The 6 Most Amazing Books of the 2020s, Ranked

Image via Bloomsbury Publishing Published Nov 3, 2026, 6:41 AM EST Sign in to your Collider account I have already had the humiliating experience of calling several books from this decade “recent” and then realizing they have been living in my head for years. That is probably the better test anyway. Not whether I loved them during the first week, but whether a family argument, a strange friendship, a house full of impossible rooms, or one furious voice keeps resurfacing long after I have forgotten half the other books I read around them. The six here have that staying power for wildly different reasons. One made me care about a financially collapsing Irish family as if I knew them personally, for example. Another turned a grocery store into the center of an entire neighborhood. Get the point? Let’s dig in. 6 'The Bee Sting' (2023) Image via Macmillan Publishers The Bee Sting follows the Barnes family in rural Ireland as money problems, buried resentments, failed ambitions, and old secrets begin pressing on each member from a different direction. Paul Murray wrote the novel by moving among father Dickie, mother Imelda, teenage daughter Cass, and younger son PJ, so the family you think you understand keeps changing every time somebody else gets the microphone. I became absurdly invested in these people. Dickie’s business is failing, Cass is drifting toward choices that scare you, PJ is trying to make sense of adults who keep withholding the truth, and Imelda carries a past that gradually explains far more than anyone around her realizes. Murray can be genuinely funny while making the whole household feel one bad decision away from collapse. The ending is the part I would almost forbid people from discussing beforehand. You finish the book wanting to grab someone else who has read it and immediately start arguing about what happens next. 5 'The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store' (2023) Image via Penguin Random House In The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride brings us to Chicken Hill, a poor neighborhood in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where Black and Jewish residents build lives beside one another in the 1920s and 1930s. The story gradually centers on efforts to protect Dodo, a deaf Black boy whom authorities want to institutionalize, while the neighborhood’s relationships, prejudices, loyalties, and buried histories begin connecting in unexpected ways. McBride wrote the kind of community novel where somebody who seems peripheral on page fifty can become emotionally essential a hundred pages later. I love that the grocery store itself feels almost like a moral crossroads. People come through it carrying gossip, debts, favors, suspicions, food, and whatever little protection they can offer one another. The novel is angry about institutional cruelty without flattening its characters into representatives of social issues. Everybody remains stubbornly human. 4 'Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow' (2022) Image via Knopf Publishing Group Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet as children, reconnect years later, and begin designing video games together. Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow follows their creative partnership through friendship, success, jealousy, romantic complications, resentment, and the strange intimacy of building imaginary worlds with somebody who knows how your brain works. Sam and Sadie drove me insane in the way only very well-written friends can. They understand each other deeply and still manage to misread each other spectacularly. Sometimes they are generous. Sometimes ego walks into the room before either realizes it. Marx becomes essential because he understands both of them in ways they do not always manage for each other. And then the book hits a point I will not spoil where play, grief, and communication become inseparable. 3 'Piranesi' (2020) Image via Bloomsbury Publishing A man called Piranesi lives inside an apparently endless House filled with enormous halls, statues, staircases, clouds, and ocean tides that move through its lower levels. Piranesi is presented through his journal, where he carefully records the House and his meetings with the only other person he regularly sees, a man he simply calls the Other. Susanna Clarke wrote it super intimately. Piranesi’s strange existence begins feeling completely logical before the questions surrounding it become impossible to ignore. I would protect this book from spoilers with physical force. Part of the pleasure is inhabiting Piranesi’s mind before you understand what the House is, why he is there, or why certain gaps exist in his memory. But the thing that stayed with me was not the mystery. It was his gentleness. He treats statues as companions, cares for the dead, watches birds, records tides, and finds genuine beauty in a place another person might experience only as imprisonment. Clarke makes knowledge itself morally complicated. Learning the truth matters, but so does the question of what parts of a person survive after truth changes everything. 2 'Demon Copperhead' (2022) Image via Harper Demon Copperhead gives us Damon Fields, known as Demon, a boy born into poverty in rural Virginia who moves through loss, abusive foster homes, football, first love, injury, and eventually opioid addiction. Barbara Kingsolver wrote the novel as a modern reimagining of Dickens’ David Copperfield, but Demon’s voice is so specific to Appalachia that the literary framework disappears almost immediately behind the boy speaking to us. That voice is everything. Demon is observant, funny, defensive, furious, and very good at turning pain into a story before somebody else gets to define it for him. The foster-care chapters made me angry. The football years made me briefly hopeful. Then pain medication enters his life with horrifying ease, because addiction here is not treated like a dramatic personality change. It arrives through injury, prescription, poverty, isolation, and an economy that already knows how little protection kids like Demon have. I wanted him out so badly that reading sometimes became stressful. That is how completely Kingsolver makes him feel alive. 