Reading Lists · Lisanne Swart
The Best Books, Year by Year
Every year I read across fiction, memoir, and nonfiction and choose the books I keep thinking about long after I have finished them. Not the most hyped. Not the longest lists. The ones worth your time — with honest notes on what makes each one earn its place. Start anywhere.
2026
The books that arrived while everything else was still in motion
Han Kang · Asako Yuzuki · Patrick Radden Keefe · Gisèle Pelicot
- Hooked — Asako Yuzuki · follow-up to Butter: female obsession, loneliness, Japan
- Light and Thread — Han Kang · the Nobel laureate’s first nonfiction in English
- A Hymn to Life — Gisèle Pelicot · the memoir from France’s most significant trial in years
- London Falling — Patrick Radden Keefe · investigative nonfiction in the tradition of Say Nothing
2025
The year that asked who gets to tell whose story
David Szalay · Percival Everett · Miranda July · Han Kang · Banu Mushtaq
- Flesh — David Szalay · Booker winner: a man unmade by forces beyond his control
- James — Percival Everett · Pulitzer winner: Huckleberry Finn retold from Jim’s perspective
- All Fours — Miranda July · a woman stops her road trip two hours from home and stays
- Feeding Ghosts — Tessa Hulls · Pulitzer memoir: three generations of a Chinese-American family
2024
Sally Rooney at full range, and a novel set entirely in space
Samantha Harvey · Sally Rooney · Yael van der Wouden · Percival Everett
- Orbital — Samantha Harvey · Booker winner: six astronauts orbit a wounded Earth in 24 hours
- Intermezzo — Sally Rooney · two brothers, grief, falling in love in ways that make no sense
- The Safekeep — Yael van der Wouden · debut shortlisted for Booker: a Dutch house with a dark past
- James — Percival Everett · shortlisted for Booker 2024, Pulitzer winner 2025
2023
The Booker winner you read in one sitting, and the satire that drew blood
Paul Lynch · R.F. Kuang · Paul Murray · David Grann · Rick Rubin
- Prophet Song — Paul Lynch · Booker winner: Ireland tips into totalitarianism, told in one breathless block
- Yellowface — R.F. Kuang · a stolen manuscript, a white author, publishing’s uncomfortable mirror
- The Bee Sting — Paul Murray · Booker shortlist: Irish family in crisis, told from four perspectives
- The Creative Act — Rick Rubin · creativity as a way of paying attention
2022
The novel everyone pressed into other people’s hands
Gabrielle Zevin · Shehan Karunatilaka · Bonnie Garmus · Oliver Burkeman
- Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — Gabrielle Zevin · thirty years of creative partnership, love and ambition
- The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida — Shehan Karunatilaka · Booker winner: a dead war photographer navigates the Sri Lankan afterlife
- Lessons in Chemistry — Bonnie Garmus · a chemist who becomes a TV cook and refuses to be small
- Four Thousand Weeks — Oliver Burkeman · the anti-productivity book about what finite time actually means
2021
The year that changed how people understood their own patterns
Damon Galgut · Oprah Winfrey & Bruce Perry · Brit Bennett · Sally Rooney
- What Happened to You? — Oprah & Bruce Perry · why we love the way we do
- The Promise — Damon Galgut · Booker winner: four funerals, four decades, one broken promise in South Africa
- The Vanishing Half — Brit Bennett · twin sisters who build completely different identities from the same origin
- The Dawn of Everything — Graeber & Wengrow · the history of humanity we were never taught
2020
The year of aftermath — the books that made the present legible
Douglas Stuart · Maggie O’Farrell · Susanna Clarke · Isabel Wilkerson
- Shuggie Bain — Douglas Stuart · Booker winner: Glasgow, 1980s, a boy and his alcoholic mother
- Hamnet — Maggie O’Farrell · Women’s Prize winner: Shakespeare’s son, and the mother history forgot
- Piranesi — Susanna Clarke · a house of infinite halls, a mind without its past — unlike anything else
- Caste — Isabel Wilkerson · the framework for understanding American inequality that changed the conversation
2019
The year the Booker was shared, and Say Nothing changed narrative nonfiction
Margaret Atwood · Bernardine Evaristo · Patrick Radden Keefe · Colson Whitehead · Ocean Vuong
- The Testaments — Margaret Atwood · joint Booker winner: thirty-four years later, Aunt Lydia speaks
- Girl, Woman, Other — Bernardine Evaristo · joint Booker winner: twelve Black British women, one intricate web
- Say Nothing — Patrick Radden Keefe · the best nonfiction book about the IRA ever written
- The Nickel Boys — Colson Whitehead · Pulitzer winner: a reform school, two boys, an ending that reframes everything
2018
One of the strongest years for books in recent memory
Tara Westover · Anna Burns · Sally Rooney · John Carreyrou · Michelle Obama
- Educated — Tara Westover · a young woman teaches herself out of the world her family built
- Milkman — Anna Burns · Booker winner: Belfast during the Troubles, told in breathless stream of consciousness
- Normal People — Sally Rooney · the novel that introduced her to the world: Connell, Marianne, four years
- Bad Blood — John Carreyrou · the Theranos fraud, told by the journalist who broke the story
2017
The year Lincoln in the Bardo changed what a novel could be
George Saunders · Hanya Yanagihara · George Packer · Paul Auster
- Lincoln in the Bardo — George Saunders · Booker winner: grief, voices, and a president at his son’s grave
- Pachinko — Min Jin Lee · four generations of a Korean family in Japan — epic and intimate at once
