Reading lists

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.

107 years, from 2026 back to 1920

2020s

Updated May 2026

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
The books of 2026 →

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
The books of 2025 →

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
The books of 2024 →

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
The books of 2023 →

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
The books of 2022 →

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
The books of 2021 →

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
The books of 2020 →
↑ Back to the decades

2010s

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
The books of 2019 →
On my bookshelf

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
The books of 2018 →

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
The books of 2017 →

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
The books of 2016 →

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
The books of 2015 →

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
The books of 2014 →

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
The books of 2013 →
On my bookshelf

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
The books of 2012 →

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
The books of 2011 →

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
The books of 2010 →
↑ Back to the decades

2000s

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
The books of 2009 →

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
The books of 2008 →

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
The books of 2007 →

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
The books of 2006 →

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
The books of 2005 →

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
The books of 2004 →

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
The books of 2003 →

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
The books of 2002 →

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
The books of 2001 →

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
The books of 2000 →
↑ Back to the decades

1990s

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
The books of 1999 →

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
The books of 1998 →

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
The books of 1997 →

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
The books of 1996 →

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
The books of 1995 →

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
The books of 1994 →

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
The books of 1993 →

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
The books of 1992 →

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
The books of 1991 →

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
The books of 1990 →
↑ Back to the decades

1980s

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
The books of 1989 →

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
The books of 1988 →

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
The books of 1987 →

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
The books of 1986 →

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
The books of 1985 →

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
The books of 1984 →

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
The books of 1983 →

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
The books of 1982 →

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
The books of 1981 →

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
The books of 1980 →
↑ Back to the decades

1970s

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
The books of 1979 →

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
The books of 1978 →

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
The books of 1977 →

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
The books of 1976 →

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
The books of 1975 →

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
The books of 1974 →

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
The books of 1973 →

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
The books of 1972 →

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
The books of 1971 →

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
The books of 1970 →
↑ Back to the decades

1960s

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
The books of 1969 →

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
The books of 1968 →

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
The books of 1967 →

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
The books of 1966 →

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
The books of 1965 →

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
The books of 1964 →

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
The books of 1963 →

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
The books of 1962 →

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
The books of 1961 →

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
The books of 1960 →
↑ Back to the decades

1950s

1959: Grass published The Tin Drum, and Roth won the National Book Award at twenty-six

Günter Grass · William S. Burroughs · Philip Roth · Lorraine Hansberry · Kurt Vonnegut

  • The Tin Drum — Günter Grass · a boy who refuses to grow narrates the Nazi period as black comedy
  • Goodbye Columbus — Philip Roth · National Book Award winner: a Newark summer romance undone by class
  • A Raisin in the Sun — Lorraine Hansberry · the first play by a Black woman to appear on Broadway
  • Naked Lunch — William S. Burroughs · no plot, no continuous narrator: the Beat Generation's most radical book
The books of 1959 →

1958: Achebe published Things Fall Apart, and Lampedusa's Leopard appeared after his death

Chinua Achebe · Vladimir Nabokov · Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa · Truman Capote

  • Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe · Okonkwo's Igbo world unravels as colonizers and missionaries arrive
  • The Leopard — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa · Strega Prize winner: a Sicilian prince watches his world end
  • Breakfast at Tiffany's — Truman Capote · Holly Golightly, lonelier and stranger than the film ever let her be
  • Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov · the English edition of a monster's self-deception, told in dazzling prose
The books of 1958 →

1957: Kerouac's scroll became On the Road, and Doctor Zhivago was smuggled out

Jack Kerouac · Boris Pasternak · Albert Camus · Ayn Rand · Alain Robbe-Grillet

  • On the Road — Jack Kerouac · written on a continuous scroll: the book that changed how American prose sounded
  • Doctor Zhivago — Boris Pasternak · a doctor and poet through the Revolution, smuggled to Italy for publication
  • The Fall — Albert Camus · a former Parisian lawyer in an Amsterdam bar dismantles his own self-image
  • Jealousy — Alain Robbe-Grillet · a husband watches his wife: a founding text of the Nouveau Roman
The books of 1957 →

1956: Baldwin was told to burn Giovanni's Room and published it anyway

James Baldwin · Saul Bellow · Edwin O'Connor · William H. Whyte · Patricia Highsmith

