The Best Contemporary Literary Fiction of the Last Decade

It is very easy, and quietly comforting, to assume that all the truly great novels safely belong to the past, that literature reached its final peak with the familiar names in the anthologies and that everything published since is merely disposable noise. But the last decade or so has in fact been quietly, almost secretly extraordinary, steadily producing books that serious critics and ordinary readers alike already strongly suspect will still be read, taught, and argued over a full century from now. We are, right at this moment, living through a genuine golden age of literary fiction, and it would be a real and lasting shame to sleep straight through the whole thing while it is actually happening all around us.

These are novels vividly alive to the present moment in all its noise and confusion, wrestling openly with migration, identity, class, technology, loneliness, and the strange new shape of love in a relentlessly connected age, yet written with all the ambition, patience, and craft of the old classics. To read them now, while the ink is barely dry on the page, is a genuine chance to be an early eyewitness rather than a late and dutiful arrival decades after the fact. Here are the contemporary books most worth your precious reading time, the ones people simply cannot stop talking about, along with exactly where to begin with the handful of writers who are quietly defining this entire literary era.

The writers shaping now

A small handful of contemporary novelists have already, in just a few short years, genuinely reshaped what serious fiction looks and feels like on the page. Sally Rooney captured an entire generation's particular way of loving, texting, and talking with almost unnerving precision; Colson Whitehead boldly reimagined how the brutal American past can even be told at all; Elena Ferrante quietly turned the fierce, complicated friendship between two women into a sweeping four-book epic that the whole world devoured. Crucially, these are not obscure, difficult literary darlings admired only by a few critics; they are writers being read, adored, and argued over passionately in many millions of ordinary homes around the world, which is very often exactly how tomorrow's enduring classics quietly begin their long lives among us. The novels we now solemnly teach in universities were, in their own day, simply the books everyone happened to be arguing about over dinner. There is no good reason to assume our own moment is any different, or any less quietly rich.

The modern shelf worth reading now

• Normal People, Sally Rooney: the intimate, painfully on-and-off love story of two young people that came to define a whole generation's romantic life. Spare, precise, quietly piercing, and impossible to read at a distance.
• The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead: a Pulitzer-winning novel that boldly reimagines the escape routes from slavery as a literal, physical railway running deep underground. Harrowing, inventive, and utterly unforgettable.
• My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante: the first of the four Neapolitan novels, tracing a fierce, competitive, lifelong friendship between two brilliant girls growing up in poor and violent postwar Naples. Completely absorbing.
• A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara: an immersive, devastating, and deeply divisive story of four friends and one man's buried history of trauma. Not for everyone, but never, ever forgotten by the readers it truly marks.
• Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders: a wildly inventive, formally daring novel of grief set across a single night in a graveyard crowded with chattering, competing, heartbroken ghostly voices. Like absolutely nothing else.
• Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro: an artificial friend patiently observes human love, hope, and loss from just outside it all. Tender, unsettling, and quietly profound science fiction from a Nobel laureate.
• Pachinko, Min Jin Lee: a sweeping, generous, and deeply moving family saga following four generations of Koreans making a hard life in an often hostile Japan across the twentieth century.
• The Overstory, Richard Powers: nine separate human lives are slowly bound together by trees in an ambitious, mind-altering, Pulitzer-winning novel that genuinely changes how you see the natural world around you.

How to find the future classics

You do not, in fact, need a professional critic to tell you which brand-new books are the ones most likely to truly last; a few reliable signs are right there for anyone paying honest attention. Look closely for the novels that ordinary people simply cannot stop physically pressing into one another's hands with a fierce, urgent look in their eye, the ones that spark real, heated argument rather than polite and instantly forgettable praise, and the ones that somehow manage to feel both completely of their exact cultural moment and, at the very same time, strangely and permanently timeless. Both Normal People and A Little Life sharply divide their many readers precisely because they touch a genuine raw nerve, and touching a nerve like that, provoking real love and real fury in equal measure, is very often exactly how a book first earns its lasting place in the long, ongoing conversation of literature. Indifference, not hatred, is the real enemy of any lasting book, and not one of these novels leaves its readers indifferent. That fact alone is a good reason to pay them close attention right now.

Where to start

If what you are after is an easy, propulsive, welcoming entry point into the very best of contemporary fiction, then begin confidently with either Normal People or Pachinko; both are hugely, almost dangerously readable, and genuinely difficult to set back down once you have started them. If instead you are hungry for real ambition, formal daring, and sheer dazzle, then reach without hesitation for Lincoln in the Bardo or The Overstory and let them stretch your whole sense of what a novel can even be. And if you actively want to be thoroughly, memorably wrecked from the inside out, then A Little Life is patiently waiting for you, though you should very much go into it forewarned. Match the book carefully to your current appetite and you will see at once, with real delight, that the literary present is every bit as rich, alive, and rewarding as the celebrated past ever was.

“Every classic was once a brand-new book that somebody was brave enough to love first.”

Read them while they're new

There is a rare and genuinely special pleasure in reading an important book before it has hardened into a monument, while it is still being actively argued about and its final meaning is genuinely, excitingly unsettled. You get to form your very own honest opinion of it before the wider culture slowly closes around a single official one, and you get to join a living, breathing, ongoing conversation rather than shuffling quietly through a museum long after everyone interesting has already gone home. So pick just one of these remarkable novels, whichever single one most makes you lean forward in your chair, and read it now, this month, while it is still new and raw and undecided. Years from now, you will have the deep and quiet satisfaction of knowing that you were there early, back when it was all still being decided and nobody yet knew for certain which of these books would last.