Hold onto your bookmarks. The list of our 10 most-loved books published since 2000 spans the literary, experimental and translated as well as true crime, science fiction and memoir genres. Some will make you cry, others will make you laugh – the best will have you doing both.
Choosing only 10 books from 25 years means there are notable absences, but the list offers a sketch of the books that have shaped us and our world since the start of the millennium. Our writers, critics and editors were asked to consider their personal favourites – the books that will always have a place on their shelves – as well as quality, influence and legacy. How many have you read? W G Sebald was the German master who invented contemporary “faction”, and is the last of his longer works and the one which most resembles a novel.
The main character shares a name with the famous Napoleonic battle and he speaks in moody and melancholic arias of desolation over a period that stretches from the 1960s to the 1990s. Austerlitz hates the aggressive brutality of the architecture of Antwerp and exhibits a depth of melancholy that is the basic idiom of his self-delineation and Sebald’s characterisation. This is a mutation of fiction which has the self-validating intensity of great poetry.
is a labyrinth of a book in which dream worlds and real worlds shatter and collide. It’s manifestly a masterpiece, perhaps the very greatest of those works which insinuate and actualise the way in which the mind .