Many of the great novels that we call modern classic books today were written in the 20th century. And beyond that, into our 21st century, there have been many novels published that are already being considered modern classic books, and rightly so.

If you’re interested in the greatest classic books of old, from literature’s earliest beginnings in Greece and Japan to the classic novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries, you can find them right here. What you’ll find below are many of the best modern classic books, written between 1950 and today. And, since today is always moving forwards, expect this list to grow often. So, be sure to check back regularly!

While you’ll find many familiar and beloved classics from Europe and the US, you’ll also find many incredible works of 20th and 21st century Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fiction, as well as Latin American masterpieces. Here are the best modern classic books for you to read right now, from the second half of the 20th century to right now.

Note: This list has been divided into the best modern classic books of the 20th century’s second half, and the best modern classic books of the 21st century.

The Best Modern Classic Books (20th Century)

Published between 1950 and 1999, these modern classic books defined genres, created modernist writing styles, and popularised the concept of literary fiction. These are modern classic books that defined their time, reflected their politics, and have been inspiring readers and writers for decades.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Much like with 1984 (above), here’s little left to say about The Handmaid’s Tale that hasn’t already been said. Published in 1985, The Handmaid’s Tale is a bleak look into the USA’s future; a time in which women have been reduced to nothing but their anatomy and reproductive abilities.

After fertility rates dropped to the point that they threatened human extinction, the US government decided to take the few men who were still fertile and give them power.

They then took fertile women and turned them into sex slaves living in the big houses now owned by the newly powerful fertile men and their faithful but infertile wives.

Now known as Gilead, the US is a military dictatorship controlled by traditional Biblical ideals which strip women of all rights and privileges.

It’s a bleak novel, but, like 1984, remains one of the most important and influential works of the 20th century, a landmark work of feminist fiction, and one of the very best modern classic books you’ll ever read.

Buy a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale here!

Red Sorghum by Mo Yan

Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt

Mo Yan is a fascinating writer with an incredible career. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature back in 2012, his pen name translates to ‘Don’t Speak’, which was inspired by a repeated warning from his parents about the dangers of speaking out.

Red Sorghum is not only Mo Yan’s most famous novel but also one of the most successful and beloved Chinese novels of the past hundred years.

Similar to Jung Chang’s historical biography Wild Swans, this Chinese novel spans three generations and begins during the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s, the most famous incident of which was the Rape of Nanjing.

China saw so many political crimes and social tragedies throughout the 20th century, both from without and within, and Mo Yan found the strength to capture that in his works.

Mo Yan is one of the great Chinese writers of the 20th century, and Red Sorghum is one of the very best modern classic books to have come out of China.

Buy a copy of Red Sorghum here!

Kindred by Octavia Butler

A generation-defining science fiction novel and one of the best pieces of American fiction to come out of the 20th century, Butler’s Kindred is a true masterpiece.

Written by Black American author Octavia E. Butler, Kindred is considered by many to be her magnum opus, a piece of incredible literary science fiction.

Originally published in 1979 and set in 1976, Kindred follows a Black writer named Dana and her white husband Kevin as they find themselves inexplicably tethered through time to a plantation in the year 1815.

When the novel begins, Dana and Kevin are unpacking after moving to a new house in California, when she finds herself teleported back 150 years to a plantation in Maryland and the sight of a drowning red-headed boy.

Dana saves the boy from drowning and immediately finds herself facing down the barrel of a white man’s gun, before being yanked back through time to her present in 1976.

As it transpires, the drowning boy is Rufus, an ancestor of Dana’s who will father a child with one of his family’s slaves, and Dana is now caught in a loop: any time Rufus’ life is threatened, she is pulled back to save him.

Similarly, if she is put in harm’s way while in the past, she is sent back to 1976. On her third journey back to 1815, her husband is dragged back with her.

Being a Black woman married to a white man, Dana is assumed a slave, and Kevin her owner. Kindred is a sci-fi novel about cruelty and compassion, about the importance of education and empathy.

A true literary masterpiece of the 20th century by one of the US’s most important literary voices, Kindred is one of the most important and best modern classic books.

Buy a copy of Kindred here!

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of all time. Her novels set a standard for American fiction that is hard to match.

Beloved, one of her most celebrated books, was written in 1987 and set in 1873, after the end of the American Civil War.

Our protagonists are former slave Sethe and her teenage daughter Denver. Their home is haunted by a ghost which they believe to be that of Sethe’s own eldest daughter.

When a former slave from the same plantation on which Sethe once worked, a man named Paul D, turns up at their home, he drives the ghost away.

Paul D then invites the mother and daughter to a carnival, and when they return home, a young woman named Beloved is waiting for them on their front porch.

Beloved is a story of slavery, of its traumas and the ways in which it defines a person, their family, and their community. It is a classic of American fiction, a true masterpiece, and one of the very best modern classic books of the 20th century.

Buy a copy of Beloved here!

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy of fantasy novels is the most important and influential work in the fantasy genre. With these books, Tolkien took what he began with his children’s novel The Hobbit and turned it into an entire world — a world with its own deep history, lore, and languages.

In fact, in many ways these books are a showcase in building an entire, fully realised fictional landscape. The scope of Tolkien’s Middle Earth is unmatched in fiction even to this day.

This is also the series that took aspects of European folklore and mythologies and turned them into staples of the genre.

Races like elves and dwarves; settings like mines and mountains; multiple language systems; wizards; royal lineages; armies of light and darkness. All of this began with Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings.

If you love what the fantasy genre has given you — if you love its themes and settings and tropes — these books are where it all began.

The Lord of the Rings is the greatest achievement of the fantasy genre, and of world-building and epic storytelling.

Buy a copy of The Lord of the Rings here!

Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin

Translated from the Chinese by Bonnie Huie

Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile is a few things: it is one of the quintessential Taiwanese novels of the twentieth century; it is also one of the most prominent and powerful lesbian novels of the past few decades.

Separated into a series of notebooks, Notes of a Crocodile tracks the university years of a queer Taiwanese student who goes by the name Lazi.

Lazi is tormented by her love for a woman in the year above; their relationship is tumultuous and aggressive. She also spends time in queer circles populated by other emotionally unhealthy young people.

This is a visceral tale of personal hatred and acceptance, of love and lust and danger. Reminiscent of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human, this Taiwanese novel rips you apart unapologetically.

Buy a copy of Notes of a Crocodile here!

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin was a 20th century author who did so much for the science fiction and fantasy genres.

She was an incredible writer of great moral integrity. She loved art, and felt strongly about giving voices to the voiceless.

There aren’t many authors as revered for their works in both the science fiction and fantasy genres, but Le Guin was truly special in this regard (and many others).

Ursula Le Guin’s sci-fi masterpiece The Left Hand of Darkness is a vital piece of feminist science fiction literature.

The Left Hand of Darkness  follows protagonist Genly Ai, an envoy from Earth who travels to a strange world called Gethen. Ai hopes that Gethen will join the confederation of planets, which her home planet of Earth is a part of.

Our protagonist, however, quickly becomes shaken and surprised by the fact that Gethen’s population are “ambisexual”, which means they have no fixed gender.

This concept exemplifies the novel’s core theme of exploring ideas surrounding sex and gender, and how we allow them to affect modern society’s social and political laws.

Ai has arrived on a planet entirely unburdened by the societal segregation of gendered groups, a world of Le Guin’s own imagination.

The Left Hand of Darkness has touched many readers on a deep emotional level, as it asks questions about the impact of gendered society and how gender divides work to isolate us as groups and as individuals.

It’s also, quite simply, an exceptional piece of science fiction; a blend of Star Treke-sque space opera and speculative, philosophical sci-fi. Amongst science fiction novels, this is one of the true masterpieces of its century, and one of the best modern classic books of its time.

Buy a copy of The Left Hand of Darkness here!

Endless Night by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie was, and always will be, queen of the murder mystery novel. Her books are true classics of the genre, heralded as the best crime novels ever written.

One of Christie’s later works, Endless Night, is also one of her few standalone novels — that means no Poirot or Miss Marple to be seen.

Written in 1967, Endless Night is a gothic-inspired mystery thriller, and one of the best novels Christie ever wrote.

The book takes place in a small English village, in which a young chauffeur named Mike meets a wealthy American heiress named Ellie, and the two quickly fall in love.

They buy a house in this village, one which the locals insist is cursed, and employ a famous architect to restore and renovate it to their liking.

The house’s curse begins to show itself, as do strange and suspect supporting characters, including Ellie’s long-time companion Greta.

Endless Night is a claustrophobic gothic mystery novel, one of the Queen of Crime’s finest works, and one of the best modern classic books of the second half of the 20th century.

Buy a copy of Endless Night here!

Dune by Frank Herbert

There are sci-fi novels, and then there’s Dune. An enormous space opera full of intricate and political world-building, Dune is a thematically dense creature that explores enormous social and political concepts.

These concepts stretch from those of power and autonomy all the way to tackling the toxic tropes and habits of narratives and storytelling.

Dune is daunting in its size and scope, both in terms of the galactic world it presents us with, and also the themes it aims to explore and tackle.

Set in a far-distant future, the world of Dune harkens back to mediaeval Europe, in which noble houses control certain areas of space. Our protagonist, Paul Atreides, is the son of one such noble house, and that house has just been given stewardship of the planet Arrakis.

Arrakis is a desert planet rich in something called “spice”, a drug that is vital for so many aspects of life in this world. But Arrakis is also a dangerous and almost inhospitable place.

The novel takes us on a journey across the planet, as we learn about complex political games, subterfuge, manipulation, and Shakespearean backstabbing.

Few science fiction novels are as detailed, well-plotted, well-considered, and well-formed as Frank Herbert’s Dune. The pinnacle of 20th century epic sci-fi and one of the best modern classic books of the past several decades.

Buy a copy of Dune here!

We Have Always Live in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Like the UK’s Daphne du Maurier, the US’s Shirley Jackson was a pioneer of 20th century gothic literature.

Famously reclusive, Jackson wrote several beloved short stories and novels, the finest of which is her gothic masterpiece We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

An inversion of the tropes of the gothic in many clever ways, We Have Always Lived in the Castle follows the youngest sister of an isolated family at the edge of town.

Merricat lives with her sister and uncle; shunned by the townsfolk and hidden away in their big house, Merricat has set up superstitious tokens as wards around their property.

Her sister Constance never leaves the property, and their uncle Julian is confined to a wheelchair as he obsessively writes his memoirs.

The rest of the family died by arsenic poisoning, and now Merricat is the only one who ever leaves the house to go shopping, but she is not welcomed by the locals.

This is a masterpiece of tension and unease; a mesmerising gothic novel that drips with paranoia and upset. Few gothic novels hit as hard, yet as subtly, as We Have Always Lived in the Castle; one of the very best modern classic books.

Buy a copy of We Have Always Lived in the Castle here!

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was an unmistakable genius of postmodern 20th century literature.

Before becoming a writer, Vonnegut served in World War II, was captured during the Battle of the Bulge, and survived the bombing of Dresden by hiding in the meat locker of a slaughterhouse. It was these experiences that inspired Vonnegut’s 1969 magnum opus, Slaughterhouse-Five.

The novel tells the story of American man Billy Pilgrim, who saw the same traumas of war that Vonnegut saw, but was also abducted by aliens and put in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore. Slaughterhouse-Five is an anti-war science fiction novel.

It is deeply moral and philosophical, detailing the effects of war on the human psyche. It asks big questions related to purpose, life, and death.

There is nothing quite like Slaughterhouse-Five, one of the great anti-war novels and a true masterpiece of 20th century fiction.

Buy a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five here!

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

When asked to name an American classic, most readers would quickly turn to Harper Lee’s masterpiece To Kill A Mockingbird. And they’d be right to do so.

To Kill A Mockingbird, which has been adapted to the screen and the stage with enormous success, remains a true masterpiece of American fiction.

The story is told by a young girl, Jean Louise Finch, lovingly nicknamed Scout by her father, the iconic literary character Atticus Finch. Atticus is a widower, and raises Scout and her brother Jem alone, while working as a lawyer.

While we follow the local neighbourhood antics of Scout and Jem, the main crux of the novel is Atticus being appointed as legal defender in a case of sexual assault.

A Black man named Tom has been accused of raping a young white woman, and Atticus, whose Black live-in cook has helped him raise his children, has accepted the role of Tom’s defense attourney.

We see all of this play out from Scout’s young and naive perspective, and the novel explores American race relations in the South in many different ways: social, legal, and historical.

Few, if any, American novels have had the legacy of Harper Lee’s classic, making To Kill A Mockingbird one of the best modern classic books in history.

Buy a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird here!

Read More: Inspiring Quotes About Reading

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Like 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian tale that serves as a warning against the refusal and destruction of knowledge and stories.

In a version of the USA where all books have been banned, we follow a fireman — someone who burns all remaining traces of literature — as he becomes disenchanted with his work.

After giving into temptation and taking a book from a home full of books which he has been ordered to burn, protagonist Guy Montag eventually switches allegiances and vows to preserve the written word and the knowledge it contains.

Inspired by the ways in which fascist regimes burn books, remove academics from positions of authority, and limit the spread of knowledge and information, Fahrenheit 451 is a powerful warning.

One of the most important American novels of the 20th century, Ray Btadbury’s dystopian masterpiece stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the other best modern classic books of its age.

Buy a copy of Fahrenheit 451 here!

The Bell by Iris Murdoch

Irish-British novelist Iris Murdoch wrote many compelling and beautiful books, the most celebrated of which is arguably The Sea, the Sea, which won her the Booker Prize.

However, the one which holds a special place in my heart is The Bell, a captivating novel about a small religious community in rural England.

Our protagonist is Dora, an unhappily married woman who has travelled with her husband to Imber Court, which sits beside a lake.

On the other side of the lake is Imber Abbey, a convent which is home to Benedictine nuns. There is a legend attached to the abbey which explains why the abbey’s bell tower has no bell.

The story goes that a 12th century nun broke her vows and fell in love, which cause the bell to escape its tower and sink to the bottom of the lake.

This is a beautiful novel about secrecy, purity, and belief that stands the test of time and remains one of Iris Murdoch’s finest works.

Buy a copy of The Bell here!

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Like many of the best modern classic books of the 20th century, A Clockwork Orange is often overshadowed by its (admittedly astonishing) film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick, starring Malcolm McDowell.

But Burgess’ original novel has a unique flavour all its own. A surreal black comedy set in a strange dystopian world that could be anywhere in Europe.

Legend goes that Burgess wrote this novel in just three weeks; whether that’s true or not, what we have is a remarkable work of satirical fiction.

A Clockwork Orange is set in a future dystopia where violent criminal gangs of youths have the run of the city, and they speak in a kind of slang dialect that Burgess himself created for the novel.

Our psychopathic protagonist and gang leader, Alex, narrates the story and gleefully tells us of his love for classical music, as well as for unjust and unjustifiable acts of violence.

A Clockwork Orange is a bleak novel; often called sadistic, but undeniably original, inventive, and beloved. A real modern classic of 20th century fiction.

Side note: I have a vivid memory of picking this book up in a school staff room while training as a teacher, and reading it during my free classes. A haunting by escapist experience.

Buy a copy of A Clockwork Orange here!

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear

Published in 1967, The Master and the Margarita is a Russian novel that was written gradually over years during Stalin’s regime as leader of the Soviet Union, and Bulgakov didn’t live to see it published. The Soviet Union was officially secular, and this novel set out to challenge the Union’s attitude towards religion with a visit from the Christian devil, embodied by a professor called Woland.

The Master and the Margarita is a darkly satirical novel that deeply criticises the Soviet Union from within, exposing the hypocrisy and greed of its leaders.

And this is only the first half, with the novel’s second part taking place in the Jerusalem of Pontius Pilate and his trial of Jesus Christ. Dark, daring, satirical, and savvy, The Master and the Margarita stands entirely alone as a stunning and radical work of fiction, and one of the best modern classic books of its time.

Buy a copy of The Master and the Margarita here!

Poor Things by Alasdair Gray

Written by 20th century Scotland’s greatest author, Alasdair Gray, Poor Things is at once an homage to the gothic legacy of Victorian fiction and a pseudo-feminist satire of the genre. On its surface, Poor Things is a creature stitched together by Lolita, Flowers for Algernon, and, appropriately, Frankenstein. But there is much beneath the surface of this great Scottish novel.

Poor Things is framed as a true account written by a 19th-century doctor named Archie McCandless — a book lost to time, rediscovered, and then edited back together by Gray himself. It also features a letter by McCandless’ wife which refutes everything narrated to the reader in the story proper.

That story is about McCandless befriending a monstrous-looking surgeon at medical school, and being privy to the fact that this surgeon, Baxter, had recovered the dead body of a pregnant woman, replaced the woman’s brain with that of her unborn child, and revived her. When McCandless falls in love with Bella, a darkly comedic journey across Europe ensues. This is a wildly strange and funny gothic parody.

Buy a copy of Poor Things here!

The Shining by Stephen King

Stephen King will forever be known as the master of American horror, having penned some of the most revered and best-selling novels of the 20th and 21st centuries. Choosing a novel to represent his enormous library of works is impossible, but The Shining is certainly one of his finest, and most widely-read. And let’s not forget Kubrick’s iconic 1980 film adaptation.

The Shining begins with our protagonist, an unemployed recovering alcoholic, finding employment as a caretaker at the remote and imposing Overlook Hotel over the deserted winter period. The now iconic protagonist Jack Torrance drags his wife and son along for company, but they aren’t the only guests at the hotel. There are guests here who don’t want the family to ever leave.

A legendary horror story about isolation and psychosis, The Shining perfectly balances is creeping dread with an upsetting combination of psychology and pure, supernatural terror. Of all the fantastic horror novels of the 20th century, this one stands out as one of the smartest, most original, and most beloved by fans of the genre, and of King’s work. A true modern classic novel.

Buy a copy of The Shining here!

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Written when she was only 29 years old, Donna Tartt’s debut novel The Secret History is, for many of us, the definitive dark academia novel. The Secret History is a twisted yet grounded tale that, on the surface, is about cults and murder but, beneath it all, is an exploration of class privilege, youthful arrogance, and ordinary evils.

The Secret History follows Richard Papen, newly enrolled at a college in Vermont. Richard is originally from a small California town, poor and uninteresting, but talented at Greek.

He quickly falls into a small class of hideously pompous and dysfunctional students who consider themselves to be their school’s elite. Slowly, this class reveals itself to be a mindless, murderous cult, projected forward by hedonism, carelessness, and arrogance.

The Secret History is a masterpiece, glued together by the internal social politics of its characters, their strained and toxic relationships, dangerous behaviours, and unpredictability.

Buy a copy of The Secret History here!

Chronicle of a Blood Merchant by Yu Hua

Translated from the Chinese by Andrew Jones

Yu Hua is one of the most prominent and daring Chinese authors of the past several decades. Crafting stories through a satirical, critical lens as he does, writing for Yu Hua is a dangerous and defiant act.

In his book China in Ten Words, Yu discusses how lax slander and libel laws in China mean his words can be co-opted and manipulated with terrifying ease.

Yu’s novel Chronicle of a Blood Merchant tells a heart-wrenching tale of a man simply trying to survive during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a period of Chinese history where a famine led to the deaths of countless millions.

Our protagonist relies on selling his own blood to the local blood chief in order to find the money to support his family.

This becomes increasingly dangerous and is further complicated by the shame that comes from learning that one of his children is not actually his own blood.

This is a moving and desperate Chinese novel that captures a life and a moment in time where simply living a life was at its most difficult.

Buy a copy of Chronicle of a Blood Merchant here!

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis, a dear friend of beloved fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien (above), was a born-again Christian who penned some of the most cherished children’s books of all time. This series, The Chronicles of Narnia, began with its most famous book The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.

(Although, if readers were to pick up a new collection of the series now, they’d find the sixth book, The Magician’s Nephew, placed first in the series. This is because, chronologically, it is the first in the story, serving as a prequel to the other six books).

The story follows four children who are evacuated during World War II and relocated to a large country house.

There, via a portal in a wardrobe, the children visit the magical land of Narnia, and embark on a series of fantastical journeys.

Widely known to be a biblical allegory, with the titular lion Aslan being a stand-in for Jesus, The Chronicles of Narnia has been a classic series of children’s books for decades.

Buy a copy of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe here!

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

The novel for which Daniel Keyes is best remembered is a true masterpiece of science fiction, using the genre to explore themes of value, intelligence, and human rights.

Our protagonist, Charlie, is an “intellectually disabled” man in his thirties who works in a bakery. Charlie is soon made a test subject for intellectual development.

The first test subject was the titular Algernon, a mouse who underwent experimental surgery with impressive results, and Charlie will be the first human test subject.

As the novel, written as a diary from Charlie’s perspective, progresses, we see his intelligence grow, and with it his observations, his relationships, and even his grammar.

Charlie’s development from a man of lower-than-average intelligence to one of genius status leads us to question the ways in which we treat one another based on our intelligence.

This is a sci-fi novel with valuable themes to consider, and the ways in which Keyes explores those themes also tug viciously at the reader’s heartstrings.

A remarkable masterpiece of the genre, Flowers for Algernon is one of the best sci-fi novels ever written, and as such one of the best modern classic books of its time.

Buy a copy of Flowers for Algernon here!

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Currently the only work featuring a lesbian relationship written by a woman to win a Pulitzer, this epistolary novel is a true classic that spans twenty years of protagonist Celie’s life. 

It’s a beautifully written and important novel that can be difficult to read at times due to its bleak subject matter.

While explicitly a lesbian novel The Color Purple also tackles race, class, gender, sexual assault, domestic abuse, and religion.

Told through a series of letters to ‘God’ (and later her sister Nettie in Africa), Celie is fourteen at the beginning of the novel and is being abused by her father. She is desperately trying to protect her sister from the same fate. 

