The first two years out of college are their own reading window. The institutional reading list is gone. The free time is bigger than expected and smaller than it looks. The questions about work, money, friends, parents, and what kind of adult you actually want to be are urgent. We picked eight books that respect those questions.
Reader guide
Books for Recent Graduates
Books for the first two years after college.
The first two years out of college are their own reading window. The institutional reading list is gone. The free time is bigger than expected and smaller than it looks. The questions about work, money, friends, parents, and what kind of adult you actually want to be are urgent. We picked eight books that respect those questions.
Hand-picked
The shelf for recent graduates
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
by Gabrielle Zevin
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin 2022 review. Three decades of creative collaboration between two video-game designers. The breakout literary commercial novel of 2022 and one of the canonical contemporary novels about friendship and work.
Normal People
by Sally Rooney
Normal People by Sally Rooney 2018 review. Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small Sligo town, attend Trinity College Dublin together, and orbit each other across four years of intermittent intimacy. The literary-fiction novel that defined the Rooney moment.
Klara and the Sun
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro 2021 review. Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches the children passing by the storefront and waits to be chosen. Late-career Ishiguro at his most patient and most strange.
The Midnight Library
by Matt Haig
A gorgeous concept executed with warmth and wit. The Midnight Library will make you think differently about the choices you have made - and the ones still ahead.
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid 2017 review. An aging Hollywood icon agrees to tell the true story of her career and her seven marriages, but only to an unknown journalist. The TikTok-era literary fiction novel that defined contemporary Hollywood-memoir-fiction.
Educated
by Tara Westover
Educated by Tara Westover 2018 review. The memoir of growing up in a survivalist Idaho family that kept her out of school until age seventeen, and her subsequent education through Brigham Young University and Cambridge. The PEN/Bingham winner and one of the canonical contemporary memoirs.
Fourth Wing
by Rebecca Yarros
Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros 2023 review. Violet Sorrengail, a fragile scribe, is forced into the brutal dragon-riding war college. The first book of the Empyrean series and the romantasy novel that defined the 2023-2024 BookTok moment.
The Anxious Generation
by Jonathan Haidt
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt 2024 review. The smartphone-and-social-media-driven youth mental-health crisis and a four-point reform proposal. The most-cited contemporary book on adolescent psychology.
FAQ
Common questions
- What is the single best pick for a recent graduate?
- Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. The novel runs three decades of friendship and creative partnership starting from a Harvard-and-MIT first meeting and the structural argument the book makes about work, ambition, and the people you choose to do work with is exactly what the first post-college years are about.
- I am moving for my first job and I want one book in the carry-on.
- Normal People. Three hundred pages, propulsive, and structurally about the transition from college into the next thing. It will pull you across the flight and the first lonely weekend in the new apartment.
- I want something to read with a group of college friends I am about to scatter from.
- Tomorrow x3 or The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Both produce real discussion about ambition, identity, and what you owe the people you have chosen to know. Both are also long enough to give a long-distance book club something to chew on for a month.