- The Underground Railroad — Colson Whitehead · Pulitzer winner: a literal underground railroad and the America above it
- Homo Deus — Yuval Noah Harari · what humanity might become after solving hunger, plague, and war
2016
The year Paul Beatty won the Booker and made everyone reckon with satire
Paul Beatty · Colson Whitehead · Celeste Ng · Ottessa Moshfegh
- The Sellout — Paul Beatty · Booker winner: the most daring American satirical novel in decades
- The Underground Railroad — Colson Whitehead · Pulitzer winner: slavery, escape, and an America that keeps reinventing cruelty
- Little Fires Everywhere — Celeste Ng · two families, one suburb, and the secrets that unravel both
- Sapiens — Yuval Noah Harari · the history of humankind, retold from the outside looking in
2015
A Little Life and the question of how much a reader can hold
Hanya Yanagihara · Marlon James · Anthony Doerr · Ta-Nehisi Coates
- A Little Life — Hanya Yanagihara · Booker shortlist: the most emotionally demanding novel of the decade
- A Brief History of Seven Killings — Marlon James · Booker winner: Jamaica, the CIA, and the night someone tried to kill Bob Marley
- Between the World and Me — Ta-Nehisi Coates · a letter to a son about living in a Black body in America
- The Buried Giant — Kazuo Ishiguro · memory, forgetting, and what a marriage survives when the past returns
2014
All the Light We Cannot See and the year that rewarded slow readers
Anthony Doerr · Richard Flanagan · Emily St. John Mandel · Helen Macdonald
- All the Light We Cannot See — Anthony Doerr · Pulitzer winner: WWII France, a blind girl, a German soldier, and a radio signal
- The Narrow Road to the Deep North — Richard Flanagan · Booker winner: Australian POWs building the Burma Death Railway
- Station Eleven — Emily St. John Mandel · a pandemic, a travelling theatre company, and the things worth preserving
- H is for Hawk — Helen Macdonald · Costa Award: grief, a goshawk, and T.H. White — one of the decade’s finest memoirs
2013
The Goldfinch, Americanah, and the year literary fiction reclaimed its audience
Donna Tartt · Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · Eleanor Catton · Dave Eggers
- The Goldfinch — Donna Tartt · Pulitzer winner: a painting, a boy who survives, and the question of what beauty is for
- Americanah — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · a Nigerian woman navigates race, identity, and America — one of the decade’s essential novels
- The Luminaries — Eleanor Catton · Booker winner: the youngest ever winner, a gold rush mystery in 19th-century New Zealand
- The Interestings — Meg Wolitzer · six friends from a summer arts camp, thirty years later — about talent and who gets to keep it
2012
Gone Girl made everyone distrust their narrators — Mantel won her second Booker
Gillian Flynn · Hilary Mantel · Katherine Boo · Zadie Smith · Alice Munro
- Gone Girl — Gillian Flynn · the book that made the domestic thriller a serious literary genre
- Bring Up the Bodies — Hilary Mantel · Booker winner: Mantel becomes the first author to win it twice
- Behind the Beautiful Forevers — Katherine Boo · National Book Award: the most honest book about poverty of the decade
- Mastery — Robert Greene · on my shelf: how depth happens, and what it actually takes
2011
Julian Barnes finally won the Booker — in under 160 pages
Julian Barnes · Haruki Murakami · Chad Harbach · Esi Edugyan · Patrick deWitt
- The Sense of an Ending — Julian Barnes · Booker winner: memory, self-deception, and forty years of being wrong about your own story
- 1Q84 — Haruki Murakami · 900 pages, two people, a Tokyo with a second moon — his most ambitious novel
- The Art of Fielding — Chad Harbach · one of the rare debuts that arrives fully formed
- Half Blood Blues — Esi Edugyan · Giller Prize: jazz musicians in Nazi-occupied Paris, and a trumpeter who disappeared
2010
The Social Network was in cinemas — these were the books that matched the moment
Jonathan Franzen · Emma Donoghue · Jennifer Egan · Kathryn Stockett
- Freedom — Jonathan Franzen · the Great American Novel argument of the decade: a marriage, a family, a country unravelling
- Room — Emma Donoghue · Booker shortlist: a mother and five-year-old son, one room, everything beyond it
- A Visit from the Goon Squad — Jennifer Egan · Pulitzer winner: time, music, and a PowerPoint chapter that shouldn’t work but does
- The Help — Kathryn Stockett · one of the most read novels of the year; Mississippi, the 1960s, and whose voice gets told
2009
Hilary Mantel won her first Booker and reimagined what historical fiction could do
Hilary Mantel · Colm Tóibín · Stieg Larsson · Margaret Atwood
- Wolf Hall — Hilary Mantel · Booker winner: Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, and the most controlled prose in the prize’s history
- Brooklyn — Colm Tóibín · an Irish woman emigrates to New York in the 1950s and must choose which life to live
- The Girl Who Played with Fire — Stieg Larsson · Lisbeth Salander becomes one of the decade’s defining characters
- The Year of the Flood — Margaret Atwood · the second MaddAddam novel: a world after the waterless flood
2008
The White Tiger and the year debut fiction arrived with something to say
Aravind Adiga · Junot Díaz · Roberto Bolaño · Sebastian Barry
- The White Tiger — Aravind Adiga · Booker winner: a murderer writes letters to the Chinese premier about modern India
