40 favorite novels of the 21st century (so far)

Choose your own misadventure

Okay, I haven’t read everything, or everyone, though the top names on my English-language should-get-to list are Anne Enright and Cory Doctorow, and I don’t think who isn’t an EFF donor would say that you can’t understand 21st century fiction without having read Little Brother. My coverage of fiction in translation is much spottier—there are known unknowns (I’m sure Knausgård deserves a fairer trial than the couple of pages I gave him), as well as large countries full of unknown unknowns. Otherwise, my biases are evident: I only really read literary fiction and SFF, and there isn’t even that much SFF on this list because apparently I’m a snob when it comes down to it.

Single books not series, one per author. Works first translated into English this century are eligible. I’m not going to re-hash blurbs for things I’ve rewritten about in the Substack era, so follow links as you desire.

TOP TWENTY

1. László Krasznahorkai: Seiobo There Below (tr. Ottilie Mulzet)

See 30 favorite fiction books, 2010–19. (Everything else here not discussed or linked to is discussed there.)

2. Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives (tr. Natasha Wimmer)

Feel free to substitute the comparably great 2666; it’s just that that one’s so bleak I don’t know if I’ll ever re-read it. Unlike so many books of its kind, Detectives doesn’t make the authorial stand-in a total loser: true, he’s, as they used to say, a real piece of work and Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima leave decades-long trails of chaos and sometimes death behind them, but they are almost always as cool as fjuck, even when participating in the most ridiculous sword fight in literary fiction, though maybe not when running into Octavio Paz. Modern poets are epic; modern poetry less so.

3. J.M. Coetzee: Summertime

Speaking of total losers: this is the last book of Coetzee’s autobiographical-or-is-it Scenes from Provincial Life trilogy, though it’s not necessary to read the other two books first—maybe skim a few pages to see Summertime is something formally different. Unreliable recountings of experiences with John Coetzee from lovers, haters, possible hatefuckers, and tangled-in-unrequited-incestuous-affection relatives are mediated through an interviewer-biographer who’s more than a bit of a pseud. The resulting work has the most narrative traps I’ve encountered since I used to read Choose Your Own Adventure books. Your adventure ends here.

4. Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty

He takes two not-disjoint worlds—Conservative politicians and young gays in 1980s Britain—and goes Henry James detached-not-disinterested observer on them as they spin each other like gears, and unlike just about everybody who’s tried this lately (though see number 11 below), he has the chops to pull it off. This has some of the best set pieces of recent decades: the (first) drug-filled party with the young scions of old Tories, the visit to a lover’s mother’s Jesus-filled flat in Willesden. In the end, well, you know Thatcher’s general election win-loss record.

5. Paul Auster: The Book of Illusions

Best descriptions of non-existent movies ever. Then it goes deeper into what it means to destroy an artist’s work, which is of course a related subject: what’s the difference between a work that no longer exists save for a brief description in prose, and a work that was never more than a brief description in prose in the first place? Also there’s the standard litfic grief/alcoholism/despair stuff if you need that, all in Auster’s hyper-informed but no-nonsense prose.

6. Bernardine Evaristo: Girl, Woman, Other

See 2021 Books of the Year.

7. Zadie Smith: White Teeth

The one book on this list that made me want to be a writer, only to discover I had the stamina for 200 words max and none of Smith’s underrated ability to wrangle a complex plot to an ending. She’s written “better” books since—more formally challenging, more elegant at the sentence level. But she hasn’t written a more enjoyable one—not one as funny or one as ambitious in how much of the world (i.e. London) it embraces. As with all things, blame James Wood.

8. Wiesław Myśliwski: Stone Upon Stone (tr. Bill Johnston)

9. Kim Stanley Robinson: 2312

10. Anna Burns: Milkman

11. Arkady Martine: A Desolation Called Peace (but read A Memory Called Empire first)

See 2022 Books of the Year.