  • Giovanni's Room — James Baldwin · an American in Paris and the cost of refusing to acknowledge who you are
  • Seize the Day — Saul Bellow · one catastrophic Manhattan day in the life of Tommy Wilhelm
  • The Last Hurrah — Edwin O'Connor · Atlantic Prize winner: an aging political boss runs his final campaign
  • The Organization Man — William H. Whyte · how the postwar corporation replaced individual striving with group conformity
The books of 1956 →

1955: Lolita appeared in Paris after four American publishers turned it down

Vladimir Nabokov · Graham Greene · Flannery O’Connor · William Gaddis

  • Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov · first published by Olympia Press in Paris: a novel to read against its narrator
  • The Quiet American — Graham Greene · a British journalist in Saigon and an American with a theory
  • A Good Man Is Hard to Find — Flannery O’Connor · ten Southern stories, most ending in violence, none in comfort
  • The Recognitions — William Gaddis · 956 pages on a painter turned forger, dismissed by reviewers in 1955
The books of 1955 →

1954: Golding stranded schoolboys on an island while Tolkien sent Frodo from the Shire

William Golding · J.R.R. Tolkien · Kingsley Amis

  • Lord of the Flies — William Golding · rejected by every major publisher before Faber took it on
  • The Fellowship of the Ring — J.R.R. Tolkien · the first volume of The Lord of the Rings: from the Shire to Rivendell
  • Lucky Jim — Kingsley Amis · Somerset Maugham Award winner: a junior lecturer who doesn't believe in his subject
The books of 1954 →

1953: Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451, and Waiting for Godot was first performed in Paris

Saul Bellow · James Baldwin · Ray Bradbury · Samuel Beckett

  • The Adventures of Augie March — Saul Bellow · a poor Chicago boy's picaresque that won the National Book Award in 1954
  • Go Tell It on the Mountain — James Baldwin · Baldwin's first novel: a Harlem boy's fourteenth birthday and his father's God
  • Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury · firemen burn books, written in nine days on a rented typewriter
  • Waiting for Godot — Samuel Beckett · two men wait beside a tree for someone who does not come
The books of 1953 →

1952: Ellison published Invisible Man, and Hemingway returned with The Old Man and the Sea

Ralph Ellison · Ernest Hemingway · John Steinbeck · Flannery O'Connor

  • Invisible Man — Ralph Ellison · National Book Award winner: a narrator seen as a type, never a person
  • The Old Man and the Sea — Ernest Hemingway · Pulitzer winner: Santiago's three-day struggle with a great marlin
  • East of Eden — John Steinbeck · Cain and Abel retold across two families in the Salinas Valley
  • Wise Blood — Flannery O'Connor · O'Connor's first novel: Hazel Motes preaches the Church Without Christ
The books of 1952 →

1951: Holden Caulfield spent three days in New York, and Arendt traced totalitarianism's origins

J.D. Salinger · Marguerite Yourcenar · Hannah Arendt · Albert Camus · Isaac Asimov

  • The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger · the novel that invented the first-person teenage voice in American fiction
  • Memoirs of Hadrian — Marguerite Yourcenar · an old emperor writes his life to the young Marcus Aurelius
  • The Origins of Totalitarianism — Hannah Arendt · Nazi and Stalinist terror traced through antisemitism and imperialism
  • The Rebel — Albert Camus · the essay on rebellion that ended his friendship with Sartre
The books of 1951 →

1950: Lessing's debut opened in Southern Rhodesia, and Asimov tested the Three Laws of Robotics

Doris Lessing · Isaac Asimov · Ray Bradbury · Samuel Beckett

  • The Grass Is Singing — Doris Lessing · Lessing's debut: a farmer's wife breaks down under colonial isolation
  • I, Robot — Isaac Asimov · nine stories where the Three Laws of Robotics produce outcomes nobody intended
  • The Martian Chronicles — Ray Bradbury · loosely connected fables about the human colonization of Mars
The books of 1950 →
↑ Back to the decades

1940s

1949: Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Second Sex, and Arthur Miller's Pulitzer-winning salesman

George Orwell · Simone de Beauvoir · Arthur Miller · Nelson Algren · Gwendolyn Brooks

  • Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell · Orwell's last novel, published seven months before tuberculosis killed him
  • The Second Sex — Simone de Beauvoir · the argument that femininity is a situation rather than a nature
  • Death of a Salesman — Arthur Miller · Pulitzer Prize for Drama 1949: Willy Loman comes home late and does not leave again
  • Annie Allen — Gwendolyn Brooks · 1950 Pulitzer for Poetry, the first won by an African American writer
The books of 1949 →

1948: Cry, the Beloved Country arrived four months before South Africa voted for apartheid

Alan Paton · Norman Mailer · Graham Greene · William Faulkner · Truman Capote

  • Cry, the Beloved Country — Alan Paton · a Zulu priest goes to Johannesburg to find his sister and his son
  • The Naked and the Dead — Norman Mailer · a platoon on an invented Pacific island, written by a twenty-five-year-old veteran
  • The Heart of the Matter — Graham Greene · James Tait Black Memorial Prize: a Catholic police officer in a West African colony
  • Intruder in the Dust — William Faulkner · a sixteen-year-old sets out to clear a Black farmer before the town lynches him
The books of 1948 →

1947: Primo Levi and Anne Frank published in the same year, alongside Camus's The Plague

Primo Levi · Albert Camus · Malcolm Lowry · Anne Frank · Hugh Trevor-Roper

  • If This Is a Man — Primo Levi · eleven months in Auschwitz, written by a chemist in measured, almost clinical prose
  • The Plague — Albert Camus · an epidemic seals off Oran, and Dr. Rieux keeps tending the sick
  • Under the Volcano — Malcolm Lowry · a former British consul drinks himself to death on the Day of the Dead
  • Diary of a Young Girl — Anne Frank · published in Dutch in June 1947, edited by her father Otto
The books of 1947 →

1946: Viktor Frankl wrote Man's Search for Meaning in nine days after Auschwitz

Viktor Frankl · Robert Penn Warren · Nikos Kazantzakis · Albert Camus · Evelyn Waugh

  • Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl · a camp memoir that becomes an argument for logotherapy and the search for meaning
  • All the King's Men — Robert Penn Warren · Pulitzer winner: a backwoods idealist becomes a ruthless, corrupted governor
  • Zorba the Greek — Nikos Kazantzakis · a bookish narrator opens a lignite mine on Crete with Alexis Zorba
The books of 1946 →

1945: Animal Farm, Black Boy and Cannery Row in the year the war ended

George Orwell · Evelyn Waugh · Richard Wright · John Steinbeck · Nancy Mitford

  • Animal Farm — George Orwell · rejected by four publishers, then sold out within days in August 1945
  • Black Boy — Richard Wright · a memoir of growing up Black in the Jim Crow South
  • Brideshead Revisited — Evelyn Waugh · Charles Ryder, the Flyte family, and an elegy for the English country house
  • Cannery Row — John Steinbeck · a love letter to Ed Ricketts and the waterfront street in Monterey
The books of 1945 →

1944: Maugham's The Razor's Edge and Strange Fruit, the novel banned in Boston

W. Somerset Maugham · Lillian Smith · Jorge Luis Borges

  • The Razor's Edge — W. Somerset Maugham · a First World War aviator refuses the life everyone expects of him
  • Strange Fruit — Lillian Smith · a forbidden love in 1920s Georgia, banned in Boston and Detroit
The books of 1944 →

1943: The Little Prince was published in New York while its author was in exile

Betty Smith · Antoine de Saint-Exupéry · Ayn Rand · T.S. Eliot

  • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn — Betty Smith · Francie Nolan grows up in Williamsburg; nearly three million copies in two years
  • The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry · a pilot in the Sahara, a boy from an asteroid, and a fox
  • The Fountainhead — Ayn Rand · an architect who will not compromise, after twelve publishers said no
The books of 1943 →

1942: Camus debuted twice in occupied Paris, and Zweig finished Chess Story in Brazil

Albert Camus · Stefan Zweig

  • The Stranger — Albert Camus · Meursault does not cry at his mother's funeral, and society cannot forgive it
  • The Myth of Sisyphus — Albert Camus · the essay behind the novel: we must imagine Sisyphus happy
  • Chess Story — Stefan Zweig · a man who learned chess in Gestapo solitary confinement, published posthumously
The books of 1942 →