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao — Junot Díaz · Pulitzer winner: a Dominican-American nerd, a family curse, Trujillo’s shadow
- 2666 — Roberto Bolaño · published posthumously: five novels in one, anchored by hundreds of unsolved murders
- The Secret Scripture — Sebastian Barry · Booker shortlist: a 100-year-old woman writes her life in secret in a mental institution
2007
The last Harry Potter and the year literary fiction competed with it for readers
Anne Enright · Cormac McCarthy · J.K. Rowling · Ian McEwan
- The Gathering — Anne Enright · Booker winner: a family assembles for a funeral in Dublin and a secret surfaces
- The Road — Cormac McCarthy · Pulitzer winner: a father and son walk south through a dead America — survival and love stripped bare
- On Chesil Beach — Ian McEwan · a wedding night in 1962 and the misunderstanding that undoes two lives
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — J.K. Rowling · eleven million copies on the first day; the ending of a world
2006
Kiran Desai and the year the Booker went to a novel about belonging
Kiran Desai · Kazuo Ishiguro · Cormac McCarthy · Khaled Hosseini
- The Inheritance of Loss — Kiran Desai · Booker winner: a judge in the Himalayas, his granddaughter, and her lover in New York — colonialism’s afterlife
- Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro · 2005 in hardback but 2006 peak readership — what it means to know your life has limits
- The Road — Cormac McCarthy · published November 2006: a father, a son, and a dead America — Pulitzer the following year
- A Thousand Splendid Suns — Khaled Hosseini · two Afghan women, one brutal marriage, thirty years of war
2005
Kazuo Ishiguro returned, Ian McEwan won the Booker, and Never Let Me Go changed everything
Ian McEwan · Kazuo Ishiguro · Marilynne Robinson · Zadie Smith
- The Sea — Ian McEwan · Booker winner: an art historian retires to a seaside town and a grief he cannot name
- Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro · the most quietly devastating novel of the decade — what it means to know your life has limits
- Gilead — Marilynne Robinson · Pulitzer winner: a dying minister writes a letter to his young son — one of the great American novels
- On Beauty — Zadie Smith · Booker shortlist: two families, one university, art and race and marriage colliding
2004
The Booker and the Pulitzer both went to novels that deserved them — and Cloud Atlas arrived
Alan Hollinghurst · Marilynne Robinson · David Mitchell · Philip Roth
- The Line of Beauty — Alan Hollinghurst · Booker winner: a young gay man in Thatcher’s London — prose as the argument
- Gilead — Marilynne Robinson · Pulitzer winner: a letter from a dying father to the son he won’t live to see grow up
- Cloud Atlas — David Mitchell · six nested stories spanning centuries — the most formally ambitious novel of the decade
- The Plot Against America — Philip Roth · Lindbergh wins 1940, signs with Hitler — and the Roth family watches America change shape
2003
Morrison won the Nobel — and The Known World, Austerlitz, and Runaway appeared in the same year
Edward P. Jones · W.G. Sebald · Alice Munro · Mark Haddon · Jhumpa Lahiri
- The Known World — Edward P. Jones · Pulitzer winner: a Black slaveholder in antebellum Virginia — one of the great American novels
- Austerlitz — W.G. Sebald · English translation 2003: the novel that changed how writers thought about prose and memory
- Runaway — Alice Munro · the collection many consider her finest — women who leave, or try to
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time — Mark Haddon · Whitbread Book of the Year: a child’s voice, a family secret, formally extraordinary
2002
Life of Pi won the Booker and divided readers — the other books of 2002 were quietly extraordinary
Yann Martel · Richard Russo · Ian McEwan · Jonathan Franzen
- Life of Pi — Yann Martel · Booker winner: a boy, a tiger, a lifeboat — and the question of which story you choose to believe
- Empire Falls — Richard Russo · Pulitzer winner: a small Maine diner, three generations, a town that is losing everything
- Atonement — Ian McEwan · Booker shortlist: a misremembered moment in 1935 and the wreckage it leaves across decades
- The Corrections — Jonathan Franzen · National Book Award 2001, paperback 2002: the Lambert family, dysfunction as an American condition
2001
September 11 happened in the middle of a literary year already asking hard questions
Jonathan Franzen · Ian McEwan · Peter Carey · W.G. Sebald
- The Corrections — Jonathan Franzen · National Book Award: five members of one dysfunctional family — the Great American Novel argument of its year
- Atonement — Ian McEwan · a thirteen-year-old’s misinterpretation and the lives it destroys — McEwan at the height of his powers
- True History of the Kelly Gang — Peter Carey · Booker winner: Ned Kelly writes his own story in a voice entirely his own
- Austerlitz — W.G. Sebald · the original German publication — the novel that changed how writers thought about prose and the past
2000
The highest-rated books of the year — fiction that still holds
J.K. Rowling · George R.R. Martin · Stephen King · Michael Chabon
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire — J.K. Rowling · the book where the series turned dark and became unmissable
- A Storm of Swords — George R.R. Martin · the Red Wedding, and the most shocking sequence in modern popular fiction
- On Writing — Stephen King · half memoir, half masterclass — the most useful book about writing ever published
