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The Observer's best books of the 21st century
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Choose your favourites from the Observer's list of the best books of the last 25 years
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White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000)
The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman (2000)
London Orbital by Iain Sinclair (2002)
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (2004)
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (2006)
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006)
2666 by Roberto Bolaño translated by Natasha Wimmer (2008)
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009)
Collected Stories by Lydia Davis (2009)
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis (2010)
Human Chain by Seamus Heaney (2010)
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2010)
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein (2012)
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride (2013)
This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial by Helen Garner (2014)
How to Be Both by Ali Smith (2014)
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015)
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (2015)
Homer’s Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson (2017)
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zubof (2019)
James by Percival Everett (2024)
The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years by Sunil Amrith (2024)
We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (2025)
