A long friendship between two girls in a poor neighborhood in Naples, Italy. The exodus of nearly six million Black Americans from South to North. The rise of Thomas Cromwell in cutthroat Tudor England. A series of unsolved murders in a Mexican border town. The Underground Railroad reimagined as a literal one, rails and all.
These are stories from some of the 100 books that — in the opinion of more than 500 novelists, nonfiction writers, librarians, poets, booksellers, editors, critics, journalists and other readers polled by the Book Review — are the best of this still-young century.
What do we mean by “best?” We left that to the respondents. Most appeared to agree with E.M. Forster, who wrote that “the final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.” The only criterion for eligibility was publication in English on or after Jan. 1, 2000. (Somebody — one of you pedants who celebrated the new millennium a year after everyone else — is going to point out that the year 2000 is technically part of the 20th century. Don’t let it be you.)
The best of the best, Nos. 1 through 10, are linked for sure by sensitive intelligence and achieved ambition. But other connections can be made. Most are historical novels or narrative histories, as if readers, weary of the vacuity and smash-and-grab belligerence that dominate much of American political and social discourse, desired either to escape or to gaze backward, to better understand how we arrived here.
Memory and identity are especially strong concerns in the top 10. In an impermanent age of push alerts and TikTok clips, Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” is the only one in which the internet makes an appearance. Readers seemed to want a break from contemporary social reportage; they wanted immersive and unfractured narratives that cast a sustained spell.
The highest tier also underlines a generational cohort. Each of the 10 writers, save the comparatively young Colson Whitehead, was born close to the middle of the last century. Besides Isabel Wilkerson, all of them are represented by novels. Two — Elena Ferrante and Roberto Bolaño — made the list with books in translation.
Much of the more piquant news is in the rest of the list. Fiction dominates, by a five-to-one ratio. Two graphic novels appear. One of the biggest literary trends of the past 25 years — the boom in memoirs and books of essays — is reflected far less than I expected. The only writers with three books on this list are Ferrante, Jesmyn Ward and George Saunders. The writers with two: Bolaño, Edward P. Jones, Denis Johnson, Alice Munro, Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith and Philip Roth.
A few writers were squeezed out because their votes were split among several of their works. This was the case with Karl Ove Knausgaard and his six “My Struggle” novels, none of which appears here. The same goes for J.K. Rowling. Popular books that captured or created cultural moments — “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “Gone Girl,” “Seabiscuit” — are nowhere to be found, another hint as to how readers defined “best.”
There were books I loved but never expected to see on this list. I’m glad people remembered Barbara Ehrenreich’s barbed and earthy “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” and Lucia Berlin’s careworn and haunting story collection “A Manual for Cleaning Women.” I was disappointed to find no poetry save Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen.” On my ballot were Kay Ryan’s “The Best of It: New and Selected Poems,” and Rita Dove’s “Collected Poems: 1974-2004.” If I’d had more room I would have added poetry collections by Edward Seidel and Louise Glück.
The diversity of this list is notable. In 2003, the editors of the Book Review ran a similar poll, asking 100 prominent literary people to identify “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.” Of the 22 titles that were listed, only two were by women and two by people of color.
We hope that this list surprises and delights you as much as it did us. “A great book should leave you with many experiences,” William Styron wrote, “and slightly exhausted at the end.” Putting together this project left us the same.
Not everyone is a fan of lists and prizes. John le Carré was one of these people. But some forms of recognition, he understood, are better than others. As he wrote to his friend, the critic Al Alvarez, who had won an award from his peers: “Honors suck. Flattery sucks. Recognition is for the birds. On the other hand, it’s nice to be fancied, and nicer still to be fancied by people who, by and large, know their poetic arses from their literary elbows.”
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