Top 21st Century Books: Books 75 to 51
Welcome to day two of our Top 21st Century Books project. I’ll be releasing 25 rankings a day. If you would like to read the first selection of books and an introduction, click here.
To me this section contains quite a few glaring omissions from the original list, so I’m very happy to see them here. Starting with…
The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy
How there was no Deborah Levy on the NYT list I don’t know; was it the American bias, is she just lesser known over the pond? Either way, she strikes me as an author who has really hit her stride in the last couple of decades with some fascinating, layered and clever novels (and her ‘living autobiographies’). Honestly couldn’t find a way to summarise this slippery novel in a sentence so I’m borrowing from The Guardian: “The trauma of European totalitarianism is channelled through one man in this intricately layered analysis of personal and political power”.
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
Wilkerson uses her signature narrative journalistic style to shed light on the depth and breadth of America’s Great Migration—the movement northward of millions of Black Americans through the twentieth century—through the perspectives of three people, compiled over thousands of hours of interviews.
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
I’m very glad to see Emezi on this list, even though I actually haven’t read any of their books yet. Nonetheless, they strike me an author we’ll continue to watch and will come to embody many of the movements in fiction of the last couple of decades (for example, their genre-bending approach which combines elements of speculative, romance, poetry). I’m looking forward to their new novel Little Rot but this debut, Freshwater, follows a girl with one foot in two worlds, the human world and the gods'.
Trust by Hernan Diaz
Diaz’s sophomore novel is a metafictional puzzle in four parts following a wealthy couple in 1920s New York, and the legacy of Edith Wharton is strong.
Afropean: Notes from Black Europe by Johnny Pitts
Pitts documents the lives of ‘Afropeans’, Europeans of African descent by creating a kind of alternative map of the continent.
Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson
Brandon and I are not the most favourable of literary matches, but I’m still pleased to see him on this list. The Stormlight Archive has been a sensation since the release of The Way of Kings in 2010, and to leave him out entirely feels like an omission. This is book two of the epic fantasy series which follows a selection of characters in Sanderson’s Cosmere universe.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
I was really surprised not to see this on the original list, if only because it’s one of the first books in my literary memory that I remember being a big deal. It felt like everyone was reading it, including me. It may have been one of the first adult novels I read. And it absolutely captured my small heart. I haven’t returned to it since and have no idea what I’d make of it now, but I loved it at the time. Stranded in the middle of the ocean for 277 days after a shipwreck, young Pi tries to make the best of it with just a Bengal tiger for company.