Later we are privy to the events of Celie’s abusive forced marriage to ‘Mister’ and also her developing relationship with Shug, Mister’s mistress, who shows her love and intimacy for the first time.

The Color Purple is an American masterpiece, an incredible piece of queer Black fiction, and one of the very best modern classic books.

Buy a copy of The Color Purple here!

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

It’s good to be critical of Lord of the Flies — a novel so often lauded for its depiction of a world without societal structures.

This is because we often forget that Golding’s novel is fiction, and when a real-life Lord of the Flies event actually occurred, it didn’t resemble the book at all.

That event was discussed in the phenomenal history book Humankind by Rutger Bregman, and it highlights dark and depressing cynicism of Golding’s novel.

All of that aside, however, Lord of the Flies does remain a fantastic work of fiction in its own right. As a former teacher, I always thoroughly enjoyed teaching the novel. Teenagers are often so rapt by it.

Lord of the Flies is set during World War II, when a group of English schoolboys are stranded on a deserted island after their plane goes down.

The boys quickly descend into tribalist behaviour, begin to believe in and worship a beast that lives on a hill, and eventually turn to violence against one another.

It’s an excellent novel, and certainly one of the best modern classic books of its era; but it’s also important to remember that Golding was overly cynical when it comes to human behaviour, and it is just a novel.

Buy a copy of Lord of the Flies here!

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The only novel by celebrated American poet Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar is a modern classic of feminist fiction.

The Bell Jar is a semi-autobiographical novel inspired by Plath’s own life and her descent into the throes of mental illness.

The novel follows the life of college graduate Esther who lands an internship at a women’s magazine in New York City. Disenchanted and hollowed out, Esther feels little joy and only increasing disorientation and suffocation.

The Bell Jar a novel that explores the role of a woman in 20th century society, and the titular bell jar is a symbol of suffocation, both from a feminist angle and one of mental illness.

Buy a copy of The Bell Jar here!

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Published in 1961, Catch-22 is a satirical anti-war novel set between the years of 1942 and 1944. Our protagonist is John Yossarian, an American captain of the 256th US Army Air Squadron.

Moving freely and out of chronological order, Catch-22 mostly follows the events of Yossarian’s life during World War 2, primarily set on the Mediterranean island of Pianosa.

Inarguably one of the great American novels of the 20th century, Catch-22 has had an impact that is hard to measure.

Satirising the absurdity of warfare and the lives of military soldiers on the battlefield, Catch-22 is the quintessential American war novel and one of the best modern classic books of its time.

Buy a copy of Catch-22 here!

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Revered American author wrote many bestselling books, and his own life has almost become mythology at this point.

But the most famous and frequently discussed Hemingway story will always be The Old Man and the Sea, a short and quiet novella published in 1952.

This classic American novella tells the story of an old and unlucky fisherman named Santiago, and opens with his former trainee helping him get ready for yet another fishing trip out at sea.

Much of the story depicts the old man’s persistent physical struggle with reeling in a large fish he has hooked; a struggle that lasts through the night.

The Old Man and the Sea was heralded and celebrated by critics of the time as Hemingway’s masterpiece; his finest work.

Since then, the story has continued to have a lasting legacy, and now stands as one of the best modern classic books of the American canon.

Buy a copy of The Old Man and the Sea here!

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita has always been a fascinating novel; a work of aesthetic and literary beauty, written in some of the most stunning and vivid prose you’re ever likely to read.

However, the novel has repeatedly been marred by venomous criticism for its depictions of a dark, taboo, and arguably evil subject matter.

That clash of beauty and disgust is remarkable in its own right, and the discussions that Lolita encourages amongst its readers and critics are also lively and worthwhile.

The novel presents us with a famous example of the unreliable narrator: a professor who becomes obsessed with an underage girl whom he kidnaps and sexually abuses, calling her Lolita.

Few novels have ever been written in such illustrious and breathtaking prose, and have dared to explore such subject matter so brazenly and with such complexity.

Lolita is like no other novel that exists, and remains one of the most daringly unique and best modern classic books of all time.

Buy a copy of Lolita here!

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

A curious classic of modern American literature, A Confederacy of Dunces is a fantastic dark comedy that is a favourite of many readers.

Our protagonist is a loser who would describe himself as anything but. He considers himself a scholar and the smartest person in the room.

Ignatius J. Reilly is thirty and lives with his mother. Over the course of the novel, we see him get into various dreadful social and professional situations that are exacerbated by his inflated ego.

There is a perpetual air of sadness surrounding this novel, however. Its author never lived to see its publication.

After several failed attempts to see his work published, Toole ended his own life, only to be posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize a decade after his death.

Decades after the novel’s publication, A Confederacy of Dunces stands tall amongst many of the best modern classic books to come out of the United States in the 20th century.

Buy a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces here!

The Best Modern Classic Books (21st Century)

The 21st century has already seen some of the best novels of all time, which is a truly incredible statement to make. We are living in a golden age of fiction writing, and it’s glorious.

Of course, we have to be careful when labelling a book a “modern classic”, because we may well be wrong. The book might not stand the test of time. Because of this, the modern classic books you’ll find here have all been critically acclaimed, won awards, been adapted to film, and are already beloved by countless readers. Enjoy!

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Never Let Me Go is Ishiguro’s masterpiece. His magnum opus. And Ishiguro himself also happens to by my favourite author.

Never Let Me Go is a science fiction novel set in the modern day. It’s a novel with a central mystery that, if you’ve never had it revealed to you, should absolutely not be spoiled.

Our narrator is Kathy, a woman who works as a carer. Who or what she cares for isn’t clear. Kathy spends much of the novel reminiscing about her childhood at a secretive English boarding school called Halisham.

We become familiar with her old friends and quietly unnerved by the elephant in the room, even though we don’t know the name of the elephant or why it’s there. As the story unfolds and secrets are revealed, tragedy sets in.

Never Let Me Go is a truly astonishing work of literary magic. One of the great works of literary fiction and science fiction. One of the best modern classics of our time.

Buy a copy of Never Let Me Go here!

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Wolf Hall manages to be many things. For many readers, it is the defining book of the historical fiction genre. For others, it’s not only one of the best modern classic books, but one of the best books ever published.

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and its direct sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, both won the Booker Prize, while the final book of the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize.

The Guardian newspaper called Wolf Hall the best novel of the 21st Century (so far), and we certainly agree that it deserves to be high on that list.

Wolf Hall is, undeniably, a masterpiece of historical fiction, and general fiction. It’s dense and its language can be challenging, but it is beautiful, clever, and enthralling.

Telling the fictionalised biography of the legendary English politician Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall throws readers into the fraught and frightening world of Henry VIII’s court.

We watch Cromwell rise from being the abused son of a blacksmith to the man at Henry VIII’s ear; the man with the real power in England.

Mantel paints Cromwell as a more sympathetic character than history has done, and uses that altered perspective to tell one of the most engaging historical novels ever penned.

Few novels have made as much of an impact on their respective genres as Wolf Hall has; unquestionably one of the best modern classic books.

Buy a copy of Wolf Hall here!

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

Elena Ferrante is one of the most beloved Italian authors of all time; a literary author whose works explore feminism, class, and family dynamics in fresh and deeply clever ways.

The Lying Life of Adults follows Giovanna, a girl from a wealthy family that all live in a house which sits high up, overlooking the poorer, working class people below.

Her father came from rags to riches, and now works as a professor. His wife, Giovanna’s mother, is also a well-educated woman and they are all kind and compassionate on the surface.

When her father, in an unthinkingly cruel act of sexism, compares his daughter’s looks to those of his awful, ugly sister, Giovanna is distraught.

To understand why her aunt is so hated, Giovanna visits her and gets to know her. From here, she is torn between the truths that her parents tell, and those her aunt tells.

This is a novel about patriarchy and sexism, and about modern-day class divides and privilege. An incredible piece of fiction that stands tall as one of the best modern classic books.

Buy a copy of The Lying Life of Adults here!

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel has proven herself a modern master of blending genre fiction with lofty literary concepts, and for this she has written many of the best modern classic books we have.

With The Glass Hotel, she created a compelling literary thriller. With Sea of Tranquility, she continued the tradition of blending the literary with incredible sci-fi storytelling.

But before those books, she gave us Station Eleven, a celebrated piece of literary fiction that turns the post-apocalypse on its head.

Rather than this being another novel about human survival, and returning us to our base, animal selves, Station Eleven is a novel about holding onto human art and culture.

This is a pandemic novel about a group of travelling troubadours; a theatre troupe who roam North America bringing Shakespeare to those of us who are left.

Station Eleven celebrates the things worth holding onto: the art that humans created, and the culture which inspired, and was in turn inspired by that art.

A beautiful and hopeful piece of fiction that encourages the reader to consider the importance of the art we create, and how it changes us, and one of the best modern classic books on the shelves.

Buy a copy of Station Eleven here!

Normal People by Sally Rooney

Irish author Sally Rooney’s second novel, Normal People, became an overnight literary sensation upon its publication, and it remains beloved by countless readers. This novel turned her into a star of the publishing world.

Called a modern day Jane Austen by many readers, Rooney is a writer exploring the ebb and flow of modern-day relationships within the context of capitalism and outmoded class systems.

Normal People follows two teenagers, Connell and Marianne, who develop a fraught kind of romance over the course of the novel.

While at school, Connell is popular and admired, and Marianne is meek and unassuming, outside of school Connell is a working class lad and Marianne comes from privilege. Both are well-read and intelligent, and end up attending university together, where they shift and change and struggle in different ways.

Normal People is a literary romance novel about class divides, social struggles, and the rapid ways in which we grow, learn, and change as individuals and within our relationships.

Easily one of the most beloved and cherished novels of the 21st century so far, Normal People is unquestionably one of the best modern classic books we have.

Buy a copy of Normal People here!

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami

Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett & David Boyd

Breasts and Eggs is one of the best Japanese books of the 21st century, and an absolute masterpiece of feminist literary fiction.

Breasts and Eggs follows the story of Nastsuko, an Osaka-born writer living in Tokyo who has spent her adult life trying to see her works get published.

The first half of this two-book novel focuses on a short visit by Natsuko’s more extroverted sister and that sister’s daughter. The daughter has fallen mute and her mother is in Tokyo for breast implants. We see the world from the perspectives of all three women, and they each have differing attitudes to womanhood and its place in society.

In the book’s second story, Natsuko has made it as an author but now dreams of being a mother, though she has no real wish for a partner to share her life with.

Both stories explore how womanhood is defined and how women can find happiness, contentment, and strength in a patriarchal modern world.

This is very much a piece of hefty literary fiction about what womanhood is, what it can be, and what we are told it should be by patriarchy and tradition.

Breasts and Eggs is a groundbreaking piece of feminist Japanese fiction, and one of the very best modern classic books. A must-read for readers the world over.

Buy a copy of Breasts and Eggs here!

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo

Translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 can be understood as the novelisation of the lived experiences of every ordinary Korean woman for the past forty-plus years.

Our protagonist is not one woman, but is rather a representation of the ordinary and expected experiences of your average woman in modern-day South Korea. The novel traces the life of a woman from early childhood to marriage and, eventually, motherhood.

Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 is a book that brings to light the everyday misogyny, sexism, ignorance, aggression, bias, and abuse (both active and passive) that women in South Korea (and, of course, the world over) suffer and do their best to survive in this modern world.

It is not a story with a view to entertaining us. It is a book that enlightens, and encourages anger in, its readers. A fantastic piece of feminist literary fiction.

Kim Jiyoung is not a character to form a bond with. She is every abuse victim. She is every woman who has encountered sexism at home, at school, in the workplace, and on the street, and who perhaps never even realised it.

There is feminist rage stitched into every line of this incredible Korean book; a must-read that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the best modern classic books of the past several decades.

Buy a copy of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 here!

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Upon its release, The Vanishing Half saw an incredible amount of critical praise, all of which was wholly deserved, and immediately cemented it as a true modern classic of American literature.

A novel of immense hype matched only by its scope of content and theme. The Vanishing Half tells two parallel stories of twin sisters who grow up to be very different women. Born into a Black community in the deep south, twin sisters Stella and Desiree leave town at the age of sixteen.

After spending a little time in New Orleans, one moves to DC and “becomes” Black, while the other ends up in the white suburbs of California and “becomes” white.

In a deeply literary way, The Vanishing Half examines what it means to perform Blackness and whiteness in a societal and cultural sense, beyond just skin colour.

The Vanishing Half chronicles the choices and life events of these sisters, as well as those of their children as we move through the second half of the 20th Century.

It considers the relationships between place, race, and class, as well as how our relationships are defined by these seemingly immovable things. Spanning decades, this is a multi-generational novel that makes clear the visible yet ignored racial, political, and class divides of modern America.

A masterpiece of Black American fiction and one of the best modern classic books you’ll ever read.

Buy a copy of The Vanishing Half here!

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri

Translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles

Yu Miri was born in Japan to Korean parents, and as such is a South Korean citizen and occasional recipient of racist bias and abuse in Japan. Despite this, she has had a phenomenally successful career in Japan as both a playwright and a writer of prose.

Although born in Yokohama, Japan’s second largest city, she now lives in a small town in Fukushima, close to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant which suffered a meltdown following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami which claimed thousands of lives.

Her novel Tokyo Ueno Station is a boldly raw and angry literary novel about class disparity and social injustice. Kazu, Tokyo Ueno Station‘s protagonist, was born in the same year as Japan’s emperor, and both men’s sons were born on the same day.

While the emperor was born into the height of privilege, Kazu was born in rural Fukushima, a place that would later be ravaged by destruction in 2011.

While the emperor’s son would go on to lead a healthy life, Kazu’s son’s life would be cut short, and Kazu himself would live out his final days as one of the many homeless barely surviving in a village of tents in Tokyo’s Ueno Park.

A socialist novel about the unfairness of social standings and class divides, and one of the most outstanding modern classic books to read right now.

A novel that asks the reader to ponder just how fair it is that the time, place, and financial situation we happen to be randomly born into determines everything we will become.

Buy a copy of Tokyo Ueno Station here!

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr 

Carnegie Medal and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All The Light We Cannot See has become one of the giants of American literature in the 21st Century, making it one of the best modern classic books we have.

Set against the backdrop of war-ravaged France, All The Light We Cannot See tells the story of Marie-Laure, a blind French woman and the path that leads her to the orphaned Werner, a member of the Hitler Youth.

The glue that holds this WW2 novel together is its lovable cast of characters, including Marie-Laure’s father, a miniaturist and keeper-of-keys at the Museum of Natural History.

The relationship between him and his daughter is a deeply moving one, as is the story of young Werner, who witnesses the effects of Nazism from the inside, and from a young age.

All The Light We Cannot See is, inarguably, one of the most powerful, moving, and satisfying American novels of this century so far, and one of the best books on World War 2, without question.

Buy a copy of All The Light We Cannot See here!

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko is a sincerely beloved novel; an epic family saga that takes the reader on a soulful journey through early 20th century Korea and Japan, and which has quickly become a true modern classic of literature.

Four generations of a Korean family take us through their lives in the midst of the tragic and tumultuous annexation of Korea by the Japanese Empire.

Today in post-empire Japan, many zainichi Koreans continue to live, descended from those Koreans who were forced to move to Japan in the years leading up to World War II.

This fact gives Pachinko a sense of weight; its characters and events, what they went through, the tragedies they experienced, it all continues to reverberate into the modern day.

We begin with Sunja, a young and poor Korean who is pulled mercilessly in different directions by the actions and choices of men.

As we read, we travel from rural, coastal Korea to both the highest and lowest parts of Japanese society. Pachinko is an incredible family saga and one of the best modern classic books of our time.

Buy a copy of Pachinko here!

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead’s masterpiece The Underground Railroad won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

This is an amazing piece of American historical fiction that reimagines the titular Underground Railroad as an actual underground network of train lines.

We follow Cora, a slave in the 19th century American South, who escapes her Georgia plantation with the help of fellow slave Caesar.

The pair hunt for the Underground Railroad and encounter both friends and enemies along the way. They commit desperate deeds to ensure their survival.

This is an incredible work of American fiction that has since cemented Colson Whitehead as one of the great American writers of the 21st century, and this one of the best modern classic books, period.

Buy a copy of The Underground Railroad here!

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters has made a name for herself as an author of queer historical romance novels, mostly set in or near the 19th Century. And the beefy Fingersmith is, by far, her most popular and finest work.

Serving as the inspiration for Korean film director Park Chan-wook’s masterpiece The Handmaiden, Fingersmith is a work of absolute beauty. One of the most iconic historical novels in existence.

The titular fingersmith is a London thief named Sue; an orphan and a survivor raised to steal from the rich. When her enigmatic associate, known to everyone as Gentleman, comes to her with a job, she gladly accepts.

The job takes Sue to a country estate, wherein she must play the role of maid to a naive young heiress while Gentleman slowly begins to court her for a fortune that he will eventually split with Sue.

Unfortunately, Sue begins to fall in love with the rich heiress, and what follows is an incredible series of impossible-to-predict twists and turns.

Fingersmith is one of the most gorgeously-written historical novels ever published. Poetic prose dances on the page. And it is a celebration of raw, queer love, to boot. A masterpiece amongst modern classic novels.

Buy a copy of Fingersmith here!

The Wind That Lays Waste by Selva Almada

Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews

Argentinian author Selva Almada has written several great works of feminist literature, and The Wind That Lays Waste is her finest achievement.

Set in the rugged wilds of the Argentinian countryside, this novella presents us with a travelling preacher and his daughter, whose car breaks down and is fixed by a lonely roadside mechanic and his apprentice.

While the car is being fixed, the preacher and his daughter stay with the mechanic, and the two men begin to discuss religion, with the mechanic being an immovable atheist and the preacher being, well, a preacher.

In a style and setup reminiscent of Waiting for Godot, the isolated story escalated gradually, with the younger characters each intrigued by the other’s perspective and way of living.

This is the story of bullheaded men coming to blows over their beliefs, as the rest of us watch on and the world falls away around them. An incredible piece of Argentinian fiction and one of the best modern classics you’ll ever read.

Buy a copy of The Wind That Lays Waste here!

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Across his celebrated career as a writer of novels, children’s books, comics, and screenplays, Neil Gaiman has reshaped the world of fiction writing more than once. And American Gods remains his finest work. A true masterpiece amongst modern classic books.

American Gods follows Shadow, a man newly released from prison at the same time that his wife is murdered. Recruited by a man known as Wednesday, Shadow takes an odd road trip across the US, seeing all the stranger sights along the way.

Dripping with a rich and detailed atmosphere, this novel provides readers with a journey that absorbs them completely. You live Shadow’s journey wholly and completely, and what a thrill ride it is.

American Gods also has a truly masterful central concept. Gods need people to invent them, worship them, and dedicate their lives to them. Without people, gods disappear.

So, what happened when Europeans moved to the New World? Some brought their gods with them while others got abandoned. There are also new gods; new things to worship: TV and internet and microwaves. There is a war brewing between the old gods and the new, and Shadow is caught in the middle.

This is a fascinating and gripping premise that makes for a perfect novel. American Gods is Neil Gaiman’s best work, and one of the great modern classic novels.

Buy a copy of American Gods here!

Human Acts by Han Kang

Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith

Han Kang, the legendary Korean author, was celebrated the world over for her daring and subversive novel The Vegetarian, which won the International Booker Prize in 2017. Her subsequent novels The White Book and Greek Lessons have also stolen our hearts.

But it’s her experimental and bleak novel Human Acts, set amidst the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980, that presents her work at its most brazen and difficult.

The Gwangju Uprising was a moment of intense political change, as the people of South Korea rose up against their government’s military dictatorship.

Our protagonist is the dead boy Kang Dong-ho, and this short novel takes us from 1980 to the present day via the people who knew him and the lives they have led.

Feverish and strange, but also raw and heart-wrenching, Human Acts stands alone amongst other best modern classics of this century.

Buy a copy of Human Acts here!

The Broken Earth Series by N.K. Jemisin

This staggering trilogy of epic fantasy books by American author N.K. Jemisin represents a vital and necessary turning point in fantasy fiction.

These fantasy novels, narratively and conceptually, are unlike anything that exists in the realms of fantasy and science fiction literature. Their breadth and scope is exceptional.

For proof of the impact these books had upon their release, every single book in the trilogy took home the Hugo Award for Best Novel in its respective year, making it the only trilogy to ever accomplish this.

The first novel in this trilogy of best fantasy books, The Fifth Season, follows three separate protagonists, all living in slightly different times on a massive continent called the Stillness.

Essun is a middle-aged mother who sets out on a journey of revenge after she comes home to find that her husband has killed their son and taken their daughter away.

Essun herself is secretly able to manipulate the earth itself; this is a skill that a small percentage of people — known as orogenes — possess.

The second protagonist is Damaya, a young orogene whose parents have organised to be removed from their home and put into the hands of an organisation — known as the Fulcrum — that can train and weaponise her.

And the third protagonist, Syenite, is a member of the Fulcrum who has been sent out on a mission with the world’s most powerful orogene.

The worldbuilding and character writing of this phenomenal trilogy is what sets it so far apart from all other fantasy books, making them some of the best fantasy books ever written.

At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, nothing else in the world of fantasy has managed to marry intimate character moulding with political and social allegories and ingenious worldbuilding quite like the Broken Earth trilogy.

For these reasons, The Fifth Season is easily one of the biggest and best modern classic books we have; a book that has reshaped the entire landscape of fantasy fiction.

Buy the trilogy here!

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft

Olga Tokarczuk is a Nobel Prize-winning Polish author, and writer of some of the best modern classic books of this (or any) century. A true genius and an unparalleled visionary writer.

