The 25 best novels of the 21st century

a very subjective list

Reading is personal. A book that sends one’s friends into raptures—A Gentleman in Moscow, let’s say—may strike you as absurdly twee. One that critics insist is a masterpiece—perhaps The Corrections—may make you so irritable you begin resenting not only the book but everyone who has ever praised it. Like all art, the books you revere are finally just that: the books you revere.

A few years ago, The New York Times published its list of the 100 best books of this century. I had read many of the novels they chose—the list included both fiction and nonfiction—and, whatever else may be said for it, it is not a list I would have made.

So I made my own. You can thank me for stopping at 25.*

These are the novels I see as classics of tomorrow. They are books that astonished me when I first read them and held up when I read them again. Each has characters I have never forgotten, plots that kept me absorbed, and sentences that made me stop and swoon. I have not, of course, read every novel published in the past twenty-five years. This is not the canon. It is the list I can honestly make.

I’ve listed them in chronological order and offered no explanations. I’m curious to know what you think of my choices—and which books would be on your list.

Here they are.

• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling (July 8, 2000)

• The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman (October 10, 2000)

• Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2000)

• Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)

• Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro (2001)**

• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (September 4, 2002)

• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (May 29, 2003)

• Saints at the River by Ron Rash (2004)

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

• Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (February 2009)

• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (April 30, 2009)

• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (May 13, 2010)

• Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (August 24, 2010)

• 11/22/63 by Stephen King (November 8, 2011)

• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (May 24, 2012)

• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (May 6, 2014)

• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (September 9, 2014)

• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (February 7, 2017)

• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (February 14, 2017)

• Circe by Madeline Miller (April 10, 2018)

• The Dutch House by Ann Patchett (September 24, 2019)

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (July 5, 2022)

• The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton (2022)

• Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane (April 25, 2023)

• Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (March 4, 2025)

*It did not escape my notice that there are no Black authors on this list. Had I expanded the list to another 25 years, there would be plenty. I’d have included The Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Roots by Alex Haley, and The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor at the very least. There are several current Black authors I really like—Walter Mosley, Attica Locke, S. A. Cosby, Talia Hibbert, Jasmine Guillory—but they all write genre fiction and very of that made my list.

**Yes, this is a collection of short stories but, for me, it functions as a novel.