The 50 Best Novels of the 21st Century

Take that New York Times.

The New York Times did a list of the best books of the 21^st century which everyone is talking about. So I thought it would be fun to do my own.

There are a few differences! First, I tried to stick with novels, broadly defined (maybe I’ll do a nonfiction list if people are into this.) Second—well, it’s my list, which means it’s more idiosyncratic by a lot than the NYT’s poll of leading literary lights. By virtue of its methodology and predilection, the NYT stuck mostly to books that could be considered literary fiction, and to best-selling and high profile works. I have some of those on here…but there’s also a lot of less-recognized genre work—SF/F, romance, YA, horror, crime, comics. Hopefully you’ll find some things you didn’t know about and/or that you’d be tempted to try.

I’ve provided a brief summary of all the books, and a link to longer reviews where I’ve written longer reviews. Feel free to let me know what I left out in the comments!

50.
Fledgling (2005)
Octavia Butler
Butler’s final, disturbing novel featuring a vampire protagonist parasite and slaver, and focuses on her favorite themes of consent, control, and the way inequities of power make justice impossible.  

49.
The Three-Headed Dog (2016)
Laura Agustín
(link to review)

A sort-of noir, sort of crime story about a missing youth, “The Three-Headed Dog dispenses with the rescue storyline, and so finds itself outside of familiar storylines altogether.  Freed of the need for dramatic payoff, the novel is willing to let its characters alone to inhabit their lives, without making them dance to someone else’s genre beats. The result is satisfyingly unsatisfying—a book that quietly shows how savior narrative expectations can be as limiting, and as cruel, as borders.”

48.
Couplets: A Love Story (2023)
Maggie Millner
Millner’s short novel uses a mix of prose and poetry to tell the story of a disintegrating marriage and a queer mid-life crisis. Witty, passionate, confused, and satisfyingly unresolved, like a couplet where the end-rhyme isn’t quite right.

47.
The Icarus Girl (2007)
Helen Oyeyemi
A ghost story told from the viewpoint of a nine-year-old, in which the line between childhood and adulthood becomes a metaphor for the line between the living and the dead, or possibly vice versa.

46.
The Only Good Indians (2020)
Stephen Graham Jones
A gory supernatural slasher filled with terror, death, and snark; the best scene is a game of one-on-one basketball with an angry and vengeful spirit.

45.
Diary of a Void (2022)
Emi Yagi
Irritated by her demanding and unfulfilling job, the protagonist spontaneously decides to pretend to be pregnant, in this sly story of early-life crisis and self-rebirth.

44.
Idlewild (2016)
Jude Sierra
(link to review)

“Asher, owner of the restaurant Idlewild, is recovering from the death of his husband five years before; new waiter Tyler is trying to decide what to do with his life after dropping out of med school. Their love isn’t an earth-shattering upheaval so much as a quiet step or two towards hope and renewal—a step that mirrors the novel’s faith in Detroit. ‘We don’t need to be saved from ourselves,’ Tyler tells Asher. ‘We need people to work beside us.’ Forget the great dramatic narratives; Sierra knows quotidian togetherness has more heart.”

43.
The Prophets (2021)
Robert Jones Jr.
(link to review)

A story of two enslaved men on a Southern plantation whose love inspires a revolt. “The Prophets chronicles much cruelty and misery and violence, as is inevitable in a book about slavery. But it’s not really a pessimistic book. Rather, the novel itself functions as an act of love and resistance, by expressing solidarity with those who love despite sanctions and oppression.  Patriarchy and white supremacy insist on rigid roles for Black and white, male and female. The Prophets imagines a different past, and a different future. ‘L O V E,’ Jones Jr. writes. ‘That is the living word.””

42.
Eileen (2015)
Ottessa Moshfegh

A young prison assistant’s comes of age through a crush on a woman therapist and an ugly discovery of the nature of patriarchal complicity. Moshfegh’s notorious for her jaded millennial prose, but Eileen is not in any sense a glib or easy book.

41.
The Sympathizer (2015)
Viet Thanh Nguyen
(link to review)

John Le Carré meets Kafka in this spay novel of post-war Vietnam refugees. The skewering of Coppola and his colonialist Vietnam movie is worth the price of admission alone.

40.
Seven Sisters (2002)
Margaret Drabble

Drabble’s unexpected foray into postmodernism, featuring an older divorced woman who reclaims her independence and capacity for surprise and joy in part through refusing to narrate reliably. The book forces the reader to experience the way the story of a life can in fact radically change course, if you’re willing to follow it.

