Must-Read
Best Booker Prize-Winning Novels of the Modern Era
The Booker Prize gets plenty wrong each year. When it gets it right, the winners are some of the most carefully written novels in English published in their year. These six are the modern Booker winners our editors are still confidently recommending years later.
6 books on this list.
Prophet Songby Paul Lynch
5.0“Prophet Song by Paul Lynch 2023 review. A Dublin mother of four watches Ireland slide into an emergency-power dictatorship. Booker Prize 2023 and one of the canonical contemporary dystopian literary novels.”
The Sympathizerby Viet Thanh Nguyen
5.0“The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen 2015 review. A communist double agent flees with the South Vietnamese government to Los Angeles in April 1975. Pulitzer Prize 2016 and the canonical contemporary Vietnamese-American novel.”
Lincoln in the Bardoby George Saunders
5.0“Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders 2017 review. Abraham Lincoln's eleven-year-old son Willie dies and Lincoln returns to the Georgetown cemetery. The Bardo is populated by the cemetery's reluctant dead. Man Booker Prize 2017.”
Bring Up the Bodiesby Hilary Mantel
5.0“Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel 2012 review. Thomas Cromwell engineers the fall of Anne Boleyn and the rise of Jane Seymour. Booker Prize 2012, the second volume of the Cromwell trilogy, and the rare novel that exceeds an already-canonical predecessor.”
The Handmaid's Taleby Margaret Atwood
5.0“The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood 1985 review. In the near-future Republic of Gilead, women have been stripped of their rights, and the handmaid Offred remembers the world before. The most-cited dystopian novel of the late twentieth century.”
Never Let Me Goby Kazuo Ishiguro
5.0“Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 2005 review. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, a special English boarding school. As adults, they begin to understand what Hailsham was for. The novel that defined the contemporary literary-SF register.”