Her novel, Flights, catapulted her into the public eye of the English-speaking world when it was published by indie press Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2018.

Flights is both a fictional travelogue that philosophically muses on time, movement, and inertia, and an historical examination of life and the human body.

This is a book that blends history and philosophy, fact and fiction, memory and essay. Much of it is spent in stories of migration, of nomadism, of wandering.

Other stories take us back through time to strange occurrences, such as the story of how Chopin’s heart was transported after his death. There is nothing in the world like Flights, like the writings of Olga Tokarczuk.

Buy a copy of Flights here!

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

When Oliver Marks is released from a decade of prison (for a murder he may not have even committed), he is immediately greeted by the detective who got him convicted.

Now, the detective wants Marks’ truth from ten years back. Marks is one of seven college students deeply entrenched in a love of The Bard.

They are a small society of Shakespeare fanatics who live and breathe his works. They are also darkly obsessed with one another, shutting out the rest of the world.

When emotions run this high, however, it only takes a small glitch to throw their dynamic into catastrophe and, eventually, even death.

The experience of reading If We Were Orphans will undeniably be enhanced for anyone with their own love for the works of Shakespeare. It’s not required, but it certainly helps.

A Shakespeare-inspired murder-mystery dark academia novel that has so quickly defined itself as one of the best modern classic books we have.

Buy a copy of If We Were Villains here!

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Written by one of the most talented and insightful literary authors of today and published in 2022, Small Things Like These is a modern classic that will go down in history as one of the great novels of our time.

At its heart, this is a novel about the everyday acts of goodness performed by honest people versus the twisted, monstrous, ironically sinful behaviour of organised religion.

It’s 1985 and we follow our protagonist, father of five Bill Furlough, and he works and visits his neighbours and goes shopping in the days leading up to Christmas.

As we get to know his family and his community, we are also shown glimpses of Bill’s childhood, and how his single mother was saved from a difficult life by the simple acts of kindness by those around her.

Bill has seen kindness, and is proof that it is infectious. Against the grain of his community, who are complicit in the sins of the church, he does what is right and considers it his moral duty as a living human. As he does so, he exposes the harmful, damaging actions of the church.

Small but powerful, this literary Irish novel is a work of magic, and one of the best modern classic books of our time.

Buy a copy of Small Things Like These here!

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

George Saunders is celebrated for his craft as a writer of short stories, but his debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, immediately struck a chord with readers and went on to win the Booker Prize.

A bizarre and charming piece of historical fiction which I have read multiple times, Lincoln in the Bardo follows the son of Abraham Lincoln, William, as he is caught in a space between life and death.

This space, the titular bardo, is part of buddhist belief, and here is used by Saunders to explore the grief of Lincoln, and as a means of flexing the author’s craft as a storyteller.

As we follow young William, we meet other ghosts caught in the bardo whom he befriends, and we also see glimpses of the world of the living, and how Honest Abe is coping with the loss of his son.

This is a beautiful and delightfully unique piece of contemporary fiction that is unlike anything else you’ll ever read. Surreal but not off-putting, this is one you’ll never forget, and one that stands strong amongst the best modern classic books of this century.

Buy a copy of Lincoln in the Bardo here!

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Where thrillers are concerned, Gone Girl might be the most famous, successful, and celebrated novel of this century so far. This is a book that has redefined the thriller genre. What The Fifth Season (above) did for fantasy, Gone Girl has done for thrillers. A truly exceptional modern classic novel.

The fame this novel saw was hugely bolstered by the massive success of David Fincher’s excellent film adaptation; perfectly paced, with an immaculate tone and incredible performances.

Fincher really knows how to direct a thriller, and you couldn’t find a better pairing than his directorial eye and Flynn’s original story.

Gone Girl focusses around the disappearance of Amy Dunn, a woman who vanished on her fifth wedding anniversary.

All eyes are on her husband, Nick. Public consensus is that he was involved in her disappearance, but how? What role did he play? Where is she? Is she even alive?

This is a novel of two halves, with an enormous midpoint twist separating it into two distinct narratives.

In the first half, we follow a pretty standard investigation, with public interest in the case gaining steady momentum, and Nick in the spotlight. But that twist changes and refocusses everything we thought we knew.

Few thrillers nail their execution and pacing as well as Gone Girl does, making it a real masterpiece of the genre, and one of the best modern classic books you’ll ever read.

Buy a copy of Gone Girl here!

Essential Modern Horror Books

Beyond the library of horror giant Stephen King, there is a wealth of wonderful modern horror fiction out there for you to sink your bloodthirsty fangs into!

Note: As these are the best modern horror books, not only novels, you’re going to find a few short story collections, comics, and manga here as well.

The modern horror books on this list have been gathered up from across the world — from Argentina to Japan — and represent the finest in horror fiction as it exists today (beyond that of Stephen King). Boundaries are being pushed; new kinds of horror are being discovered, poked at and tampered with. Enjoy what you find here, and keep the lights on after you’re done.

Read More: The Best Horror Novels Ever Written

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

With What Moves the Dead, author T. Kingfisher has taken Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story, The Fall of the House of Usher, and built upon it. The result is something glorious. It takes a lot of daring to attempt something like this, and Kingfisher should be applauded for not only attempting it, but for also creating one of the finest modern horror books you’ll ever read.

The nameless protagonist from Poe’s original tale has here been given a name and a backstory, and just like in the original, they are on their way to the Usher house in response to a letter from an old friend. What Easton finds there, much like in Poe’s original, is a sick and frail brother-sister pair living in a crumbling estate on a marshy land.

However, in What Moves the Dead, Kingfisher has decided to answers questions raised by The Fall of the House of Usher. The biggest being: what caused all of this sickness and decay? The answer is a genius one, and it creates a wonderfully frightening and compelling “villain” for us to follow and consider.

What Moves the Dead is a truly chilling and disgusting modern horror novel; a gothic delight that builds on Poe’s original tale in so many fantastic and clever ways. An instant classic of the horror genre.

Buy a copy here!

Read More: 15 Best Books About Hell (Devils, Demons & Magic)

The Haar by David Sodergren

Legend of the world of grassroots horror David Sodergren delivers an absolute banger with The Haar, a unique work of terror that features an eighty-four-year-old protagonist, a shapeshifting sea monster, a soulless billionaire, and some unexpected but very welcome romance.

Muriel McAuley has lived in a small Scottish fishing village all her life; her husband was lost to sea a decade ago; and now a rich American wants to raze the village to make way for a golf course. And only the elderly residents of Witchaven have the guts to stand up to him. But as they fall, only Muriel remains. Her and the sea monster she found on the beach.

The Haar is a brilliant work of terror packed with really grotesque moments of body horror and some heartbreaking romantic scenes. A one-of-a-kind horror novel that proves the power of Sodergren’s unique brand of terror.

The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell

Laura Purcell is the modern queen of horror; a British author who twists and turns all the most beloved tropes, characters, and settings that horror fans love, turning them into something wholly fresh and disgusting. While her second novel, The Corset, is considered by many (this writer included) to be her finest work, her debut novel The Silent Companions is easily her most immediately frightening.

The Silent Companions is easily one of the best modern horror books of this century; a haunted house novel of unique and exciting proportions.

Exceptionally gothic, very reminiscent of Susan Hill and Shirley Jackson, and yet wholly its own beast, The Silent Companions is gothic fiction, historical fiction, and horror all smooshed nicely together.

Our protagonist, Elsie, is pregnant, but her husband is already dead. And so she moves into his family’s country estate, where she feels isolated and lonely, with only her late husband’s cousin to call friend. The thing that haunts this novel is what makes it unique; something we’ve never seen before in the haunted house subgenre of horror fiction. A masterpiece amongst modern horror books.

Buy a copy here!

Shiver by Junji Ito

Japanese mangaka Junji Ito could (and should) easily swipe the horror crown off Stephen King’s head. Nobody in the world does horror and terror like Ito does. While he has written several lengthy horror manga, Ito’s finest works remain his short stories, and the best collection of these stories is easily Shiver.

Junji Ito blends cosmic horror (see his books Sensor and Remina for more proof of that) with the isolation, tension, and surrealism of intimate family horror. His ideas, characters, and narratives are creepy, intense, quietly frightening; his art pairs so beautifully with this as it brings to eerie life the expressions and experiences of his poor characters.

In Shiver we see a family that give into the urge to become living marionette dolls; a plague of flying balloons that look like (and hunt) us; and a house drowning in heat and grease.

It’s hard to go wrong with Junji Ito; he rarely disappoints. But if you really want to experience his finest works (and iconic characters like his terrifying cannibalistic supermodel), you need to check out Shiver immediately. Junji Ito is the true king of horror, and his manga are some of the best modern horror books of all time.

Buy a copy here!

The Hole by by Pyun Hye-young

Translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell

The Hole is perhaps one of the most underrated modern horror books you’ll ever read. This is a masterpiece of truly unsettling, nail-biting terror. Film fans should already know that Korean horror movies are a step above everything else, but the same can also be said about Korean horror novels, and The Hole is the best of them.

The Hole begins with a car crash. Our protagonist is fully paralysed, and his wife is dead. His mother-in-law has taken him in to care for him, but she blames him for the death of her daughter.

We must read on helplessly as our protagonist is trapped in his own mind, unable to move or fend for himself. All the while his mother-in-law digs an enormous hole in the garden.

Terror has never been done so well, not by Stephen King or any other horror author. This is tension like you’ve never felt it. If you’re looking for the very best modern horror books, you owe it to yourself to read Pyun Hye-young’s The Hole.

Buy a copy here!

Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle

This one will be less sugar-coated than the others. Camp Damascus is, straight up, one of the best modern horror books you’ll ever read. A true masterpiece of horror fiction. Author Chuck Tingle is infamous across the internet for writing hilarious, absurdly-named self-published queer erotica about sex with monsters, dinosaurs, and even abstract concepts like time and money.

He is also a strange but wholesome man who hides his identity and makes no secret of the fact that love is what matters in this life, above all else. He believes that love is the ultimate truth. Given that information, it’s quite remarkable how Chuck Tingle has managed to write one of the best horror books of this century so far.

Camp Damascus is set in a relatively insular Montana community, in which people belong to a sect of Evangelical Christians known as the Kingdom of the Pine. This community’s pride and joy is the titular Camp Damascus, the world’s most successful gay conversion camp.

Our protagonist is a teenager named Rose Darling, a proud member of this church. When the novel begins, however, strange things are happening to Rose. During dinner with her parents, after they eagerly tell her to follow her urges and date a boy who likes her, Rose vomits a host of mayflies all over the dining table.

Rose then starts to see a horrifying figure wherever she goes, even at home. This figure is wearing a metal collar and has impossibly long fingers. Soon enough, it even manages to kill someone close to Rose. What is happening to her? Is she being haunted? Possessed? Cursed? Or is this something else entirely?

The novel’s first act is wall-to-wall scares. The second act is about revelations, themes, and understanding. And the third act is a frenzy of action and excitement. Camp Damascus is a wild ride from cover to cover. This is one American horror novel you should not miss out on. A terrifying queer tale about religious indoctrination, love, identity, truth, and so much more.

Buy a copy of Camp Damascus here!

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez

Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

Written by Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez, Our Share of Night is nothing short of a political, cosmic horror epic. This 700+ page horror novel blends the Lovecraftian, the Stephen King-esque, and the dark academia genre to create something smart, political, and allegorical.

We begin in the early 1980s, during a period of military dictatorship. Juan is a medium for a powerful cult known as the Order. Now that his son, Gaspar, is showing signs of the same power, Juan is on the road trying to find a way to keep Gaspar away from the Order, and to give his son a better life than he has had.

The Order offers sacrifices to a cosmic god known as the Darkness, and in exchange is able to maintain power, wealth, and privilege, as well as eventually attain immortality. This is a horror novel about the abuse of power, about the rich manipulating the poor and vulnerable, about colonialism and corruption.

As it moves forward, the novel also shifts its tone from the cosmic to more local horror, and eventually to dark academia. This is a masterpiece of modern horror that wears its influences on its sleeve while also being so much greater than the sum of its parts.

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Whisper by Chang Yu-ko

Translated from the Mandarin by Roddy Flagg

Whisper is a Taiwanese folk horror story set in the modern day. If you’ve seen and enjoyed the 2022 Taiwanese horror movie Incantation, you’re going to want to read Whisper. This horror novel is very reminiscent of classic Japanese horror movies, as well as the darker side of Japanese and Chinese mythology.

The Japanese connection is fitting because Whisper is also a political novel that prods at the historical relationship between Taiwan and Japan. There are moments of gross body horror here, as well as relieving moments of comedy, and all are handled so exceptionally by the translator, Roddy Flagg.

Our protagonist is a drunk, gambling waste of space; a taxi driver who has all but given up. He and his wife are haunted by a ghost, and that ghost succeeds in killing his wife in the very first chapter (in a very gruesome and unsettling way). The ghost itself first manifests as the talking and singing voice of a Japanese girl, and its presence leads to disaster.

Whisper takes us on a journey across both geography and history, to many different locations as our protagonist continues to be haunted. This is one of those essential modern horror books that gives you everything: creeping dread, gross body horror, twisted imagery, vivid dreams, and paranoid hauntings.

Buy a copy here!

Read More: Essential Taiwanese Books

Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt

Alison Rumfitt is one of the most unique and exciting voices in modern horror, and Tell Me I’m Worthless isn’t only one of the best modern horror books of this century, but also one of this writer’s favourite novels ever. Tell Me I’m Worthless is a British horror novel by an incredible transgender author, published by a small indie press, and it is singlehandedly shaking up the world of literature, both within and outside of the horror genre.

This is an angry novel that holds a mirror up to the fascistic state of modern day Britain. Our protagonists are a pair of young women who were once friends. At university, they and a third friend spent a night at a haunted house.

Something terrible happened at this house, and the women blame each other for it. They each claim the other sexually assaulted them in this haunted house. Now, one of them is a young trans woman haunted by ghosts that represent the twisted state of modern-day Britain. The other is a TERF who campaigns against the rights of trans people.

The house itself, Albion (get it?), is also a character in its own right, and we learn a lot about its history as the novel progresses. This is an angry, smart, punk, and critical horror novel about trans rights and TERF Island. It’s also an imaginative and bold piece of horror fiction. One of the best modern horror books you’ll ever read.

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Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca

This beautiful, disgusting book collects three stories by author Eric LaRocca. The first and longest is the titular Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, which is an epistolary story comprised entirely of emails and instant messages between two women.

We begin with a woman struggling to pay her rent, and so she is looking to sell an antique apple peeler online. A woman responds to the ad, they exchange a few emails, and the second woman convinces her to keep the antique, and she will just help the destitute woman pay her rent.

In exchange, she must enter into a contract where she does whatever the second woman says, and the story spirals into something quite horrific from there. The second story is set in a world where scientists have proven that there is nothing beyond death.

The son of couple who are going through divorce crucifies himself, and his suicide note simply begs them to remain together, and so they do. The crux of this story takes a cue from The Shining, as the couple then spends the winter taking care of an empty hotel on an isolated island.

The third and shortest story involves a man visiting his elderly neighbour and being wrangled into a series of dangerously escalating dares for money. Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke is a masterfully modern horror book from one of the genre’s rising stars.

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The Trees Grew Because I Bled There by Eric LaRocca

Following the huge success of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Met comes this collection of terrifying tales from Eric LaRocca, with a larger emphasis here on body horror. The short horror stories in this collection will make you feel more uncomfortable than you’ve ever felt; you’ll squirm in your seat as you read them. You might even feel a little nauseated.

Take, for example, the titular tale of this collection: The Trees Grew Because I Bled There (also the most aggressively visceral story here). In this story, a woman wheels herself into the house of her lover, a man who has been steadily taking pieces from her for a handful of years. He removed one eye, both her feet, and even her heart.

She offered him these things willingly, and claims to love him dearly. But now he tells her that he loves and is engaged to someone else. She does not take this news well. The story Bodies Are For Burning follows a pyromaniac obsessed with burning things — specifically people — who has been asked to look after her infant niece for a day, and is terrified of what she might let herself do.

The Strange Thing We Become is framed as a series of blog posts from a woman whose wife is undergoing cancer treatment; but this wife is also obsessed with a performance artist who did radical things as acts of protest, including bodily mutilation and self-mummification. Modern horror books are often described as “not for the feint of heart” but that phrase has never been used more accurately than when describing this collection specifically. Tread carefully.

Buy a copy here!

You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood by Eric LaRocca

You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood is a wildly smart, enticing, and layered horror novella that never gets away from itself. This is a collection of transcripts, diary entires, poems, and even a novella within a novella that all works together perfectly. We begin with an editor’s note which explains that everything within this book belonged to a serial killer named Martyr Black, who recorded conversations with his partner, wrote poems, and even had his own novella published.

All of that is presented here in a satisfying cycle. We read a short diary entry, then a poem, then a few chapters of a horror novella, then a transcript, then another diary entry, and as it goes on. The novella within this novella is fantastic: the trippy and claustrophobic tale of a young woman who has been recruited by an enigmatic but beloved video games designer to help him with his newest project.

She brings along her little brother, and her work takes place in this odd man’s enormous gothic home. He has been injured and is bedridden, and his standoffish sister rules the roost. You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood is a bonkers concept that works so well in execution, perfectly demonstrating LaRocca’s imagination and his strengths as a writer, plotter, and editor.

There is nothing quite like this novella; one of the most enigmatic, exciting, and original modern horror books.

Buy a copy of You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood here!

My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

Grady Hendrix might well be king of the clever horror titles, with each one proclaiming that this is his take on a specific horror sub-genre, and each one being given a dash of humour and cheekiness. My Best Friend’s Exorcism isn’t just a funny title, but one that is also thematically detailed, stating to the reader that this is a horror novel about demonic possession, but also one about friendship.

Hendrix never just writes horror; he blends horror into stories about family feuds, community, young life, and more. Here, Hendrix is tackling the trope of high school drama, smartly setting it in the ’80s when that trope was all the rage.

Our protagonists are two best friends who (as part of a larger group of four girls), met in a clumsy way at age ten and have been mostly inseparable ever since. One night, the four of them decide to try hallucinogenic drugs and one girl, Gretchen, goes missing for the entire night. When Abby finds her best friend, she is different.

Something terrible happened to her during those few hours, and Gretchen is steadily reliving the horrors of it while also losing control of herself, changing, becoming unfamiliar, and even manipulating those around her. This is a story that uses demonic possession as a way to explain and build an allegory for puberty and adolescence, but it is not half as clumsy as that might sound.

This is a frantic, dynamic, satisfying novel that escalates to a frightening crescendo and one of the smartest modern horror novels of the past few years.

Buy a copy of My Best Friend’s Exorcism here!

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

Any fan of horror cinema will be familiar with the “final girl” trope: the one young woman left alive at the end of a slasher movie. She’s usually a sweet, innocent virgin. The trope has become an important element of the slasher formula, but also a key ingredient when creating “meta horror”, which at this point is also an exhausted genre of its own.

The Final Girl Support Group is a piece of meta horror that leans hard on the final girl trope, and yet what we have here is something truly exciting, messy, fun, and clever. The titular final girl support group is a collection of middle-aged women who all survived real slasher stories in the ’80s and now meet on a regular basis; their meeting chaired by a famous psychiatrist.

But when the novel begins, one of these final girls doesn’t show up, and we soon learn that she’s dead. A recent slasher incident has also created its first final girl in decades. So begins a slasher about slashers: the story of someone killing off final girls. This is a love letter to the genre while being a thrilling modern horror novel in its own right.

The Final Girl Support Group begins with a fun concept and quickly morphs into a chilling adventure that places it amongst the very best modern horror books.

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How to Sell A Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

Following The Final Girl Support Group, Hendrix wrote his take on the haunted house novel: How to Sell A Haunted House. Like Hendrix’s other novels, this is one of those modern horror books that puts as much of an emphasis on character drama as it does on horror, blending comedy, terror, and family drama together perfectly.

Our protagonist is a single mother named Louise, who is close to forty and living in San Francisco. She learns from her brother back home in South Carolina that their parents have tragically and suddenly died. Leaving her daughter in the hands of her ex, Louise returns home to organise the funeral, the wills, and to sell the home she grew up in, but the house has other plans.

At its heart, this is a tale of grief and familial bonds, as well as the inescapable traumas that families instil in us, to one degree or another. Smart, witty, and a brilliant reflection of sibling rivalries — both as children and as adults — this novel feels like the next step in American horror.

Fans of ghosts, demons, and hauntings will not be left disappointed, but neither will readers who love getting hooked on addictive family drama.

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My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

Genre fiction legend Stephen Graham Jones has created a smart and subversive homage to the slasher subgenre of horror movie with My Heart is a Chainsaw. But, Jones being a Blackfoot Native American, this modern horror novel is also something that confidently and powerfully shines a spotlight on the legacy of American brutality against his people.

Our protagonist is a young Idaho native named Jade, who is struggling to graduate from high school; her father is abusive, her friends nonexistence, and she has an encyclopaedic knowledge of slasher films. Jade is a walking caricature of angsty teenage life; she quotes horror films, wears heaps of eyeliner, and has accepted her position as the school and community outcast.

When My Heart is a Chainsaw begins, we enjoy a prologue which features a young Dutch couple mysteriously drowning in Jade’s local lake, before then cutting to Jade herself attempting suicide there shortly after. And so begins a literary slasher film.

If you like your modern horror books to be smart, literary affairs with a lot to say; books that play on the horror genre; books that move at a breakneck pace, then this is exactly what you’re looking for. With My Heart is a Chainsaw, Stephen Graham Jones has penned one of the great modern American horror novels.

