My 20 Favorite Novels of the 2020s
For my latest reading recommendations, a pastiche of the list we can’t stop discussing
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Earlier this month, the staff of The New York Times Book Review published one of their most ambitious ventures. After polling just over 500 “novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics, and other book lovers,” they were left with a stunning, behemoth relic of the 21st century’s first quarter in literature: a definitive list of (what they called) The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.1
As you may remember, my first-ever post on Substack was a guide to my favorite fiction (which was not ranked at the time, though in retrospect, I do have one). All that to say, as a critic, the NYT ranking felt ripe for pastiche.
Barring an issue: NYT’s parameters felt too ambitious even for its own list. Though the rankings were theoretically open to all forms, in practice, the selections favored novels and non-fiction while largely ignoring poetry and short story collections. They skewed American and British—of the hundred selections, there were only ten works in translation.2 They also skewed toward books published in the mid-2010s, while a mere 10 were published in the 2020s, and none after 2022. Authors who participated in the survey were allowed to vote for their own work—and several did. There were a striking number of repeat authors.3
And, on my end, as a critic, my niche has historically been new literary fiction.
So I bent the rules: rather than all books, I chose to focus specifically on novels (and, knowing myself, literary fiction). Equally important, I chose to abridge the timeline: rather than focusing on the entire 21st century, I honed in on just the 2020s. Though I’d initially considered replicating the “Best of the 21st Century” format, or even a “Best of All Time” approach (which ultimately felt too similar to my first roundup), I found myself skewing toward more recent reads anyway. Maybe it’s recency bias—or maybe, despite the NYT’s opinion, the last four years have been an excellent period for fiction.
I’m embracing my niche. But, like the staff of The New York Times Book Review, I too hope you’ll discover a book you’ve always meant to read—or maybe a novel you were always meant to read.
20. TIE: Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez (Flatiron, 2024), My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin (Henry Holt and Co., 2023)
Note: It’s the first entry and I’ve already bent the rules a second time. In my defense, after scouring my previous reading recommendations for worthy books, I went back and forth between these two contemporary campus novels more times than I could count. Neither of the books—both historical autofiction, loosely inspired by the authors’ real comings of age and hyper-focused on the topography of late-90s early womanhood—felt right on the list without mention of the other. Sacrificing something else in their favor felt just as off-base.
I oscillated between choosing one as an entry point and reserving the second for an honorable mention, but found that writing the entry for either novel somehow reminded me of what I loved so much about the other. So here we are: a tie.
Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez (Flatiron, 2024)
It’s 1998 in Brown University’s art history department, and Raquel Toro is one of painfully few students of color when she finds herself creatively blocked while researching her art history thesis. Thirteen years earlier, Anita de Monte is one of painfully few people of color in New York’s hyper-exclusive art scene when she’s brutally murdered by her jealous husband, Jack. With an interwoven narrative partially inspired by her own time at Brown and partially inspired by the real-life story of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, Gonzalez blends auto- and historical fiction with critical fabulation for a story that follows three complicated artists as each navigates their place in art history.
Full review here.
If you like this, try: Trust by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead, 2022)
My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin (Henry Holt and Co., 2023)
At the height of the Clinton impeachment, a college senior in Rhode Island attempts to bury past trauma with an illicit new romance—and finds there’s much she doesn’t understand about the inner workings of adulthood and power. In Florin’s period autofiction, intricately reconstructing the ethos of an era is only half the battle—her captivating, sometimes brutal, intensely reflective prose does the rest.
If you like this, try: My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell (William Morrow, 2017)
19. All’s Well by Mona Awad (Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci, 2021)
The 2020s have seen Mona Awad cement her voice as a masterful architect of darkly comic surrealist horror that halts just before jumping the shark entirely, drawing from classic stories and tropes with a voice that feels unparalleled in its originality. With All’s Well, her best is on display.
In All’s Well, a misanthropic drama professor desperate to regain control of her life and find a cure for her debilitating chronic pain finds herself at a crossroads when three mysterious figures offer a magical solution to all her problems. What comes next, were it not for Awad’s authorial dexterity, could hardly be put into words.
If you like this, try: Big Swiss by Jen Beagin (Simon & Schuster, 2022)
18. Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin (Celadon, 2022)
An isolated small town with a strange, supernatural tradition is thrown into uncertainty when an enigmatic stranger comes to visit, forcing a young woman to rethink everything she knows about the mysterious place she calls home. Though it takes inspiration from dystopian classics like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Schaitkin’s eerie meditation on motherhood feels fiercely original—and is just as haunting.
