Watching a film or television series is often a social experience, but reading tends to be more intimate. Grasping a physical book gives readers a tactile work of art and an escape into a fully imagined world shaped by the writer’s words and their own minds.
Over the past two decades, a remarkable range of novels and works of nonfiction has reshaped modern literature. From sweeping historical epics and literary mysteries to inventive science fiction and landmark dystopias, these ten titles have left an enduring mark on storytelling. Some have become major screen franchises, while others have changed the way readers understand history and society. Though countless acclaimed books could have been included, this ranking highlights a diverse mix of critical favorites, award winners, and cultural touchstones. Which of these books has stayed with you the longest?
10
‘The Hunger Games’ by Suzanne Collins (2008)
Few young adult novels have changed pop culture as profoundly as The Hunger Games. Suzanne Collins’s dystopian series begins in Panem, a future nation ruled by the wealthy, authoritarian Capitol, which extracts tribute from twelve impoverished districts. Each year, a boy and a girl are chosen to fight to the death in a televised spectacle. When Katniss Everdeen volunteers in her younger sister’s place, she enters a brutal contest that tests her loyalty, conscience, and will to survive. The Hunger Games blends urgent survival drama with a sharp examination of media manipulation, propaganda, and state power.
Collins uses the games to expose how spectacle can numb audiences to suffering and normalize violence. Katniss becomes an unconventional hero because her courage grows from fear, grief, and moral conflict rather than invincibility. The novel’s fast chapters and close first-person narration create relentless momentum, while its themes reach well beyond its young adult audience. The Hunger Games‘ wide appeal helped it become both a literary phenomenon and the foundation of a major media franchise, making it one of the defining stories of the 21st century.
9
‘All the Light We Cannot See’ by Anthony Doerr (2014)
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Anthony Doerr‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See is one of the most moving historical novels of the past two decades. Set during World War II, it follows Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind French girl, and Werner Pfennig, a German orphan, as their lives move toward an unlikely convergence in Saint-Malo. Connected through radio, science, and secrecy, the characters inhabit a world where innocence is constantly threatened. Doerr’s sensory prose turns sound, light, and distance into the heart of a deeply human wartime story.
The novel contrasts the devastation of war with small acts of courage, compassion, and resistance. Its shifting short chapters build suspense while revealing how environment and ideology shape young people. Through lyrical language and precise imagery, All the Light We Cannot See creates a vivid world through sound, texture, and touch. Nature, radio waves, and scientific discovery become metaphors for connection across division. Rather than reducing its characters to symbols of good and evil, the novel invites readers to recognize shared vulnerability on every side of the conflict.
8
‘Station Eleven’ by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is a post-pandemic novel that finds meaning after catastrophe. A flu known as the Georgia Flu obliterates nearly 99 percent of the world’s population, and the story moves between the years before and decades after the collapse. At the center is the Traveling Symphony, a troupe of performers and musicians dedicated to keeping art alive. When the company reaches a hostile outpost, it must confront both external danger and the fragile systems that hold communities together. The novel traces how strangers become connected through memory, grief, and the need for human contact.
Unlike many dystopian narratives, Station Eleven is less interested in the mechanics of collapse than in what, if anything, makes life worth preserving. Mandel juxtaposes a dying present with a richer portrait of the past, allowing separate lives to resonate across time. The motto “survival is insufficient” captures the novel’s central argument: culture, beauty, and memory give people a reason to endure. Through its expansive cast, the book explores loss, regret, communication, and renewal through one interwoven human story. Its elegant structure and emotional restraint also translated successfully to television.
7
‘The Warmth of Other Suns’ by Isabel Wilkerson (2010)
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The Warmth of Other Suns, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, is a landmark work of historical nonfiction by Isabel Wilkerson. The book chronicles the Great Migration, when nearly six million Black Americans left the Jim Crow South between 1915 and 1970, transforming the culture, politics, and demographics of American cities. Wilkerson anchors this vast history in three interwoven lives: Ida Mae Gladney, who left Mississippi for Chicago in 1937; George Starling, who escaped danger in Florida for Harlem in 1945; and Robert Foster, who drove from Louisiana to California in 1953.
Using extensive research and close biographical detail, Wilkerson reveals that segregation and racial violence were national problems, not regional ones confined to the South. Her portraits combine historical context with deep empathy, honoring the agency and dignity of people who risked everything to build new lives. The Warmth of Other Suns speaks to both specialist readers and general audiences because it makes a defining era of American history personal and immediate. Its influence reached far beyond literary circles; President Barack Obama later credited the book with broadening the national conversation about race.
6
‘Wolf Hall’ by Hilary Mantel (2009)
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Hilary Mantel‘s Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall retells the Tudor court through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, one of Henry VIII’s most formidable ministers. Beginning with Cromwell’s rise and ending with the fall of Sir Thomas More, the novel presents history from the perspective of a clever, socially ambitious outsider. Mantel’s close third-person narration and vivid present-tense prose turn political calculation into a tense psychological drama. Cromwell emerges not as a simple villain or hero, but as a reformer, survivor, and architect of momentous change.