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay — Michael Chabon · Pulitzer winner: art, escape, and two cousins in 1940s New York
1999
J.M. Coetzee won the Booker with a novel nobody forgot
J.M. Coetzee · Jonathan Lethem · Salman Rushdie · Barbara Kingsolver
- Disgrace — J.M. Coetzee · Booker winner: a professor, a transgression, post-apartheid South Africa — one of the sharpest novels of the century
- Motherless Brooklyn — Jonathan Lethem · National Book Award: a detective with Tourette’s, Brooklyn, and the mystery of a dead mentor
- The Ground Beneath Her Feet — Salman Rushdie · rock music, myth, and a parallel world — Rushdie at his most expansive
- The Poisonwood Bible — Barbara Kingsolver · a missionary family unmade by the Congo — one of the decade’s essential American novels
1998
Ian McEwan won the Booker with Amsterdam — and Birthday Letters arrived the year Hughes died
Ian McEwan · J.M. Coetzee · Ted Hughes · Tom Wolfe
- Amsterdam — Ian McEwan · Booker winner: two friends, one promise, and what civilised men will do to protect their reputations
- Boyhood — J.M. Coetzee · the first memoir-novel told in second person — one of the strangest and truest accounts of childhood
- Birthday Letters — Ted Hughes · the poems to Sylvia Plath written over twenty-five years, published in the year he died
- A Man in Full — Tom Wolfe · the sprawling Atlanta novel — ambition and collapse in late Reagan’s America
1997
The God of Small Things and the year literary fiction felt urgent again
Arundhati Roy · Philip Roth · Don DeLillo · Jon Krakauer
- The God of Small Things — Arundhati Roy · Booker winner: twins, forbidden love, and the caste system in Kerala — still breathtaking
- American Pastoral — Philip Roth · Pulitzer winner: the American Dream unravelling across three decades
- Underworld — Don DeLillo · fifty years of American history through a single baseball
- Into Thin Air — Jon Krakauer · a first-hand account of the 1996 Everest disaster
1996
Graham Swift won the Booker and sparked the prize’s first major controversy — Infinite Jest arrived
Graham Swift · David Foster Wallace · Penelope Fitzgerald · Beryl Bainbridge
- Last Orders — Graham Swift · Booker winner — and the plagiarism controversy that followed: four voices, one journey to scatter the ashes
- Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace · the novel that defined a generation of writers — addiction, entertainment, and the search for sincerity
- The Blue Flower — Penelope Fitzgerald · the historical novel about Novalis so perfectly made it changes what you think a novel can be
- Every Man for Himself — Beryl Bainbridge · Booker shortlist: the Titanic, the week before, five people who will not survive it
1995
Pat Barker won the Booker, Carol Shields won the Pulitzer — and The Liars’ Club changed memoir
Pat Barker · Carol Shields · Philip Roth · Mary Karr · David Foster Wallace
- The Ghost Road — Pat Barker · Booker winner: the third volume of the Regeneration trilogy — WWI, the mind, and what healing costs
- The Stone Diaries — Carol Shields · Pulitzer winner: a woman’s biography told through its own gaps and silences
- Sabbath’s Theater — Philip Roth · National Book Award: the most honest novel about aging and rage in American fiction
- The Liars’ Club — Mary Karr · the memoir that changed the genre — a Texas childhood written from inside the child’s terror
1994
The Shipping News won the Pulitzer, and the Booker went to the novel that split the judging panel in two
E. Annie Proulx · James Kelman · William Gaddis · Sherman Alexie
- The Shipping News — E. Annie Proulx · Pulitzer and National Book Award winner: a hapless man rebuilds his life in a windswept Newfoundland fishing town
- How Late It Was, How Late — James Kelman · Booker winner: one of the prize’s most controversial choices ever, narrated entirely in working-class Glaswegian vernacular
- A Frolic of His Own — William Gaddis · National Book Award: a man suing everyone in sight, including himself — Gaddis’s funniest and angriest novel
- Reservation Blues — Sherman Alexie · a blues guitar with a supernatural past lands on a Spokane reservation — one of the essential Native American novels of the decade
1993
Toni Morrison won the Nobel — and A Suitable Boy arrived at 1,349 pages
Roddy Doyle · Vikram Seth · Toni Morrison · Jeffrey Eugenides · Susan Faludi
- Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha — Roddy Doyle · Booker winner: a ten-year-old in Dublin whose parents’ marriage is ending — devastating precisely
- A Suitable Boy — Vikram Seth · 1,349 pages, four families, newly independent India — one of the great English-language novels
- The Virgin Suicides — Jeffrey Eugenides · five sisters, a chorus of boys looking back — the most precise novel about the male gaze
- Jazz — Toni Morrison · Harlem 1926: a murder, a marriage, a narrative voice that keeps being wrong about what it’s narrating
1992
Michael Ondaatje shared the Booker and The English Patient became a film ten million people saw
Michael Ondaatje · Barry Unsworth · Cormac McCarthy · Art Spiegelman
- The English Patient — Michael Ondaatje · joint Booker winner: a burned man, a villa in Italy, four people in the wreckage of WWII
- Sacred Hunger — Barry Unsworth · joint Booker winner: the Atlantic slave trade, told from inside the machinery
- All the Pretty Horses — Cormac McCarthy · National Book Award: a young man rides into Mexico and finds out what the world costs
