ENRICHMENT

21st Century Essentials playlist

The 21st century is still very much in its youth, so this list doesn’t have quite the pedigree of the older lists: the status of these texts as stone-cold classics is not yet guaranteed. However, we didn’t want to leave out the last quarter century from our playlist programme, so we made this list. The texts here are mostly British in origin, sticking with our general system of categorisation, but we have loosened the rules a bit for the 21st century, including texts by non-British writers who write in English. As with the other lists, we have recommended a handful of these texts as particularly worth reading, just to give you somewhere to start, but you can’t go wrong with any of them, really.

21st Century Essentials

  1. White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000)

  2. Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)

  3. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)

  4. Brick Lane by Monica Ali (2003)

  5. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (2003)

  6. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (2003) - recommended read

  7. The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (2004)

  8. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005) - recommended read

  9. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006) - recommended read

  10. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)

  11. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (2009)

  12. Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel (2009-2020)

  13. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (2011)

  14. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (2013)

  15. Normal People by Sally Rooney (2018)

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