Award winners
Award-winning books in the catalogue
Every book in our catalogue that has won a major literary prize — the Booker, the Pulitzer, the Hugo, the Nebula, the Women's Prize, the National Book Award or the Nobel Prize in Literature. 123 titles, all verified.
123 books · ranked
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1
Interpreter of Maladies
Stories of Indian and Indian-American lives between cultures; a Pulitzer-winning debut of great delicacy.
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2
Wolf Hall
Thomas Cromwell's rise in the court of Henry VIII; political intrigue rendered in extraordinary close-up prose.
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3
All the Light We Cannot See
A blind French girl and a German boy whose paths cross in occupied France; luminous, intricate storytelling.
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4
The Road
A father and son walk through a dead, ash-grey world; stripped-bare, unbearably tender post-apocalyptic fiction.
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5
The Goldfinch
When a bomb destroys the museum where he is visiting, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives but his mother does not. In the chaos, he takes a small Dutch painting — The Goldfinch — which will haunt his life for the next decade and a half, through foster care, antiques, addiction and a criminal underworld. Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a meditation on art, loss and the things we carry.
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6
The Corrections
The three grown children of Alfred and Enid Lambert return home for a final Christmas as Alfred's Parkinson's progresses and Enid refuses to accept what is happening to her marriage and family. Franzen's National Book Award-winning novel moves between the Lambert children's separate American lives and their parents' Midwestern home in a portrait of family, decline and the late-20th-century United States.
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7
Piranesi
A man lives alone in an endless house of statues and tides; a short, strange, haunting puzzle of a novel.
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8
Half of a Yellow Sun
The Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967-70 — one of the defining catastrophes of postcolonial Africa — is seen through four perspectives: an educated Nigerian couple, their houseboy and a British journalist. Adichie's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is about the specific collapse of a world that thought itself modern and secure.
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9
The Underground Railroad
A reimagining of the escape from slavery as a literal railway; inventive, brutal and morally clear.
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10
The Stone Sky
The concluding volume of the Broken Earth trilogy brings Essun and her daughter Nassun toward an inevitable confrontation over the fate of a world wracked by recurring apocalypses — and reveals the deep history of the Stillness and the Obelisk Gate. Jemisin's trilogy made history as the only series to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years running, with this final volume completing one of the most acclaimed achievements in contemporary fantasy.
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11
A Memory Called Empire
Mahit Dzmare arrives as ambassador to the vast Teixcalaanli Empire carrying the memories of her predecessor — who has died under suspicious circumstances — implanted in her brain. Martine's Hugo Award-winning novel is space opera built on questions of cultural assimilation, imperial seduction and what it means to love the empire that is erasing your home.
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12
Network Effect
Murderbot — the anxious, TV-obsessed security AI who would rather be left alone — returns in the first full-length Murderbot novel, drawn into a crisis involving a kidnapped friend, a hijacked ship and a conspiracy that forces Murderbot to confront its feelings about the humans it protects. Wells's Hugo and Nebula-winning novel combines thriller pacing with one of science fiction's most beloved unconventional narrators.
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13
We Begin at the End
Walk, a small-town California police chief, releases his childhood best friend Vincent from prison thirty years after Vincent killed Walk's sister — and the return sets off a chain of events involving Vincent's niece Duchess, a self-declared outlaw raising her younger brother. Whitaker's CWA Gold Dagger-winning novel is both a literary character study and a propulsive thriller about guilt, loyalty and the children paying for adults' worst days.
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14
American Gods
Shadow Moon, recently released from prison, takes a job with the mysterious Mr Wednesday and finds himself at the centre of a war between the old gods brought to America by immigrants — Anansi, Odin, Anansi, Czernobog — and the new gods of media, technology and globalisation. Gaiman's novel is a myth of America as a land that forgets its gods.
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15
Good Girl, Bad Girl
Forensic psychologist Cyrus Haven is asked to assess Evie Cormac, a teenage girl found hiding in a house with a murdered man years earlier, whose true identity has never been established — while investigating the murder of a teenage figure skater. Robotham's CWA Gold Dagger-winning novel launched a series built around Cyrus and Evie's relationship and the mystery of who Evie really is.
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16
The City We Became
New York City is about to be born as a living entity — and each of its boroughs manifests as a human avatar who must fight an ancient enemy trying to prevent the city's birth. Jemisin's Locus Award-winning novel is urban fantasy as both celebration of New York's diversity and confrontation with the forces — including a very particular kind of cosmic racism — that resist cities becoming what they could be.