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A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

American author Paul Tremblay has made a big name for himself with some of the best modern horror books of our time, but the best of these is A Head Full of Ghosts. The perfect horror novel for fans of possession narratives, A Head Full of Ghosts begins with a young woman returning to her childhood home.

She is accompanied by an author who wishes to hear, and then writer, Merry’s family’s story. Merry recounts to the author, and to us, the story of how her older sister began to change, showing signs of schizophrenia, before the family eventually became the subject of a cult reality TV show called The Possession.

Multiple perspectives and narrative keep this incredible horror novel moving at a breakneck pace, and the events of this story are truly chilling. This is a real American horror novel, through and through, even down to its iconic rural New England setting. One of the finest modern horror books you’ll ever read.

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The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay

Published a few years after A Head Full of Ghosts, Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World elevated his craft even further, showing his skills at their peak. This is a 300-page horror novel in which not a lot actually happens. Only a single day passes, and every moment of that day serves up nail-biting tension.

We begin with a family in a rural New Hampshire cabin: a young adopted girl and her two fathers. Almost immediately, a tall man appears and begins chatting with the girl. He explains that three more people will soon be joining him, and that the four of them must be invited into the cabin.

The are wielding hand-made weapons out of farming tools, and they promise that they will not harm the family. That, in fact, they need the family’s help to prevent the end of the world. This is a novel all about faith and cult mentalities, about scepticism versus blind belief, about conspiracies and signs and how our experiences shape us (for better or worse).

The shifting perspectives, the layers that get peeled back, it all leads to more and more uncertainty and terror from the reader, until it reaches a feverish conclusion.

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Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

Both a modern horror novel and a mystery thriller, Bad Cree tells the story of a young cree woman in Vancouver whose dreams are seeping into reality. When Mackenzie wakes up one day, she is holding the severed head of a crow, and this isn’t the first time a thing from her dreams has materialised in her waking world.

The dreams themselves are taking her back to a lakeside forest, a place where her older sisters briefly disappeared, before emerging, dishevelled and shaken up, but safe. That is, until one of these sisters, Sabrina, very suddenly died of an aneurysm, and now she seems to be haunting her little sister’s nightmares.

The memories, the haunting, the blurring of dreams and reality all make for some really disturbing and chilling horror, as well as a compelling supernatural mystery. When Mackenzie confesses some of these occurrences to her family, she learns that many of them have powers related to their dreams, and so the plot thickens.

Twisted and chilling as a horror novel, and utterly compelling as a mystery thriller, Bad Cree is a unique spectacle of a novel.

Buy a copy of Bad Cree here!

Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White

Andrew Joseph White’s third novel continues his upward trajectory into the hallowed halls of American horror fiction. Like his first two books, Compound Fracture sees him exploring the trans-masculine narrative with nuance and dynamism. But what elevates this one even further is the ways it tangles its queer themes nicely with those of generational violence and working-class masculine struggles (reminiscent of Selva Almada’s Brickmakers).

Our protagonist is Miles, a freshly-out sixteen-year-old who has grown up in a West Virginia mining town. For generations, his family has been in a bloody war with another. His parents have seen torment and tragedy at the hands of the local sheriff, and Miles wants to end this violent cycle. But before he can, he’s beaten to within an inch of his life by she sheriff’s son. Now, he wants revenge.

Helping him on that path is the silent ghostly presence of Miles’ own great-grandfather; a socialist miner who was brutally and publicly executed one hundred years ago. Now, Miles must forge his own path of coming out, protecting his family, getting revenge, and ending this cycle of violence.

The House That Horror Built by Christina Henry

Christina Henry is one of several modern American horror authors (Paul Tremblay, Grady Hendrix etc.) who take established themes, tropes, and ideas—ones which have become cliche over the years—and do something fresh and fun with them, or even shows how they can be used to tell a different kind of story. The House That Horror Built is easily one of the best examples of this method being done to brilliant effect.

Our protagonist, Harry, is a thirty-four-year-old single mother living and struggling in Chicago with her teenage son Gabe. After the pandemic, she has taken a cleaning job at a big manor house, which happens to be owned by a reclusive former director of horror movies—films which Harry herself loves, and which she and her son have bonded over. But there is something wrong with this house.

As she gets to know Javier Castillo, and learns about the events in his life that led to his reclusion from society, she begins to wonder what other secrets remain hidden in this house: the locked room upstairs; the thumping sounds; the old horror movie props that decorate the house and seem to move on their own. This is a wonderful homage to the legacy of horror, to the haunted house story, and also a brilliant original tale in its own right.

Orpheus Builds A Girl by Heather Parry

There has never been a modern gothic horror novel that captures the vibe, tone, and character style of the 19th Century gothic period like Heather Parry’s Orpheus Builds A Girl. This is a novel with Frankenstein and Dracula in its veins. A claustrophobic gothic story of science fiction, madness, obsession, and the frightening power of male authority.

Our two narrator-protagonists are the villain, a German doctor named Wilhelm von Tore, and the hero, a Cuban woman named Gabriela. Wilhelm is a “mad scientist” who believes that death is only the beginning, and there is life left beyond it. He becomes obsessed with a sick girl named Luciana (Gabriela’s little sister).

Luciana becomes an object of Wilhelm’s dangerous and deluded romantic obsession, as well as a lab rat for his experimental approach to mastering and overcoming death. Ghostly apparitions and gross, tangible body horror (reminiscent of the aforementioned Frankenstein and schlocky 80s horror movies like Re-Animator) is stitched through this narrative.

This is an unhinged and frighteningly intelligent gothic horror that explores themes of migration, male privilege, sisterhood, and more.

Buy a copy here!

NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

Every horror fan knows that Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son, and that the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree when it comes to writing excellent modern horror books. Hill has written novels, short stories, and comic books, but the best of the bunch (for this writer’s money) is NOS4A2.

Much like his father’s fiction, Hill’s NOS4A2 is set in rural New England, and begins in the 1980s with a girl who figures out how to find lost things by riding her bike across a covered bridge. One of her journeys takes her to a library where she meets a woman with the power to predict future events using Scrabble tiles.

She warns our protagonist about the book’s vampiric villain: a kidnapper of children called Charlie Manx, who takes stolen children to a place called Christmasland. NOS4A2 is a creatively strange and engaging horror novel that is wonderfully reminiscent of many of King’s own works, while still refreshingly existing as Hill’s own beast.

Side Note: Hilariously, for us British readers, the novel is spelled NOS4R2 to align with our accents.

Side Note 2: This writer is of the right age to remember a robot vampire character of the exact same name from the cartoon Buzz Lightyear of Star Command.

Buy a copy here!

The Shadow Book of Ji Yun

Translated from the Mandarin by Yi Izzy Yu and John Yu Branscum

Ji Yun was a famous and well-regarded politician, scholar, poet, philosopher from 18th Century China, and what we have here is a collection of his writings, newly edited and translated by two incredible translators. As the book’s introduction explains, Ji Yun took it upon himself to investigate strange, ghostly happenings and then write them down with a “storytelling flair”.

The result of this is The Shadow Book of Ji Yun, a collection of observations, accounts, and folk tales from 18th Century China. These stories are sometimes creepy and frightening, sometimes strange and eerie, and almost always impossibly weird.

The blurb sums up the vibe by saying: “Imagine if H.P. Lovecraft was Chinese and his tales were true.” That is exactly what you’re getting here. These are stories of the metaphysical and the supernatural. Either Ji Yun experienced them himself or was told them by people he knew or met on his journeys.

In one section of the book, the stories specifically deal with encounters with gods, saints, and mythological beings from Taoist and Buddhist folklore and tradition. While not technically modern, this book still fits into this collection of modern horror books, given that it is freshly collected and translated for us to enjoy here and now, for the first time!

Buy a copy here!

Read More: Essential Chinese Books

Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung

Translated from the Korean by Anton Hur

Korean author Bora Chung is a sensation. A fluent speaker of Korean, English, Russian, and Polish (at least), she also teaches Russian language, literature, and sci-fi studies at Yonsei University. Her accolades go beyond this, but the most important point for us right now is that she writes phenomenal horror and folk tales, like those found in Cursed Bunny.

This is a collection of stories that mangle genre in a playful and twisted way. Sci-fi, fantasy, fairy tales, and most importantly horror fiction are all found here. Cursed Bunny could perhaps best be described as a book of frightening and malformed fairy tales for horror addicts.

The book’s first two stories are unapologetically gross and visceral body horror; twisted, scary, and gross. From here we move into experimental ghost, sci-fi, and fantasy tales. If you’re a fan of weird fiction, of blurring the lines between genres, and of fairy tales, Cursed Bunny is one of the most essential modern horror books you could ever read.

Buy a copy here!

Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Manhunt is a curious piece of fiction. It is gross, gory, uncomfortable, visceral, shocking, and punk as all hell. It isn’t, at any point, particularly scary, however. But, like many of the best 80s horror b-movies, it foregoes terror for truly disgusting body horror.

Manhunt is also a plainly angry book. It is a post-apocalyptic narrative that follows a pair of trans women who have survived a plague that specifically targeted testosterone. This plague turned anyone with high levels of testosterone into horny, snarly, mindless zombie-like beasts, which means most cis women, and some trans women and men, were saved.

Our protagonists must fight and hunt and scavenge to survive, while also facing down another threat: TERFs. There is a cult of dangerous transphobes who hunt and lynch any trans women they come across. Manhunt is a horror novel about the mindless, sexual, and physical aggression of men towards women (cis or trans), and about the potential violent endgame of transphobia.

The visceral nature of Manhunt cannot be overstated. This is a book of such violent and bloody imagery that many readers may not be able to stomach it. Horror fans should have no problem with it, and what they’ll find is one of the most daring modern horror books ever written.

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The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig

American author Chuck Wendig has made a name for himself writing comic books, Star Wars novels, and then his award-winning sci-fi epic Wanderers. And here, with The Book of Accidents, he has proven himself a master of modern horror as well.

The Book of Accidents follows a three-person family who have moved from Philadelphia into the family father’s childhood home, following the death of his own father. Nate’s late father was abusive and callous, and Nate — a former cop — takes joy in seeing his father die. He doesn’t want to inherit the house, but his obligations to his family force him to be responsible.

Nate’s son, Oliver, is a sweet, tender, and empathetic teenager. We watch him make friends with the local nerds at his school, and eventually meet a far rougher punk kid who might tempt him down a darker path. It doesn’t take long before strange things start happening in and around the house: images and noises that all point to a typical haunting; this story, however, is far from typical.

The Book of Accidents is a modern horror novel that tests family ties, that explores inherited trauma and cycles of abuse, and also blends the genres of horror and science fiction together in unexpected ways.

Buy a copy of The Book of Accidents here!

A Good House for Children by Kate Collins

On its surface, A Good House for Children is a traditional haunted house novel, but at its core its a novel about what parenthood asks and demands of us. This modern horror novel presents us with a dual narrative: the late 2010s and the mid 1970s, both set in the same place: a lonely house known as The Reeve, which sists on the cliffs of Dorset, on England’s south coast.

In 2017, a married couple with two children move from Bristol to The Reeve, the man of the family insisting it’ll be good for their mute son to be out in the fresh and open air. In 1976, a woman from London moves in with a family whose patriarch has died, and her job as nanny is to care for the big brood of four children: an eldest boy, twin girls, and a baby boy who was born after his father passed.

Both timelines present us with a haunting; The Reeve twists the minds of its residents, making them see things and doubt their senses. And eventually, a curse will guarantee the tragic death of a child. A Good House for Children is a spine-chilling modern horror novel that plays with the tropes and traditions of the haunted house narrative in engaging and tantalising ways.

Buy a copy here!

Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth

Motherthing is an intense and unsettling modern horror novel that explores the toxic, demanding, and unhealthy relationships between in-laws. Our protagonist is a Canadian woman named Abby whose husband has asked if they can move in with his mother to take care of her, since her physical and mental health is declining.

When the book opens, however, Ralph’s mother takes her own life, and her ghost begins to haunt the basement. We frequently flash back to Abby’s relationship to her abusive mother-in-law, as well as her own troubled childhood with her love-obsessed and abused mother.

The tension and the horror builds to a bloody conclusion as Motherthing examines the toxicity of female relationships, and the ways in which patriarchy puts pressure on the roles of women. Motherthing has so much to say about the creepy relationships that often tether mothers to their sons, as well as the strain that family puts on a person and on a marriage.

This is also a novel that blends blood, ghosts, delusional terror, and knife-edge tension spectacularly well.

Buy a copy here!

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez

Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

Mariana Enriquez is one of Argentina’s finest modern writers. She takes modern politics and feminism, blends them together with folk traditions and superstition, and creates something refreshingly unique and powerful. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is a spine-chilling collection of modern gothic short stories. These tales focus around ghosts and hauntings, cults and witches, curses and cursed places.

If you’re a fan of the ways in which horror blends with gothic fiction, you can’t do better than The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Take the story Meat, which begins with an Argentinian rock star with a cult following of obsessed teenagers.

When he kills himself (in the most brutal fashion) in a hotel room, the media predicts a slew of copycat suicides. Instead, something far darker and stranger follows. The Well follows a woman who, as a young girl, was taken to a witch by the seaside to watch as her sister and mother had their anxieties exorcised.

As an adult with her own crippling anxieties, she and her sister return to the witch only to learn the truth of what happened that day. The stories found in this collection are haunting, inducing fear and paranoia and hopelessness in the reader. A powerful collection, and one of the best modern horror books on the shelves.

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The Grip of It by Jac Jemc

The Grip of It is one of those rare modern horror books with a literary twist. Its language is considered and weighted; sometimes cryptic and often evocative. This is a haunted house novel built around vagueness. It invited the reader to contemplate the reasons behind every event and every mystery, and the results of doing so are wonderfully satisfying.

The Grip of It is set in modern-day USA. Julie and James are a couple who have decided to leave the city and buy their first home out in the countryside, because James has been struggling with a gambling addiction. As soon as they’re all moved into their large house at the edge of a forest, they start to forget who arranged the viewings, and the name of the real estate company. Memories of getting the place slip away.

Then the house itself starts to toy with them. Rooms grow and shift and move. Noises have no source. People they meet tell them conflicting stories about the history of that house and its previous residents. The novel’s narrative shifts back and forth between Julie and James, both written in the present tense to give the narrative immediacy and momentum. And the terror gradually amps up with the mystery.

The Grip of It is a dizzying and claustrophobic literary horror novel that plays with your senses and your expectations brilliantly.

Buy a copy of The Grip of It here!

The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

The Last House on Needless Street is a nerve-shredding, spine-chilling psychological thriller that will send you down into a deep, dark labyrinth of confusion, paranoia, and disorientation. This horror-thriller puts you in the mind of Ted, a lonely and isolated man who lives in the titular last house on Needless Street.

Ted is unemployed and lives with his cat, Olivia, and his daughter Lauren. After spending some time with Ted, we also soon get to see the world through Olivia the cat’s eyes. Eleven years ago, Ted was a prime suspect in the disappearance of a young girl at a nearby lake (one of many). Since then, he has lived a solitary life.

However, that missing girl’s sister, another POV character in this story named Dee, is still on the hunt for her sister and the kidnapper, and the trail is leading her back to Ted. But surely Ted didn’t do it? That would be too obvious.

This really is a mind-bending thriller. You’ll guess a thousand times at what is really going on; which narrator is unreliable and how and why. You might even guess right, but you’ll enjoy the ride regardless.

This is one of those modern horror books that so seamlessly blends the horror of gore and claustrophobia with the tension of a good psychological thriller.

Buy a copy here!

Through the Woods by Emily Carroll

Through the Woods is a wonderfully fresh and unique take on horror. A collection of horror short stories, reminiscent of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, but all drawn with a dreamlike flair. Carroll embraces the unknown and the unknowable with her stories; they are tales that thingle the spine and rarely reach a satisfying conclusion, leaving the reader feeling cold and alone.

But Through the Woods is also a comic book, and the twisted, ethereal nature, as well as the emphasis on black, white, and red, gives this book a nightmarish visual quality. If you’re a fan of comic books, short stories, gothic tales, and a hefty dose of dread in your horror, Through the Woods is one of the best modern horror books you can pick up and read right now.

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A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll

After the sensational success of her horror comic collection, Through the Woods, Emily Carroll brings readers the spine-chilling haunted house graphic novel A Guest in the House. The story follows Abby, newly married to David (whose first wife tragically died) and doing her best to be a good stepmother to Crystal. But Crystal insists that she gets visited by her late mother at night sometimes.

Soon enough, Abby comes to understand what Crystal is talking about, and the haunting begins. But there is so much buried truth to dig up. And elevating the horror and gothic tension of the story is Carroll’s unmistakeable and unique art, which is utilised brilliantly here. The majority of the art is black and grey, with splashes of colour at pivotal moments or during dream sequences. Exquisite.

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

The debut novel by an author who has already cut her teeth on imaginative and visceral short stories, Our Wives Under the Sea is a powerful modern gothic novel. The dual-narrative story follows a lesbian couple, one of whom is sent on an expedition in a submarine to the bottom of the sea.

While the expedition should last a few weeks, she and the crew are stranded there for six months. Her narrative is a claustrophobic and tense one, with a Lovecraftian fear of the unknown knocking at the walls of the submarine with every page turn.

When she finally returns, however, she is no longer herself, and her wife must make peace with the fact that the woman she loved is gone, replaced by something else. Our Wives Under the Sea is a contemporary gothic horror novel about how we grieve, and the fact that we can grieve badly.

It’s a claustrophobic story, set in a cramped submarine and an equally cramped apartment, with the unknown and the terrifying always within arm’s reach.

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Lost in the Garden by Adam S. Leslie

This folk horror tale takes readers on a fever-dream journey across the English landscape, in a time of perpetual summer where the dead are rising as corporeal and violent ghosts.

English kids are raised on the old warning: never go to the village of Almanby. But Heather’s boyfriend has done just that, and he’s been gone too long. And so, Heather invites her friends Rachel and Antonia to join her on a trip to that forbidden village.

Rachel has to visit anyway, because she has a package to deliver, and Antonia is following Heather there because she is secretly in love with her. The road trip will be difficult, and as they approach Almanby, impossible things will start to happen.

This is an eerie tale that begins creepy and gently dials up its surreal atmosphere to eleven. This is a folk horror tale unlike any other, and would be right at home as an A24 flick.

The Gingerbread Men by Joanna Corrance

Published by the fine folks at Scotland-based indie publishing house Haunt, Joanna Corrance’s novel The Gingerbread Men is a fantastically gothic fairy tale for adults. We begin at a Christmas market in Edinburgh, where protagonist Eric is suddenly and inexplicably drawn away from his fiancee by the allure of a woman named Delia.

Showing no regret for his actions, however uncharacteristic, Eric is taken in a taxi to a remote hotel in the Scottish highlands; a place that never sees any guests and the snow never stops falling. Enchanted by Delia’s spell, Eric remains at this hotel for weeks. Those weeks become months, and soon enough Christmas rolls back around.

Only men work at the hotel, and they occasionally pass the time by telling horror stories, which we also get to enjoy. These stories act as allegories and warning signs against Delia, the hotel, and the power she seems to have over them.

Eric considers leaving, but fails, and quickly falls into a comfortable life at this labyrinthine place, under the spell of the enigmatic Delia. Blending the tropes of classic fairy tales with the horror of an unknowable, claustrophobic, and gothic environment, The Gingerbread Men is a nightmare of a novel that sets the reader on edge and keeps them there until the end.

Buy a copy of The Gingerbread Men here!

Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud

Nathan Ballingrud’s short horror/sci-fi novella is a hefty return to the world of pulp genre fiction. Set in an alternative 1920s, and reminiscent of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (who is referenced here), Crypt of the Moon Spider follows Veronica, who has just arrived on the moon; she struggled with depression and so her husband is abandoning here at an asylum.

This asylum was built atop a cave which astronomers discovered decades ago, and in that cave was the corpse of an enormous spider. Now, the silk that it left behind is used in operations and experiments on the asylum’s inmates, and Veronica is about to become the next experiment for Dr. Cull and his assistant Charlie to play around with. What does this spider silk do? What are they trying to accomplish?

Crypt of the Moon Spider is a strange and surreal novella that leaves the reader with a deep feeling of unease. Not everything makes sense; it all feels off-balance, shrouded, and unnerving. You’ll be drenched in discomfort and a victim of heavy claustrophobia as you read. It’ll be over soon, but the ride is unforgettable.

Sisters by Daisy Johnson

Daisy Johnson’s Sisters is a tiny novel; a short piece of dreadful gothic horror. Our protagonists are a pair of teenagers, two girls, whose mother has moved them north from Oxford to a big, empty house in the Yorkshire countryside.

Their mother is a children’s book author who is struggling with depression and exhaustion. The girls are left to play alone and entertain themselves. All the while, the reason for their move — some terrible incident at school — hangs over them like the sword of Damocles, and we must wonder what in the world happened.

This is a modern twist on the haunted house genre of horror, one that explores trauma and shared pain within a family that is cracked but still held together, however poorly.

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The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley

British author Andrew Michael Hurley has penned a few excellent gothic horror novels, but his debut The Loney remains this writer’s favourite. The titular Loney is an isolated and lonely stretch of beach in Lancashire where the majority of this novel takes place.

A family (mother, father, and two sons) come up to the Loney every year from London, along with their local parish priest. This is a pilgrimage, and here they pray, mostly for their one son who is mysteriously mute.

This is a gothic horror novel all about mysteries piled on top of mysteries. Questions surround the family, the Loney itself, their faith, and the strange locals that live in the area year-round. The Loney is all about atmosphere. The bleak, gloomy, isolated, cold world of this forgotten corner of England is an unsettling place that strikes fear without actually doing anything at all.