39.
Bluebeard’s Castle (2023)
Anna Biller

An over-the-top camp tribute to gothic novels and films, which is also a passionate condemnation of domestic violence and the misery of patriarchal subjugation.

38.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2005)
Stieg Larsson

Computer genius and investigator Lisbeth Salandar is still one of the most memorable protagonists of the 21^st century. In earlier pulp, she’d be the damsel in distress, but here she gets to save herself and everyone else.   

 37.
The Devourers (2015)
Indra Das

A gory trans werewolf story in which you can feel the bones crack underfoot and taste the sinews in your teeth.

36.
Under the Pendulum Sun (2017)
Jeannette Ng

Heart of Darkness for the colonizers of faery, who are undone by the greed and desire and lusts they bring with them to the land that warps their maps.

35.
Gifts (2004)
Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin returned to YA fantasy with this late career series. While Earthsea was about a child with unexpected magic, Gifts is about a boy who doesn’t have the gifts his parents want him to have, and about the brutal effects of parental expectations.

34.
Side Chick Nation (2019)
Aya de León
(link to review)

“A story about Dulce Garcia, a Dominican-American sex worker who makes a living picking up a series of sugar daddies in Puerto Rico. After the storm warnings devastate tourism and ruin her business, she is unable to get off the island. She is left to dodge the floodwaters and struggle alongside the rest of the island's population to find shelter, food, and clean water. Dulce's experience as a "side chick" is a metaphor for Puerto Rico itself, which the United States cheerfully exploits in good times, and abandons when it is in need.”

33.
The Reformatory (2023)
Tananarive Due
(link to review)

A story about a haunted, segregated Florida Reformatory in which the ghosts aren’t nearly as terrifying as white supremacy. The book is “arguably [Due’s] fullest and clearest encapsulation of her own much-quoted insight: ‘Black history is Black horror.’”

32.
Bet Me (2004)
Jennifer Crusie

A book which insists women deserve pleasure, whether in the form of sex, romance or food. Jennifer Crusie is one of the great romcom writers, and this is probably her best and funniest, book.

31.
Blindsight (2006)
Peter Watts

Earth comes into contact with alien beings who are superintelligent but not sentient. Also, as a bonus, space vampires! Smart, provocative, and exceedingly silly in the way that only hard SF can be.

30.
Hunters in the Snow (2014)
D.M. Thomas

Thomas’ last novel is narrated, in a tour de force, by a young Adolf Hitler, who manages to be both sympathetic and utterly repulsive, not least because of his aggressive insistence on lying to his sort-of girlfriend Anna Freud, to everyone else he speaks to, and to himself.

29.
The Wife in the Attic (2021)
Rose Lerner

A Jewish lesbian gothic, and that rarity, a romance with a happily-ever-after which nonetheless manages to be truly and profoundly sad.

28.
All Systems Red (2017)
Martha Wells
(link to review)

A far future corporate controlled dystopia, with a nonbinary killer robot progatonist.  “Murderbot isn’t created from scratch, but it’s put together differently enough that even the most well-worn bits and pieces gleam with new possibilities. After reading Murderbot Diaries, you start to wonder if that testosterone-fueled Terminator ever pauses in its relentless pursuit to binge its favorite television show, or if the female AI ever gets tired of providing emotional support and just wants to hide to avoid conversation. Murderbot makes it clear that our gender programming is more idiosyncratic than most stories, or most robots, would have you believe.”

27.
Invincible (2003-2018)
Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley
(link to review)

“Villains in Invincible rarely stay villains, and heroes often do villainous things. The comic rejects the usual superhero absolutes of good/evil, and so also rejects the logic of incarceration. When people do wrong, Kirkman usually asks not, ‘How can they be punished?’ but ‘What good can they do to redress those wrongs?’ It’s a restorative justice approach. Within limits.”

26.
Palimpsest (2009)
Catherynne M. Valente

An extended magical realist prose poem about a fantasy realm that you can only travel to by having sex with someone who’s already been. Profligate in erotics and imagination, it’s really unlike anything else; maybe the strangest book on this list.

25.
Severance (2018)
Ling Ma

A delightfully slow zombie riff about falling out of the workforce and into a world of dislocation, anomie, and the walking dead.

24.
The Saint of Bright Doors (2023)
Vajra Chandrasekera

A dislocated past/future fantasy/SF narrative of an assassin who (literally) sheds his shadow—and a parable about the disconnected landscapes of colonialism.