If you like this, try: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Hartman, translated by Ros Schwartz (Transit Books, 1995/2018)
17. The Four Humors by Mina Seçkin (Catapult, 2021)
It’s summer in Istanbul when 20-year-old Sibel arrives at her grandmother’s home, grieving her father’s sudden death and suffering from inexplicable migraines. Before long, however, her search for a nontraditional medical remedy is hijacked, becoming an odyssey through generations of family secrets. With an innovative structure that makes manifest Sibel’s veritable maze of familial and political history, The Four Humors is an alienated young woman novel that subverts the very idea of an alienated young woman, incorporating elements of diasporic and multigenerational family narratives for a story that can’t be categorized or contained.
If you like this, try: The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (Catapult, 2024)
16. Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda (HarperVia, 2022)
Over a century after Bram Stoker’s Dracula, another vampire descends on London: Lydia, a 23-year-old multiracial artist born into her bloodlust, living on her own for the first time, trying everything to avoid killing anyone along the way. In her inventive, enchanting debut, Claire Kohda approaches the literary vampire with generations of diasporic literature in her toolbox—and an entirely fresh perspective.
If you like this, try: Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, edited by Carmen Maria Machado (Lanternfish Press Clockwork Editions, 2019, originally published 1872)
15. The Fetishist by Katherine Min (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2024)
Katherine Min’s The Fetishist, the author’s posthumous final novel, has been described as a “reframing of Lolita from the perspective of an Asian fetishist,” a white man with a fetish for Asian women. In practice, it’s much harder to characterize.
When embittered, impulsive punk musician Kyoko hilariously flubs her attempt at revenge on Daniel, the man she blames for her mother’s untimely death, she inadvertently triggers a series of reckonings—for herself and her partner, for Daniel, and for the dying woman he credits with making him a fetishist. Told as a braided, nonlinear narrative that jumps from dreamscape to flashback, to crushing reality, The Fetishist is equal parts funny and shattering, a poignant exploration of love and performance, and the inescapable weight of colonial history.
But what makes this novel such a fascinating creation is something else entirely. Layered into the winding roller coaster of a plot is a profound sense of grief, both lived-in and anticipatory, told through breathtaking reflections on death, mortality, and legacy from an author navigating these phenomena at their most intimate levels, in real time.
If you like this, try: Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou (Penguin, 2023)
14. Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield (Picador, 2022)
Armfield’s novel is often marketed as queer horror thanks to its supernatural undercurrent, but it’s just as understandable as a romantic tragedy. In dueling narratives, a young deep-sea researcher realizes her latest expedition for a mysterious entity is going far from planned, while back on land, her grieving wife attempts to navigate a new reality. With haunting prose that rarely answers its readers’ questions but still avoids ever leaving them unsatisfied, Armfield crafts a story where any form of monster is merely a backdrop for navigating two lovers through a maze of grief—and somehow emerges with one of the decade’s most compelling horrors.
If you like this, try: The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta (St. Martin’s Press, 2011)
13. All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews (Viking, 2022)
Milwaukee, 2013: though the recession has decimated prospects for millions, a precious few young people—like Sneha and her mismatched friend group—have managed to escape the worst of it. But when the reality of adulthood under economic downturn sets in, the only way out may be through fantasy. With haunting, sometimes flowery but never tedious prose, Mathews counters the fast-paced anxiety of Emma Cline’s The Guest with a slow-burn, almost suffocating sense of dread, but to a much different end. What results is a generational elegy rooted in a love for community and belief in imagining a better future.
If you like this, try: The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty (Knopf, 2022)
12. Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell (Hogarth, 2023, originally published in Spanish, 2019)
When we meet Juan, a prodigious medium and the protagonist of Enriquez’s Gothic horror, he’s already on the run. It hasn’t been long since his wife met a sudden, brutal end, but without her, their six-year-old son is a prime target for the Order, an uber-wealthy coven manned by Juan’s in-laws, convinced their mystic heir may be the key to retaining power on their quest to find life after death. For the rest of Enriquez’s epic, decades-spanning saga, we follow father and son on a mad, mystical, complicated dash to avoid a dark fate, and an even darker force pulling them toward it. Set against the backdrop of Dirty War Argentina, Enriquez’s winding, monumental novel is wildly, unapologetically horrific—and all the better for it.
If you like this, try: Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova (Zando, 2023), or Tender is the Flesh by Augustina Bazterrica (Scribner, 2017/2020)
11. The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue (Knopf, 2023)
It’s the late 2000s and the Irish recession is at its worst when literature student Rachel befriends James, her closeted coworker. When the two concoct a seemingly innocuous scheme to win the favor of Rachel’s beloved English professor, they find themselves in a web of secrets that tangles for years to come. With whip-smart prose that feels like a comic answer to Sally Rooney, in the canon of post-recession bildungsromane, The Rachel Incident is perhaps the most affecting—or, at least, the most entertaining.
