The New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

The New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century is a ranked list of the 100 best novels published in the English language of the 21st century. The list was compiled by The New York Times. The first book on the list was the Elena Ferrante novel My Brilliant Friend published in 2012. The authors who were listed the most were Elena Ferrante (3), W. Jesmyn Ward (3), George Saunders (3). The following authors were listed twice Roberto Bolaño, Edward P. Jones, Denis Johnson, Alice Munro, Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith and Philip Roth.

List

Rank	Title	Author	Year
1	My Brilliant Friend	Elena Ferrante	2012
2	The Warmth of Other Suns	Isabel Wilkerson	2010
3	Wolf Hall	Hilary Mantel	2009
4	The Known World	Edward P. Jones	2003
5	The Corrections	Jonathan Franzen	2001
6	2666	Roberto Bolaño	2008
7	The Underground Railroad	Colson Whitehead	2016
8	Austerlitz	W.G. Sebald	2001
9	Never Let Me Go	Kazuo Ishiguro	2005
10	Gilead	Marilynne Robinson	2004
11	The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao	Junot Díaz	2007
12	The Year of Magical Thinking	Joan Didion	2005
13	The Road	Cormac McCarthy	2006
14	Outline	Rachel Cusk	2015
15	Pachinko	Min Jin Lee	2017
16	The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay	Michael Chabon	2000
17	The Sellout	Paul Beatty	2015
18	Lincoln in the Bardo	George Saunders	2017
19	Say Nothing	Patrick Radden Keefe	2019
20	Erasure	Percival Everett	2001
21	Evicted	Matthew Desmond	2016
22	Behind the Beautiful Forevers	Katherine Boo	2012
23	Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage	Alice Munro	2001
24	The Overstory	Richard Powers	2018
25	Random Family	Adrian Nicole LeBlanc	2003
26	Atonement	Ian McEwan	2002
27	Americanah	Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie	2013
28	Cloud Atlas	David Mitchell	2004
29	The Last Samurai	Helen DeWitt	2000
30	Sing, Unburied, Sing	Jesmyn Ward	2017
31	White Teeth	Zadie Smith	2000
32	The Line of Beauty	Alan Hollinghurst	2004
33	Salvage the Bones	Jesmyn Ward	2011
34	Citizen	Claudia Rankine	2014
35	Fun Home	Alison Bechdel	2006
36	Between the World and Me	Ta-Nehisi Coates	2015
37	The Years	Annie Ernaux	2018
38	The Savage Detectives	Roberto Bolaño	2007
39	A Visit From the Goon Squad	Jennifer Egan	2010
40	H Is for Hawk	Helen Macdonald	2015
41	Small Things Like These	Claire Keegan	2021
42	A Brief History of Seven Killings	Marlon James	2014
43	Postwar	Tony Judt	2005
44	The Fifth Season	N.K. Jemisin	2015
45	The Argonauts	Maggie Nelson	2015
46	The Goldfinch	Donna Tartt	2013
47	A Mercy	Toni Morrison	2008
48	Persepolis	Marjane Satrapi	2003
49	The Vegetarian	Han Kang	2016
50	Trust	Hernan Diaz	2022
51	Life After Life	Kate Atkinson	2013
52	Train Dreams	Denis Johnson	2011
53	Runaway	Alice Munro	2004
54	Tenth of December	George Saunders	2013
55	The Looming Tower	Lawrence Wright	2006
56	The Flamethrowers	Rachel Kushner	2013
57	Nickel and Dimed	Barbara Ehrenreich	2001
58	Stay True	Hua Hsu	2022
59	Middlesex	Jeffrey Eugenides	2002
60	Heavy	Kiese Laymon	2018
61	Demon Copperhead	Barbara Kingsolver	2022
62	10:42	Ben Lerner	2014
63	Veronica	Mary Gaitskill	2005
64	The Great Believers	Rebecca Makkai	2018
65	The Plot Against America	Philip Roth	2004
66	We the Animals	Justin Torres	2011
67	Far From the Tree	Andrew Solomon	2012
68	The Friend	Sigrid Nunez	2018
69	The New Jim Crow	Michelle Alexander	2010
70	All Aunt Hagar's Children	Edward P. Jones	2006
71	The Copenhagen Trilogy	Tove Ditlevsen	2021
72	Secondhand Time	Svetlana Alexievich	2016
73	The Passage of Power	Robert Caro	2012
74	Olive Kitteridge	Elizabeth Strout	2008
75	Exit West	Mohsin Hamid	2017
76	Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow	Gabrielle Zevin	2022
77	An American Marriage	Tayari Jones	2018
78	Septology	Jon Fosse	2022
79	A Manual for Cleaning Women	Lucia Berlin	2015
80	The Story of the Lost Child	Elena Ferrante	2015
81	Pulphead	John Jeremiah Sullivan	2011
82	Hurricane Season	Fernanda Melchor	2020
83	When We Cease to Understand the World	Benjamín Labatut	2021
84	The Emperor of All Maladies	Siddhartha Mukherjee	2010
85	Pastoralia	George Saunders	2000
86	Frederick Douglass	David W. Blight	2018
87	Detransition, Baby	Torrey Peters	2021
88	The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis	Lydia Davis	2010
89	The Return	Hisham Matar	2016
90	The Sympathizer	Viet Thanh Nguyen	2015
91	The Human Stain	Philip Roth	2000
92	The Days of Abandonment	Elena Ferrante	2005
93	Station Eleven	Emily St. John Mandel	2014
94	On Beauty	Zadie Smith	2005
95	Bring Up the Bodies	Hilary Mantel	2012
96	Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments	Saidiya Hartman	2019
97	Men We Reaped	Jesmyn Ward	2013
98	Bel Canto	Ann Patchett	2001
99	How to Be Both	Ali Smith	2014
100	Tree of Smoke	Denis Johnson	2007