1941: Virginia Woolf's last novel appeared five months after she walked into the Ouse

James Agee · Walker Evans · Virginia Woolf · Erich Fromm · Eudora Welty

  • Let Us Now Praise Famous Men — James Agee · three Alabama sharecropper families, with Walker Evans's photographs; sold a few hundred copies
  • Between the Acts — Virginia Woolf · a village pageant in June 1939, published posthumously and unfinished
  • Escape from Freedom — Erich Fromm · why people surrender their freedom voluntarily, written as fascism consumed Europe
The books of 1941 →

1940: France fell, and Koestler, Wright, Greene and Hemingway all published major novels

Arthur Koestler · Richard Wright · Graham Greene · Ernest Hemingway · Carson McCullers

  • Darkness at Noon — Arthur Koestler · an old Bolshevik confesses to a crime he did not commit
  • Native Son — Richard Wright · Bigger Thomas in 1930s Chicago; 215,000 copies in three weeks
  • The Power and the Glory — Graham Greene · a whisky priest hunted through a Mexican state that has outlawed the Church
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls — Ernest Hemingway · his longest novel, written in thirteen months in Cuba and Sun Valley
The books of 1940 →
↑ Back to the decades

1930s

1939: The Grapes of Wrath was burned in California, and Philip Marlowe made his debut

John Steinbeck · Raymond Chandler · James Joyce · James Hilton

  • The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck · Pulitzer winner: the Joad family drives west on Route 66 looking for work
  • The Big Sleep — Raymond Chandler · Chandler's first novel at fifty, introducing the private detective Philip Marlowe
The books of 1939 →

1938: The year of Munich, Manderley, and a play with no scenery

Daphne du Maurier · Thornton Wilder · George Orwell

  • Rebecca — Daphne du Maurier · a nameless second wife, Mrs Danvers, and a house ruled by the dead
  • Our Town — Thornton Wilder · Pulitzer winner: a Stage Manager, a few chairs, and Grover's Corners, New Hampshire
The books of 1938 →

1937: Two ranch hands, one hobbit, and books about small worlds

John Steinbeck · J.R.R. Tolkien · George Orwell

  • Of Mice and Men — John Steinbeck · George and Lennie's dream of a few acres, told in under a hundred pages
  • The Hobbit — J.R.R. Tolkien · Bilbo Baggins did not want an adventure, and got one anyway
The books of 1937 →

1936: Gone with the Wind and Absalom, Absalom! told the same South twice

Margaret Mitchell · William Faulkner · Sinclair Lewis

  • Gone with the Wind — Margaret Mitchell · Pulitzer winner: the best-selling American novel, read here with its whitewashing in view
  • Absalom, Absalom! — William Faulkner · Thomas Sutpen's rise and fall, pieced together by unreliable narrators decades later
  • It Can't Happen Here — Sinclair Lewis · a folksy populist wins the presidency and dismantles American democracy
The books of 1936 →

1935: Clifford Odets wrote four plays in one year and lit up Broadway

Thomas Wolfe · Dorothy L. Sayers · Enid Bagnold · Clifford Odets · T.S. Eliot

  • Of Time and the River — Thomas Wolfe · the nine-hundred-page sequel to Look Homeward, Angel, edited by Maxwell Perkins
  • Gaudy Night — Dorothy L. Sayers · Harriet Vane, Lord Peter Wimsey, and poison-pen letters at an Oxford women's college
  • National Velvet — Enid Bagnold · a butcher's daughter, a raffle-won piebald, and the Grand National
  • Awake and Sing! — Clifford Odets · three generations of the Jewish Berger family crowded into a Bronx apartment
The books of 1935 →

1934: Fitzgerald finished Tender Is the Night, and Tropic of Cancer was banned

F. Scott Fitzgerald · Henry Miller · Robert Graves · Henry Roth · Agatha Christie

  • Tender Is the Night — F. Scott Fitzgerald · nine years in the making: a psychiatrist's marriage unravels on the French Riviera
  • Tropic of Cancer — Henry Miller · published in Paris, then banned in the United States for twenty-seven years
  • I, Claudius — Robert Graves · a Roman emperor who survived the court by being underestimated
The books of 1934 →