If you like this, try: Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021)
10. Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters (One World, 2021)
The NYT list and mine only overlap once, and it’s on this novel.4 For good reason: Peters’s storytelling flows between acerbic and poignant for a mercilessly honest, fiercely original, as-yet-unparalleled family drama. In Detransition, Baby, a trans woman’s world and dreams of motherhood are thrown into orbit when she learns her ex, who has since detransitioned, is now expecting a child with his boss, a cis woman. As time winnows down to make a decision about the pregnancy, all three members of the unconventional love triangle must grapple with what parenthood, gender, and family could mean for them.
If you like this, try: Nevada by Imogen Binnie (Topside Press, 2013)
9. My Husband by Maud Ventura, translated by Emma Ramadan (HarperVia, 2023, originally published in French, 2021)
Ventura’s part-satire, part-psychological thriller finds suspense in the ultra-mundane. For the protagonist of My Husband, prepping for a dinner at home with her partner of 15 years becomes as precarious and meticulous as a planned hit.
Even after 13 years of marriage and two perfect children, the unnamed 40-year-old narrator is as in love with her husband as the day they met—but all the more obsessed. Over the course of a week, Ventura follows the wife’s turbulent inner monologue, her initial bliss devolving into passionate delusion as she methodically tracks her husband’s movements and perceived slights, convincing herself he is alternatively unfaithful, unhappy, and matching her obsession. A masterclass in pacing, tension, and the unreliable narrator, My Husband is a send-up of marriage and surveillance culture that oscillates between biting humor and moments of stomach-dropping dread.
If you like this, try: Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux, translated by Tanya Leslie (Simple Stories Press, 2003), or Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth (Vintage, 2022).
8. Candelaria by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (Astra House, 2023)
Blending the multigenerational, diasporic Latina family narrative of the 90s (think How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents or Dreaming in Cuban) with a hint of magical realist horror, Candelaria follows three generations of a semi-estranged Guatemalan American family brought back together by a supernatural event.
In Boston, grandmother Candelaria, her daughter Lucia, and granddaughters Bianca, Candy, and Paola are each navigating their own battles—from complicated affairs to dashed ambitions, to nefarious cults—when they’re confronted with a larger issue: the city has devolved into a full-blown zombie apocalypse. Better known as a poet, Lozada-Oliva brings not just her lyrical prowess, but her signature viscerality to her first work of prose, and births a truly extraordinary result.
If you like this, try: Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina García (Knopf, 1992)
7. The Guest by Emma Cline (Random House, 2023)
There has yet to be another millennial writer like Emma Cline—one as exciting and intentional, who navigates their pacing with such dexterity. If Cline’s much-discussed debut novel, The Girls, hadn’t already proven that, she certainly cemented her place with The Guest.
One summer in the Hamptons, a young drifter finds herself suddenly on shaky ground when she loses favor with her wealthy older boyfriend. Over the next week, Cline stalks her protagonist like a cat, following her as circumstances go from precarious to worse, her narration placing a constant, ever-growing sense of dread in the throats of her readers along the way. The Guest feels impossible to put down, even after the final page.
If you like this, try: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (HarperCollins, 2001), or Cline’s first novel, The Girls (Random House, 2016)
6. The Adult by Bronwyn Fischer (Algonquin, 2023)
At the start of her freshman year at a major university in Toronto, small-town teenager Natalie has never felt more alone—though to be fair, she’s never entirely fit in. Enter Nora, an enigmatic, recently divorced neighbor in her 30s who all too readily takes an interest in young Natalie. With a haunting, almost dream-like stream of consciousness evocative of Shirley Jackson’s prose in Hangsaman, Fischer follows Natalie into the depths of obsession in what feels like a definitive bildungsroman for the era of isolation.
If you like this, try: Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson (Penguin Classics, originally published 1951), or Mrs. S by K Patrick (Europa Editions, 2023)
5. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (Riverhead, 2020)
If Brit Bennett was not buzzy enough after her flooring debut with The Mothers (Riverhead, 2016), then her sophomore novel, The Vanishing Half—likely the best-known book on this list—surely solidified her place as the preeminent young spinner of culturally and geographically rich, decade-spanning narratives.
Thanks to a fraught history, in the tiny, close-knit Black community of Mallard, Louisiana, nearly every resident—twin sisters Desiree and Stella included—shares a distinctive trait: skin light enough to pass for white. At a pivotal moment in 1954, the twins make a mad dash from Mallard for a new life in New Orleans. Then Stella begins living as a white woman, ripping her away from her sister and triggering a decades-long saga as the twins, their daughters, and their ancestors reckon with the murky waters of identities lost and found.
