms, and it has found itself at the center of years of book censorship, too–this is a novel that doesn't shy away from the tough things that touch human lives worldwide.

This is maybe a controversial choice since Whitehead’s other Pulitzer-winning novel, The Underground Railroad, tends to dominate critical conversations about his work, and rightfully so. It’s no easy feat to blend surrealism and historical fiction into a tale about the ugliest and most painful acts in American history. In The Nickel Boys, Whitehead again takes on racism and racialized violence, and at an even higher level of difficulty, as there are no bells and whistles and no magic. If we must reach for genre classification, The Nickel Boys is a horror novel, but one made all the more terrifying by the fact that everything in it is real.

Winner of the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize and finalist for the National Book Award, Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans is a perfect blend of genres—from family drama to murder mystery— that tackles family secrets, grief, immigration, and the effects of a crime on a family. It’s beautifully written from multiple points of view, shows why she was a Pulitzer finalist for previous work, and she remains an automatic buy author. And bonus points for a multicast audiobook!

You know what this book is about—or, you think you do—even if you’ve never read it. The Road has an aura. A reputation. In the two decades since its publication, this post-apocalyptic tale of a father and son struggling to survive some years after a catastrophic event has wiped out most of humanity has become shorthand for a whole subgenre. McCarthy presents spare, bleak, moments of gut-punching horror punctuated by moments of quiet beauty in a story that isn’t really about the action at all. Here is a deeply humane contemplation of honor, morality, masculinity, and what makes us human. An ode to art, this is a work of the highest order.

This National Book Award-winning novel tells the story of a 13-year-old boy living on an Ojibwe reservation who decides to investigate and punish his mother's rapist when the white police and courts fail to seek justice. The novel portrays the broken legal system, the limits of Native American sovereignty, and the gender-based violence Native women experience both from Native and non-Native men. The writing is heartbreaking and haunting. And the book also represents a larger shift in Native American literature away from solely telling stories based in history and folklore to explore grittier urban and contemporary stories as well.

In a world where short story collections by debut authors don't sell nearly as well as novels, Philyaw's collection broke records. The award-winning stories explore an area not often shown in literature: the inner lives of Black women and girls. The Church Ladies here contend with double standards, have affairs, and defy expectations. In each story, lilting prose constructs nuanced characters who define themselves and pursue their desires as it suits them.

Paul Beatty's 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and 2016 Man Booker Prize-winning book reads like a classic. The novel about a Black man who works to reinstate slavery and segregation explores big subjects like the U.S. Constitution and civil rights in a most unexpected way. Beatty's work is a study in satire as a powerful form of critique and perspective shifting, as well as showcasing comedic genius.

Viet Thanh Nguyen won a Pulitzer for his debut novel. Let that sink in. It's hard to keep track of the numerous awards and accolades The Sympathizer picked up after publishing in 2015. This thrilling novel set after the Vietnam War is narrated by a communist double agent living as a refugee, building a new life in Los Angeles, and reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. In addition to its countless literary achievements, the novel was adapted into a star-studded HBO limited series.

When this was first published, it made everyone's list and was nominated for award after award. With it, Bennett channels Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, while still maintaining her own distinct voice. In the '50s in the South, the Vignes girls are identical twin sisters who run away from their small, Black town. But one day one comes back with a dark-skinned daughter, Jude, on whom all the weight of the town's colorism falls. After Jude finally escapes and goes to college, she finds herself staring at a carbon copy of her-mother-who-is-not-her-mother. It's Stella, her mother's twin, who has been living as a white woman this entire time.

This is a strange, transgressive, intensely unsettling book, the kind of novel critics love but that often puts off the average rank-and-file reader. That it is as beloved by readers worldwide as it is by critics is a testament to both Kang’s skill and our hunger for art that engages with the most challenging issues we face. The Vegetarian asks questions about freedom, self-determination, sex, violence, the relationship between sex and violence, and the right—or not—to cause yourself harm, and it provides zero answers. The pleasure is in the asking, and the rewards for sitting in the deep silence Kang creates like a magic trick are myriad.

Set in the Bay Area, Orange’s bestselling debut weaves the stories of 12 characters whose paths converge at the Big Oakland Powwow. The propulsive novel spotlights Indigenous people in urban landscapes in stunning ways, “We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls, we know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even fry bread.” A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award and the John Leonard Prize, among other accolades, this must-read explores community, grief, history, and memory.

This breathtaking book by Gabrielle Zevin gained an incredible amount of popularity this century, receiving many Book of the Year selections, a spot on the Wingate Literary Prize Shortlist, and an upcoming movie adaptation starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Sky Yang, and Sean Kaufman. Zevin writes so beautifully, and her characters truly make you feel. As her protagonists Sadie, Sam, and Marx navigate the world of video game design, Zevin digs into poignant themes like complicated friendships, race, single parenthood, disability, art, fame, and grief. Her story creates a tender love letter to the late 1980s through early 2000s as well.

Set in the '80s at an elite performing arts high school in an unnamed Southern city, Trust Exercise isn’t your average campus novel. Told in three parts, Choi’s fifth novel plays with form and narrative structure in ways that are hard to talk about without giving too much away; what begins with a love story takes an unsettling turn into revenge, and how we get there is part of the titular exercise. It’s a polarizing read that asks big questions about the reliability of memory, trauma, consent, power, and the appropriation of story, and it won Choi the National Book Award for Fiction in 2019.

Everyone in literary spaces knows the name Zadie Smith. The spotlight swiveled to the author almost immediately after she published her debut, which won numerous awards and heaps of critical praise. The novel following the very different but intersecting lives of London's Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones launched the career of one of our most renowned contemporary authors. Whatever one thinks of White Teeth today (including Smith herself), it has earned rarified status as a literary fiction bestseller and debut standout.

Readers have been paying attention to R.F. Kuang's books since she swept genre awards with Babel but, not one to be pigeonholed, the author's thrilling publishing industry satire, Yellowface, was a book club darling and bestseller. The novel narrated by June, a white author who steals her Asian frienemy's unpublished manuscript after Athena dies in a freak accident, is a witty, scathing commentary on everything from online literary discourse to the publishing industry's exploitation of BIPOC stories to author behavior. This was the book everyone was talking about in 2023 and it continues to be a topic of debate and discussion today.