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17
The Last Cuentista
Petra Peña, one of the children chosen to journey to a new world after Earth's destruction, wakes from cryosleep to find her memories have been erased by the ship's new ruling order — except for the stories her grandmother told her, which become the only thing she has left of where she came from. Higuera's Newbery Medal-winning novel uses science fiction to explore cultural erasure, memory and the power of storytelling to preserve identity.
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18
The Tainted Cup
In an empire defended from monstrous leviathans by genetically and magically altered humans, investigator Ana Dolabra and her assistant Dinios Kol are called to solve the murder of an imperial officer killed by a tree that grew through his body overnight. Bennett's Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning novel combines fantasy worldbuilding with a genuine Holmes-and-Watson detective dynamic and a richly imagined bureaucratic empire.
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19
Down the River unto the Sea
Joe King Oliver, a former NYPD detective framed and imprisoned years earlier on charges that destroyed his career and marriage, is approached by the woman who set him up — now wanting his help — while he investigates the case of a journalist accused of killing two police officers. Mosley's Edgar Award-winning novel is a hardboiled meditation on corruption, race and the New York City justice system from one of crime fiction's most distinctive voices.
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20
A Song for a New Day
In a near-future America where mass gatherings have been banned after a wave of attacks and a pandemic, a touring musician who refuses to stop performing live encounters a young scout for a tech company that has built an empire on virtual concerts. Pinsker's Nebula Award-winning novel — written before COVID-19 but eerily predictive — is about live music, isolation and what gets lost when everything moves online.
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21
The Volunteer
Witold Pilecki, a Polish resistance officer, volunteered to be captured and sent to Auschwitz in 1940 specifically to gather intelligence and build a resistance network from inside the camp. Fairweather's Costa Book of the Year-winning biography tells one of the most extraordinary and least-known stories of WWII resistance — a man who chose to enter the camp the rest of the world was trying to escape.
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22
Five Decembers
In November 1941, a Honolulu police detective investigates a brutal double murder that leads him to Hong Kong just as the Pacific war begins — and the case, and the war, will consume the next five years of his life. Kestrel's Edgar Award-winning novel is an epic crime story that becomes a war novel, following one detective across the entire Pacific theatre in pursuit of a case he cannot let go.
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23
The City in the Middle of the Night
On a tidally locked planet where one side burns and the other freezes, two cities cling to survival in the narrow habitable zone — and a young woman exiled from one of them encounters the planet's indigenous, possibly sentient inhabitants. Anders's Locus Award-finalist novel is about colonialism, communication across genuinely alien difference, and what survival costs a society over generations.
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24
Notes on an Execution
On the night of his execution, a serial killer's life is reconstructed not through his own perspective but through the women connected to him — his mother, his sister-in-law, the detective who caught him. Kukafka's Edgar Award-winning novel deliberately withholds the killer's voice, redirecting the true-crime genre's usual fascination with the perpetrator toward the women whose lives intersected with his.
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25
The Saint of Bright Doors
Fetter was raised by his mother to kill his father — a cult leader and living saint — but instead moves to a city full of doors that lead nowhere, where he discovers an underground of the unseen and the discarded. Chandrasekera's Nebula Award-winning debut is a richly strange fantasy about prophecy, chosen ones who refuse their roles, and the parts of cities that official narratives erase.
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26
The Kaiju Preservation Society
Jamie Gray, laid off at the start of the pandemic, takes an unusual job that turns out to involve travelling to an alternate dimension where enormous kaiju — Godzilla-scale creatures — live in a vast wilderness that needs protecting from both the kaiju and the humans who'd exploit them. Scalzi's Locus Award-winning novel is fast, funny science fiction adventure, written partly as what he's called 'a pop song' after a difficult creative period.
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27
System Collapse
Murderbot and its allies must prevent a corporate hostile takeover of a newly contacted human colony — while Murderbot deals with the psychological aftermath of trauma from the previous book, in ways its companions notice before it's willing to admit. Wells's Locus Award-winning novel continues the series' blend of action, humour and one of science fiction's most quietly moving explorations of mental health and recovery.
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28
The Mercy of Gods
Humanity, having spread to a distant world, is conquered by the Carryx — an ancient, incomprehensible alien empire that absorbs species into its vast collection of subject civilisations. The Mercy of Gods, by the writing team behind The Expanse, begins a new space opera series about survival under genuinely alien, indifferent conquest — won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
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29
The Nickel Boys
At the Nickel Academy, a Florida reform school in the 1960s, two Black teenagers — the idealistic Elwood and the pragmatic Turner — face systematic abuse and find different ways to survive. Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a devastating account of institutional racism and the long shadow that violence casts over an entire life.