12. Irène Némirovsky: Suite Française (tr. Sandra Smith)

Just because it’s 1940 and the Nazis have taken over your country (and you’re Jewish) doesn’t mean the social satire stops. The first book in particular does a stop-stop-it’s-already-dead job of kicking the French national myth when it’s down, with only the middlest of middle classes offering some decency on the regular and the aesthetes being the most morally bankrupt. The second, about love and Germans, isn’t as thrilling, but still gives a compelling picture of rural life under occupation. The third, fourth, and fifth books she never wrote; she was shipped off to Auschwitz and died in 1942.

13. W.G. Sebald: Austerlitz (tr. Anthea Bell)

Sebald has arguably been the author most influential on this century’s literary fiction, not least for the structure of his sentences, which can run on for pages as long as your budget for commas doesn’t run out, and you include little asides, like this one, to offer the reader a bit of a break, while eschewing quotation marks to blur the distinction between direct and indirect speech, between character and narrator, is what Bolaño said, or what he would’ve said, if he had lived, and if he had a Substack (pretend this goes on for ten more pages)

14. Orhan Pamuk: Snow (tr. Maureen Freely)

Had this at number one on my end-of-decade list in 2009; now it seems merely Nobel-worthy. On re-read, the depiction of a writer (of course he’s a writer) caught between authoritarian and religious extremists isn’t that deep—shit is hard, well yeah. What holds up is, well, literature: poems we never get to read, structures for structure’s sake, a framing story that recapitulates the main story just for that extra sop of inevitability. The most uncanny massacre in comp lit is only the center.

15. Aimee Bender: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

16. Liu Cixin: The Three-Body Problem (tr. Ken Liu)

17. Helen DeWitt: Lightning Rods

18. Han Kang: The Vegetarian (tr. Deborah Smith)

Yeong-hye decides to go vegan. Her husband is one of the most contemptible narrators in recent fiction, and he’s not even the man who takes her decision the worst. The story starts as something like a cross between Safe and “The Yellow Wallpaper”, but Yeong-hye keeps heading to darker and darker places even relative to those works. When her sister In-hye takes over the narration, Kang expresses her remarkably complex attitude in simple flat sentences like she’s describing roadside scenery, which maybe she is.

19. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Half of a Yellow Sun

The best work of art to date in which one of the major characters is a professor of nonparametric statistics based on the author’s father. (As I don’t have kids or tenure, it’s going to be up to PinkPantheress to beat it.) The book is very strong when it’s detailing bourgeois ’60s life in what would soon become Biafra from the point of view of its “Taxi Driver”-loving participants as well as the POV of houseboy Ugwu; it does as well at bringing to life one of Williams’s “knowable communities” as anything this millennium. It then turns into a war story and becomes much less surprising (there’ve been a lot more novels about war than about nonparametric statisticians) but still holds on to its greatness, which only slips once things get a bit soap-opera. Still, a major book, and I should try to slip in a reading of Americanah before I accidentally read anything she wrote about cancel culture.

20. Richard Powers: The Time of Our Singing

In the end it’s a bit much, but it does have some of the best writing about music in fiction. Or rather, about musicking—you don’t learn much about Palestrina or whatever; instead, it’s exceptionally beautiful when describing acts of making music. The attempt to encapsulate all of American race relations from 1939 to 1992 is less successful, but points for trying.

NEXT TWENTY (NOT IN MUCH ORDER)

Irme Kertész: Fiasco

Tomi Adeyemi: Children of Blood and Bone

Junot Díaz: The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao

Peter Watts: Blindsight

Marlon James: A Brief History of Seven Killings

Ian McEwan: Atonement

Eleanor Catton: The Luminaries

Robert Charles Wilson: Spin

Pamela Lu: Ambient Parking Lot

Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Thomas Pynchon: Against the Day

Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone: This Is How You Lose the Time War

Hilary Mantel: Bring Up the Bodies

Per Olov Enquist: The Royal Physician’s Visit

Sally Rooney: Normal People

Mary Gaitskill: Veronica

Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Wizard of the Crow

David Diop: At Night All Blood Is Black

Sarah Waters: Fingersmith

Ali Smith: Autumn

See also:

25 favorite novels, 1800-1899

Favorite sci-fi novels by decade