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Severed by Scott Snyder, Scott Tuft, and Attila Futaki

Written by comic book legend Scott Snyder (whose run on Batman is legendary, as is his vampire comic American Vampire), Severed is a fantastic piece of American horror. Set in 1916, the story follows a boy named Jack who runs away from his warm, loving home to find his “real” father.

Jack hops on a train and hitchhikes his way across the US, while being hunted by a monstrous, cannibalistic killer. This is a thrilling cat-and-mouse story set on the open road of pre-war America. It has hefty Stephen King vibes but also manages to stand on its own as an original horror comic.

The book’s framing device begins with an older Jack telling us the story of what happened on that journey and how he lost an arm along the way. And this is all expressed through some stunningly textured and rich art by Attila Futaki.

With a little blood and a lot of terror, this is an excellent piece of dark, unsettling American horror.

Buy a copy here!

The Lost Ones by Anita Frank

Set during World War I, The Lost Ones is a historical piece of gothic horror fiction very reminiscent of the works of Laura Purcell and Susan Hill. Our protagonist is a tortured young widow who lost her husband during the war, which she herself worked through as a nurse.

She has now moved in with her pregnant sister in her impressive country manor, but it’s here that the horrors unfold. Stella hears footsteps and crying: the sounds of a child haunting the house. And she becomes obsessed with who the child was and what happened to them.

This is a novel that blends horror, gothic drama, and mystery into a delicious cocktail of intrigue and dread. One of the most engaging modern horror books of recent years.

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Wilder Girls by Rory Power

Wilder Girls is unique on this list of modern horror books in the sense that it’s the only YA novel here. And, in true horror fashion, it blends with other genres as well. Those genres include post-apocalyptic fiction, sci-fi, and “pandemic fiction”.

This YA horror novel is set on an island off the coast of Maine. This island is home to the Raxter School for Girls, which has been put under quarantine after the breakout of a virus called the Tox.

The Tox has taken the lives of several students and teachers, and those who haven’t died have been physically mutated in painful and gruesome ways. These mutations are described with rawness and grit, making the reader squirm with discomfort.

Our protagonist, Hetty, leads us on a journey to uncover the mysteries of this virus, and the quarantine itself, after her best friend Byatt disappears following a “flare-up” of the virus. There is more going on here than meets the eye, and Hetty is willing to endanger herself (and her friend Reese) to find answers, and to find Byatt.

Buy a copy here!

Essential Modern Sci-fi Novels

Whether you’re an aficionado of classic science fiction and want to know what modern authors are all about, or you are new to the genre and want to start with the contemporary and work backwards, here’s what you need to be reading.

These authors from around the world are redefining the genre and writing some of the best modern sci-fi novels you can read right now.

Disclaimer: For a book to make this list of modern sci-fi novels, it has to have been published this century.

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How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

It’s not a stretch to call How High We Go in the Dark the next step in science fiction. This is one of the best modern sci-fi novels you’ll ever read; a bold new approach to the genre of science fiction. Reminiscent of the narratives and themes found in the works of Emily St. John Mandel, with a sprinkling of Black Mirror, Sequoia Nagamatsu’s debut novel is essential reading.

We begin with a scientist whose daughter, also a scientist, has recently and tragically died while on an expedition to the Batagaika Crater in Siberia. Cliff heads to Siberia to continue his daughter’s work, with the support of her colleagues.

The work involves investigating the melting permafrost to see if any potentially long-frozen diseases might be uncovered and spread across the world. This is a very real issue that scientists fear, and that is part of what makes How High We Go in the Dark so compelling and chilling.

And of course, a virus is uncovered and it does spread. From here, we follow a host of different first-person narratives in a world where infected children have their organs slowly mutated until they fail completely. Multiple sci-fi themes and tropes are explored in new ways here, including the question of human intelligence when a pig that was being used to grow human organs develops advanced intelligence and even telepathic speech.

These disparate themes and narratives all work together so beautifully, like an orchestra of science fiction concepts. It’s beautiful and makes for a very addictive read.

Buy a copy here!

Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author Adrian Tchaikovsky is prolific, having written multiple sci-fi epics, each of which has further cemented him as a modern giant of the genre. Alien Clay might be his finest work; a novel that doesn’t just blend politics with scientific discovery—it stitches them together as inseparable themes and plot elements, all while being set on a strange, deadly, and exciting alien world.

Set some time in humanity’s future, Alien Clay presents an Earth ruled by a tyrannical government known as the Mandate, something which uses the veneer of science to structure society into neatly-organised and easily-controlled binaries. Our scientist protagonist, Daghdev, has been captured as an academic dissident and shipped off to a planet nicknamed Kiln. The prison labour force there are charged with uncovering the secrets of this world.

Kiln is littered with abandoned alien structures which must surely have been built by intelligent hands; they are marked with some kind of language as well. But the people who built them are gone, and they left no trace. Discovering the truth of this world is only half the battle for Daghdev; the other is breaking free of his shackles.

Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang

Translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu

As things stand right now, Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds feels like the defining sci-fi novel of the decade. This is a grand, ambitious, considered, philosophical masterpiece of political science fiction, and one of the very best modern sci-fi novels.

Taking place in 2201, Vagabonds is set on Mars and focuses on the tensions between Mars and Earth. Similar to the timeline of the early USA, Mars was colonised (though unlike the US, it wasn’t already lived on and therefore nothing was stolen).

After its colonisation, Mars was dependent on Earth for supplies, but eventually wanted to strike out on its own and a war for independence ensued. After the war, Earth resembles the greatest extremes of capitalism and Mars is something of a communist utopia.

Forty years after the war, our protagonist, Luoying, is a young Martian woman who has returned to Mars after years of living and studying on Earth as part of the Mercury Group (a batch of young people sent over to learn and improve interplanetary relations).

The big question posed by Vagabonds concerns the meaning of freedom. Each planet views the inhabitants of the other with pity, seeing the other as less free. Terrans are free to pursue different jobs, move cities and countries, and spend their money how they please. Martians are free from the stresses of money, poverty, corporate pressure, unemployment, and unfulfillment.

For their unique freedoms, both planets have their own drawbacks and restrictions. Feeling like she belongs to both cultures, Luoying is seeking answers to the question of what freedom really looks like.

Beyond all of this is the world-building. Hao Jingfang provides us with such a detailed and exciting version of Mars, mechanically, politically, and economically. It’s dense but endlessly fascinating. While it is a long and slow book, Vagabonds is one to get lost in. A genius work of Chinese sci-fi and one of the best modern sci-fi novels.

Buy a copy here!

Read More: The Best Sci-Fi Books Ever Written

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

Written by Scottish author Martin MacInnes, In Ascension is a literary sci-fi epic that has the potential to change the way you think and feel about the world around you, about what we are, where we came from, and where we might go.

Set in the present day, In Ascension follows a Dutch biologist named Leigh, who grew up in Rotterdam and is captivated by sea life. In the novel’s first part, Leigh joins an expedition to the north Atlantic ocean, to explore a deep sea vent that might tunnel deeper than the Mariana Trench, and therefore house life never seen before.

The life in this vent, untouched for billions of years, would be like a time capsule, taking us back to the earliest forms of life on this planet. What Leigh discovers in the vent takes her to the Mojave Desert, to a job working with a NASA-like space agency that is using a newly-discovered form of fuel to send people to the furthest reaches of our solar system and beyond.

The questions that In Ascension poses, and the incredibly discoveries made, ask the reader to deeply consider that old cliche: we are all made of star stuff.

In Ascension is a modern sci-fi novel that takes us from the most inaccessible parts of the deepest darkest ocean to the furthest point in our solar system. And, as we explore these places old and new, big and small, we ask ourselves what we are, where we came from, where we will go, and how it is ultimately all the same. We are all star stuff.

Buy a copy of In Ascension here!

The Hierarchies by Ros Anderson

It might be impossible to count the number of sci-fi stories that explore the themes of consciousness, AI, and machine learning. These themes have been made famous by writers like Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro, Becky Chambers, and so many more.

But here, with The Hierarchies, Ros Anderson has managed to do something fresh and new on this well-trodden ground, while also taking a bold, modern approach to feminist writing. Sylv.ie is a sex robot. She exists to please the man who owns her. Sylv.ie’s owner is a married man whose wife is pregnant, and she gives birth soon after the novel begins.

Sylv.ie must stay upstairs, sit idle, browse the internet (Ether), and wait for her husband to come to her with his needs — be they sexual or social.

Sylv.ie’s moral code is governed by a short list of “hierarchies”, much like Asimov’s laws of robotics, and she is able to learn and develop by plugging herself into the internet.

Soon enough, however, Silv.ie wakes up in hospital for a “routine” check. She gets a nice new vagina, a software update, and upon returning home, she realises that a large section of her memory is missing. When she finds a coded diary from her past self, a self she no longer remembers, she learns that she has already attempted to escape once, and she must do again.

The Hierarchies is a very nuanced and captivating exploration of consciousness, learning, personal growth, freedom, and purpose. It tackles themes that sci-fi has been tackling since its inception but in bold new ways.

One fresh and fascinating aspect of the novel is the inclusion of an angry group of “bio women” who protest the existence of female sex robots. These women are allegorical of conservative bigots who look down their noses at transgender women and sex workers, and their inclusion makes this one of the most bold and dynamic modern sci-fi books you’ll ever read.

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The Vanished Birds by Simon Jiminez

The Vanished Birds is a perfect work of science fiction. An ambitious tale about purpose, destiny, and human advancement which spans decades and follows a dynamic cast of complex, compelling characters. Nia is captain of a small transport ship which visits a farming community every twelve years. During one particular visit, she is handed a mute boy who fell from the stars, and asked to take him to the Umbai Company’s Pelican Station.

After humanity abandoned an uninhabitable Earth, the first things we built were a series of bird-like stations, masterminded by Fumiko Nakajima, a woman who has lived for a thousand years by frequently freezing herself in cold sleep. She wants this boy, and her curiosity will send Nia on a journey of discovery beyond Umbai space.

The Vanished Birds breaks many of the conventions of sci-fi storytelling in small ways, in order to deliver readers something fresh, dynamic, and frankly beautiful.

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

Ninefox Gambit, the first book in a trilogy of mind-bending, reality-twisting space operas, isn’t so much a pushing of the genre’s boundaries as it is an ignoring of them. In fact, the boundaries don’t exist at all. This is uncharted territory, and Yoon Ha Lee will do with them as he pleases. This is a novel that is as much a political and tactics-focussed military space opera as it is a work of borderline surrealist mathematical insanity.

In a far-distant future, so much of space is controlled by a hegemony known as the hexarchate. Through a deep understanding of mathematical and physical laws, time and space can be altered to one’s will. And so, the hexarchate must universally agree on how those laws should work.

When everyone agrees, there is harmony. But occasionally, heretical groups pop up to challenge the status quo. And doing so can literally break the fabric of everything.

Our protagonist is both a soldier and a mathematical genius named Cheris. When she strays from the agreed-upon tactics of a mission, she is set to be punished. Instead, she is anchored to the ghost of a madman who was once the greatest tactician the hexarchate has ever known. With his voice in her head, she must lead an assault on the latest group of heretics, in order to restore balance to everything. But what will she learn along the way?

Appleseed by Matt Bell

The phenomenal Appleseed is a slow-burn eco-novel spanning multiple timelines and genres, and one of the most revolutionary modern sci-fi novels ever written. Matt Bell expertly blends folklore with sci-fi and post-apocalyptic themes with an ending that ties three disparate narratives together in ways that you simply can’t predict.

We spend the majority of our time as readers in eighteenth-century Ohio, as two brothers follow the path of the legendary Johnny Appleseed, planting apple orchards across the US. As the brothers pass through settlements and forests teeming with myth, their bond is tested over and over.

The second narrative is set fifty years from our present time, in the second half of the 21st Century, when climate change has ravaged the Earth. Having invested early in genetic engineering and food science, one company now owns all the world’s resources. But a growing resistance is working to redistribute both land and power.

You follow one of the company’s original founders as he returns to the headquarters, intending to destroy what he helped build. The final narrative is set thousand years in the future, when North America is covered by a massive sheet of ice. One lonely sentient being inhabits a tech station on top of the glacier.

You follow him as he sets out to follow a homing beacon across the continent in the hopes of discovering the last remnant of civilisation. There are few novels as imaginative and beautifully plotted as Appleseed, a novel of important ideas that need to be paid attention to.

This is one of the best sci-fi novels on the shelves, especially for fans of the eco-novel subgenre.

Buy a copy here!

To Be Taught If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

To Be Taught If Fortunate is an original sci-fi novella by Becky Chambers. While her celebrated Wayfarer series is a space opera, this is a harder, quieter, more serious story.

This is one of the best modern sci-fi novels; set in a future where a new public space program has been kickstarted by the funding of ordinary people, with a specific view to exploring and discovering and expanding human understanding of the cosmos.

A crew of four people has been sent to a faraway solar system, in order to examine the planets and moons that are believed to harbour life.

To Be Taught If Fortunate is another novel that flexes the muscles of Becky Chambers’ imagination. She repeatedly considers what might, reasonably, be found on certain worlds with certain climates.

This is not about imagined civilisations but about biodiversity and small discoveries, about the beauty of life and the magic of exploration. This is a book that celebrates science and what it can achieve. Easily one of the most impactful and comforting little sci-fi books by women that you’re likely to read in your life.

Buy a copy here!

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Annihilation is the first in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, and this modern sci-fi novel was also adapted into a film by Alex Garland, director of Ex Machina. While it is the first of a trilogy, Annihilation also works perfectly as a stand-alone novel, and it is also smartly short. A novel as strange and surreal as this one not outstaying its welcome is a very savvy decision.

Annihilation is set entirely within the limits of “Area X”, an abandoned and marshy part of US coastline which was officially designated a place of ecological disaster.

Our protagonist is a nameless biologist who is part of the twelfth expedition into Area X; the purpose of these expeditions is the explore the strange area and learn as much as possible about what it is and what caused it. Most expeditions end with disaster: insanity, disease, tragedy. And as our protagonist ventures deeper in, stranger things emerge.

The strangest being a tower/tunnel which burrows into the Earth. There is a staircase inside and the walls are lined with biblical-sounding gibberish made out of moss, flowers, and other living stuff. The thing that wrote this gibberish is a possibly extraterrestrial humanoid creature dubbed the Crawler.

Annihilation is a sci-fi eco novel of sorts that explores the concept of ecological change and adaptation in the face of difficulty and things beyond our understanding. Lovecraftian, feverishly strange, but also beautiful in a way that only the best sci-fi can be, Annihilation is one of the most addictive modern sci-fi novels ever written.

Buy a copy here!

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel took the world by storm with the publication of her post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven, a novel which focusses on the preservation of human art and culture rather than the survival of people themselves. With Sea of Tranquility, she has written a phenomenal piece of time travel science fiction which surpasses even Station Eleven, in this writer’s opinion.

Cleverly tied to her literary thriller The Glass Hotel with recurring events and characters from that novel, this is a book that unfurls gradually and strangely, creating a kind of symmetry with itself by the final page. We begin in 1912, with an English nobleman exiled to the rural wilds of western Canada by his family. Then we move to the modern day, with characters from The Glass Hotel revealing what almost seems like a glitch in the world.

Next is the life of an author who grew up on a moon colony and is now doing a global book tour in 2203, just as a pandemic is about to sweep the planet. Finally, at the book’s halfway point, we meet our true protagonist: a man named Gaspery, whose sister works for a time travel agency.

All of these lives become stitched together as the novel progresses, in ways that will blow your mind over and over again. The plotting of this novel is beaten only by its incredibly revelations. Sea of Tranquility is a true masterpiece, and one of the very best modern sci-fi novels.

Buy a copy of Sea of Tranquility here!

The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey

Before he turned to novels, M.R. Carey was a legend of the comic book world, writing under the name Mike Carey. His comic book masterpieces Lucifer and The Unwritten were celebrated across the medium.

The Girl With All The Gifts was Carey’s first foray into prose, and what a breakout hit it was. Blending science fiction and horror in a post-apocalyptic world, this novel is a dazzling exploration of human connection.

Our protagonist, Melanie, lives in a cell. Every day, she is strapped into a wheelchair and wheeled into a classroom full of other young children where they learn subjects like maths and English, like in any other school. Melanie loves one teacher in particular, and hates the military sergeant who treats her with fear and disdain.

Soon enough, we learn that the world outside this military base is infested with zombie-like things that have been infected with the fungal cordyceps (just like in The Last of Us).

Melanie and the other children are infected with the fungus, and yet they remain calm and lucid and intelligent. That is, unless they are given the chance to taste human flesh, in which case they become feral and dangerous. Sergeant Parks and the scientists at the base believe that Melanie is dead, and that what they are talking to each day is the fungus talking through her body. She is simply a test subject.

Beginning in a cramped prison cell and eventually opening up into a dangerous trek across the southeast of England, The Girl With All The Gifts is a frantic page-turner and one of the finest modern sci-fi books around.

Buy a copy here!

Infinity Gate by M.R. Carey

Infinity Gate, the first in a duology by M.R. Carey (author of The Girl With All The Gifts, above), is a sweeping science fiction epic that takes readers across an infinite multiverse. Decades from now, professor Hadiz Tambuwal stumbles across a way to Step between dimensions, granting her access to alternate Earths.

The Earth that she leaves behind, our Earth, has been ravaged by climate change and capitalism to the point of collapse. What she finds — or, more accurately, what finds her — is a political alliance of a millions Earths known as the Pandominion.

Our Earth is rare, it turns out; one which never learned to Step. The million Earths that did learn this science formed a union of worlds, but war is coming. Matching the Pandominion in terms of strength and size is a similar network of parallel Earths on which all life is mechanical, rather than biological, and these two factions do not understand one another.

Infinity Gate is a modern sci-fi epic that takes readers on a journey across many different Earths: some where no life exists at all, others where life was wiped out hundreds of years ago.

Many Pandominion worlds are almost entirely similar to ours; others saw herbivores and carnivores, rather than omnivorous apes, grow and evolve to become the dominant species. The scale of this multiversal novel is unparalleled, making Infinity Gate one of the most exciting modern sci-fi novels on the shelves.

Buy a copy of Infinity Gate here!

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This is How You Lose the Time War is a stellar short sci-fi novel, co-written by two celebrated and award-winning science fiction authors. Primarily, this is a love story. Our protagonists, Red and Blue, are accomplished agents of rival factions which are fighting for control of time itself.

While roaming the aftermath of a battlefield, Red finds a letter left by Blue; the letter taunts and flirts and teases Red, and also reveals that Blue is becoming disenchanted by this endless war. From here we move between Red and Blue’s perspectives, and those perspectives are divided by letters sent back and forth between the two.

As they move through strands of time that move back and forth through possible pasts and futures, each finds a letter left by the other, and these letters steadily take on a different tone.

From flirtatious taunts to passionate declarations of love, the letters steadily spell out the intense addiction that these two opposing women have developed for one another.

The world-building is also thrilling. Larger-than-life concepts involving time manipulation and riding the threads of time, taking us from Shakespeare’s London to mecha wars on distant planets. This is a wildly exciting science fiction novel that shows us how, no matter the scale of the world, no matter the advancements in technology, love still conquers all.

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Ten Low by Stark Holborn

The first book in an action-packed sci-fi trilogy, Ten Low is inescapably comparable to legendary works of fiction like Dune, Mad Max, and even Star Wars, thanks to its rich yet barren desert planet (or, in this particular case, moon) setting. Our protagonist is the titular Ten Low, named for the number of years she was sentenced to serve for the actions she took during a war between a federation and a rebellion within a single solar system.

The novel is set in a future in which Earth is behind us, but still spoken of. Some people still living were even born there. And since escaping prison, Low has been hiding out on a backwater desert moon occupied by raiders, ravagers, black market traders, and other lowlifes. But this moon is also home to a strange, ghostlike alien race that goes by many names, and is so unknowable that many refuse to believe they exist at all.

But Low is guided by their whispers, and when we begin, she is urged towards a crash site, the only survivor of which is a genetically modified child soldier—a general of the federation side. Low fixes her up, and the unlikely pair begin a difficult journey of discovery, betrayal, and many tough fights in this brilliant adventure of a sci-fi novel.

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi

The first in an epic sci-fi series by genre titan John Scalzi, Old Man’s War is set in a future in which humanity has colonised much of the galaxy, but that has put us in the crosshairs of many other races vying for ownership of the stars. On Earth, people know little about what the spacefaring Colonial Defence Force gets up to, but when they hit 75 years old, American citizens are allowed to apply for the military and start a whole new life.

They don’t know how, but those who enlist assume that their age will somehow be reversed. With few years left to live, many prefer to spend a second life fighting an intergalactic war than continuing to deteriorate. John Perry has just turned seventy-five. He and his wife agreed to enlist together, but she died of a sudden stroke several years ago. And before he knows it, Perry is whisked off to the stars, and to an unknowable future.

Old Man’s War is a fast and vibrant slice of modern sci-fi, full of wit and humour, as well as plenty of heart and soul. Its version of the future is a smart and strange one, and its story is urged forward by forged friendships and plenty of twists and turns. Scalzi is a mastermind of great science fiction, and Old Man’s War is the best proof of that.

Buy a copy of Old Man’s War here!

Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh

With Do You Dream of Terra-Two?, Temi Oh makes the wonderfully creative choice to take the established concept of a coming-of-age story and set it on a lonely ship bound for a far-flung planet. The titular Terra-Two is an Earth-like planet that was recently discovered, and will take twenty-three years for a manned ship to reach. But this is necessary, given the way our climate is changing.

The crew of the Damocles is comprised of four experienced astronauts, doctors, and engineers, and six British teenagers who have been training for, and dreaming of, this one-way trip for most of their lives. The novel’s first quarter introduces us to our protagonists, establishes the stakes, and throws a painful and shocking emotional curveball at us before we’ve even left Earth.