1933: The year of the Berlin book burnings, when Malraux won the Goncourt

André Malraux · Vera Brittain · George Orwell · Gertrude Stein · James Hilton

  • Man's Fate — André Malraux · Prix Goncourt winner: three revolutionaries and the failed 1927 Shanghai uprising
  • Testament of Youth — Vera Brittain · the defining female account of the First World War, from Oxford to nursing
  • Down and Out in Paris and London — George Orwell · Orwell's first book: hotel kitchens in Paris, spike houses in London
The books of 1933 →

1932: Huxley imagined control through pleasure, the year before Hitler came to power

Aldous Huxley · William Faulkner · Louis-Ferdinand Céline

  • Brave New World — Aldous Huxley · a World State kept compliant with soma, published fifteen years before Nineteen Eighty-Four
  • Light in August — William Faulkner · Faulkner's most accessible major novel: Joe Christmas, Lena Grove, and Yoknapatawpha County
  • Journey to the End of the Night — Louis-Ferdinand Céline · Prix Renaudot winner: Bardamu's furious voice rewrote what European prose could sound like
The books of 1932 →

1931: Woolf wrote a playpoem in six voices while Faulkner wrote a potboiler

Pearl S. Buck · Virginia Woolf · William Faulkner · Dashiell Hammett

  • The Good Earth — Pearl S. Buck · Pulitzer winner: Wang Lung and O-Lan through drought, famine, and prosperity
  • The Waves — Virginia Woolf · six soliloquies from childhood to old age, Woolf's most radical formal experiment
  • Sanctuary — William Faulkner · the book Faulkner called a potboiler became his first commercial breakthrough
The books of 1931 →

1930: Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying on the night shift at a power plant

William Faulkner · Dashiell Hammett · Evelyn Waugh · Bertrand Russell

  • As I Lay Dying — William Faulkner · fifteen voices carry Addie Bundren to Jefferson, one of them Addie's own after death
  • The Maltese Falcon — Dashiell Hammett · Sam Spade, a jewel-encrusted statuette, and the template for hard-boiled crime fiction
  • Vile Bodies — Evelyn Waugh · a satire of the Bright Young Things that ends on a battlefield
The books of 1930 →
↑ Back to the decades

1920s

1929: Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, months apart

Ernest Hemingway · William Faulkner · Virginia Woolf · Alfred Döblin

  • A Farewell to Arms — Ernest Hemingway · an ambulance lieutenant, a nurse, and the retreat at Caporetto
  • The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner · the Compson family's decline, told through four radically different minds
  • A Room of One's Own — Virginia Woolf · two Cambridge lectures that invented Shakespeare's sister
The books of 1929 →

1928: Orlando changed sex, and a British court ordered The Well of Loneliness destroyed

Virginia Woolf · Erich Maria Remarque · Radclyffe Hall · D.H. Lawrence

  • Orlando — Virginia Woolf · a nobleman who lives three centuries and wakes up a woman
  • All Quiet on the Western Front — Erich Maria Remarque · the most widely read novel ever written about the First World War
  • The Well of Loneliness — Radclyffe Hall · prosecuted for obscenity despite containing no explicit content at all
  • Lady Chatterley's Lover — D.H. Lawrence · privately printed in Florence because no British publisher would touch it
The books of 1928 →

1927: Woolf went To the Lighthouse while Sinclair Lewis got hate mail for Elmer Gantry

Virginia Woolf · Hermann Hesse · Sinclair Lewis · Willa Cather

  • To the Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf · a postponed boat trip and a decade compressed into Time Passes
  • Steppenwolf — Hermann Hesse · a man split between human and wolf, rediscovered in the 1960s
  • Elmer Gantry — Sinclair Lewis · a hollow, ambitious preacher; banned in several American cities
  • Death Comes for the Archbishop — Willa Cather · two French missionary priests in the New Mexico territory
The books of 1927 →

1926: Hemingway's Lost Generation and A.A. Milne's honey-loving bear arrived the same year

Ernest Hemingway · A.A. Milne · Franz Kafka · Agatha Christie

  • The Sun Also Rises — Ernest Hemingway · expatriates drift from Paris bars to the bullfights of Pamplona
  • Winnie-the-Pooh — A.A. Milne · the Hundred Acre Wood, built from games with Milne's own son
  • The Castle — Franz Kafka · published posthumously: K. never quite gets into the castle
  • The Murder of Roger Ackroyd — Agatha Christie · the Poirot solution that broke one of detective fiction's oldest rules
The books of 1926 →

1924: A Passage to India, The Magic Mountain, and a Melville manuscript found in a box

E.M. Forster · Thomas Mann · Herman Melville

  • A Passage to India — E.M. Forster · James Tait Black winner: a friendship tested by the Marabar Caves
  • The Magic Mountain — Thomas Mann · a short visit to a Swiss sanatorium that lasts seven years
  • Billy Budd, Sailor — Herman Melville · left unfinished in 1891, discovered among family papers, published 1924
The books of 1924 →

1923: Jean Toomer's Cane opened the Harlem Renaissance as Rilke finally finished his elegies

Jean Toomer · Kahlil Gibran · Rainer Maria Rilke · Dorothy Sayers

  • Cane — Jean Toomer · poems, sketches and drama from rural Georgia to Washington and Chicago
  • The Prophet — Kahlil Gibran · slim aphoristic parables that became a best seller of the century
  • Duino Elegies & Sonnets to Orpheus — Rainer Maria Rilke · completed in a three-week creative storm at a Swiss tower
The books of 1923 →

1922: Ulysses appeared on Joyce's fortieth birthday, and The Waste Land followed in October

James Joyce · T.S. Eliot · Sinclair Lewis · Virginia Woolf · Hermann Hesse

  • Ulysses — James Joyce · one Dublin day, June 16, 1904, published in Paris by Sylvia Beach
  • The Waste Land — T.S. Eliot · five fragmented sections on a civilization in ruins, dedicated to Pound
  • Babbitt — Sinclair Lewis · a Zenith real estate agent whose surname entered the dictionary
The books of 1922 →

1921: Zamyatin's We imagined the OneState, and Pirandello's Six Characters caused a riot in Rome

Yevgeny Zamyatin · Luigi Pirandello · Aldous Huxley

  • We — Yevgeny Zamyatin · the dystopia behind Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four
  • Six Characters in Search of an Author — Luigi Pirandello · abandoned characters interrupt a rehearsal and demand their story be finished
  • Crome Yellow — Aldous Huxley · a country house party debut that already sketches Brave New World
The books of 1921 →

1920: Fitzgerald's debut sold out in four days, and Agatha Christie introduced Hercule Poirot

F. Scott Fitzgerald · Edith Wharton · Agatha Christie · Sigmund Freud

  • This Side of Paradise — F. Scott Fitzgerald · Amory Blaine at Princeton: the debut that announced the Jazz Age
  • The Age of Innocence — Edith Wharton · Pulitzer winner: Wharton was the first woman to receive the award
  • The Mysterious Affair at Styles — Agatha Christie · a poisoning at Styles Court and the first Hercule Poirot case
The books of 1920 →
↑ Back to the decades

Frequently Asked Questions

Which years does this page cover?

Every year from 1920 to 2026, 107 years in total, newest first. Each year has its own page with the full list and my notes on every book.

How do you choose the books for each year?

I read across fiction, memoir and nonfiction and keep the books I am still thinking about long after finishing them: not the most hyped, and not the longest lists.

Where should I start?

Anywhere. Pick a decade, open a year that means something to you, or use the Surprise me button for a random year.

Keep exploring

If a year here caught your attention, here's where else to look.

PrizesLiterary PrizesEvery winner, and the ones I think are worth reading. DirectoryAuthorsEvery author guide, with the full body of work and where to start. If you loved one writerAuthors LikeFind the next writer after the one you just finished. By themeReading ListsBooks grouped by theme, mood and question.

From the bookshelf

The books I return to, with the notes on why, and one pick a month in the newsletter.

See my bookshelf Get the monthly newsletter
Start Typing
Dummy Image

Hi, there.

Home

About

My Bookshelf

Weekly’s

Stay tuned: sign up for the newsletter!