- Maus II — Art Spiegelman · Pulitzer: the conclusion of the most important graphic novel of the twentieth century
1991
The Cold War ended — Okri won the Booker and The Secret History arrived with ten years of work in it
Ben Okri · John Updike · Donna Tartt · Don DeLillo · Angela Carter
- The Famished Road — Ben Okri · Booker winner: a spirit child in a Nigerian shantytown, between two worlds — extraordinary prose
- The Secret History — Donna Tartt · the novel that invented dark academia — an inverted mystery ten years in the making
- Rabbit at Rest — John Updike · Pulitzer winner: Rabbit Angstrom at sixty, America at the end of the 1980s — both running out of time
- Wise Children — Angela Carter · her final novel — joyful, theatrical, shot through with grief — Dora Chance at seventy-five
1990
Possession won the Booker — and The Things They Carried became the essential Vietnam novel
A.S. Byatt · Tim O’Brien · John McGahern · Oscar Hijuelos · Janet Malcolm
- Possession — A.S. Byatt · Booker winner: two Victorian poets, two contemporary scholars, a secret love affair across centuries
- The Things They Carried — Tim O’Brien · the definitive American novel about Vietnam — story-truth versus happening-truth
- Amongst Women — John McGahern · Booker shortlist: an IRA veteran ruling his family — the masterpiece of the most underread major novelist in English
- The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love — Oscar Hijuelos · Pulitzer winner: Cuban brothers, New York, the mambo era, and what it means when your moment passes
1989
The Berlin Wall fell, the fatwa was issued, and Ishiguro published the finest novel of his career
Kazuo Ishiguro · Salman Rushdie · John Irving · Anne Tyler · John Banville
- The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro · Booker winner: a butler drives across England not quite able to say what he has lost — one of the great novels
- The Satanic Verses — Salman Rushdie · the novel that became a historical event — and is also an extraordinary work of fiction
- A Prayer for Owen Meany — John Irving · faith, accident, friendship, and a character certain of things nobody else can know
- The Book of Evidence — John Banville · Booker shortlist: a murderer explains himself in prose so beautiful it becomes the problem
1988
Peter Carey won his first Booker, and Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer for Beloved
Peter Carey · Toni Morrison · Salman Rushdie · Anita Brookner
- Oscar and Lucinda — Peter Carey · Booker winner: an obsessive gambler and a glass church transported across colonial Australia
- Beloved — Toni Morrison · Pulitzer winner: a formerly enslaved woman haunted by the daughter she could not save
- The Satanic Verses — Salman Rushdie · published in September 1988, the year before the fatwa changed everything around it
- A Cold Red Sunrise — Aaron Elkins · Edgar Award winner, for readers who want something propulsive after the heavier titles above
1987
Penelope Lively won the Booker, and Toni Morrison published the novel that would win her the Pulitzer the following year
Penelope Lively · Toni Morrison · Peter Taylor · Larry McMurtry
- Moon Tiger — Penelope Lively · Booker winner: a dying woman reconstructs her own history, out of order, on her own terms
- Beloved — Toni Morrison · published 1987: the ghost story that is really about what slavery does to memory and motherhood
- A Summons to Memphis — Peter Taylor · Pulitzer winner: a son called home to stop his elderly father’s remarriage
- Lonesome Dove — Larry McMurtry · Pulitzer winner 1986, still the defining Western a year later: two old Texas Rangers, one last drive
1986
Kingsley Amis won the Booker for satirising old age, and Larry McMurtry won the Pulitzer for the last great Western
Kingsley Amis · Larry McMurtry · Margaret Atwood
- The Old Devils — Kingsley Amis · Booker winner: old friends, old grudges, and a lifetime of drinking in a small Welsh town
- Lonesome Dove — Larry McMurtry · Pulitzer winner: a cattle drive from Texas to Montana that becomes an elegy for the West
- The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood · Booker shortlist: the dystopia that has never stopped being relevant since
1985
Keri Hulme won the Booker with her only novel, and Alison Lurie won the Pulitzer for academic adultery in London
Keri Hulme · Alison Lurie · Margaret Atwood · Don DeLillo
- The Bone People — Keri Hulme · Booker winner: a Māori artist, an abused boy, and a mute giant — fierce, strange, unforgettable
- Foreign Affairs — Alison Lurie · Pulitzer winner: two American academics in London, both ambushed by love they didn’t plan for
- White Noise — Don DeLillo · National Book Award: consumerism, a toxic cloud, and the fear of death dressed up as a campus comedy
1984
Anita Brookner won the Booker with a quiet novel about loneliness, and William Kennedy won the Pulitzer for a ghost-haunted gravedigger
Anita Brookner · William Kennedy · Julian Barnes · J.M. Coetzee
- Hotel du Lac — Anita Brookner · Booker winner: a romance novelist exiled to a Swiss hotel after a scandal, watching other people’s lives instead of living her own
- Ironweed — William Kennedy · Pulitzer winner: a homeless ex-ballplayer returns to Albany and the family he failed
- Flaubert’s Parrot — Julian Barnes · Booker shortlist: a retired doctor’s obsessive search for the truth about Flaubert — formally unlike anything else that year
1983