Once their journey begins, we watch with beady eyes as these young people adapt to life in space, grow, learn to work together, fight, and fall frequently into disfunction. Do You Dream of Terra-Two? blends the isolation and wide-eyed hope of a good sci-fi novel with the angst and drama of a good coming-of-age story, and this strange genre cocktail tastes excellent.

Buy a copy here!

Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

Several People Are Typing is a mind-bending, genre-bending novel presented entirely as a series of Slack messages. This fantastic piece of comedy horror science fiction for the digital age that would make Franz Kafka proud.

Several People Are Typing begins with Gerald, a man who works in New York City, logging into his company Slack to inform his colleagues that he has been trapped in the app. Upon learning that his consciousness (or possibly his entire self?) has been uploaded to Slack, his colleagues naturally don’t believe him and it becomes a tired prank to them very quickly.

But, with nothing to do but figure out how to get out, Gerald keeps working and his productivity gradually improves in a hilarious moment of kafkaesque black comedy. Meanwhile, more creepy events occur with increasing frequency and drama, including the sound of howling outside one colleague’s window and signs that the Slack help bot may be gaining sentience.

What begins as a kafkaesque commentary on modern work culture slowly descends into a creeping sci-fi horror novel, all written like a Slack transcript. Brilliant.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Written by one of the modern world’s finest and most beloved authors, Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun is easily one of the finest modern sci-fi books of recent years.

This is a science fiction masterpiece that tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend (or AF). The purpose of an AF is to be a companion to the teenager who selects them.

Klara begins her story in a store in an unspecified American city. She is put on display and, through her eyes, we learn about the world — or, at least, the world as she sees it. Klara is soon chosen by a teenage girl called Josie who takes Klara home to live with her in the countryside.

This is a novel about love and hope. Klara’s relationship with Josie, and Josie’s relationship to her own mother Chrissie and her best friend Rick, is the glue of this book.

What makes this almost an elevation of Ishiguro’s unreliable narrator trope is Klara’s own unique perspective on the world (literally, how her robot eyes see things, and metaphorically, how she learns and comes to understand people and their relationships).

This is a very sweet and tender novel full of love in all its forms. It considers class and social groups, but it also deals heavily with love, religion, superstition, and, most importantly, how we hope; how we use hope as a method of survival.

Alongside Never Let Me Go, Klara and the Sun proves that Ishiguro’s greatest strength is observing human relationships through a variety of lenses; and he is at his best when using science fiction as a tool for exploring that to its fullest.

Buy a copy here!

Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

Translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses

Blurring the lines between sci-fi and dystopian fiction, Tender is the Flesh brings us something entirely new. Living in a world that is either a little to the future of, or a possible parallel to, our own, our protagonist Tejo works at a slaughterhouse which deals exclusively in human meat.

A disease is said to have tainted, and mostly wiped out, most non-human animals, and so came a period known as the Transition, wherein human meat production became an accepted norm across the world. The humans that are bred for slaughter are not considered people, are referred to as ‘heads’, and are kept in much the same condition as cattle are today.

Therein lies the book’s first clear-cut message: to consider how modern-day battery farming, and meat and dairy production, treats non-human animals: the conditions they’re kept in; the ways they are raised, tortured, abused, and ultimately killed.

If this were the only message the book carried, it wouldn’t be adding anything new to the popular discourse. Fortunately, Tender is the Flesh offers a broader scope than that. While Tender is the Flesh treads dangerously close to being gratuitous and unnecessarily violent at times, and its exposition never ceases to feel disconnected from the plot.

The questions and warnings it raises are ones genuinely worth sitting with and pondering on as our planet continues to diminish in a frightening multitude of ways.

Tejo’s personal story is also aggressively compelling, and it carries the book’s messages and morals expertly. It is, ultimately, those messages that make this book worth reading, and what makes it one of the best modern sci-fi novels.

Buy a copy here!

The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

What do you get when you cross the political wisdom and boundless imagination of Terry Pratchett with the knowledge and experience of Stephen Baxter?

One of the most essential modern sci-fi novels on the shelves, that’s what.

One of the simplest pleasures that good sci-fi novels can provide is eliciting that “wow” feeling when confronted with a big idea or event.

The Long Earth is full of these moments:

• When you follow protagonist Joshua to his first parallel world
• When you learnt that there are no people on any other world
• When you learn that they are potentially infinite
• When you learn of a strange human-like race of natural “steppers” that move between parallel worlds
• When you learnt that a catastrophe is wiping out these worlds

There’s a healthy helping of surrealism here, as well as a big dollop of political intrigue. But there is also that blissful sense of wide-eyed discovery and adventure.

The Long Earth is a novel in which scary and dangerous ideas coalesce with the human urge for adventure, discovery, and doing something risky for the sake of it.

While it lacks the wit of Pratchett’s Discworld series, it makes up for that with a mind-opening feeling of discovery and intrigue.

Buy a copy here!

The Employees by Olga Ravn

Translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021, The Employees is a short sci-fi novel by Danish author Olga Ravn. Set on a massive spaceship in the 22nd Century, this is a satire of hypercapitalist workplace culture. It is one of the very best modern sci-fi novels.

The Employees is structured as a series of interview statements with various workers about a ship which has just picked up a collection of unknown objects from a newly discovered planet. The objects are slowly and subtly changing the minds and feelings of the workers, both human and humanoid (robot AI).

And the company is observing these changes through a series of interviews with both groups. This Danish sci-fi novel explores the theme of AI and the meaning of life in truly fresh and original ways. It also satirises the cold and uncaring relationship between a company and its workforce.

The company sits silent and invisible as its human employees grow increasingly nostalgic about life on Earth, while its robot employees feel lost, wistful, and even angry as they too become nostalgic, but for what?

The concept of AI and the ethics behind it are considered from new angles, such as when one humanoid observes that it has been programmed to behave faithfully, but all it sees are hypocritical and unfaithful humans all around it.

The Employees is one of the most original and unique science fiction novels to come along in years, and an absolute must-read amongst sci-fi books by women authors.

Buy a copy here!

Tower by Bae Myung-hoon

Translated from the Korean by Sung Ryu

Tower is a truly unique and boundary-pushing piece of modern science fiction. As its name implies, this piece of Korean sci-fi is set entirely in an enormous tower. This titular tower is a nation unto itself, home to 500,000 people.

Bae implies that it was built on Korean soil but this is never explicitly stated. The book is divided into a series of interconnected speculative tales, all set within this solitary tower nation known as Beanstalk.

The world-building is fantastic, as the tower needs to be a believable place in order for the author’s disparate tales to work. Infrastructure, economy, politics, and daily life all need to be accounted for and designed in a way that the reader can understand and appreciate.

The six stories in Tower are tied together by the place itself and by recurring characters and events. And each story serves to further build the world while also telling an entirely self-contained tale. In that sense, this is a unique piece of Korean fiction that blends the concepts of the novel and the short story collection.

And each tale also, as all good science fiction does, poses an ethical, political, or philosophical quandary for us to muse over. What an amazing book amongst the best modern sci-fi novels.

Buy a copy here!

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

The Echo Wife is a grounded piece of speculative science fiction. A deeply personal and human tale of love and loss and betrayal and desperation and death. Our protagonist, Evelyn, is a research biologist who has seen breakthroughs in the field of human cloning. Her ex-husband, a fellow biologist named Nathan, has recently remarried.

After receiving an award for her work, Evelyn is asked out to tea by Nathan’s new partner, Martine, who turns out to be a clone of Evelyn, grown by Nathan. Martine also happens to be pregnant, which is something that Evelyn, the leading expert in cloning, believes to be impossible.

To say more would be to spoil a novel full of twists and turns. This is an intimate science fiction thriller, a true page-turner. What makes this novel so crisp and tight, however, is Evelyn herself. Written as a true scientist, she is clinical and logical in her view of people. She is kind and helpful, but not warm and passionate.

The world of The Echo Wife is also wonderfully well-realised. While perhaps not hard sci-fi, it is grounded enough to feel believable — or, at least, conceivably.

Tightly plotted, elegantly written, and populated with sharp, unique characters, The Echo Wife is a modern masterpiece of speculative science fiction that explores big moral and ethical questions, as all good speculative sci-fi should.

Buy a copy here!

I’m Waiting for You by Kim Bo-young

Translated from the Korean by Sung Ryu and Sophie Bowman

Kim Bo-Young is a legend of Korean literature, and even worked as a script editor on Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer. With I’m Waiting for You, readers can see first-hand why she’s such a special sci-fi author. This collection of four stories is essential reading amongst modern sci-fi novels.

The four stories in this collection actually work as two pairs. The first and fourth stories — I’m Waiting For You and On My Way to You — are the same tale told from two perspectives: a bride and groom each making their way home to Earth for their wedding ceremony.

The second and third stories — The Prophet of Corruption and That One Life — which are also the longest and shortest tales respectively, are a blend of religion, mysticism, and science fiction. In these two middle tales, the characters are a set of gods, and it is quickly revealed that they created Earth as a school in which they themselves can learn and grow.

The main protagonist of The Prophet of Corruption, Naban, is a single god whose prophets, disciples, and children all separated from them like cells. Individually, they spend entire lifetimes on Earth, learning and experiencing and dying.

Naban believes in asceticism as a school of learning; their children are reborn in low roles; they suffer and toil and eventually return home. But some are rebelling against this approach to living and learning. What makes these stories so tantalisingly addictive is both Kim’s world-building and also her attempt at writing gods as characters, with motivations and behaviours different from our own.

The stories that bookend this collection are each written in an epistolary fashion, as letters to the other. In I’m Waiting For You, our nameless groom is trying to make it to Earth, and is updating his bride each time something goes awry (and a lot goes awry).

The same is true in On My Way to You, only here the bride has her own hurdles to get over. These two stories are heartbreaking. You’ll root for them, cry for them, hope against hope that things will work out for them.

Buy a copy here!

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

John Scalzi has solidly established himself as one of the most inventive, unique, and hilarious voices in modern science fiction. His novels are full of heart and humour, and Starter Villain is another wonderful example of that. Protagonist Charlie is thirty-two, divorced, and has ended up back in his hometown working as a substitute teacher after losing his job as a journalist in Chicago. But there’s good news: his uncle has just died.

Charlie was under no assumptions that his quiet (not eccentric at all) billionaire uncle would have left him much, if anything in his will. But, as he soon learns, Uncle Jake was, in fact, a professional villain, providing covert and illegal services to various governments and agencies around the world. He also had an island volcano lair, an army of intelligent spy cats, and an unhappy dolphin labour force who are looking to unionise.

As the inheritor of his uncle’s empire, Charlie suddenly finds himself whisked into the world of villainy and everything it entails. There’s a lot to learn, but his cat Hera should be able to help him along. Starter Villain is a charming, smart, and often hysterical novel.

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

A breakout hit when it was first published in 2017, this epistolary modern sci-fi novel takes the simple concept of “mystery” and stretches it as far as possible. Author Sylvain Neuvel clearly had a lot of fun teasing something, big, something tantalising, something jaw-dropping in the execution of Sleeping Giants.

The initial premise is simple: a young girl in a quiet USA town sneaks out at night, falls into a pit, and finds herself sitting in the palm of an enormous metal hand. Growing up to become a scientist, Rose Franklyn has dedicated her life to understanding what this hand is, and where the rest of the body is.

As the novel progresses, we find more and more parts dotted around the planet, and we also learn that they are likely extraterrestrial in origin, given the near-impossible rarity of the metals used to forge them and the age of the limbs. The body parts are slowly assembled, and more and more truths come to light.

The epistolary style of this narrative makes the plot that much more engaging, as everything is presented as a series of classified interviews with government agents of private journals of those involved.

Buy a copy of Sleeping Giants here!

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu

Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem brings science fiction back to the era of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke—an era of wild and surreal concepts, loosely made to look plausible through their links to physics and mathematics. Set between China’s Cultural Revolution and a version of its present, the novel leads readers on a disorientating path—with all the pace and excitement of a thriller—to dizzying revelations about the universe.

During the Cultural Revolution, Ye Wenjie saw her father named as a bourgeois academic and killed by a group of students. From here, she is banished to a labour force and eventually recruited onto a mysterious science base which is sending signals out into space. They claim to be disrupting enemy satellites but something else is clearly going on.

In the present day, scientist Wang Miao is working on a new kind of nanomaterial but is soon saddled with the responsibility of infiltrating and spying on a strange collection of scientists (a cult in all but name). Their existence is linked to the suicides of multiple scientists, and once he is involved, Wang starts experiencing strange phenomenon. Adding to the strangeness, he starts playing a new VR game set on a planet with three suns.

The Three-Body Problem is one of the wildest rides you will ever take in the world of science fiction. A strange and exciting story full of cynicism and enormous ideas.

Buy a copy of The Three-Body Problem here!

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

The Space Between Worlds is the debut novel by author Micaiah Johnson; a multiverse-spanning journey of mystery and discovery, and one of the most original and affecting modern sci-fi novels on the shelves.

Our protagonist is Cara, a young traverser who moves through 380 different versions of Earth in order to observe and gather data. Her job is simply to report on what makes each version of Earth unique.

What makes this premise fun is that a traverser can only set foot on an Earth if that Earth’s version of them is dead, and Cara is dead in all but eight Earths, due to the difficult circumstances of her birth and youth. Despite its impressive and ambitious world-building, The Space Between Worlds is actually a rather intimate character-focussed sci-fi novel.

Through this sci-fi novel, Johnson offers us both questions and answers on the themes of identity, nature vs nurture, and the lasting impact of trauma. She gives us satisfying character writing, powerful plot twists, and some nice genre-bending.

Cara herself is the driving force of this novel. A damaged, angry young woman with too much on her shoulders. She is relatable in a tragic kind of way, and someone to watch with unblinking eyes as her journey of discovery becomes more personal than professional.

Buy a copy here!

We often think about international literature in terms of literary fiction; books that are grounded within the culture they come from. But what about genre fiction?

Fantasy, sci-fi, horror, romance? Of all these genres, Chinese science fiction is making enormous waves and leading the genre into a new golden age.

Chinese literature, for an awful long time now, has offered us something special indeed. Chinese authors push against, and topple, literary barriers which we are so used to that we don’t even see them any more.

Chinese fantasy author Jin Yong leans into the comical, caricatured beauty of martial arts to deliver a sweeping epic that’s as beautiful as it is bombastic. National treasure Yan Lianke writes the most biting satire found in any culture on Earth (the man is a literary genius).

So, what of Chinese science fiction? What makes it so unique? That’s a difficult question to answer but the most logical one seems to come from the same place of intrigue that all international literature comes from: underexplored perspectives.

Chinese sci-fi deals with concepts, politics, geography, history, traditions, and trajectories that most of us in the West haven’t experienced. Sci-fi might be a genre that predicts the future or imagines an alternate world, but it does so from a place of experience and real-world inspiration.

Chinese science fiction is fascinating for the exact same reason that Chinese literary fiction is fascinating: it comes from a place we have not yet imagined, and so to us, it is new and bold and beautiful. It’s a revolution of the genre.

Chinese authors are ushering a new golden age of science fiction, with writers like Liu Cixin, Hao Jingfang, and Chen Qiufan being the new shining stars; they are this century’s Ursula Le Guin, Arthur C Clarke, and Isaac Asimov.

5 Chinese Science Fiction Books

Here are five works of Chinese science fiction. Two are collections, one is a trilogy, and the last two are novels. All are available in translation in English, and all are stellar works of Chinese sci-fi.

Invisible Planets

Collected, translated, and edited by master translator and author Ken Liu, this is where to begin with Chinese science fiction. This is a beautiful, exploratory, enormous (in size and scope) book of Chinese sci-fi stories by a long list of phenomenal authors.

Because they’re all translated by one translator, there is a sense of coherence and pace here, but the variety of themes, styles, and ideas is still dizzying!

Collected in this book is a novella which one the 2016 Hugo Award, and is by an author whose first full-length novel features further down this list.

Folding Beijing is an incredible dystopian sci-fi story which made Hao Jingfang the first female Chinese author to win a Hugo Award, and it was very well-deserved. Also in this collection is a story by the greatest legend of Chinese science fiction (who also features on this list): Liu Cixin.

Read More: 10 Best Chinese Translated Books

Broken Stars

Edited and Translated by Ken Liu

Also collected and translated by Ken Liu (Boston-based author of The Grace of Kings and The Hidden Girl), this is another collection which can be considered a kind of sequel to Invisible Planets.

Once you’ve read Invisible Planets and found that you’re hungry – ravenous – for more Chinese sci-fi stories (which you will be), you need to next turn to Broken Stars for more of the same.

This is another collection of astonishing Chinese sci-fi short stories. Pairing Broken Stars and Invisible Planets together really cements just how expansive and daunting the scope of science fiction is in this new golden age that Chinese authors have ushered in.

Within this collection is an amazing story by rising star (and author of a full-length novel features further below) Chen Qiufan. Chen also has a short sci-fi story in The Book of Shanghai, which is another must-read. He’s destined to be one of the best sci-fi authors of all time.

Read our complete review of Broken Stars here!

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin

Translated by Ken Liu

Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem is famous the world over for two reasons. The first is that it marked the first time that the Hugo Award was won by a Chinese author.

The second is that it was loved and promoted loudly by President Barack Obama. But beyond all of that, The Three-Body Problem is an epic trilogy of mind-bending science fiction that everyone should read.

Like everything else, this book was translated by award-winning author Ken Liu, and it is set, in part, in an alternate history of the Maoist era Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and traces some surreal yet familiar Sci-fi beats from there into the present.

But the book goes so dizzyingly far beyond all of this, entering digital realities, crossing dimensions, encountering other species, and visiting new worlds.

It is a true science fiction epic that is heavy on the science. There is so much to marvel at with this incredible trilogy, one that has almost kick-started a new revolution of science fiction from China.

Read our review of The Three-Body Problem here!

Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan

Chen Qiufan is all set to be one of history’s great sci-fi writers. If his stories in The Book of Shanghai and Invisible Planets are anything to go by, he is one of a kind.

But you don’t need to stop with those tantalisingly short tales. In 2019, his first novel in translation was published. Waste Tide is a book for our times; one that takes capitalism and consumer culture to its bitter, disturbing, and destructive end.

Set on an island known as Silicon Isle, found in the South China Sea, the book explores the life of Mimi, a migrant worker on a polluted and toxic island of electronic waste, where she and all the others are at the mercy of their corrupted bosses.

Waste Tide is a warning against the corrupting and abusive forces born out of greed, consumption, and power. A science fiction masterpiece.

Read More: Outstanding Dystopian Novels in Translation

Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang

Translated by Ken Liu

While Liu Cixin and Chen Qiufang have been making waves of their own, quietly has risen the astonishing sci-fi genius of Hao Jingfang, the first Chinese woman to win the Hugo. Her first full-length novel in English translation is Vagabonds (also translated by Ken Liu).

Vagabonds is set in a future some three hundred years from now, as Mars has been colonised and humanity is now two groups: Terrans and Martians.

After its colonisation, Mars was dependent on Earth for supplies, but eventually wanted to strike out on its own and a war of independence ensued. After the war, Earth resembles the greatest extremes of capitalism and Mars is something of a communist utopia.

Forty years after the war, our protagonist, Luoying, is a young Martian woman who has returned to Mars after years of living and studying on Earth as part of the Mercury Group (a batch of young people sent over to learn and improve interplanetary relations).

Mars resembles a communist utopia while Earth has grown in its capitalistic power. After spending time Earth, Luoying now finds herself torn between the two planets — a vagabond without a true home.

This Chinese sci-fi novel explores, with a mature philosophical edge, these two opposed ideologies and what happens when they’re left to flourish unimpeded. It’s a political saga first and foremost, set against an exciting future sci-fi backdrop.

Read More: Essential Sci-fi Novels by Women

The Best Chinese Novels in Translation

The politics of literature in China is fascinating. For example, Chinese science fiction novels are pushing boundaries and standing head-and-shoulders above all other sci-fi right now, and yet there’s a law in China that forbids time travel in any Chinese fiction.

Time travel movies don’t even make it to Chinese cinemas. Beyond that, several of the authors on this list of Chinese novels are actually in exile, living in the UK or US.

Politics aside, Chinese novels in translation are having something of a golden age right now, with some incredible wuxia novels (martial arts fantasy books), Chinese sci-fi, and earth-shattering Chinese literary fiction for readers to lose themselves in and be forever changed by. Here are some of the very best Chinese novels in translation right now.

The Wedding Party by Liu Xinwu

Translated by Jeremy Tiang

Originally published in China in 1985, Liu Xinwu’s The Wedding Party is a delightful novel set at a moment in time that hung in the air for post-revolution China. Not yet a global powerhouse, but now open for trade and travel, 1980s China was an interesting place not often captured in film or fiction.

It is 1982 and Auntie Xue’s son is getting married. Set on across that single wedding day, from dawn to dusk, The Wedding Party paints a vivid and moving picture of ordinary life amongst the working class of Beijing in the early ’80s. This is an ensemble story that gives multiple perspectives, with Jiyue and his bride’s wedding acting as the fulcrum for these disparate narratives.

As the day passes, we learn more and more about the colourful characters who inhabit Auntie Xue’s neighbourhood. We learn the story of the caterer, the guests, and the two families. We have wedding crashers and plans gone awry.

The Wedding Party is an incredibly human and relatable story, full of detail and backstory that fleshes out every character, giving them all equal weight and attention. While the titular wedding party is central to the plot, this Chinese novel is really about ordinary people’s ordinary lives: their families, their pasts, their dreams, their loves and losses. It is human and grounded by never sombre.

One of the most sweet, charming, and warming Chinese novels in translation you’ll ever read.