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30
The Overstory
Nine Americans whose lives are changed by trees — a chestnut tree photographed for generations, a couple bonded by a sentinel banyan, a scientist who discovers trees communicate — are drawn together in a defence of old-growth forests. Powers's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel makes trees the protagonist of American history and asks whether human consciousness will arrive before or after the damage is done.
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31
How to Be Both
Two stories are bound together in a single novel: a grieving English teenager in the present and a 15th-century Italian fresco painter in the past. Smith's Booker Prize-winning novel exists in two editions with the stories in different orders — asking what changes about the meaning of a life story depending on where you begin.
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32
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans survives as a prisoner of war building the Burma Death Railway, haunted by a love affair that began just before his capture. Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning novel is a meditation on love, memory, survival and the particular moral difficulty of having lived through something that others did not.
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33
The Luminaries
In 1866, on the goldfields of New Zealand's West Coast, a young man stumbles into a meeting of twelve men who have gathered secretly to discuss four unsolved mysteries. Catton's Booker Prize-winning novel is structured around astrological charts and is one of the most formally elaborate works in contemporary fiction — a Victorian detective novel that turns its genre inside out.
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34
The Sympathizer
A communist spy serves as a captain in the South Vietnamese army and escapes to America after the fall of Saigon, all while writing a confession to an unnamed commandant. Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning debut is a dazzling, angry novel about colonialism, complicity and the double consciousness of the man who belongs to every side and none.
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35
Hamnet
In 1580s Stratford-upon-Avon, Agnes — wife of a young Latin tutor who will become William Shakespeare — struggles to save their son Hamnet from an illness moving through the household. O'Farrell's novel imagines the loss of a child that may have given rise to the greatest play ever written, exploring grief, love and the way a mother's devotion can outlast death. Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020.
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36
Shuggie Bain
In 1980s Glasgow, Shuggie Bain worships his beautiful, deeply troubled mother Agnes — an alcoholic in a community where alcoholism is everywhere and escape almost impossible. Stuart's Booker Prize-winning debut is an unsparing portrait of poverty, addiction, love and the specific cruelty of a society that offers no way out.
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37
The Mirror & the Light
The final volume of Mantel's Cromwell trilogy follows Thomas Cromwell through the executions, marriages and political manoeuvres of the final years before his own fall. Mantel writes with the same extraordinary inhabited immediacy as Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, completing one of the greatest historical novel sequences in English. Winner of the Walter Scott Prize 2021.
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38
The Secret Scripture
Roseanne McNulty, a hundred years old in a Roscommon mental hospital, writes her memoirs in secret. Her psychiatrist Dr Grene, compiling her case history, discovers that the truth of her life is nothing like her file says. Barry's Booker-shortlisted novel is a study in Irish institutional memory, the violence done to women, and the stories people tell themselves to survive.
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39
Demon Copperhead
Damon Fields — nicknamed Demon Copperhead for his copper hair and his will — grows up in rural Appalachian Virginia in the opioid epidemic, ageing out of foster care into addiction, loss and an attempt to survive a world that has been systematically stripped of its economic future. Kingsolver's Pulitzer Prize-winning retelling of David Copperfield is the most urgent American novel about the opioid crisis.
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40
Flesh
Following one Hungarian-British man — István — from his teenage years on a Budapest housing estate through decades of life in the economic shadow of London's super-rich, Szalay's spare, propulsive novel tracks a man who is emotionally detached yet persistently unravelled by events beyond his control. Winner of the Booker Prize 2025.
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41
Orbital
Six astronauts orbit Earth every ninety minutes, watching sixteen sunrises a day, as storms and fires rage below and one crew member waits for news of her dying mother. Harvey's Booker Prize-winning novella asks what it means to look at the Earth from outside it — and whether distance creates clarity or only the illusion of it.
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42
James
A radical retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim — rechristened James — who is far more intelligent, self-aware and morally complex than Twain's narrator allows him to be. Everett's Booker Prize-winning novel is a devastating, often darkly funny examination of race, freedom and the authorship of American stories.
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43
The Song of Achilles
Patroclus, a young Greek prince, is exiled to the court of Peleus where he meets the brilliant, gold-haired Achilles. Their childhood friendship becomes love; their love leads to Troy. Miller's retelling of the Iliad through the eyes of Patroclus is one of the most beloved retellings of classical myth in recent years.
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44
Trust
Four separate texts — a novel, a memoir, a manuscript and a diary — together tell the story of a 1920s New York financier and his wife, each contradicting or qualifying the others. Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel asks who controls the narrative of a life — and what is erased in the process.