Coetzee’s first Booker win, decided by a coin toss in spirit, and Alice Walker won the Pulitzer for The Color Purple
J.M. Coetzee · Alice Walker · Salman Rushdie · Anne Tyler
- Life & Times of Michael K — J.M. Coetzee · Booker winner: a simple man tries to survive a South African civil war by disappearing from it entirely
- The Color Purple — Alice Walker · Pulitzer and National Book Award winner: a Black woman in the rural South writes her way to her own voice
- Shame — Salman Rushdie · Booker shortlist, famously the runner-up the judges almost chose instead: Pakistan reimagined as fable
- Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant — Anne Tyler · Pulitzer finalist: a Baltimore family circling the same wounds for decades
1982
Thomas Keneally won the Booker with the book that became Schindler’s List, and Updike’s Rabbit grew old enough to win a Pulitzer
Thomas Keneally · John Updike · Marilynne Robinson · Alice Walker
- Schindler’s Ark — Thomas Keneally · Booker winner: the true story behind Schindler’s List, told as documentary fiction
- Rabbit Is Rich — John Updike · Pulitzer and National Book Award winner: Rabbit Angstrom prospers in the Reagan years, and it costs him something
- Housekeeping — Marilynne Robinson · Pulitzer finalist, her debut: two sisters raised by an eccentric aunt on the edge of a lake town
1981
Midnight’s Children won the Booker and was later named the best Booker winner ever — twice
Salman Rushdie · John Kennedy Toole · D.M. Thomas
- Midnight’s Children — Salman Rushdie · Booker winner, later crowned “Booker of Bookers” in both 1993 and 2008: a boy born at the exact moment of India’s independence
- A Confederacy of Dunces — John Kennedy Toole · Pulitzer winner, published eleven years after the author’s death: New Orleans’ most magnificently insufferable failed scholar
- The White Hotel — D.M. Thomas · Booker shortlist: psychoanalysis, the Holocaust, and a structure unlike anything else nominated that year
1980
William Golding finally won the Booker, and Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer for the book that took him a decade
William Golding · Norman Mailer · Anthony Burgess · David Lodge
- Rites of Passage — William Golding · Booker winner: a Georgian sea voyage, a death that shouldn’t have happened, and a narrator slowly realising his own complicity
- The Executioner’s Song — Norman Mailer · Pulitzer winner: the true story of murderer Gary Gilmore, who insisted on his own execution
- Earthly Powers — Anthony Burgess · Booker shortlist: a century of history narrated by an aging, gay novelist who has seen everything
1979
Penelope Fitzgerald won the Booker in a famous upset, and Cheever’s collected stories swept the Pulitzer
Penelope Fitzgerald · John Cheever · V.S. Naipaul
- Offshore — Penelope Fitzgerald · Booker winner, in a result that surprised everyone including her: houseboat dwellers on the Thames, barely staying afloat in every sense
- The Stories of John Cheever — John Cheever · Pulitzer and National Book Award winner: sixty-one stories that defined American suburban unease for a generation
- A Bend in the River — V.S. Naipaul · Booker shortlist: an Indian shopkeeper in a newly independent African country, watching the certainties of colonialism dissolve
1978
Iris Murdoch finally won the Booker, and the Pulitzer jury’s pick for an unforgettable story collection was overruled
Iris Murdoch · James Alan McPherson · Paul Scott
- The Sea, the Sea — Iris Murdoch · Booker winner: a retired theatre director retreats to the coast and is consumed by an old obsession
- Elbow Room — James Alan McPherson · Pulitzer winner: short stories on race and identity in America, the first by a Black author to win the prize
- Staying On — Paul Scott · Booker winner the year before, still widely read in 1978: an aging British couple left behind after Indian independence
1977
Paul Scott won the Booker for the novel that closed his Raj Quartet, the year the Pulitzer board controversially gave no fiction award at all
Paul Scott · Alex Haley · Toni Morrison
- Staying On — Paul Scott · Booker winner: the British couple who stayed behind in India after independence — the coda to his Raj Quartet
- Roots — Alex Haley · awarded a special Pulitzer after the fiction jury’s pick was overruled and no fiction prize was given: seven generations from Africa to America
- Song of Solomon — Toni Morrison · National Book Critics Circle Award: a man’s search for his family’s buried history and the meaning of flight
1976
David Storey won the Booker for a quiet family novel, and Saul Bellow won both the Pulitzer and the Nobel in the same year
David Storey · Saul Bellow · Iris Murdoch
- Saville — David Storey · Booker winner: a Yorkshire mining family and the son who is supposed to escape it
- Humboldt’s Gift — Saul Bellow · Pulitzer winner, the same year Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature: friendship, ambition, and the death of a poet
- Henry James’s Letters — edited by Leon Edel · National Book Award for nonfiction: the correspondence of a writer who never stopped revising himself
1975
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala won the Booker for a novel of two timelines in India, and Michael Shaara won the Pulitzer for Gettysburg
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala · Michael Shaara · Jon Cleary
- Heat and Dust — Ruth Prawer Jhabvala · Booker winner: two Englishwomen, two generations apart, both undone by India in different ways
