25 Modern Classics of the 21st Century

A contemporary reimagining of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, Demon Copperhead follows a young boy growing up in rural Appalachia amidst poverty, addiction, and systemic neglect. Kingsolver’s sharp prose and empathy breathe life into a marginalized world often overlooked. While winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2023, the novel has also found widespread adoration from its selection by Oprah to its buzz among Booktok enthusiasts. The Washington Post wrote, “Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, this is the story of an irrepressible boy nobody wants, but readers will love.”

A seven-part novel written in a single flowing sentence, Septology is a meditative masterpiece on faith, art, and the self. The Norwegian author, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, uses repetition and rhythm to probe existential questions with hypnotic beauty. The New Yorker’s Merve Emre wrote, “Septology is the only novel I have read that has made me believe in the reality of the divine” and author Lauren Groff described it as “a desperate prayer made radiant by sudden spikes of ecstatic beauty.”

A groundbreaking debut, There There intertwines the lives of twelve Native characters converging at a powwow in Oakland. The novel confronts the complexities of urban Native identity and the legacy of colonial violence. A Pulitzer finalist and a New York Times bestseller, it heralded Orange as a vital new voice. His follow up, Wandering Stars, explores the lives of the ancestors of the family we first met in There There and examines the experience of generational trauma in Native communities.

This post-apocalyptic odyssey follows a father and son’s journey through a devastated, dystopian landscape. McCarthy’s stark, poetic prose and moral intensity earned The Road the Pulitzer Prize and a lasting place in American literature.

This sweeping narrative history tells the story of the Great Migration through the lives of three Black Americans. Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, blends personal stories with exhaustive research. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was hailed by the New York Times as “a landmark piece of nonfiction.”

The first of the Neapolitan Novels, My Brilliant Friend tracks the intense and complicated friendship between Elena and Lila in a working-class Naples neighborhood. Ferrante’s nuanced portrayal of friendship, ambition, and class stratification challenges conventional literary representations of women’s interior lives and has catalyzed a reevaluation of feminist narrative structures within contemporary European literature. The book, and the series, are lauded as modern classics, bolstered by an acclaimed HBO adaptation and being ranked by the New York Times as the best book of the century.

Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko is a multigenerational epic that traces the complex trajectories of a Korean family in Japan across the 20th century. Interweaving intimate familial dynamics with the broader structural exclusions faced by ethnic Koreans in Japan. A National Book Award finalist, Lee’s novel is a masterclass in storytelling, praised for its dignified portrayal of resilience in the face of discrimination. It was adapted to critical acclaim by Apple TV.

Published posthumously, 2666 is the Chilean author Bolaño’s magnum opus: a labyrinthine narrative encompassing a missing author, murdered women in Mexico, and the ghosts of European fascism. Vast, enigmatic, and genre-defying, the novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award and is regarded as a towering achievement of 21st-century literature.

This Booker Prize-winning historical novel reimagines the rise of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII. Mantel reinvents the genre with razor-sharp prose and a psychologically rich portrait of power and survival. It won the Booker in 2009 and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, also earned the prize, a rare literary feat.

Smith’s dazzling debut novel examines immigration, race, and generational identity in late-20th-century London. A multiracial, multigenerational comedy of manners, White Teeth marked the arrival of a major literary talent at only 24. It won numerous accolades including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Whitbread First Novel Award.