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45
Let the Great World Spin
In 1974, Philippe Petit walks a tightrope between the Twin Towers — and the same day touches the lives of a dozen strangers across New York. McCann's National Book Award-winning novel is a formal experiment in interconnection, asking what it means to share a city and a moment in history with people whose lives will never touch.
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46
Days Without End
Thomas McNulty, an Irish immigrant in 1850s America, enlists with the US Army and serves through the Indian Wars and the Civil War — surviving through his love for his fellow soldier John Cole. Barry's National Book Award winner is a novel of extraordinary beauty about violence, tenderness and the survival of love in inhospitable places.
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47
The Sense of an Ending
Tony Webster remembers his school friendship with the brilliant Adrian Finn and the relationship they both had with a girl named Veronica — and discovers decades later that his memory of these events is dangerously self-serving. Barnes's Man Booker-winning novella is a study in the gap between how we remember our lives and what we actually did.
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48
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Eva Khatchadourian writes letters to her estranged husband Franklin in the aftermath of their son Kevin's school massacre. Told entirely from Eva's perspective — and therefore unreliable in the most interesting ways — Shriver's novel asks whether some people are born evil, whether Eva failed Kevin, or whether she is simply unable to love him because she always knew what he was.
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49
The Line of Beauty
Nick Guest, a young gay man from a modest background, moves into the Notting Hill home of his Oxford friend Toby Fedden, whose father is a Tory MP. The novel follows Nick across three pivotal years in 1980s Thatcher Britain — through parties, affairs, AIDS and the inevitable end of his borrowed life. Winner of the Booker Prize.
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50
The Sea
Max Morden, a recently widowed art historian, returns to the Irish seaside resort where he spent a childhood summer — and where something happened to a family called the Graces that he has spent his adult life trying not to remember. Banville's Booker Prize-winning novel weaves between past and present in prose of exceptional, almost painful beauty.
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51
The Gathering
Veronica Hegarty assembles her family for the funeral of her brother Liam, who has drowned himself, and finds herself trying to reconstruct the truth of what happened to Liam in their grandmother's house when they were children. Enright's Booker Prize-winning novel is about family memory, silence, and the specifically Irish relationship to shame.
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52
The Amber Spyglass
The final volume of His Dark Materials brings Lyra and Will to the land of the dead while their parents and allies fight to determine the fate of consciousness itself. Pullman completes his rewriting of Paradise Lost, making Lyra's choice — and its cost — the theological and emotional climax of the trilogy. Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year.
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53
Lincoln in the Bardo
Abraham Lincoln visits the Washington cemetery where his son Willie has just been buried, and the novel unfolds through the voices of the ghosts inhabiting the bardo — the intermediate state between death and whatever comes next — as they witness Lincoln's grief and try to help Willie move on. Saunders's Man Booker-winning debut novel is formally unlike anything else.
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54
Small Island
Two couples — the Jamaican migrants Gilbert and Hortense, newly arrived in London in 1948, and the English couple Queenie and Bernard — share a house in the years after the Second World War. Levy's Orange Prize-winning novel asks what Britain promised the Windrush generation and what it actually gave them, exploring the gap between the coloniser's idea of England and its daily reality.
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55
A Brief History of Seven Killings
The attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976 Jamaica radiates outward through decades and continents, told through more than seventy voices — gang members, CIA operatives, journalists, ghosts. James's Booker Prize-winning novel is enormous in ambition and in length, capturing the chaos and violence of a specific political moment through an extraordinary polyphony.
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56
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Music executive Bennie Salazar and his assistant Sasha are at the centre of a set of stories spanning decades and shifting perspectives, formal registers and even one chapter written as a PowerPoint presentation. Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel asks what time does to people, to music and to the stories we tell about both.
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57
On Beauty
Two academic families — one liberal white British, one conservative Black American — are connected by a long professional rivalry, their children's entanglements and a painting that both men want to own. Smith's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is a deliberate retelling of E.M. Forster's Howards End set in a New England college town.
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58
The Sellout
A young Black farmer in a fictional suburb of Los Angeles is taken to the Supreme Court for reinstating slavery and segregation in his town — and somehow his actions have made his community happier. Beatty's Booker Prize-winning novel is a savage, absurdist satire of race in America that doesn't spare anyone: not the oppressors, not the activists, not the Supreme Court, not the narrator himself.
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59
The Night Watchman
Thomas Wazhashk, a night watchman on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation in 1953, leads the fight against a congressional bill designed to terminate the tribe's legal status. Erdrich's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is based on her own grandfather's resistance to termination and is one of the defining works of Native American literature.