- The Killer Angels — Michael Shaara · Pulitzer winner: the Battle of Gettysburg told from inside the minds of the generals who fought it
- Peter’s Pence — Jon Cleary · Edgar Award winner: a Vatican thriller, for readers who want pace after the heavier titles above
1974
Nixon resigned — and le Carré wrote the spy novel against which all others are judged
John le Carré · Bob Woodward · Stephen King · Peter Benchley
- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy — John le Carré · Booker shortlist: George Smiley hunts a Soviet mole at the top of British intelligence
- All the President’s Men — Woodward & Bernstein · the journalism that brought down a presidency — still the standard for investigative reporting
- Carrie — Stephen King · King’s debut: rescued from the bin by his wife, published in April 1974 — the horror novel that launched everything
- Jaws — Peter Benchley · made the sea terrifying before the film made it worse
1973
Watergate broke, Pynchon wrote a masterpiece, and Jong rewrote what women were allowed to say
Thomas Pynchon · Erica Jong · Alexander Solzhenitsyn · William Goldman
- Gravity’s Rainbow — Thomas Pynchon · National Book Award: the most ambitious American novel of the postwar era — WWII, paranoia, entropy
- Fear of Flying — Erica Jong · the novel that said what women actually thought about sex and freedom — and was immediately controversial
- The Gulag Archipelago — Alexander Solzhenitsyn · the document that made the Soviet system visible to the world — Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the USSR the following year
- The Princess Bride — William Goldman · first published 1973: the novel that outlasted every film about it
1972
Watership Down changed what a novel about animals could be — adults read it before children did
Richard Adams · Frederick Forsyth · Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · Richard Bach
- Watership Down — Richard Adams · rejected by thirteen publishers: a novel about rabbits that is really about leadership, survival, and political authority
- The Day of the Jackal — Frederick Forsyth · the thriller that defined the procedural: an assassin planning to kill de Gaulle, told with documentary precision
- Jonathan Livingston Seagull — Richard Bach · one of the bestselling books of the 1970s — a fable about transcending limits that struck a cultural nerve
- August 1914 — Alexander Solzhenitsyn · the first volume of his epic about WWI and the Russian collapse — historical fiction as moral reckoning
1971
Thompson invented gonzo journalism — and Morrison published her first novel
Hunter S. Thompson · Toni Morrison · John Updike · E.L. Doctorow
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — Hunter S. Thompson · the book that invented a genre: Thompson and his attorney drive to Las Vegas on assignment and the American Dream dissolves
- The Bluest Eye — Toni Morrison · Morrison’s debut: a Black girl in Ohio prays for blue eyes — the most devastating critique of white beauty standards in American fiction
- Rabbit Redux — John Updike · Rabbit Angstrom in 1969, watching the moon landing while his wife leaves him — America at the end of the 1960s
- The Book of Daniel — E.L. Doctorow · the Rosenberg trial, the Cold War, the 1960s — Doctorow’s most politically urgent novel
1970
Angelou, Greer, Didion — the year women’s writing demanded to be taken seriously
Maya Angelou · Germaine Greer · Joan Didion · Erich Segal
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — Maya Angelou · the memoir that changed what autobiography was allowed to say — trauma, race, survival, and the making of a voice
- The Female Eunuch — Germaine Greer · the feminist text that outsold everything around it and named what millions of women already knew
- Play It As It Lays — Joan Didion · a Hollywood actress in collapse — Didion’s darkest and most formally precise novel
- Love Story — Erich Segal · the bestselling novel of 1970 — sometimes a book’s moment of impact is itself the historical fact
1969
Slaughterhouse-Five and The Godfather arrived in the same year — neither has ever gone out of print
Kurt Vonnegut · Mario Puzo · Philip Roth · Vladimir Nabokov
- Slaughterhouse-Five — Kurt Vonnegut · the Dresden bombing, time travel, and Billy Pilgrim unstuck in time — one of the great anti-war novels
- The Godfather — Mario Puzo · the novel that made a genre: organized crime as a study of power, loyalty, and the American family
- Portnoy’s Complaint — Philip Roth · the funniest and most scandalous American novel of its decade — a man confesses everything to his analyst
- Ada, or Ardor — Vladimir Nabokov · the most extravagant novel by the most extravagant prose writer of the century — incest, memory, and a parallel world
1968
2001 and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? arrived in the same year — science fiction grew up
Arthur C. Clarke · Philip K. Dick · Tom Wolfe · John Updike
- 2001: A Space Odyssey — Arthur C. Clarke · Clarke wrote the novel alongside Kubrick’s screenplay — one of the few cases where the book and film are inseparable
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Philip K. Dick · the novel that became Blade Runner: what separates human from machine, empathy from performance
- The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test — Tom Wolfe · the book that defined New Journalism: Wolfe follows Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters across America