1 'James' (2024) Image via Doubleday James retells the events of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who escapes after learning that he may be sold away from his family and eventually travels down the Mississippi with Huck. Percival Everett wrote the novel around a devastating idea: James has always been far more educated, perceptive, and linguistically sophisticated than white people allow themselves to imagine, and he deliberately performs the version of Blackness they expect because that performance can help keep him alive. That changes everything. Conversations you might once have interpreted as simple become tactical. Language becomes camouflage. James is constantly deciding what another person is safe enough to hear, how intelligent he is permitted to sound, and what part of himself must remain hidden. Everett is also ferociously funny, which somehow makes the cruelty sharper rather than softer. I finished it wanting to reopen Twain immediately, because James does not merely give a famous supporting character more interiority. It forces you to confront how easily a person can be reduced when the story has trained you to look at him from somebody else’s side of the raft Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Fantasy World Do You Belong To? Middle-earth · Grand Line · The Continent · Camp Half-Blood Pick your magic, your crew, where you want to wake up and who you would rather be fighting, and we will tell you which world you actually belong in. Four are open to you: an ancient kingdom living through its last good age, an endless sea full of pirates, a continent that pays people to kill monsters, and a summer camp where the Greek gods are extremely real and mostly a nuisance. 💍Middle-earth(Rings of Power) 👒Grand Line(One Piece) 🐺The Continent(The Witcher) 🔱Camp Half-Blood(Percy Jackson) FIND YOUR WORLD → 01 What kind of power do you want? Every one of these worlds runs on a completely different sort of magic. ASomething ancient and half forgotten that came down through my family. BSomething completely ridiculous that works in a fight and gets a laugh. CNo magic at all, just training, potions and a very sharp sword. DSomething I inherited from a parent I have barely met. NEXT QUESTION → 02 Who is travelling with you? Nobody gets through any of these stories entirely on their own. AA fellowship drawn from every corner of the world who barely trust each other. BA crew I picked up one at a time, all of whom would die for me. CTwo or three people I would never describe out loud as friends. DTwo mates from school who are exactly as out of their depth as I am. NEXT QUESTION → 03 Where do you want to wake up tomorrow? The best fantasy is usually just somewhere you would genuinely like to live. AA high city of white stone with the sea somewhere far below. BA ship under sail, with an island ahead that nobody has mapped. CA rented room over a tavern, in a town I am leaving in the morning. DA cabin at a summer camp with everybody else already awake outside. NEXT QUESTION → 04 How are you making a living out there? Even in fantasy somebody has to pay for the horse. AI am not, because somebody far older than me decided this was my duty. BTreasure, and I am not always careful about whose it used to be. CI take contracts, since people will pay well for what they will not touch. DI am fifteen and this is all technically a school trip. NEXT QUESTION → 05 There is something in the woods. What do you do about it? All four of these worlds keep something unpleasant out there in the dark. ASend word to somebody who has seen this before, then hold the line. BWalk straight in, because it is interesting and possibly edible. CAsk what it has been eating and what the village is willing to pay. DWork out which myth it escaped from, then improvise very badly. NEXT QUESTION → 06 Who is the villain of your story? The enemy tells you far more about a world than the hero ever does. AAn ancient evil that has been patient for several thousand years. BA government that has spent a long time calling itself the good guys. CA man who turns out to be far worse than anything I hunt for money. DA god, or possibly my own family, and quite likely both at once. NEXT QUESTION → 07 What do you actually believe in out there? Every world hands its heroes one rule and asks them to hold onto it. ASome things are worth defending even when the odds are hopeless. BNobody gets to tell me where I can go or what I am allowed to want. CPick the lesser evil, and never pretend afterwards that it was not evil. DMy friends come before anything a prophecy has to say about it. NEXT QUESTION → 08 A thousand years from now, how are you remembered? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your world. AIn a song, in a language hardly anybody still speaks. BAs the one who got there first and proved the whole thing was possible. CBarely, and mostly wrongly, in ballads I would absolutely hate. DOn a plaque at a camp, read by kids about to do the same thing. REVEAL MY WORLD → The Map Is Drawn Your World Is…Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in return. Middle-earthYou belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime. This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat, fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends. You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost everything you touch is older than your entire family line. The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight. You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot. The Grand LineYou want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is finding out what is over there. One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together. You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea. The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land harder because of that rather than in spite of it. You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of it. The ContinentYou would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the people are where it all gets complicated. Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept. You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer. The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people. You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story got told wrong. Camp Half-BloodYou want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as everybody kept telling you. Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners, which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse. You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for something nobody thought to test for. The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud every time a prophecy tries to get in the way. Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong. ↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