23.
Money Shot (2008)
Christa Faust

Ex-porn star and talent agent Angel Dare is shot and thrown in the trunk of a car. She’s not dead yet, though, and the carnage escalates from there. Seedy, bleak, and gleeful; the sequel, Choke Hold (2011) is also highly recommended.

22.
Mrs. Fletcher (2017)
Tom Perrotta

Eve Fletcher, the title character, is a 46-year-old divorced mom whose son has just left for college. Alone for the first time in decades, Eve starts to become obsessed with sex and porn. Perrotta chronicles humor, cringe, anticlimax and equivocal enlightenment with unwaveringly deft prose.

21.
Winterglass (2017)
Benjanun Sriduangkaew

A fairy-tale about surviving gladiatorial combat in the grim frost of endless colonial empire. Later books in the series leave more room for optimism, but I love Winterglass’ unrelieved cynicism and bitterness, which in Sriduangkaew exists alongside an intense appreciation of beauty.

20.
The Buried Giant (2015)
Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro manages to turn even a knight’s quest into an exercise in enervation and self-doubt. The protagonists here, an aging quasi-medieval couple, are almost paralyzed with amnesia and barely understood recriminations. It’s a novel about the seduction of a mystical past, and about the way that forgetting what’s come before makes it impossible to move on.

19.
Binti (2015)
Nnedi Okorafor
(link to review)

“Binti is, most directly, a coming-of-age story, about how a girl from a rural backwater comes to the urban center of the universe. But it also challenges science fiction to see that journey as an answer to its apocalyptic invasion obsessions. Every cultural exchange doesn’t have to be a genocide — and, in fact, people from other cultures are not hard to find. There are different people everywhere. The question is whether you’re willing to see them, and willing to let them change you, rather than the other way around…”

18.
Dreadnought (2017)
April Daniels
(link to review)

“April Daniels’ genius is in recognizing that all the superhero tropes—empowerment, transformation, double identities, public stigma, struggles around the morality of violence—work better when the protagonist is queer. Dreadnought got her powers passed down to her by a cis man. But she shows once and for all that the most perfect superhero is a trans woman.”

17.
Sonata Mulattica (2009)
Rita Dove

Dove’s book, mostly in poetry, is a fictionalized biography of biracial musician George Bridgewater, who almost had a Beethoven Sonata dedicated to him until he (maybe?) dated a woman Beethoven was interested in. The book is fascinating and often surprisingly funny as it explores changing ideas of race and racism and the life of the artist.

16.
There Is No Antimemetics Division (2021)
qntm

The anonymous qntm specializes in puzzle-box SF. This, their masterpiece, is about a horror that eats memories, so by definition those who fight it have to do so without knowing what they’re doing. The novel takes positive joy in eating its own exposition in a dazzling display of anti-erudition.

15.
99 Erics (2020)
Julia Serano

Serano is best known as a feminist and trans theorist, but her novel is a delight. Like the title says, the main character dates 99 people named Eric, in an absurdist scattershot investigation of gender expectations and of whatever ideas, jokes, and insights happen to be bashing around in Serano’s head.

14.
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2010)
N.K. Jemisin

The massive critical success of Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy has largely eclipsed her earlier work, but I still pledge my heart to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which was her first foray into stories of chained gods, complicated love, and freedom as revolutionary apocalypse.

13.
Piranesi (2020)
Susanna Clarke
(link to review)

A novel about an exile in a pocket universe of statuary and floods. “Piranesi is a gentle man, and a gentle book. It wants to leave doors open for its characters and its readers. “When this world becomes too much for me, when I grow tired of the noise and the dirt and the people, I close my eyes and I name a particular vestibule to myself, then I name a hall.” Piranesi is a novel to revisit—a house you can open again, with statues touched by quiet thoughts and strange tides.”

12.
Gaylord Phoenix (2010)
Edie Fake
(link to review)

Edie Fake’s comic book chronicle of fantastic and monstrous gender exploration. “It doesn’t really read like a comic at all. Instead, it’s like pictures from a dream — or an art gallery. Indeed, in both his obsession with design and in his elegant mastery of the boundary between representation and abstraction, Fake seems like a Bauhaus artist who has wandered out of his proper era, a formalist mystic cast adrift in a sea of slapdash, toked-up mini-comics rebels.”

11.
The Wind Done Gone (2001)
Alice Randall
(link to review)

“Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone is superior to the Margaret Mitchell novel it is based on in many respects. Though Mitchell’s prose is quite good, Randall’s is better, earthier and more poetic at once (“It’s a pissed bed on a cold night to read words on paper saying your name and a price.”) Randall’s economical, short book also avoids Mitchell’s tendency to ramble. But perhaps most surprising in a sequel/parody, Randall’s book makes more sense.”