Evocative of Nella Larsen’s iconic novella Passing a century earlier, Bennett’s generation-spanning family narrative interrogates the performance of race and the nature of identity, with a singularly adept guide at the helm. 5
If you like this, try: Passing by Nella Larsen (Knopf, 1929)
4. Vladimir by Julia May Jonas (Simon & Schuster/Avid Reader Press, 2022)
In Vladimir, a once-beloved English professor is left in limbo when multiple students accuse her husband of misconduct—then a magnetic young author arrives on campus as a visiting professor, and she’s bound up in a boundary-pushing, obsessive dynamic of her own. In a turn that subverts the campus novel and runs full-throttle at the unreliable narrator, Jonas interrogates academic webs of sex and power with raw, visceral prose and unflinching precision. It’s a novel almost as difficult to reckon with as it is to put down.
If you like this, try: Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin, 2020)
3. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf, 2020)
O’Farrell’s most popular work of historical fiction isn’t told chronologically. It oscillates, between the early days of William Shakespeare’s illicit affair with his future wife, Agnes (better known to history as Anne Hathaway), and the morning, 15 years later, that changes their lives forever: when their 11-year-old son, Hamnet, develops the plague that will end his short life. Another, even more striking decision: Hamnet is told not by Shakespeare himself, but by Agnes, his long-since sidelined wife.
Inspired by the real-life death of William Shakespeare’s only son and published with impossibly apt timing that only adds to its passionate urgency (the book was released in March 2020, and quickly rebranded “a novel of the plague”), Hamnet at once subverts the “great man” narrative and confronts unimaginable tragedy with O’Farrell’s imaginative, critical eye, one that longs for the dismissed voice.
If you like this, try: Half-Life of a Stolen Sister by Rachel Cantor (Soho Press, 2023), or Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (Random House, 2017)6
2. Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova (Zando, 2023)
Something between horror, coming of age, and a queer parenting saga a la Detransition Baby, Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s debut is just as difficult to categorize by genre as its characters are to pin down geographically. Between Mexico City, Upstate New York, and Berlin, an unconventional young family raises an even less conventional son—Monstrilio, a creature cultivated from a malformed organ belonging to their lost child, Santiago. But as the creature grows, his differences from Santiago grow harder to ignore. Part Bones and All, part Pet Sematary, Monstrilio is a magical realist novel for the post-COVID era, a fantastical bildungsroman about grief and the surreal privilege of growing up.
Full review here.
If you like this, try: Beloved by Toni Morrison (Knopf, 1987)
1. The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf, 2022)
Inspired by two other works of art—the 1842 poem “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning and its subject, the titular 16th-century portrait of Italian duchess Lucrezia de' Medici—O’Farrell’s novel sees the author at her most imaginative, peering into the eyes of an enigmatic figure and conjuring an entire world around her.
Like in Hamnet, The Marriage Portrait is punctuated by family tragedy—Lucrezia, barely a teenager, has lost her beloved eldest sister, Maria. Unlike in Hamlet, elements of a historical thriller brew underneath: in Maria’s place, Lucrezia is sent to marry her sister’s betrothed, Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara. A year later, Lucrezia is dead under mysterious circumstances. In the interim, O’Farrell spins a world of thrilling possibilities for the last days of a heroine fighting not to be snuffed out—and a child struggling to understand her suddenly adult existence.
The lesser-known—and more inventive, flooring, heart-pounding—product of O’Farrell’s era of speculative historical fiction, The Marriage Portrait is a poignant, daring attempt to imagine an untold story for a woman intentionally cut from history, with a final page that revives all those feelings once more.
If you like this, try: Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (Picador, 2012)7
I do not have an interactive reading tracker a la NYT Book Review: but please, tell me your tally!
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Collages via the author.
Why this poll was taken in the first half of the year and published in July, rather than December, I couldn’t tell you.
Not to mention that of these ten works in translation, five were by the same two authors: three by Elena Ferrante and two by Roberto Bolaño.
Elena Ferrante, George Saunders, and Jesmyn Ward each got three mentions, while Roberto Bolaño, Denis Johnson, Hilary Mantel, Alice Munro, Philip Roth, and Zadie Smith each made the list twice.
That said, mine does overlap twice with the NYT’s “Readers Pick” version.
Here and in the #3 entry, I find myself overlapping with the "Readers Pick" selections, where The Vanishing Half is ranked #96, and Hamnet #22.
NYT actually recommends Hamnet for fans of Lincoln in the Bardo, and the recommendation works just as well in reverse.
Another NYT Pick, at #95 on the original list (Wolf Hall, another of Mantel's books from the same series, is ranked #3).
I’ve read Our Wives Under the Sea, The Guest, & The Vanishing Half from your list (which I loved reading through, thanks for sharing!). The recommendation of Bel Canto for fans of The Guest was super unexpected to me, but the more I think about it, the more strangely suited the books are to one another, I feel like you’re definitely onto something there