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60
Salvage the Bones
The Batiste family in rural Mississippi — three brothers, a pregnant teenage girl — prepare for Hurricane Katrina in the week before it strikes. Ward's National Book Award-winning novel is told through Esch, the lone girl, who is pregnant and reading Medea. The hurricane, when it comes, is rendered with devastating intimacy.
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61
Prophet Song
In a near-future Ireland rapidly sliding into authoritarianism, Eilish Stack watches as her husband is taken by the secret police, her eldest son joins the resistance, and the state dismantles civil society with bureaucratic precision. Lynch's Booker Prize-winning novel compresses an apocalypse into a family story, its long, breathless sentences enacting the panic of a world coming apart.
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62
Bel Canto
When terrorists seize a South American vice-president's mansion during a soprano's recital, they take dozens of hostages — and the weeks of captivity that follow become a strange, suspended world in which music, love and an unlikely community develop in the middle of a political crisis. Patchett's PEN/Faulkner winner is about beauty, connection and the life that forms in confinement.
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63
The Satanic Verses
Two Indian actors survive a plane explosion over the English Channel by falling — and land transformed: one into a figure of divine radiance, one into something diabolical. Rushdie's novel is a meditation on identity, migration, good and evil, and the nature of revelation — and it became the most politically explosive novel of the 20th century.
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64
Redeployment
Fourteen stories about American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan — some combat veterans, some rear-echelon, some still in country. Klay's National Book Award-winning debut collection is one of the most clear-eyed accounts of what the Iraq War did to the people who fought it and to the civilians who didn't.
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65
An Officer and a Spy
The Dreyfus Affair — the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of Jewish French army officer Alfred Dreyfus for treason in 1894 — is told from the perspective of Colonel Georges Picquart, who discovers the cover-up and tries to expose it from within a hostile institution. Harris's Walter Scott Prize-winning novel is both a spy thriller and a study in institutional injustice.
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66
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Nine stories about Black women and the Black church — their desires, their hypocrisies, their grace, their hidden lives. Philyaw's PEN/Faulkner Award-winning debut is a formally accomplished, deeply felt collection about what the church gives Black women and what it withholds from them.
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67
Milkman
An eighteen-year-old woman in an unnamed city during 'the Troubles' is stalked by a much older paramilitary figure known only as 'the milkman' — and finds that resisting his attention makes her the subject of community gossip and suspicion. Burns's Booker Prize-winning novel, narrated by a woman known only as 'middle sister,' is written in a dense, looping, deliberately unnamed style that captures the paranoid texture of life under constant surveillance.
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68
The Promise
Three generations of a white South African family gather for funerals across four decades — 1986, 1996, 2004 and 2018 — and a promise made by the dying matriarch to leave a small house to the family's Black servant, Salome, remains unfulfilled at each one. Galgut's Booker Prize-winning novel is a portrait of South Africa from apartheid to the present, told through a family's accumulating broken promises.
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69
Less
Arthur Less, a minor novelist about to turn fifty, accepts a series of literary invitations around the world to avoid attending his ex-boyfriend's wedding — and finds himself, almost despite his own bumbling, on a journey toward something like self-acceptance. Greer's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a comic, tender portrait of an unsuccessful writer who turns out to be the hero of his own story after all.
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70
Babel
Robin Swift, taken from Canton to Oxford to study at the Royal Institute of Translation — Babel — discovers that the British Empire's power runs on magical silver activated by translation, and that his education is inseparable from the empire's exploitation of the languages and people it has colonised. Kuang's novel is a dark academia fantasy that is also a sustained argument about language, colonialism and the violence embedded in empire.
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71
Home Fire
Isma, Aneeka and Parvaiz Pasha are the British children of a jihadist father; when Parvaiz is recruited to ISIS, his sister Aneeka's relationship with the son of the Home Secretary becomes a test of loyalty, love and the limits of the state. Shamsie's Women's Prize-winning novel is a contemporary retelling of Sophocles' Antigone, asking what a sister owes a brother the state has declared an enemy.
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72
An American Marriage
Roy and Celestial are newly married when Roy is wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. The novel follows both of them — and Celestial's childhood friend Andre — through the twelve years of Roy's sentence and what happens when he is released. Jones's novel, an Oprah's Book Club selection and Women's Prize winner, is about love, loyalty and what the carceral system does to relationships.
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73
Angel Down
During the First World War, soldiers in No Man's Land discover a fallen angel among the dead. Kraus's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — written entirely as a single unbroken sentence — blends war narrative, allegory, magical realism and science fiction into one continuous breath, an extraordinary formal experiment applied to the horror of trench warfare.