10.
Kushiel’s Dart (2001)
Jaqueline Carey

Jacqueline Carey writes epic fantasy for anti-Brexiters; her alternate earth is notably non-Puritanical and determinedly cosmopolitan. In the first volume, we meet Phaedra, a holy bisexual masochist prostitute, who uses her smarts, her determination, and occasionally her sexual skills to perform epic quests, save the world, and fall in love with both the celibate hero knight and the wiley femme fatale would be evil queen.

9.
Atonement (2001)
Ian McEwan

McEwan’s book is one of the most effective anti-war novels, because it’s not about war. Instead, the Great War interrupts the romance, and the narrative becomes about how the wrong narrative, in the wrong place, destroys life, love, and the possibility for forgiveness.

8.
The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner (2010)
Stephenie Meyer
(link to review)

“The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, Meyer’s 2010 novella, is a brief, affecting summary of her refusal to follow through on the vampire trope of extermination. The book is told from the perspective of Bree Tanner, a minor vampire character killed in Meyer’s third Twilight novel, Eclipse. In most vampire narratives — Stoker’s, or Stephen King’s, or Whedon’s, or Anne Rice’s — Bree would simply be a way to pile up the body count, an extra dead monster, satisfyingly slain for the greater good. But Meyer wants her readers to feel pain for Bree when she dies. As Meyer says, ‘no perspective is ever truly trivial.’”

7.
Dr. Franklin’s Island (2002)
Ann Halem

(link to review)

Feminist/environmental SF cyberpunk writer Gwyneth Jones pens YA books as Ann Halam. Dr. Franklin’s Island is an argument with Well’s Dr. Moreau, in which Halam refutes the idea that animals are lower creatures, or that turning into them would be a debasement. “It’s a quiet story about how isolation can lead to horror, trauma, and sometimes to something better.”

6.
Erasure (2001)
Percival Everett

Novelist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is tired of being expected to write stereotypically “Black” novels, so he decides to double down and write something no literary agent will take. Instead, his wildly violent and racist novel Fuck or My Pafology becomes a massive hit, and Monk has to keep giving the (white) people what they want. Hysterically funny and horrifying by turns, this may be the absolute best of Everett’s expansive and impressive oeuvre.

5.
Life After Life (2013)
Kate Atkinson
(link to review)

Literary fiction in which the main character is born and reborn into multiple timelines and lives. “For Atkinson, the question “what if?” doesn’t open on adrenaline-charged excitement. It’s bittersweet. The novel loves Ursula so much it can’t let her die in the snow, or of flu, or in Germany, after realizing too late that her husband had it in him to be a Nazi. So she comes back and tries again. And she sometimes finds friendship and love. But wherever she goes, there’s also sadness, betrayal, disappointment and death. She gets more life after life, but it’s still life, which means darkness still falls. The multiverse isn’t a pulp adventure plot device. It’s a wish to protect what can’t be protected and fix what can’t be fixed. Every other world is as kind and as cruel as hope.”

4.
Annihilation (2014)
Jeff Vandermeer

Vandermeer’s at the forefront of the new weird horror, and Annihilation is his masterpiece. A biologist whose main emotional connection is to the minibiome in an abandoned swimming pool goes off to investigate Area X, a strip of land that has been transformed into a (seemingly) pristine wilderness. An alien invasion novel with no aliens and no invasion, only a nature that we’re eating, or that is eating us.

3.
A Gentleman Undone (2012)
Cecilia Grant

A regency romance in which a traumatized ex-soldier and a traumatized sex worker figure out how to love each other. A Gentleman Undone is a book about pain which manages to be kind without condescension, and to suggest healing is possible without being glib.  Grant seems to have stopped writing romances, alas, but this one is just about perfect

2.
The Underground Railroad (2017)
Colson Whitehead
(link to review)

“Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad suggests… that slavery never died. The buried train tunnel which carry his protagonist Cora from bondage in Georgia don’t deliver her to freedom. Instead, they take her to different kinds of abuse, imprisonment, and horror.”

1.
Likewise (2002)
Ariel Schrag

(link to review)

Ariel Schrag’s amazing graphic memoir of her senior year in college filtered through obsessions with James Joyce’s Ulysses, her girlfriend Sally, and penises (not necessarily in that order) is probably the single most underrated aesthetic achievement of the 21^st century. Mammoth, formally intricate, laugh-out-loud funny, bizarre, and agaonized, it’s one of my favorite works of art ever.