The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir by Joan Didion, accounting of the year following the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne in 2003. Published by Knopf in October 2005, The Year of Magical Thinking was immediately acclaimed as a classic book about mourning. It won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. In 2024, The New York Times Book Review ranked The Year of Magical Thinking as the 12th best book of the 21st century. It was adapted into a play in 2007.
Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.
Love (2003) is the eighth novel by Toni Morrison. Written in Morrison's non-linear style, the novel tells of the lives of several women and their relationships to the late Bill Cosey.
Maggie O'Farrell, RSL, is a novelist from Northern Ireland. Her acclaimed first novel, After You'd Gone, won the Betty Trask Award, and a later one, The Hand That First Held Mine, the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She has twice been shortlisted since for the Costa Novel Award for Instructions for a Heatwave in 2014 and This Must Be The Place in 2017. She appeared in the Waterstones 25 Authors for the Future. Her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death reached the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her novel Hamnet won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020, and the fiction prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards. The Marriage Portrait was shortlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction.
Maggie Nelson is an American writer. She has been described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory, philosophy, scholarship, and poetry. Nelson has been the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction. Other honors include the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and a 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.
Just Kids is a memoir by Patti Smith, published on January 19, 2010, documenting her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe.
White Girls is a nonfiction book by Hilton Als, published November 5, 2013 by McSweeney's.
Lila is a novel written by Marilynne Robinson that was published in 2014. Her fourth novel, it is the third installment of the Gilead series, after Gilead and Home. The novel focuses on the courtship and marriage of Lila and John Ames, as well as the story of Lila's transient past and her complex attachments. It won the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award.
H is for Hawk is a 2014 memoir by British author Helen Macdonald. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book of the Year award, among other honours.
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is a fantasy novel by British Indian author Salman Rushdie published by Jonathan Cape in 2015.
The Sellout is a 2015 novel by Paul Beatty published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the UK by Oneworld Publications in 2016. The novel takes place in and around Los Angeles, California, and muses about the state of racial relations in the U.S. today. In October 2016, it won the Booker Prize, making Beatty the first US writer to win that award.
The Labyrinth of the Spirits is a fiction novel by Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafón. This is the fourth and final book in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series. The novel was initially released on 17 November 2016 in Spain and Latin America by Planeta Group. HarperCollins published the English translation by Lucia Graves on September 18, 2018. The book was translated into more than 36 languages.
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between is a memoir by Hisham Matar that was first published in June 2016. The memoir centers on Matar's return to his native Libya in 2012 to search for the truth behind the 1990 disappearance of his father, a prominent political dissident of the Gaddafi regime. It won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, the inaugural 2017 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the 2017 Folio Prize, becoming the first nonfiction book to do so.
Flights is a 2007 fragmentary novel by the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. The book was translated into English by Jennifer Croft. The original Polish title refers to runaways, a sect of Old Believers, who believe that being in constant motion is a trick to avoid evil.
Feel Free: Essays is a 2018 book of essays by Zadie Smith. It was published on 8 February 2018 by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books. It has been described as "thoroughly resplendent" by Maria Popova, who writes: "Smith applies her formidable mind in language to subjects as varied as music, the connection between dancing and writing, climate change, Brexit, the nature of joy, and the confusions of personhood in the age of social media."
My Sister, the Serial Killer is a 2018 thriller novel by Nigerian writer Oyinkan Braithwaite. Braithwaite's debut novel was originally published in Nigeria as an e-book with the title Thicker Than Water in 2017 before being released in the United States by Doubleday Books on 20 November 2018.
The Yellow House is a memoir by Sarah M. Broom. It is Broom's first book and it was published on August 13, 2019, by Grove Press. The Yellow House chronicles Broom's family, her life growing up in New Orleans East, and the eventual demise of her beloved childhood home after Hurricane Katrina. Broom also focuses on the aftermath of Katrina and how the disaster altered her family and her neighborhood. At its core, the book examines race, class, politics, family, trauma, and inequality in New Orleans and America. The Yellow House won the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Hamnet is a 2020 novel by Maggie O'Farrell. It is a fictional account of William Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, who died at age eleven in 1596, focusing on his parents' grief. In Canada, the novel was published under the title Hamnet & Judith.
Utopia Avenue is a 2020 novel by David Mitchell. It is his eighth published novel, and his first since Slade House (2015). It was published by Sceptre on 14 July 2020. The novel tells the story of the fictional 1960s British psychedelic rock band Utopia Avenue.
Underland: A Deep Time Journey is a book by Robert Macfarlane and the sequel to The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. Initially published in English on 2 May 2019 by Hamish Hamilton in the UK and on 4 June 2019 by W. W. Norton & Company in the US, the book has been translated into over a dozen languages. An audiobook, read by Matthew Waterson, was also released in June 2019 by HighBridge Audio.