By placing Cromwell at the center of the story, Mantel challenges the inherited judgments that often define him. The novel’s intricate depiction of power makes the 16th century feel immediate, dangerous, and deeply human. Its blend of historical research, sharp dialogue, and political intrigue gives the book the momentum of a thriller without sacrificing complexity. Wolf Hall has been adapted for stage and screen, with performers including Mark Rylance, Damian Lewis, Claire Foy, and Tom Holland bringing Cromwell and his world to new audiences.
5
‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
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The Road by Cormac McCarthy, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is a spare and devastating portrait of survival. After an unnamed disaster destroys industrial civilization, a father and son travel south across a gray, ash-covered America with little more than a shopping cart of scavenged supplies. As they search for warmth and safety, they encounter starvation, violence, and remnants of a society that has collapsed into cruelty. McCarthy combines minimalist prose with stark realism to create an unforgettable story of parental love in the ruins of the world.
The novel’s sparse punctuation and absence of quotation marks mirror the barren landscape and draw readers into the father and son’s isolated existence. What begins as an exercise in endurance becomes a profound meditation on kindness, faith, and moral responsibility when institutions disappear. McCarthy finds beauty in a world stripped of almost everything else, giving even the smallest act of decency extraordinary weight. The story was adapted into the acclaimed 2009 film starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee.
4
‘A Mercy’ by Toni Morrison (2008)
Toni Morrison‘s ninth novel, A Mercy, is set in the late 17th century, before the rigid racial order of the United States had fully taken shape. Jacob Vaark, an Anglo-Dutch trader and farmer, accepts Florens, a young enslaved girl, as partial payment from an indebted Maryland planter. Florens’s mother sends her away because she believes Vaark can spare her from an even worse fate. The novel begins with that desperate act of maternal protection and follows Florens as she encounters a household marked by dependency, displacement, and unequal power. Its members include Vaark’s independent wife, Rebekka; Lina, a Native American woman; Sorrow, an orphan; and a free African blacksmith whom Florens loves.
Through shifting perspectives, Morrison explores a world shaped by slavery, indentured servitude, colonization, and abandonment. Each character is, in some way, separated from safety or belonging, yet all are searching for love, agency, and recognition. A Mercy traces the institutional roots of American racism by showing how ideas about ownership, gender, class, and justice were formed. Its fractured structure and emotional intensity make Morrison’s final novel a powerful account of how personal trauma and national history become inseparable.
3
‘The Three Body Problem’ by Cixin Liu (2008)
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin is one of the most influential works of contemporary hard science fiction. The Chinese novel follows humanity’s first contact with an alien civilization and the existential crisis that follows. What begins as a series of mysterious scientific deaths unfolds into a vast investigation involving collapsing physics, a virtual-reality game, and a distant world threatened by an unstable cosmic environment. The story moves with the tension of a detective mystery while expanding into an unprecedented vision of science, history, and the universe.
Translated by Ken Liu, the novel brought a distinctly non-Western perspective to a genre often dominated by American and British authors. Its scope connects political trauma, scientific inquiry, and the fate of an alien society into a gripping account of first contact. Liu Cixin’s ambitious historical framing helped establish a major science fiction series and opened new ground for Chinese speculative fiction. The book became the first Asian novel to win the Hugo Award and later inspired a film, comic adaptations, and the Netflix series 3 Body Problem.
2
‘The Martian’ by Andy Weir (2011)
Andy Weir is one of the defining science fiction writers of the 21st century, and The Martian remains his most accessible and exhilarating novel. The hard science fiction survival story follows Mark Watney, an astronaut left behind on Mars after a fierce dust storm leads his crew to believe he has died. Cut off from Earth, Watney must use his training as a botanist to produce water, cultivate potatoes, repair damaged equipment, and solve one life-threatening problem after another. His resourcefulness turns the hostile planet into an enormous scientific puzzle.
Combining rigorous physics, chemistry, and botany with dry humor, Weir makes complex problem-solving vivid and entertaining. Watney’s wit and refusal to surrender give the novel its emotional force, while its episodic crises build into a larger test of ingenuity and hope. At its core, The Martian celebrates the practical intelligence and stubborn optimism that can keep a person alive. The novel became a blockbuster film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon.
1
‘The Underground Railroad’ by Colson Whitehead (2016)
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Colson Whitehead‘s The Underground Railroad reinvents historical fiction by transforming one of America’s defining symbols of resistance into literal reality. The novel follows Cora, a young enslaved woman who escapes a brutal Georgia cotton plantation. In Whitehead’s alternate history, the Underground Railroad is not only a network of safe houses but an actual system of tracks, trains, engineers, and hidden stations. Pursued by the slave catcher Ridgeway, Cora travels from state to state and encounters a different version of American racism at every stop. Each setting exposes another form of violence, control, and false promise.
Whitehead uses the novel’s speculative premise to examine the history of slavery, racial terror, and state power with unflinching clarity. Cora is a resilient and fully realized protagonist, driven by memory, grief, and an uncompromising desire for freedom. Rather than relying on familiar historical-fiction conventions, the novel turns metaphor into narrative reality, allowing its episodic journey to reveal how deeply oppression shaped American life. Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Underground Railroad stands as a landmark of contemporary literature.
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