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NYT 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

Introduction

In July 2024, the New York Times released a list of the top 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Below are the titles the Saint Mary's Libraries have in our collections. The books below are listed in descending order, with 100 in the top left and 1 in the bottom right.

100 Best Books of the 21st Century

Cover of Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Cover of How to be Both by Ali Smith

Cover of Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Cover of Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

Cover of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya V. Hartman

Cover of Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Cover of On Beauty by Zadie Smith

Cover of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Cover of The Human Stain by Philip Roth

Cover of The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Cover of The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar

Cover of Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

Cover of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight

Cover of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Cover of Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

Cover of The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

Cover of A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin

Cover of Septology by Jon Fosse

Cover of An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Cover of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Cover of Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Cover of Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Cover of The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro

Cover of Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Aleksievich

Cover of The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen

Cover of All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones

Cover of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Cover of The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

Cover of Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon

Cover of We the Animals by Justin Torres

Cover of The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

Cover of The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

Cover of Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Cover of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugendies

Cover of Stay True: A Memoir by Hua Hsu

Cover of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Cover of The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

Cover of The Looming Tower: al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

Cover of Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders

Cover of Runaway by Alice Munro

Cover of Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

Cover of Life after Life by Kate Atkinson

Cover of Trust by Hernán Díaz

Cover of The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Cover of Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Cover of A Mercy by Toni Morrison

Cover of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Cover of The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

Cover of The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Cover of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt

Cover of A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

Cover of Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Cover of H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

Cover of A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Cover of The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

Cover of The Years by Annie Ernaux

Cover of Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Cover of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

Cover of Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

Cover of The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

Cover of White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Cover of Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Cover of The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

Cover of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Cover of Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Cover of Atonement by Ian McEwan

Cover of Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx

Cover of The Overstory by Richard Powers

Cover of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories by Alice Munro

Cover of Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo

Cover of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Cover of Erasure by Percival Everett

Cover of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

Cover of Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Cover of The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Cover of Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Cover of Outline by Rachel Cusk

Cover of The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Cover of The Year of Magical Thinking

Cover of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

Cover of Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Cover of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Cover of Austerlitz by Winfried Georg Sebald

Cover of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Cover of 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

Cover of The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Cover of The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Cover of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Cover of The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

Cover of My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante