Best Books of the 2010s

A thirteen-year-old survives a museum bombing and takes a small Dutch masterpiece. Tartt's Dickensian epic runs 700 pages and earns every one — a novel about art, loss, and beauty surviving catastrophe that won the Pulitzer and divided critics while enchanting readers.

The decade's most emotionally extreme novel — four men in New York, and Jude's history of abuse that eventually becomes the novel's entire gravity. Polarising, devastating, unforgettable. Read the content warnings first.

Two young Irish people circle each other through secondary school and university — brilliant, struggling, unable to say what they feel. Rooney's second novel became a cultural event and launched a new conversation about what literary fiction could look like.

An enslaved woman escapes on a literal railroad — a mechanical underground train — and finds that freedom is not a destination but a series of new dangers. Whitehead's mix of historical reality and magical infrastructure is both haunting and precise.

Abraham Lincoln visits his young son's crypt while a chorus of resident ghosts argue, grieve, and deny their own deaths. Formally unprecedented — told entirely through quoted voices — and one of the decade's most moving and inventive works.

Nick Dunne's wife Amy disappears on their fifth anniversary. Flynn's unreliable narrator structure was so widely copied after this that it became a cliché — but the original remains surgical, dark, and genuinely shocking throughout.

Lisbeth Salander, the hacker-investigator who defined an era. The Millennium trilogy dominated the decade's crime reading — a Scandinavian template that launched a thousand Nordic noir imitators. Lisbeth is one of fiction's great creations.

Rachel watches the same couple from her commuter train every morning — until she sees something she shouldn't. The novel that made domestic thriller the decade's dominant genre. Often imitated, never quite matched.

A couple leaves their infant at home while they attend a dinner party next door — and returns to find the baby gone. Perfect pacing, a genuinely surprising plot, and a moral nastiness that lingers. One of the better domestic thrillers the decade produced.

Four retirees at a village retirement community solve cold cases — and discover a live one. A warm, funny, and surprisingly sharp mystery that announced Richard Osman as one of Britain's most beloved crime writers. Technically 2020 but belongs to a 2010s spirit.

Tara Westover grew up in an Idaho survivalist family, never attended school, and taught herself into Cambridge and a PhD. One of the most compelling memoirs written about education, family, and the cost of becoming yourself.

A neurosurgeon diagnosed with terminal lung cancer writes about what makes a life meaningful. Completed with help from his wife after his death. The decade's most quietly devastating memoir — and the one most readers find themselves pressing into friends' hands.

The former First Lady's memoir sold 15 million copies in its first year. More than a political document — a careful, honest account of growing up Black in Chicago, finding identity, and navigating public life. The most-read memoir of the decade.

A letter from Coates to his teenage son about the history of race in America — the threat to the Black body as the defining feature of American history. Essential, enraging, and written with extraordinary precision.

Kvothe narrates his own legend — student, musician, magician, eventual myth. The prose is unlike anything in the genre: precise, lyrical, and addictive. The Kingkiller Chronicle redefined what fantasy prose could aspire to.

The first book in the Broken Earth trilogy — set in a world that periodically destroys itself through seismic catastrophe. Written in second person, it forces the reader into the story. Jemisin won three consecutive Hugos for this trilogy. First time any author had managed it.

A black-and-white circus appears without warning and closes before dawn — inside it, a magical duel. Impossibly lush prose, an atmosphere so specific you can smell the caramel and coal smoke. One of the decade's most enchanting debut novels.

A WWII nurse is transported back to 18th-century Scotland. The television adaptation revived mass interest in the series and introduced millions to time-travel romance. Eight books, twenty-year fandom, still going.

A reclusive Old Hollywood icon finally agrees to tell her story — seven marriages and a lifetime of secrets. TJR's novel accumulated a slow-burn fandom through BookTok before becoming inescapable. Completely earned its moment.

Lou Clark becomes carer to Will Traynor, a quadriplegic who has decided to end his life. One of the decade's most polarising romances — beautiful and devastating in equal measure — and the book that established Moyes as a major commercial novelist.