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74
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Maali Almeida — a war photographer, gambler and closeted gay man — wakes up dead in a celestial visa office in 1990 Colombo, with seven moons to discover who killed him and to retrieve photographs that could end Sri Lanka's civil war. Karunatilaka's Booker Prize-winning novel uses ghosts, bureaucratic afterlife and dark comedy to confront the atrocities of Sri Lanka's conflict.
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75
The Netanyahus
In 1959-60, a historian at a small upstate New York college hosts a visiting lecturer named Benzion Netanyahu — whose family, including his teenage son Benjamin, descends on the campus in chaos. Cohen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a satirical campus novel that is also a meditation on Jewish American identity, Zionism and a strange footnote of real history.
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76
Night Watch
In the aftermath of the American Civil War, a mother and daughter arrive at a West Virginia asylum, and the novel moves between their story and the war years that brought them there. Phillips's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is about trauma, memory and the institutions that both housed and concealed the war's psychological wounds.
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77
The Book of Form and Emptiness
After his father's death, thirteen-year-old Benny begins hearing voices from objects around him — and finds refuge in the public library, where a mysterious book seems to be narrating his own life. Ozeki's Women's Prize-winning novel is about grief, mental health, consumerism and the objects that accumulate around loss.
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78
Trust Exercise
Students at a competitive performing arts high school in the 1980s fall in love, betray each other and are shaped by a charismatic drama teacher — and then the novel restarts, reframing everything from a different perspective, and again. Choi's National Book Award-winning novel is a formally audacious examination of memory, narrative authority and who gets to tell the story of what happened.
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79
The Rabbit Hutch
In a crumbling apartment complex in a Rust Belt city, a group of residents — including eighteen-year-old Blandine, fresh out of the foster care system and obsessed with medieval mystics — converge toward a single shocking night. Gunty's National Book Award-winning debut is a portrait of American decline rendered with formal inventiveness and unexpected tenderness.
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80
New Kid
Jordan Banks, a Black seventh-grader who would rather draw cartoons than attend a prestigious mostly-white private school, navigates the daily friction of being one of the few kids of colour in his class. Craft's graphic novel won the Newbery Medal — the first graphic novel to do so — for its honest, funny depiction of code-switching and microaggressions.
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81
The Poet X
Xiomara Batista, a Dominican-American teenager in Harlem, channels her anger, faith and desire into a notebook of poems she's afraid to share — until a school slam poetry club gives her a place to perform. Acevedo's novel-in-verse won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, the Carnegie Medal and the Printz Award — a rare triple.
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82
The Only Good Indians
Ten years after four young Blackfeet men do something they shouldn't have during an elk hunt, something is coming for them — and for the families and communities around them. Jones's Bram Stoker Award-winning novel is a horror story rooted in Indigenous experience, generational trauma and the specific landscape of the Blackfeet reservation.
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83
Interior Chinatown
Willis Wu, an actor perpetually cast as 'Generic Asian Man' in a police procedural filmed in his own neighbourhood, lives his life as if it were a screenplay — formatted as a script, complete with stage directions. Yu's National Book Award-winning novel is a satire of Hollywood's treatment of Asian Americans that becomes something much stranger and sadder as it develops.
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84
The Safekeep
In 1961 in the rural Netherlands, Isabel lives alone in the house she inherited, suspicious of everyone — until her brother's girlfriend Eva comes to stay, and Isabel's careful, controlled life begins to unravel as she discovers what the house actually conceals about the war years. Van der Wouden's Women's Prize-winning debut is a slow-burn novel about desire, guilt and the things postwar Europe chose not to remember.
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85
Brotherless Night
Sashi, a sixteen-year-old in Jaffna in 1981, dreams of becoming a doctor — and watches her brothers, one by one, drawn into the Tamil militant movement as Sri Lanka descends into civil war. Ganeshananthan's novel is about the impossible choices available to women in a community torn apart by violence from every direction — the state, the militants, and the war itself.
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86
The Book of Goose
Two girls in postwar rural France collaborate on a book of brutal, brilliant stories that becomes a literary sensation — credited to only one of them. Decades later, the other reflects on what their friendship and their fraud cost each of them. Li's PEN/Faulkner-shortlisted novel is about authorship, female friendship and the specific violence of being used by someone you love.
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87
Blackouts
A young man visits a dying mentor, Juan Gay, in a strange desert hotel, and the two trade stories — including the suppressed history of a real 1941 study of queer life that Juan has spent years annotating and erasing. Torres's National Book Award-winning novel is formally experimental, blending fiction, history and visual material into a meditation on queer erasure and recovery.
