21st Century

Franzen's The Corrections: one Midwestern family's unraveling across turn-of-the-millennium America. Satire, heartbreak, and recognition.

Zadie Smith's White Teeth: a sprawling comedy of race, roots, and identity in multicultural London. Three families, three generations.

Bolano's 2666: five narratives converge on a Mexican border city haunted by femicide. A sprawling, apocalyptic masterwork.

Ian McEwan's Atonement: A child's lie destroys two lovers. A devastating novel of guilt, war, and the limits of forgiveness.

Explore Sebald's Austerlitz, a haunting novel of memory, identity, and Holocaust trauma told through architecture and lost histories.

Kazuo Ishiguro's haunting novel of clones, memory, and mortality at an English boarding school questions what it means to be human.

Explore Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a harrowing post-apocalyptic tale of a father and son's journey through a devastated America.

Discover Chabon's Pulitzer-winning epic of two Jewish cousins, comic books, and the art of escape in wartime New York.

Joan Didion's unflinching memoir of grief after the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

Junot Díaz's Pulitzer-winning novel fuses Dominican history, nerd culture, and diaspora into a dazzling epic.

Explore The Human Stain by Philip Roth, a fierce novel of identity, secrets, and the cost of self-invention in America.

Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer-winning novel traces time's toll on interconnected lives through the lens of the music industry.

Explore Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, a Booker Prize-winning novel of Thomas Cromwell's rise in Tudor England.

Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex traces an intersex narrator's identity across three generations of Greek American life.

Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend chronicles an intense female friendship in postwar Naples.

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas weaves six nested narratives across centuries to explore power, connection, and the human soul's journey through time.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah is a bold, sweeping novel about race, identity, and love across continents.

Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer-winning Gilead is a dying pastor's luminous letter to his young son about faith, family, and forgiveness.