Aftershock by Zhang Ling

Translated by Shelly Bryant

Written by celebrated Canada-based Chinese author Zhang Ling, Aftershock traces the life and experiences of a woman who survived the 1976 earthquake in Tangshan — an earthquake which took the lives of 242,000 people. Xiaodeng is now in her thirties; a successful author and mother living in Toronto with her husband. But her mental health is in tatters, and her doctor is helping her retrace the steps of her early life.

Aftershock is presented in a fragmented timeline, jumping back and forth between times and places, and between perspectives. We spend time with Xiaodeng’s mother before Xiaodeng and her brother were born. We witness the earthquake and how it shatters their family into pieces. And we see what has become of Xiaodeng’s life, marriage, and career since moving to Canada.

While Aftershock is a relatively short novel, it masterfully covers several different lives across entire decades, and we are able to pieces all of these fragments of time and space back together as we hope that Xiaodeng will find a way to heal herself. This is a heartbreaking and beautiful Chinese novel.

Buy a copy of Aftershock here!

Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge

Translated by Jeremy Tiang

Strange Beasts of China is a wonderfully imaginative and surreal work of fiction by a writer who, at the time it was originally published in China, was only twenty-one years old. This is one of the most exciting Chinese novels in translation you can read right now.

While Yan Ge now has several other books available in English (White Horse and The Chili Bean Paste Clan), this is a book that showcases the strengths of her imagination, as well as her roots as an author. Strange Beasts of China is set in the city of Yong’an. Here, many races of humanoid ‘beasts’ live amongst the humans, in a similar fashion to Tolkien’s elves and dwarves.

These beasts all have aesthetic and behavioural characteristics which identify them as part of the Sacrificial Beasts, Flourishing Beasts, Sorrowful Beasts etc. And, in each chapter, our protagonist — a novelist and former student of zoology — spends time building a relationship with, and learning the truth about, a member of a group of beasts.

The book was originally a series of short stories, but there is a slowly-moving arc that pushes the greater narrative further. It’s our narrator’s relationship to herself, her own past, and her former professor that keeps us invested in her journey.

Though, perhaps not as much as Yan’s imagination itself does. The titular strange beasts of China are such wildly and creatively devised characters, with their origin stories, powers, and behaviour patterns being so wonderfully alluring.

For example, there is one group of all-female beasts who reside in a temple complex and remind us a little of the wood nymphs of Greek mythology. There is another group who latch onto humans who are low and depressed, before drawing out and feeding off their life energy.

This is a book that celebrates the power of imagination and characterisation. It is also an experiment, in a way, that puts humans in the centre and investigates how we think and act when given an imaginary situation/relationship to handle. Strange Beasts of China is a fun, sometimes bleak, endlessly fascinating work of fiction, and one of the best Chinese novels in translation that you can pick up and read right now.

Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi

Translated by Jeremy Tiang

Ninth Building is a unique kind of Chinese literature, toeing the line between fiction and nonfiction. Zou Jingzhi is a lauded poet, playwright, and screenwriter in China. He also grew up through Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and it’s that personal narrative which you’ll find in Ninth Building.

While everything found in Ninth Building is true, each vignette is written in a prosaic style, thus reading like a novel. Ninth Building is split into two parts. Part One covers the author’s childhood in Beijing, a childhood spent confused and obsessed with the prevalent habit of tattling on one’s neighbours.

Zou learned as a child to be on the lookout for bourgeois intelligentsia; it was an obsession for everyone in Beijing at that time. In Part Two, Zou’s father has been captured and imprisoned, and so young Zou is cast out into the wastelands of northern China to work hard labour. The vignettes here offer us snippets of daily life in that world.

Many vignettes end with a moral; a final statement that sums up what young Zou learned in that particular encounter. We are watching the making of a poet, an artist, under harsh conditions, and how exactly those conditions forged the man who exists today.

As Chinese novels in translation go, Ninth Building is a truly unique piece of literature that gives us a series of glimpses into the mind and experiences of a young man before he grew into one of China’s most celebrated aritsts.

Watch my full review of Ninth Building

Cocoon by Zhang Yueran

Translated by Jeremy Tiang

Jeremy Tiang’s translator’s note at the front of this gorgeous piece of Chinese literary fiction works as a valuable foreword which contextualises these characters and the world they grew up in. Much like the author herself, the pair of protagonists in Cocoon were born and raised in a moment of economic boom.

As a result, Tiang explains, they feel alienated from the generations that came before. They are also products of the One Child Policy. What this means is that Cocoon is a Chinese novel that explores the largest generational gap that has ever existed.

But it’s also a novel about the pain of family bonds; the sheer misery of it. As early as page 2, Zhang remarks, “Blood ties are a form of violence, the way they yoke together people who feel nothing for each other.” Our protagonists are a pair of old childhood friends who reconnect by chance, and reminisce over their youth and the legacies of their parents and grandparents.

But this is also a kind of thriller. Mysteries and confusion hide amongst these memories. Cleverly constructed as a dual-narrative that flits back and forth like a conversation, this is a novel that explores generational trauma and anguish in a very raw and original way; one that is unique to the modern Chinese experience but also remains relatable.

Fu Ping by Wang Anyi

Translated by Howard Goldblatt

Fu Ping is set in Shanghai, at a moment in time that is neither modern nor ancient, as the Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong and the Communist Party has forever changed the landscape of China. Beyond World War II, this long moment is the most exciting, chilling, and fascinating era of global history in the 20^th century.

The titular Fu Ping has been brought to Shanghai from the countryside to be wed to the adopted grandson of Nainai, a long-time nanny who also once hailed from the countryside but now works for a wealthy family in the heart of Shanghai’s Puxi District.

The nameless Grandson is very much a plot device, and the real focus of the plot is in the characters of Fu Ping and Nainai, as well as the street on which they live and work – which is, in many ways, a character in and of itself. Many of the book’s chapters each focuses on a character in the district, telling a story which sums up their lot in life and also works to slot them into the larger narrative of Fu Ping.

It’s fun to see every home and every life illuminated, and there’s a lot to be learned about work life, school life, and family life in 20^th century Shanghai through the lens of Fu Ping – both the book and the character. The set-up of the novel, Fu Ping being brought to Shanghai to marry, is not the story’s true concern. Instead, we spend far more time getting to know Nainai, adoptive grandmother of Fu Ping’s betrothed.

Nainai herself is an intriguing woman, born in rural China but having lived for so long in Shanghai as to have developed political biases about what the ‘true Shanghai’ is. Fu Ping is a novel of ideas. It has a wonderful setting, intriguing characters, a world that captivates and inspires. It has cinched, snipped, pacey dialogue that keeps the story barrelling along.

Monkey King by Wu Cheng’en

Translated by Julia Lovell

Also commonly known as Journey to the West, Monkey King is perhaps the most beloved and iconic Chinese novel ever written. As Chinese novels in translation go, they don’t get more essential than Monkey King. A 16th Century classic of Chinese literature, Monkey King has been adapted countless times, most notably into Japan’s most successful manga/anime series: Dragon Ball.

Monkey King by Wu Cheng’en is a wild and rollicking adventure story that begins like a Greek myth with the hilarious and ridiculous antics of the powerful titular ruler Sun Wukong the Monkey King. Sun Wukong travels and studies and gets ever stronger until he has mastered death itself and ends up picking a fight with every angel in heaven. He is then sealed beneath a mountain for 500 years by Buddha himself.

The rest of the novel follows the fabled journey to the West, as a young monk is tasked by heaven to deliver some scriptures from China to India. Early on his travels, he stumbles across the sealed Monkey King, frees him, and takes him on as an apprentice in an attempt to reform the wild Sun Wukong.

Julia Lovell’s new translation of this book is a laugh a minute. It is a wise and witty story of insane events and ridiculous wonders. There is so much raw energy and hilarious banter poured into every line, making this new abridged translation of Monkey King a must-read, and one of the best Chinese novels in translation you can read right now.

The Day the Sun Died by Yan Lianke

Translated by Carlos Rojas

One of the newest Chinese novels in translation to feature on this list is also one of Yan Lianke’s best. If you’ve never read Yan Lianke before, he’s considered by many (myself included) to be China’s best living novelist. Originally from Henan in central China and now living in Beijing, Yan has been often cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Yan’s novels are heavily political and satirical in theme, meaning that many of them are officially banned in his home country. This makes those of us reading these Chinese novels in translation very lucky indeed!

The Day the Sun Died is, like his other books, a political stab at the rhetoric of the Chinese government. In it, residents of a small village begin to rise from their beds after dark and return to their daily duties, all of them in a state of sleepwalking.

Young Li Niannian watches on in horror as his family and neighbours all work mindlessly through the night before everything descents into chaos.

This fantastic Chinese novel cynically pulls apart the philosophy and of the ‘Chinese Dream’ and takes it to both a logical and an absurd extreme. Despite how new it is, The Day the Sun Died is still one of the best Chinese novels on the shelves today.

Read More: Our full review of The Day the Sun Died

The Shadow Book of Ji Yun

Translated by Yi Izzy Yu and John Yu Branscum

While not a novel — and technically not even fiction — The Shadow Book of Ji Yun remains one of the most spectacular and riveting Chinese books in translation available to English language readers. As the book’s introduction explains, Ji Yun was an 18th Century Chinese philosopher and politician who wrote a frankly obscene number of short accounts concerning supernatural phenomena and spiritual experiences.

The Shadow Book of Ji Yun is a collection of dozens upon dozens of these incredible accounts. Some are first-person encounters with ghosts and spirits, while others are secondhand stories he has been told by friends, colleagues, and those he has met on the road.

Ji Yun has been compared to H.P. Lovecraft, and that is a very apt comparison. The main difference being that Ji Yun (a respected politician and philosopher) claimed his stories to be true. The tales in The Shadow Book of Ji Yun come from the mouths of traders, fellow politicians, family members, Buddhist monks, and more.

They range from the beautiful and inspiring to the eerie and frightening; from the feasible to the impossible. And every single one of them is incredible.

The Vagrants by Yiyun Li

I’ve talked at length about the power of Yiyun Li’s command over language. Her two most recent books, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life and Where Reasons End are some of the most affecting and truly life-changing books I’ve ever touched.

What’s unique about Li isn’t just her sheer command over language but also the fact that she actually writes exclusively in English, her second language. Li is a writer in exile, living permanently in the US.

As she explains in Dear Friend, she has abandoned the Chinese language completely and so all of her fiction and non-fiction is written in English. Despite this, Li is still a Chinese writer and so, of course, her most famous work is on this list of Chinese novels.

The Vagrants is based on a true story from 1970s China. In this tragic Chinese novel, a 28-year-old woman who has just survived ten years of a prison sentence has now been sentenced to death for her loss of faith in Chinese Communism. Following her death, we see the ripples it causes within her local community.

Read More: 5 Books to Read Before you Visit China

Legends of the Condor Heroes by Jin Yong

Translated by Anna Holmwood and Gigi Chang

Wuxia novels are a very special, very unique kind of book. If you don’t know what wuxia novels are, they’re kind of China’s answer to high fantasy novels. In fact, this series of wuxia novels, Legends of the Condor Heroes, was called by many the Chinese Lord of the Rings.

Wuxia literally means martial heroes, and wuxia novels are epic stories of martial arts heroes heading out on grand adventures across the endless landscape of China and fighting with near mystical martial arts strength. These Chinese novels inspired films like House of Flying Daggers and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Legends of the Condor Heroes isn’t yet finished. As of right now, two volumes are out in English, with a third to be released imminently.

The first and third volumes of this enormous epic series of Chinese novels are translated by Anna Holmwood, with the second translated by Gigi Chang. Both translators expertly capture the campy, thrilling, adventurous scope and atmosphere of this pinnacle series of wuxia novels.

Read More: Our review of Legends of the Condor Heroes (Book 2)

The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Translated by Ken Liu

If there’s one specific genre of Chinese novels in translation that is exploding right now, it’s Chinese science fiction. Sci-fi authors in China approach the concept of speculative fiction in a near revolutionary way. If you’d rather a short story collection to prove this point, rather than a novel, check out Broken Stars, edited by the mighty translator and novelist Ken Liu.

In this space of Chinese sci-fi, the author most revered is unquestionably Cixin Liu, whose books are also translated by Ken Liu. Cixin Liu wrote the short story Wandering Earth which was recently adapted into a sweeping epic of a Netflix movie. The Three Body Problem is the first in a trilogy of Chinese novels, followed by The Dark Forest and Death’s End.

It became one of the best-selling Chinese novels in translation after it was praised by Barrack Obama, is an alternative history novel that begins in 1967 before jumping to the present day and a strange but wonderfully realised virtual world.

Read More: Our review of The Three Body Problem

Red Sorghum by Mo Yan

Translated by Howard Goldblatt

Mo Yan is a fascinating writer with an incredible career. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature back in 2012, his pen name (now also his legal name) Mo Yan literally means ‘Don’t Speak’, which was inspired by a repeated warning from his parents about the dangers of speaking out.

Red Sorghum is not only Mo Yan’s most famous novel but also one of the most successful Chinese novels in translation. Similar to Jung Chang’s historical biography Wild Swans, this Chinese novel spans three generations and begins during the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s, the most famous incident of which was the Rape of Nanjing.

Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

Translated by Mabel Lee

While many of the Chinese novels on this list are political, satirical, and often tragic, Soul Mountain is different. It isn’t a transformative sci-fi novel or another of the adventurous wuxia novels. Rather, Soul Mountain is one of the most ambitious and life-affirming stories ever bound.

Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, at first, but this was soon to revealed to be a false alarm. The relief and the thirst for life that a pseudo second chance offered him, Gao travelled across the vast landscape of China and, in the end, Soul Mountain was born.

It’s an epic journey of a novel that’s as much about the landscape of people in China as it is about the nation’s geography and majesty.

Chronicle of a Blood Merchant by Yu Hua

Translated by Andrew Jones

Yu Hua, like Yan Lianke, is one of the most prominent and daring Chinese authors writing today. Based in Beijing and crafting stories through a satirical, critical lens, writing for Yu Hua is a dangerous and defiant act. In his book China in Ten Words, Yu discusses how lax slander and libel laws in China mean his words can be co-opted and manipulated with terrifying ease.

Yu’s Chinese novel Chronicle of a Blood Merchant tells a heart-wrenching tale of a man simply trying to survive during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a period of Chinese history where a famine led to the deaths of countless millions.

Our protagonist relies on selling his own blood to the local blood chief in order to find the money to support his family. This becomes increasingly dangerous and is further complicated by the shame that comes from learning that one of his children is not actually his. This is a moving and desperate novel that captures a life and a moment in time where simply living a life was at its most difficult.

Love in the New Millennium by Can Xue

Translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen

In this list of Chinese novels, we’ve featured nine authors and only two of them are women. This is not fair, and I’m aware of that. Being aware of it doesn’t excuse anything but, unfortunately, the Chinese novels of male authors are still far more in abundance than those of women, at least for now.

Before we discuss Can Xue’s book, one way to level this gender playing field is to read a book I’ve already mentioned: the sci-fi short story collection Broken Stars. Many of the writers in this collection are women, and theirs are the best stories in the collection.

As for Can Xue, her novel Love in the New Millennium is a treasured and celebrated Chinese novel the world over. The author herself is considered by many to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Yan Lianke as the pinnacle of Chinese authors today.

This novel, her newest, is an experimental and often comical piece of surrealism featuring fractured narratives that, despite how strange and abstract it often seems to be, proves to be a wholly addicting and thrilling Chinese novel.

The Four Books by Yan Lianke

Translated by Carlos Rojas

Yan Lianke is the only author to feature on this list twice, and that’s simply because, as previously mentioned, he is the best Chinese author writing today. Reading more Yan Lianke is vital on the road to enlightenment (or something like that).

Perhaps what’s most remarkable about Yan Lianke is the remarkable ability of his boundless imagination to constantly create new and clever ways to critique and satirise the ethics, methods, and philosophy of the Chinese government.

In The Four Books, perhaps Yan’s most celebrated and daring Chinese novel, academics, experts, and intellectuals are sent to “re-education camps” overseen by the Child. The satire is very much on the nose here – how many times have we referred to fascist leaders and their followers as children? – but the content is very much grounded in real and recent Chinese history.

The Four Books is a blistering and intense read, and one of the most vital must-read Chinese books you’ll ever find.

China Dream by Ma Jian

Translated by Flora Drew

The first and most important thing to know about Ma Jian, one of the most prolific Chinese writers around, is that he, like Yiyun Li, is a writer in exile. While she settled in New York, Ma Jian has been living in London for decades, where he loudly and frequently uses rights that were not afforded to him in China to protest the human rights violations of the Chinese government.

The first book of Ma Jian’s that I ever read, Red Dust, is a travelogue that documents Ma’s own journey from Beijing into the rugged landscape of China as a young bohemian artist in the ‘80s. While this book is a fascinating time capsule, it certainly reads like something written by a restless bohemian artist.

China Dream, published at the end of 2018, is a far more ambitious, scathing, and impassioned book. Rather than a travelogue, this is a Chinese novel that is full of piss and vinegar. A venomous attack on the ‘Chinese Dream’ that blends reality with fantasy to create a nightmarish dystopia that, at its core, doesn’t seem all that surreal.

Ghost Music by An Yu

Ghost Music is a wild card on this list simply because, though its author was born and raised in Beijing and now lives in Hong Kong, she writes her novels in English and so there is no translator. An Yu’s debut novel, Braised Pork was a bold and adventurous novel, heavily tinged with surrealism in a way reminiscent of Haruki Murakami.

Her second novel, Ghost Music, retains that feverish surrealism but refines it, cuts away the fat, and leaves us with something beautifully and tightly-crafted. Ghost Music follows a motherless married woman in Beijing whose mother-in-law has moved in with her. At the same time, our protagonist begins receiving strange packages: boxes of mushrooms.

While her husband is absorbed in his job at a car company and her mother-in-law reveals secrets about her son’s childhood (such as the fact that he is, in fact, not an only child), our protagonist must somehow maintain her grip on reality.

Our protagonist is also a piano teacher and daughter of a once-renowned pianist. The fact that an internationally celebrated pianist went missing years ago also factors into this tale. There are several moving pieces here, and surrealism seeps into all of it. There are strange dreams and talking mushrooms and a village drowning in pollen-like orange dust.

But it’s all deceptively simply, and at its heart this is a novel about family, and and about self-love and self-acceptance.

For the first book that we published at Honford Star, we made a small but hugely influential decision – we’d hire a Korean artist for our cover of a collection of short stories, Sweet Potato, by the classic Korean author Kim Tong-in. As a publisher of translated East Asian fiction, hiring an artist from the book’s home country might not seem like a huge deal, but, as far as we know, Honford Star is the only publisher that (almost) always does this. 

 Why do we do this? It is certainly not to make our lives easier. Finding an artist that we like and who we can communicate with doesn’t do any favors for our stress levels nor does figuring out exchange rates or how to transfer money. But the upsides are worth it every time.

First off, there is real value in having an artist who understands the context the stories are set in. Western book designers are an extremely talented bunch on the whole, but it is impossible for them to know the historical, cultural, and literary background of every country.

However, Choi Jee-ook, the artist who did the cover of Sweet Potato, does know about the world Kim Tong-in was writing in. Choi could, for example, have opted for a simple image of a woman in traditional Hanbok or some other well-known visual aspect of Korean life.

Instead of the obvious, Choi illustrated the main character being weighed down by the needs of the farming community she came from and the modern life she aspires to but can’t attain because of society’s gender roles. These are symbolized, respectively, by sweet potatoes (naturally) and consumer goods with traditional Korean designs. 

With local knowledge, our artists have more information to draw from, leading to more unique covers.  Dal Sang, the artist for our collection of stories by the Korean author Kang Kyeong-ae, has actually seen the mountains she drew for the book’s cover.

Similarly, the Taiwanese artist Chiachi Yu, who did the cover to Hunter School, understands what the rural and lesser known areas of her home country look like. With that knowledge, she was able to deliver a wonderful cover that captures the spirit of the authors environmentalism that surpasses anything that could be done by using photos for references. 

Hiring East Asian artists also helps us avoid terrible book cover clichés. For the first cover she did for us, Scales of Injustice, Yu uses the national flag of Japan to convey the presence of the colonial occupiers. Contrast this with all the terrible, terrible covers that use the offensive Imperial Japanese Army flag. By hiring a Taiwanese artist for Scales of Injustice, Honford Star is much more likely to avoid that sort of lazy garbage. 

And it’s not just lazy garbage we are able to avoid but most popular Western book trends. East Asian artists are working in a different context with different influences and therefore produce different covers that don’t often line up with any trends in English language publishing. So for the cover of Tower, the artist Choi Jisu gave us a cover that doesn’t resemble any translated Korean books (or any book cover in English). 

Or take Wang Zhihong’s cover for Astral Season, Beastly Season by Japanese author Tahi Saihate. If you pick up a translated Japanese novel, the likelihood that cover has an image of either a Japanese woman or a red circle approaches 100%.

Wang, though Taiwanese himself and our one exception to the home country rule, skipped all the women and circles to create a weird blob eating a hand-drawn star. So until amorphous blobs become a trend in Japanese translated fiction, his cover will stand alone in its creativity. 

We don’t think it is necessary or even preferable that every translated novel use local artists – every publisher has their own requirements – but, at Honford Star, we can’t imagine doing anything different. 

For more information about Honford Star and their publications, you can visit their website or follow their twitter page.

Chinese literature, however, has a very particular legacy. So much so, in fact, that this legacy is often simply referred to as the Four Great Chinese Novels. Much like how, when we think of Irish literature, names like James Joyce and Oscar Wilde spring to mind, thoughts of classical Chinese literature, conjure up the names of the Four Great Chinese Novels.