- Couples — John Updike · a novel about suburban adultery that made the cover of Time — Updike diagnosing the end of the 1950s consensus
1967
García Márquez invented a world — and a sixteen-year-old published The Outsiders
Gabriel García Márquez · Mikhail Bulgakov · Ira Levin · S.E. Hinton
- One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez · Macondo, the Buendía family, and a hundred years of history told as myth — the novel that defined magical realism for the world
- The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov · completed in secret and published posthumously: the Devil visits Moscow, Jesus appears in Jerusalem — the great Russian novel of the Soviet era
- Rosemary’s Baby — Ira Levin · the horror novel that made the domestic uncanny — a pregnant woman in New York and the neighbours who are too helpful
- The Outsiders — S.E. Hinton · written by a sixteen-year-old in Tulsa: class, loyalty, and the violence of being young — still read by every generation
1966
Wide Sargasso Sea gave Bertha Mason her name — and In Cold Blood invented a genre
Jean Rhys · Truman Capote · Chinua Achebe · Sylvia Plath
- Wide Sargasso Sea — Jean Rhys · the most important act of literary reclamation of the century: Rochester’s first wife gets her story back
- In Cold Blood — Truman Capote · the book that invented narrative nonfiction — a Kansas murder and what it cost everyone
- A Man of the People — Chinua Achebe · political corruption in newly independent Nigeria — published the week of the coup that proved him right
- Ariel — Sylvia Plath · published posthumously: the poems that made her a legend and changed what confessional poetry could be
1965
The Autobiography of Malcolm X arrived six months after his assassination
Malcolm X & Alex Haley · Flannery O’Connor · Saul Bellow · Norman Mailer
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X — Malcolm X & Alex Haley · one of the essential American autobiographies — transformation, conviction, and a life cut short
- Everything That Rises Must Converge — Flannery O’Connor · published posthumously: her finest stories, completed as she was dying
- Herzog — Saul Bellow · a professor writes unsent letters to the living and the dead — consciousness as an argument about ideas
- An American Dream — Norman Mailer · a man kills his wife and gets away with it — Mailer at his most extravagant and most serious
1964
Saul Bellow, William Golding — and the year the Nobel went to Sartre, who refused it
Saul Bellow · William Golding · Jean-Paul Sartre · Philip Larkin
- Herzog — Saul Bellow · National Book Award: a professor writes unsent letters — consciousness, ideas, and the comedy of the intellectual
- The Spire — William Golding · a medieval dean builds a cathedral spire against all advice — faith, obsession, and structural collapse
- The Whitsun Weddings — Philip Larkin · the collection that made his reputation — England observed with a precision that passes for coldness
- Nausea — Jean-Paul Sartre · 1938 original, widely reread in 1964 when Sartre refused the Nobel — existentialism as lived experience
1963
The Bell Jar, The Fire Next Time — a year that named things the culture couldn’t say
Sylvia Plath · James Baldwin · Betty Friedan · John le Carré · Julio Cortázar
- The Bell Jar — Sylvia Plath · published under a pseudonym in January 1963; Plath died one month later
- The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin · put Baldwin on the cover of Time; still the most important prose about race in America
- The Feminine Mystique — Betty Friedan · named the dissatisfaction millions of women felt and launched the second wave of feminism
- The Spy Who Came In from the Cold — John le Carré · Graham Greene called it the best spy novel ever written
1962
A Clockwork Orange, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Silent Spring in the same year
Anthony Burgess · Ken Kesey · Rachel Carson · Doris Lessing
- A Clockwork Orange — Anthony Burgess · free will, violence, language, and a dystopia that invented its own dialect
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — Ken Kesey · a psychiatric ward, a rebel, and the machinery of control
- Silent Spring — Rachel Carson · launched the modern environmental movement; still urgent
- The Golden Notebook — Doris Lessing · a woman writer fragments her life into four notebooks — one of the founding texts of feminist fiction
1961
Catch-22, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie — a year that produced two immortal titles
Joseph Heller · Muriel Spark · V.S. Naipaul · Henry Miller
- Catch-22 — Joseph Heller · the novel that gave a phrase to the language and an argument about war that has never been bettered
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie — Muriel Spark · a teacher, six girls, fascism, and the most controlled irony in twentieth-century British fiction
- A House for Mr. Biswas — V.S. Naipaul · the great novel of colonial displacement — a man builds a house and what it costs him
- Tropic of Cancer — Henry Miller · written in 1934, published legally in the US in 1961 after an obscenity trial
1960
To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer — and Updike published Rabbit, Run
Harper Lee · John Updike · Flannery O’Connor · Richard Wright
- To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee · Pulitzer winner: one of the most read American novels ever written
- Rabbit, Run — John Updike · the first Rabbit novel: a former high school basketball star who can’t stop running