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88
When You Trap a Tiger
Lily moves with her family to live with her dying grandmother, and discovers that the magical tiger from her grandmother's Korean folktales may be real — and that returning what it stole could heal her family. Keller's Newbery Medal-winning novel blends Korean folklore with a contemporary story about grief, identity and the stories families pass down.
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89
Spinning Silver
Miryem, a moneylender's daughter, finds she can turn silver into gold — a gift that draws the attention of the Staryk, cold fae lords from a world of ice and silver, and binds her to one of them in marriage. Novik's Locus Award-winning fantasy, loosely inspired by Rumpelstiltskin, weaves together three women's stories of bargains, debts and the price of survival in a world where every transaction has consequences.
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90
Witch King
Kai, a demon who has been imprisoned and left for dead, wakes to find years have passed and the world he knew has changed — and sets out with his allies to discover who betrayed him and why. Wells's Locus Award-winning standalone fantasy moves between past and present to tell a story of magic, politics and friendship in a richly imagined world built on systems of power that aren't human-centred.
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91
Small Rain
A poet experiences a sudden, excruciating pain that leads to a hospitalisation for a rare cardiac emergency, and the days that follow — confined to an ICU during the pandemic — become an extended meditation on the body, illness, love and what matters when survival itself is uncertain. Greenwell's PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel is an intensely interior account of crisis, told with extraordinary precision about pain, fear and tenderness.
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92
The Long Take
Walker, a D-Day veteran from Nova Scotia, drifts through Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York in the years after the Second World War, unable to return home, haunted by what he saw and did in Normandy. Robertson's Walter Scott Prize-winning work — part novel, part book-length poem — captures postwar American cities being demolished for freeways while a generation of traumatised veterans disappear into them.
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93
Look Both Ways
Ten interconnected stories follow different groups of kids walking home from the same middle school on the same afternoon — each story a small world of its own, each connected to the others by the walk itself. Reynolds's Carnegie Medal-winning collection captures the texture of childhood and adolescence with warmth, humour and unexpected depth.
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94
The Eyes and the Impossible
Johannes, a free dog living in a vast urban park, runs faster than any other animal and serves as the Eyes for the park's ancient Bison overlords — observing everything that happens within the park's walls. Eggers's Newbery Medal-winning novel is a fable about freedom, observation and the walls that separate the wild from the managed, narrated by a dog who has never known anything but the park.
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95
The First State of Being
In the summer of 1999, twelve-year-old Michael, anxious about Y2K and obsessed with survival preparation, encounters a boy who has time-travelled from the future — and the encounter changes how Michael understands time, fear and what actually matters. Kelly's Newbery Medal-winning novel is about anxiety, friendship and the strange comfort of knowing the future doesn't end the way you fear.
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96
Freewater
Twelve-year-old Homer escapes a Virginia plantation with his sister and finds Freewater, a hidden community of formerly enslaved people living in the Great Dismal Swamp — a real historical phenomenon largely absent from American children's literature. Luqman-Dawson's Newbery Medal-winning novel is based on the real maroon communities that existed in the swamp for generations.
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97
The Reformatory
In 1950s Florida, twelve-year-old Robert is sent to a brutal reform school for boys after a single act of defiance — and discovers the school is haunted by the ghosts of boys who died there, killed by the staff and buried in unmarked graves. Due's Bram Stoker Award-winning novel is based on the real history of the Dozier School for Boys, using horror to confront a genuinely buried atrocity in American history.
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98
The Devil Takes You Home
A man facing his daughter's terminal illness and crushing medical debt takes a job as a hitman for a cartel — and the job spirals into something far more dangerous and supernatural than he anticipated. Iglesias's Bram Stoker Award-winning novel blends noir, horror and Latino working-class desperation in prose that switches between English and Spanish.
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99
Someone You Can Build a Nest In
Shesheshen, a shapeshifting monster who has lived in a ruined keep for centuries, falls in love with Homily, the woman sent by a group of monster-hunters to kill her — and must navigate romance while hiding what she really is. Wiswell's Nebula Award-winning novel is a horror-romance that takes its monster's perspective entirely seriously, asking what love looks like when one partner literally cannot show their true self.
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100
These Days
Over four nights of the Belfast Blitz in April and May 1941, two sisters navigate love, ambition and survival as the city around them is destroyed by German bombing raids — a chapter of WWII history rarely covered in fiction. Caldwell's Walter Scott Prize-winning novel renders the Blitz from a specifically Northern Irish perspective, usually overshadowed by London's experience.
