The list of the 100 best books of the 21st century from the New York Times
created by FfiFfi
last updated February, 2026
Tree of Smoke
Denis Johnson
How to be Both
Ali Smith
Bel Canto
Ann Patchett
Men We Reaped: A Memoir
Jesmyn Ward
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
Saidiya Hartman
Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell, #2)
Hilary Mantel
On Beauty
Zadie Smith
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
The Days of Abandonment
Elena Ferrante
The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)
Philip Roth
The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer, #1)
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
Hisham Matar
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis
Detransition, Baby
Torrey Peters
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
David W. Blight
Pastoralia
George Saunders
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Siddhartha Mukherjee
When We Cease to Understand the World
BenjamĂn Labatut
Hurricane Season
Fernanda Melchor
Pulphead
John Jeremiah Sullivan
The Story of the Lost Child (The Neapolitan Novels, #4)
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories
Lucia Berlin
The Other Name: Septology I-II
Jon Fosse
An American Marriage
Tayari Jones
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Gabrielle Zevin
Exit West
Mohsin Hamid
Olive Kitteridge (Olive Kitteridge, #1)
Elizabeth Strout
The Passage of Power
Robert A. Caro
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
Svetlana Alexievich
The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood – Youth – Dependency
Tove Ditlevsen
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