Best Books of the 2020s So Far

Sam and Sadie collaborate on video games for thirty years — friends, rivals, creators, and something harder to name. The decade's most beloved literary novel so far. Won every informal readers'-choice award going without winning a single major prize, which says everything about the gap between readers and institutions.

Four retirees investigate cold cases from their retirement community — and stumble onto a live one. Osman's debut became one of the fastest-selling crime novels in UK publishing history. Warm, funny, clever, and impossible to resist.

Lily meets Atlas in Boston, then Ryle — and has to navigate what love means when it becomes dangerous. Published in 2016 but became a global phenomenon through BookTok. Whatever you think of the discourse, the novel's emotional directness is genuine.

Huck Finn from Jim's perspective — a Black man navigating the antebellum South with full intelligence and dignity denied him by Twain. Won the 2024 Pulitzer. Both a masterwork and a corrective. One of the decade's most important novels.

Frances McGrath joins the Army Nurse Corps in 1965 and serves in Vietnam. Kristin Hannah's most ambitious novel — a correction to a history that forgot women served — emotionally overwhelming and rigorously researched.

Nora Seed finds herself in a library between life and death — each book a different version of her life she could have lived. Haig's novel about regret, depression, and the value of existing became a global comfort read. Sold over four million copies.

Five storylines across five centuries, connected by a single ancient Greek manuscript. Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See) proved that wasn't a fluke — this is bigger, more ambitious, and equally transported. A love letter to stories and the people who preserve them.

Ireland slides into fascism and a woman tries to keep her family intact. Lynch's Booker Prize winner is intense, formally demanding, and written in an almost biblical stream of consciousness. The decade's most challenging literary novel — and one of the most important.

Two brothers — a chess prodigy and a lawyer — grieve their father while navigating love and grief in different registers. Rooney's fourth novel is more formally conventional than Conversations with Friends or Beautiful World but more emotionally capacious than either.

Violet Sorrengail enters Basgiath War College to become a dragon rider. The novel that made romantasy the decade's dominant genre. Sold over a million copies in a week at its peak. Propulsive, sexy, and wildly entertaining.

The series that launched the romantasy boom — Beauty and the Beast retold with fae, magic, and escalating romance. Maas became the decade's most commercially dominant fantasy author. Start here and expect to lose weeks.

Alicia Berenson shot her husband five times and hasn't spoken since. Psychotherapist Theo Faber is determined to find out why. A thriller with a twist so well-constructed that re-reading it from the start reveals a completely different novel.

A family in South India across three generations, united by water and by a medical mystery affecting their bloodline. Verghese's sweeping, humane epic won the Pulitzer finalist and became one of the decade's great reading experiences.

A female chemist in the 1960s becomes an unlikely cooking show host. Witty, warm, and sharply feminist — the most fun novel on this list. Also quietly furious. The debut that showed the 2020s could still produce original comic voices.

A woman drives away from LA on a road trip but only makes it as far as a motel. A novel about desire, perimenopause, and the reinvention of the self that arrived fully formed and immediately polarised critics in the best possible way.