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101
Hungry Ghosts
In 1940s rural Trinidad, the disappearance of a wealthy landowner sets off a chain of events that exposes the brutal inequalities between a barracks of poor labourers and the estate that employs them. Hosein's Walter Scott Prize-winning novel is a richly textured portrait of colonial-era Trinidad's caste and class divisions, drawing on Hindu mythology and the island's specific historical layers.
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102
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line
Nine-year-old Jai, obsessed with true-crime television shows, decides to investigate when children begin disappearing from his Indian slum — using the detective techniques he's learned from TV to navigate a real mystery that adults around him seem unable or unwilling to solve. Anappara's Edgar Award-winning debut combines a child's voice and dark humour with a serious examination of poverty, religious tension and India's missing children crisis.
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103
The Mermaid of Black Conch
A mermaid, cursed decades earlier by jealous women, is caught by fishermen off a Caribbean island — and a local fisherman who frees her finds his life transformed by a connection that crosses the boundary between human and myth. Roffey's Costa Book of the Year-winning novel draws on Caribbean folklore to tell a story about love, transformation and what communities do with what they cannot categorise.
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104
Lark
Brothers Nicky and Kenny set out for a walk on the moors above their Yorkshire town — Kenny, who has Down syndrome, in his element among the wildlife he loves — when a sudden fog and a dog's escape turn an ordinary afternoon into a fight for survival. McGowan's Carnegie Medal-winning novella is the final book in the Truth of Things quartet, a devastatingly tender portrait of brotherly love and working-class life in northern England.
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105
The Blue Book of Nebo
After a catastrophic event leaves the world without electricity, a mother and her teenage son survive in rural Wales, each keeping a journal — hers in the present, his looking back — that together reveal what happened and what they've kept from each other. Ros's Carnegie Medal-winning novel, originally written in Welsh, is a quiet, devastating post-apocalyptic story about survival, secrets and language itself.
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106
The Boy Lost in the Maze
A boy searching for his absent father is guided through a verse narrative that weaves in the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur — both stories about boys trying to find their way through labyrinths, literal and emotional. Coelho's Carnegie Medal-winning verse novel combines contemporary family experience with classical mythology.
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107
Jade Legacy
The concluding volume of the Green Bone Saga follows the Kaul family across decades as the magical jade trade that has defined their clan's power confronts a changing world — globalisation, new technology, and generational shifts that the old ways cannot survive unchanged. Lee's World Fantasy Award-winning novel completes an epic that has been compared to The Godfather for its multigenerational crime-family structure, set in a richly imagined magical East Asian-inspired world.
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108
Bring Up the Bodies
Cromwell engineers the fall of Anne Boleyn; tense, brilliant and even sharper than its predecessor.
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109
H Is for Hawk
Training a goshawk while grieving a father; a fierce, beautiful memoir of nature and loss.
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110
A Head Full of Ghosts
A family's possession ordeal becomes a reality show; clever modern horror that keeps you guessing.
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111
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Two magicians revive English magic during the Napoleonic wars; witty, footnoted and utterly original.
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112
Annihilation
Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The twelfth expedition arrives expecting the unexpected, and Area X de
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113
Uprooted
A village girl taken by a cold wizard discovers her own power against a malevolent wood; a fairy-tale standalone.
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114
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
Winner of the 2001 Carnegie MedalOne rat, popping up here and there, squeaking loudly, and taking a bath in the cream, could be a plague all by himself. After a few days of this, it was amazing how gl
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115
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
This is Christopher's murder mystery story. There are no lies in this story because Christopher can't tell lies. Christopher does not like strangers or the colours yellow or brown or being touched. On
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116
The Graveyard Book
Bod is an unusual boy who inhabits an unusual place—he's the only living resident of a graveyard. Raised from infancy by the ghosts, werewolves, and other cemetery denizens, Bod has learned the antiqu
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117
The Testaments
15 years after the sons of Jacob seized power in the USA and became Gilead. The story is told from three female viewpoints; Daisy, Agnes and Lydia. Daisy struggles with coming to the realization of he
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118
The Windup Girl
What Happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits? And what happens when said bio-terrorism forces humanity to the cusp of post-human evolution? In The Windup Girl, award-winning au
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119
Middlesex
Three generations of a Greek-American family and a story of identity that crosses borders and bodies.
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120
Life of Pi
A boy adrift in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, and a question about faith and the stories we choose to believe.
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121
Girl, Woman, Other
Twelve interlinked lives, mostly Black British women, across a century; vivid, polyphonic and joyful.
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122
Kafka on the Shore
Two strange journeys converge in a dreamlike tale of talking cats, libraries and fate; surreal and hypnotic.
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123
Gilead
An ageing minister writes to his young son; a luminous meditation on faith, family and grace.