New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st CenturyLike this list

100 items

• My Brilliant Friend

  Ferrante, Elena

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  A modern masterpiece from one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Warmth of Other Suns

  the Epic Story of America's Great Migration

  Wilkerson, Isabel

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  In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Wolf Hall

  a Novel

  Mantel, Hilary, 1952-2022

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  England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Known World

  Jones, Edward P.

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  Henry Townsend is a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline.…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Corrections

  Franzen, Jonathan

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  After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• 2666

  Bolaño, Roberto, 1953-2003

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  Composed in the last two years of Bolaño's life, 2666 has been greeted as his greatest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters include academics and convicts, an…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Underground Railroad

  a Novel

  Whitehead, Colson, 1969-

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  Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Austerlitz

  Sebald, W. G. (Winfried Georg), 1944-2001

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  Austerlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by “one of the most gripping writers imaginable” (The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Never Let Me Go

  Ishiguro, Kazuo, 1954-

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  Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Gilead

  a Novel

  Robinson, Marilynne,

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  Nearly 25 years after Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations, from the Civil War to the 20th century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. In the…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

  Díaz, Junot, 1968-

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  Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Year of Magical Thinking

  Didion, Joan

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  Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage--and a life, in good times and bad--that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

• The Road

  McCarthy, Cormac, 1933-2023

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  A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Outline

  a Novel

  Cusk, Rachel, 1967-

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  Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Pachinko

  Lee, Min Jin,

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  Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them. Betrayed by her wealthy lover, Sunja finds…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

  a Novel

  Chabon, Michael

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  Joe Kavalier, a young Jewish artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just smuggled himself out of Nazi-invaded Prague and landed in New York City. His Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay is looking for a partner to create…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Sellout

  [a Novel]

  Beatty, Paul,

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  Raised in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens--improbably smack in the middle of downtown L.A.--the narrator of The Sellout resigned himself to the fate of all other middle-class Californians: "to die in the same bedroom you'd grown up in, looking up…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Lincoln in the Bardo

  a Novel

  Saunders, George, 1958-

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  February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Say Nothing

  a True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

  Keefe, Patrick Radden, 1976-

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  In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Erasure

  a Novel

  Everett, Percival

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  Thelonious (Monk) Ellison has never allowed race to define his identity. But as both a writer and an African American, he is offended and angered by the success of We's Lives in Da Ghetto, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black…Read moreRead more of this annotation