The four great Chinese novels are:

• Monkey King (Journey to the West) by Wu Cheng’en
• Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong
• Water Margin by Shi Nai’an
• Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin

Of the four classic Chinese novels, it is Wu Cheng’en’s Monkey King (Journey to the West) that is most famous. It has been adapted into Chinese films and cartoons, translated into English multiple times (in full and abridged) and was even the main inspiration for Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball manga.

In 2021, we have been gifted a fresh, new translation of Monkey King by scholar and translator Julia Lovell. This new translation of Monkey King breathes fresh life, humour, wit, and charm into the 16th Century classic Chinese novel.

Before we get into what Monkey King is about, it’s worth clarifying the book’s title a bit. In the original Chinese, Wu Cheng’en’s classic novel is titled 西遊記 (Xi You Ji) which literally translated to Journey to the West.

However, most English translations chose to title the book Monkey King or simply Monkey after one of the story’s main protagonists. Around the world, the book is perhaps best known as Journey to the West. However, the new edition which I’m mostly talking about (and the one I have personally read) is Julia Lovell’s Monkey King.

I’ll continue to refer to it by both names but Monkey King is now, perhaps, the definitive English version of the Wu Cheng’en classic.

What is Monkey King about?

The story of Monkey King is split into four parts, though the new translation by Julia Lovell does away with the division of those parts but keeps the chapter-by-chapter structure.

Part One of Monkey King focuses on the titular Monkey. It reads like a Greek or Norse myth as Monkey is born from a rock atop Fruit-Flower Mountain. From here, we follow the exploits of the arrogant, powerful, and stubborn Monkey (whose Buddhist name is Sun Wukong).

During Part One of Monkey King, Sun Wukong trains under a Buddhist master to learn a thousand transformations; he takes a great weapon from the kingdom of a Dragon King; he builds his own kingdom in Water Curtain Cave and rules for centuries.

Eventually, Monkey finds himself in the Jade Emperor’s heaven, picking fights, working jobs poorly, eating other people’s entire feasts, and generally causing chaos. His tearing up of Heaven and Earth ends with the Buddha himself stepping in, defeating Monkey in combat, and trapping him beneath a mountain for five hundred years.

After this setup/prologue, the real story — the Journey to the West — really begins. We follow the origin story of the young Buddhist monk Xuanzang (who was based on a real-life Chinese monk). Xuanzang’s origin story is first established, which includes his father being murdered while his mother is pregnant. From there, she is forced to marry her husband’s murderers.

Once she gives birth to Xuanzang, she sends him down the river with a note and Xuanzang is then raised as a Buddhist monk. Xuanzang takes on several names through the course of the story, including the most commonly-used Guanyin and Tripitaka (named for the scriptures he has been tasked with collecting).

It is this task which takes Guanyin on his journey and makes up the bulk of Monkey King. A Bodhisattva tasks Guanyin with retrieving scriptures and taking them to a kingdom in the south which they have beamed too barbaric and chaotic.

Early in his journey, Guanyin meets Monkey (Sun Wukong), still trapped beneath the mountain. Guanyin frees Monkey and takes him along as a disciple/bodyguard. From here, the Journey to the West really begins.

Julia Lovell’s new translation of Monkey King

In her translator’s notes, Lovell remarks on how her new translation of Monkey King is around a quarter the length of the original Journey to the West. This is a wonderful, practical move on Lovell’s part.

It’s important to say that, if you did not know that this was an abridged version of Monkey King, you never would. This coming from someone who has never read the original Journey to the West. This translation is exactly as long as it needs to be, with the fat cut and the story paced perfectly.

So, yes, this is an abridged version of Monkey King, clocking in at just under 400 pages in length, which is, as I’ve said, perfect for the story it needs to tell.

Lovell also injects Monkey King with so much camp and colour and wit and humour. The book sparkles and crackles with a uniquely British wit. Every line of dialogue drips with sarcasm, snappy one-liners, and laugh-out-loud observations for the lovable bastard that is Monkey.

If you’ve ever wanted to read Journey to the West but have been put off by fears of it being too long, too dense, too dry (as we have all thought when it comes to classics), then put those fears aside. Julia Lovell’s translation is nothing but fun, frantic fantasy writing.

Monkey King brings to mind Joanne Harris’ adaptation of the best Loki stories from Norse mythology: The Gospel of Loki. This was a book that took all the pranks and feats and failures of Loki and stitched them all into one spectacular narrative.

Julia Lovell’s translation of Monkey King comes at this classic Chinese novel with the same attitude that Joanne took to Norse mythology. She has injected the book with energy, spice, and humour. The dialogue is spicy and quick; the events are larger-than-life; the pacing tight and frantic.

While I admit to having no other translation to compare it to, I can’t imagine having more fun than I did with Julia Lovell’s hilarious translation of this Wu Cheng’en classic.

Why Monkey King is One of the Four Great Chinese Novels

If you look at Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey or the Norse Eddas and Sagas, you’ll find ridiculous tales of gods and monsters. You’ll find heroes and champions accomplishing impossible feats. You’ll find tricksters causing chaos through magic and godly powers.

The stories of mythology always involve magical monsters and godly things defying the rules of nature. They transform and disguise themselves; they live for thousands of years; they mould and shape the world to their liking. And they often do it all in the name of fun or simply because they’re bored, horny, or both.

Monkey King is one such story. It might be a classic Chinese novel (one of the four great Chinese classics), but it still reads and behaves like a collection of myths. It is a book populated by ethereal creatures, trolls and goblins and monsters. The literal Buddha traps the titular Monkey King under a mountain just to shut him up, for god’s sake.

There is so much colour and strangeness to Monkey King. One entire chapter is dedicated to a Dragon King who tries to trick a fortune teller, leading him to defy the decree of the emperor Taizong. When Taizong himself dies prematurely, he appears at the Court of the Underworld after having been sued by the Dragon King.

This is only one of dozens of bonkers stories that serve to flesh-out the stories of Chinese mythology that are found between the pages of Monkey King. Put simply, there is no end to the fun and joy gleaned from a reading of Monkey King by Wu Cheng’en, newly translated with wit and humour by the incredible Julia Lovell.

Now, in 2020, she has penned one of the most philosophical and politically thoughtful novels of the year: A Lover’s Discourse. Taking its name from A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes — a book which her protagonists reference and discuss — Guo’s newest novel is a story written with deceptive simplicity and directness.

The novel details the shifting and changing romantic relationship between two immigrants in Brexit Britain. It waxes philosophical as it flows, considering how our cultural background influences not only our politics and our ethics, but also how we see time and place, love and companionship, success and failure.

A Lover’s Discourse follows the story of a nameless Chinese woman who moves to London in 2015, at the cusp of the Brexit referendum, to pursue a PhD in cultural anthropology.

As she wrestles with both the lexicon and mood of the political zeitgeist in 2015, she meets a man of Australian and German background, working in London as a landscape architect. Referring to him only as “you”, our first person narrator tells the story of their relationship to her partner — a story of her own perspective on events, conversations, misunderstandings, choices, and changes.

In eight parts, each one named after a direction which may signify many things at once (East, West, Up, Down), A Lover’s Discourse takes our protagonist and her partner on a journey both physical and emotional. They move into a flat together, buy a canal boathouse, spend time apart, come back together, all the while shifting and changing and teaching one another things.

She picks up some German from him and he some Chinese from her. They disagree and come to blows often as their cultural backgrounds inform vastly different perspectives on things as simple and yet so deeply complex as time and death.

There is a sense of humour that runs through this novel, but an even deeper sense of melancholy. Guo’s protagonist is always at odds with the world around her. Having lost both her parents before arriving in London, the world she knew has now melted away, and yet she almost instinctively disagrees with so much of the thoughts and behaviours of the people around her.

Some of this comes from linguistic or conventional misunderstandings; but much comes from a deeper, harder place: a place of perspective, politics, and philosophy.

What strengthens this melancholy is just how aggressively dislikable our protagonist’s partner is. In my reading, I was so frequently moved and challenged by the fascinating philosophical clashes between East and West, Chinese and European, but each of these moving moments came with a venomous and angry reaction to this man’s words and behaviour.

He feels nothing, shows no empathy; he patronises and mansplains; he makes selfish choices often and gleefully.

“Obviously power is beautiful. Women in particular know that,” he confidently states in all his wisdom about women. “It is moving!” she exclaims excitedly at one moment, only for him to mansplain that “It is quickening!”

While she frequently describes things using poetry, proverbs, metaphor, and concepts, he reflexively lashes out at her language each and every time, preferring to describe things in cold, unfeeling, unimaginative, scientific terms. It’s clear that all of this was a conscious decision by Guo. The novel, after all, feels allegorical of the imperialist, over-confident, hyper-masculine West clashing aggressively with the East.

What saddens me as a reader is how she remains with him, only growing closer and more dependent as time goes by. Again, this all feels allegorical: he represents cold and brutal Westernisation and she represents the dying, changing, evolving traditions of the East.

And so, it makes sense that they would remain together, given how the world looks in the 21st century. But these characters, allegorical or not, are still people.

We grow attached to them as readers, and so we can only feel anger and exhaustion towards the atrocious waste of a man as he treats her with less feeling and more condescension. And again, this emotional reaction means that Guo’s allegory is working perfectly. It only encourages more and more respect for her as a writer.

If I take a quick breather from this back-and-forth argument with myself, it’s quite remarkable to see the lengths to which this novel succeeds in its emotional manipulation of the reader.

Every time you feel frustrated or enraged by the protagonist’s partner, you see some historical or political metaphor at play in his actions and it all serves to wisen us to the realities of globalisation, industrialisation, and Westernisation, both with regards to language — which is explored with playfulness and wit across the length of this novel — and to cultural considerations of politics, geography, history, art, and more.

There’s a reason Guo’s protagonist is a sociologist and an anthropologist, after all. Please, do not be misled into thinking that all of this waffling about allegories and geopolitics equates to a dry and heavy text. A Lover’s Discourse is far from that.

It is a novel of short sub-chapters of five or fewer pages each, and every one of them captures a moment in a relationship or a person’s life which is sometimes funny, sometimes embarrassing, sometimes distressing, often empathetic, and always engaging.

This is a novel of deep emotional waters for the reader to swim in, to dive down into and explore. This is a story of survival in a new land, and in a difficult relationship. It is a story of understanding one’s self and the world – both immediate and expansive.

There is real humour here, as much as there is frustration and heartache. Guo’s way with words is inventive and playful, as are her unique observations of simple experiences and mundane moments.

What’s most engaging and fascinating is the interweaving of three languages — English, Mandarin Chinese, and German. The way in which these languages play with one another like children in a sandpit shows the reader how differently we, as humans, can see ourselves, see one another, and see the world at large.

Conclusion

I am dangerously at risk of exhausting thousands of words excitedly rambling about how A Lover’s Discourse influenced, amused, and astonished me. At only 260 pages, Guo’s novel does so much to inspire the reader’s way of thinking about human relationships, about globalisation and geopolitics, about cultural differences, and even about art, language, and philosophy.

Guo’s greatest strength is her ability to tackle and tear open very deep and complex topics and ideas, all while disguising them as a straightforward and concise emotional narrative about two young people fallin in love in 21st century London.

his is a book of grand concepts painted beautifully with romantic and human stories. An absolute must-read and one of the finest novels of 2020, period.

Those of us who read a broad spectrum of world literature in translation often do so in order to broaden our perspectives, understand other cultures’ ways of writing, processing the world, and expressing themselves through art.

With Taiwan being one of my favourite countries and cultures, I’ve read every Taiwanese book in translation I can get my hands on. But what happens when a book is published which takes you even deeper into the culture, politics, and history of a nation you thought you understood? It can be an entirely transformative experience, and that’s exactly what Hunter School is.

Like I said, I love Taiwan. It’s a country very close to my heart. I sympathise with the nation’s political frustrations and applaud its progressive and inclusive politics.

There’s always more to learn about a country, however (that’s far from a revelatory statement), and Hunter School provides not only a doorway into an almost known world within the island nation of Taiwan, but also a new perspective on the history, traditions, and politics of a nation I have come to so fervently adore.

Sakinu Ahronglong is a member of the Paiwanese group of indigenous Taiwanese people who have populated the hills, forests, and plains of Taiwan since long before the Kuomintang or the Japanese occupation.

The story of their cultural deflation — a similar story to those of American Indians and Aboriginal Australians — is a tragic one, and groups like Ahronglong’s have had to compromise and give into modernity, industry, and capitalism in order to survive.

This was a group of people that I knew nothing about until reading this book. Even if Hunter School were bad, its value could not be understated or denied simply by virtue of what it has to teach us about the Paiwan people.

Fortunately, Hunter School is anything but bad. In fact, it is a transportive, uplifting, sweet, moving, and at times fantastical book which, while it follows one person’s narrative, shows an incredible breadth of emotion, tone, and even lessons to be learned.

The book achieves this breadth through its succinct, clear, and emotive language, as well as its structure. Hunter School is a short 160-page novel divided into three parts, with each part having multiple chapters made up of ten or fewer pages.

These chapters are true stories from the author’s life, mixed in with tales told by his parents and grandparents, as well as local folklore and traditions. Each one reads like a fable, relatively self-contained (though there is a clear chronological narrative) and with a clear and emphatic message tied to its language.

The story follows Sakinu himself as he retells his young life as a Paiwan native amidst the cultural shifts and changes in 20th century Taiwan. Part One is largely concerned with his childhood, one filled with lessons from his extremely talented hunter of a father.

Here, we learn about the traditional millet wine of the Paiwan people and the ceremonies surrounding it. The stories of Sakinu’s grandparents, the farm they tend, and the fables his father bestows on him about the native creatures of the hills and forests are nothing short of infectious.

These are real stories of real people that nevertheless take on a charming fairytale quality. Darryl Sterk’s translation here helps endlessly to provide a clear-cut tone that blends wide-eyed childish fascination with a grounded, sombre approach to change and the transience of life.

While Part One is a relatively contained narrative of Sakinu’s childhood, Part Two and Part Three blend together as a large serving of adulthood and modern life, with Sakinu telling stories of his life at sea, his father’s work in Taipei, and the almost complete collapse of their people’s peaceful and isolated way of life.

The romanticism of Part One eventually gives way to the harsh, rude, and unfair realities of modern life, a life their people did not build and do not deserve to be subjected to. And yet, changes beyond our control compel us all, in the end, to obey the rules of broader society.

It’s a tragic tale but one with a thread of hope running through it, made strong almost entirely thanks to Sakinu’s own willful dedication to tradition, family, and peace.

As someone with “progressive” and “liberal” political views, I’ve always viewed progress as ultimately good. Progress leads to scientific and medical advancements, social inclusion, fairness, an erasure of stuffy, harmful, and damaging conservative values.

However, Hunter School vividly teaches that the fight to maintain traditional values within a community can be a wholesome and positive thing when the values of that community are ones which practice peace, kindness, respect, and fairness.

Towards the book’s conclusion, we do admittedly see a lot of in-fighting and racism between the indigenous groups, but the lessons that the book, as a whole, has to teach prove to be ultimately revelatory. The TL;DR of this lesson is that progress is only necessary if we don’t have peace and fairness; if we are living in a toxic, unhealthy, unfair, unequal society.

If we are already living peacefully and fairly, as the Paiwan people have been for so long, progress is a moot point. Coming to understand this as I read Hunter School was akin to seeing the world in five dimensions, and I am forever grateful to Sakinu Ahronglong for that.

Conclusion

Hunter School is a rare book which deserves to be the opposite. It deserves to be on every single shelf of every single bookshop. And this isn’t simply because it has a lot to teach us about an underrepresented group of people but because it has so much to celebrate within its pages. Real life stories of real life experiences mixed with local folklore, history, and traditions.

This, woven into a raw and personal narrative of an indigenous Paiwan man in the 20th century, is a unique and must-read experience for any reader. Sterk’s gorgeous translation and the minimalist structure of the book also make it an enjoyable, easy, comfortable read for a single afternoon. There is nothing that’s less than wonderful here.

It doesn’t matter if these are the best Chinese novels or the worst, censorship does not empathise. Not all writers in China butt heads with censorship laws.

Some, like sci-fi writer Chen Qiufan, have managed to avoid it entirely, though they may not know why. Yan Lianke, however, is one of the unlucky few. But then, it only takes a cursory read of any one of his novels to understand why.

Yan Lianke, acclaimed author of some of the best Chinese novels of all time, was born in Henan province (where most of his books are set) in 1958 and now lives in Beijing. He has been writing since the age of twenty, and has produced some of the greatest works of Chinese fiction ever penned. His novels and stories are all inescapably, and heavy-handedly, political.

Here is a writer of deep scepticism, who uses his genius of plotting, writing, setting, and characterisation to challenge the norms of the world he was born into. Chinese historian Jung Chang called Yan Lianke “One of the masters of modern Chinese literature” and with good reason. There is nobody in the world like Yan Lianke.

English translator of Yan’s novels, Carlos Rojas, has remarked that, “several of Yan Lianke’s own works had run into problems with the authorities … following the publication of his 2004 novel Lenin’s Kisses, which describes a harebrained plan to purchase Lenin’s embalmed corpse from Russie and use it as the basis for a Chinese tourist site, Yan was dismissed from his position with the People’s Liberation Army … His following novel, Serve the People!, which offers a parody of Maoist rhetoric during the Cultural Revolution, never got through the censors … his 2006 novel about China’s rural AIDS epidemic, Dream of Ding Village, was initially published but then recalled.”

It’s rare for Yan Lianke’s books to be published in mainland China. As a result, publishers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore frequently pick up and publish his works. All of this is to say that Yan Lianke is an author of extreme political venom, with the wit and wisdom to deconstruct and expose cracks in the recent history, political structure, and economic system of his own nation.

For all of his battles with censorship in his home country, what we in the English speaking world have is an uncensored library of some of the best Chinese novels ever written.

Yan Lianke’s Novels

Few authors in the entire world right now have the imagination and courage of Yan Lianke. Frequently whispered about in excited tones when the Nobel Prize comes around, Yan Lianke is China’s most revolutionary, exciting, and entertaining writer; author of some of the best Chinese novels ever written.

Here are five of Yan Lianke’s best novels, all available in English right now.

Lenin’s Kisses

A darkly satirical novel which began its author’s journey down a road of suppression and censorship. Lenin’s Kisses tells the story of a small rural village (as do most of his novels). This village is populated by sick and elderly people who are struggling against starvation and natural disasters.

In a desperate bid to bring money and attention to their village, a scheme is hatched to steal the corpse of Vladimir Lenin from Russia and bring it to the village as a source of tourism and media attention.

Dream of Ding Village

Henan province is where Yan Lianke was born and raised. It is also the province once hit by its own AIDS epidemic at the hands of commercial companies known as “bloodheads”.

One Guardian article explained, “offered Chinese peasants a tempting deal in the early and mid-1990s: give us your blood, we will extract the plasma and let you have the rest back – plus some cash. Red blood cells were returned to the peasants from a tainted pool using unhygienic equipment.”

Dream of Ding Village is a novelisation of this epidemic and how it affected one Henan village. Full of angry satire and told from an intimate family perspective, this novel gives voices to those unknown people affected by Chinese hushed AIDS epidemic.

For proof of why Yan Lianke writes some of the very best Chinese novels, look no further than Dream of Ding Village.

Read More: 10 Incredible Chinese Novels in Translation

The Four Books

Here is a book that exists as a kind of response to the Chinese government’s dismissal and censorship of its writer. The Four Books is set during the Cultural Revolution, in a re-education camp where educated (and therefore dangerous) citizens would be imprisoned, put to work, and re-educated in order to toe the line of the Mao regime.

Our protagonists are The Author, The Scholar, The Musician, and The Theologian. Each of them is recording their experiences in their own voice, making for a disjointed narrative that refreshes with each chapter. The unique and varied structure of this novel is half of its genius. The other half lies in its unfiltered, unrestrained political satire.

The re-education camp’s leader is a man known only as The Child; his actions and commands reflect so much of the Mao regime, especially with regards to its pride-fuelled rhetoric and impossible demands (like the farming of crops that didn’t exist, which led to a famine that caused the deaths of millions).

No Yan Lianke book is as unsheathed and brutally damning as The Four Books. This is China’s best writer at his peak, and therefore undoubtedly one of the best Chinese novels ever written.

The Explosion Chronicles

This is a novel that satirises greed and self-indulgence, and takes a scathing look at the repercussions of this attitude to life. It’s a book pointed at the Chinese government and at modern China in general, but that doesn’t mean its morals and message can’t be applied to any country and culture in the world right now, as is the case with almost every one of Yan’s novels.

The Explosion Chronicles is set in a village near the Balou Mountains – a frequent setting for Yan’s novels. The village has stood for a thousand years, but in the post-Mao era it has been hit by rapid economic and structural growth, transforming it from a village into a city.

The novel explores how such an expansion affects a place and the people who live there in the darkest and most truthful ways possible.

The Day the Sun Died

At the time of writing, this is Yan Lianke’s newest novel. Translated by Carlos Rojas, The Day the Sun Died explores and deconstructs the Chinese Dream. It tells the story of a quiet rural village from the perspective of a young, wide-eyed boy called Li Niannian.

One night, after the village falls quiet, its residents begin to get up and sleepwalk back to work. They till the fields diligently, in a zombie-like state, for a while until things begin to unravel. Li is the only one not under this spell.

The Day the Sun Died is a deconstruction of the Chinese Dream. It takes the concept literally and asks readers to consider what the enactment of the Chinese Dream looks like on the ground level, in the small and unknown places that hide the backbone of China’s economy and social structure.

It’s a surreal and strange novel with bold and clear ideas and a laser focus pointed at government legislation and political rhetoric. Another work of genius and one of the best Chinese novels of this century.

Read our full review here!