The 21st century started with a bang, fiction-wise, with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and  Clay (2000), a historical novel about two comic-book artists in which Michael Chabon explores so many 20th-century themes—from the immigrant experience to the growth of pop culture—that it serves as the perfect bridge to more recent hits like Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022). Chabon kicked off 25 years of authors breaking rules and busting genres, broadening the canon to include visions and perspectives that had long been excluded.

There are books on our list that have become instant classics; it’s already hard to remember a time when some of them weren’t part of the canon: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001), Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009), The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015), The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016), Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (2017), and many others. But there are also quirky books that we just love and want readers to rediscover. I was thrilled to find that Kirkus’ verdict on Julian Barnes’ Arthur & George (2006)—a novel about Arthur Conan Doyle’s real-life investigation into a Victorian miscarriage of justice—was just two words: “A triumph.” And Kirkus agreed with my view of Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013), the story of a young woman grieving the loss of her adoptive “sister,” a chimpanzee: “A fantastic novel: technically and intellectually complex, while emotionally gripping.”

Our list includes writers near the ends of their brilliant careers—Shirley Hazzard is here with her last novel, The Great Fire (2003), and so is Philip Roth with his final full-length work, The Plot Against America (2004), which feels more timely than ever. Toni Morrison’s Love (2003) is “one of [her] finest,” according to our review. There are auspicious debuts, including The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (2000), We the Animals by Justin Torres (2011), The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw (2020), and Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters (2021). There are thrillers here, including Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), which revolutionized the genre, and romances like Sarah MacLean’s Daring and the Duke (2020), which took the historical romance out of the ballroom and into the dark corners of London’s Covent Garden. Cixin Liu’s SF novel The Three-Body Problem (trans. by Ken Liu; 2014) is “remarkable, revelatory, and not to be missed,” according to our review.

Part of the fun of creating the list was finding reviews that turned out to be prescient: “This will mean a great deal to a great many people” was our verdict on Edward P. Jones’ The Known World (2003), while Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Bloomsbury, 2004) is called “an instant classic, one of the finest fantasies ever written.” Our review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (Knopf, 2005) concluded: “Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.” Twelve years later, Ishiguro was, in fact, awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. You can’t beat that.

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.