The New York Times Best Books of the 21st Century

by | Jul 18, 2024 | Adults | 0 comments

Last week, the New York Times book review published a list of the best 100 books of the 21st century so far. We’ll examine some of the books that made the list along with some recommendations on where to start. The list has a good mix of fiction and nonfiction. At the bottom of this post is the complete list.  There are only three authors who have three books on the list: Elena Ferrante, George Saunders and Jesmyn Ward.

In first place is Elena Ferrante’s first book in her neapolitan quartet, My Brilliant Friend. My Brilliant Friend and the fourth book The Story of the Lost Child both make the list. The series follows two girls Elena and Lila as they grow up in the outskirts of Naples after the end of World War II. This book pulls you in from the beginning as Elena recounts the story of their friendship. Ferrante also writes about Italy’s political struggle as it tries to move forward from the war. My Brilliant Friend is also a hit tv show.

The ninth book on the list is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. In his sixth book, Ishiguro explores an alternate reality in the 1990s. The book does contain a big spoiler for the second half of the story so we won’t say too much. We get our narration from a young woman named Kathy H. Kathy throughout the book reflects on periods of her life and her friends.

Jesmyn Ward’s novels Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied Sing  are at 33 and 30 along with her memoir at 97. In Sing, Unburied Sing, the novel follows Jojo and his sister, Kayla, and their grandparents, Mam and Pop. When their mother Leonie shows up she keeps having visions of her deceased brother, Given. This is a beautifully written story that shows the complexities of the south and racism.

Here is the official list from the New York Times. 

  1. My Brilliant Friend – Elena Ferrante
  2. Warmth of Other Suns – Isabel Wilkerson
  3. Wolf Hall – Hillary Mantel
  4. The Known World – Edward P Jones
  5. The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
  6. 2666 by Roberto Bolano
  7. The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead
  8. Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
  9. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
  10. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson 
  11. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz 
  12. The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion
  13. The Road – Cormac McCarthy
  14. Outline – Rachel Cusk
  15. Pachinko – Min Jin Lee
  16. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon
  17. The Sellout – Paul Beatty
  18. Lincoln in the Bardo – George Saunders
  19. Say Nothing – Patrick Radden Keefe
  20. Erasure – Percival Everett
  21. Evicted – Matthew Desmond
  22. Behind the Beautiful Bars – Katherine Boo 
  23. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage – Alice Munro
  24. The Overstory – Richard Powers
  25. Random Family – Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
  26. Atonement – Ian McEwan
  27. Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  28. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
  29. The Last Samurai – Helen DeWitt
  30. Sing, Unburied, Sing – Jesmyn Ward
  31. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
  32. The Line of Beauty – Alan Hollinghurst
  33. Salvage the Bones – Jesmyn Ward
  34. Citizen – Claudia Rankine
  35. Fun Home – Alison Bechdal
  36. Between the World and me – Ta-Nehisi Coates
  37. The Years – Annie Ernaux
  38. The Savage Detectives Roberto Bolano
  39. A Visit from the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan
  40. H is for Hawk – Helen Macdonald
  41. Small Things like This – Claire Keegan
  42. A Brief History of Seven Killings – Marlon James
  43. Postwar – Tony Judt
  44. The Fifth Season -N.K. Jeminson
  45. The Argonauts -Maggie Nelson
  46. The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt
  47. A Mercy – Toni Morrison
  48. Persepolis – Marjane Starapi
  49. The Vegetarian – Han Kang. translated by Deborah Smith
  50. Trust – Hernan Diaz

51. Life After Life – Kate Atkinson

52. Train Dreams – Denis Johnson

53. Runaway – Alice Munro

54. Tenth Day of December – George Saunders

55. The Looming Tower – Lawrence Wright

56. The Flamethrowers – Rachel Kushner

57. Nickel and Dimed – Barbara Ehrenreich

58. Stay True – Hua Hsu

59. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides

60. Heavy – Kiese Laymon

61. Demon Copperhead – Barbara Kingslover

62. 10:04 – Ben Lerner

63. Veronica – Mary Gaitskill

64. The Great Believers – Rebecca Makkai

65. The Plot Against America – Philip Roth

66. We the Animals – Justin Torres

67. Far From the Tree – Andrew Solomon

68. The Friend – Sigrid Nunez

69. The New Jim Crow – Michelle Alexander

70. All Aunt Hagar’s Children – Edward P. Jones

71. The Copenhagen Trilogy – Tove Ditlevesen

72. Secondhand Time – Svetlana Alexievich

73. The Passage of Power – Robert Caro

74. Olive Kitteridge – Elizabeth Strout 

75. Exit West – Mohsin Hamid

76. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevlin

77. An American Marriage – Tayari Jones

78. Septology – Jon Fosse

79. A Manual for Cleaning Women – Lucia Berlin

80. The Story of the Lost Child – Elena Ferrante

81. Pulphead – John Jeremiah Sullivan

82. Hurricane Season – Fernanda Melchor

83. When We Cease to Understand the World – Benjamín Labatut

84. The Emperor of All Maladies – Siddhartha Mukherjee

85. Pastoralia – George Saunders

86. Frederick Douglass – David W. Blight

87. Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters

88. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis – Lydia Davis

89. The Return – Hisham Matar

90. The Sympathizer – Viet Thanh Nguyen

91. The Human Stain – Philip Roth

92. The Days of Abandonment – Elena Ferrante

93. Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel

94. On Beauty – Zadie Smith

95. Bring Up the Bodies – Hilary Mantel

96. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments – Saidiya Hartman

97. Men We Reaped – Jesmyn Ward

98. Bel Canto – Ann Patchett

99. How to be Both – Ali Smith

100. Tree of Smoke  – Denis Johnson