What Are The Best Contemporary Novels You Have Read?

Drumroll please

What are the best novels by contemporary authors you have read, dear readers? I would appreciate any recommendations, so please feel free to leave them in the comments if you are so inclined.

My last review of The Buried Giant got me to thinking: I’ve been reading novels by contemporary authors (and by that I mean living ones) for several years now, and I have never bothered to rank them in order of quality. As you can probably tell, I am going through and reviewing these, so you will hear about all of them eventually, but I here is my ranking of them so far.

1. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan

2. Brothers, by Yu Hua

3. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy#

4. Snow*, by Orhan Pamuk

5. The Buried Giant*, by Kazuo Ishiguro

6. The Red Haired Woman, by Orhan Pamuk

7. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy#

8. Klara and the Sun*, by Kazuo Ishiguro

9. The Mathematics of Love, by Emma Darwin

10. The Ardent Swarm, by Yamen Manai

11. The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick DeWitt

12. Please Tell Me, by Mike Omer

13. The Brief History of the Dead, by Kevin Brockmeier

14. All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

15. Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

I should mention that this list include books I might recommend to others. I have read several novels that I would not recommend and did not like, many of them historical novels. (I finished my first historical novel a few years ago and I am writing another, and I was looking for comps.)

Cheers!

* These are books I have already reviewed.

# I am aware that McCarthy is dead but I read his novels while he was still alive and he is only recently deceased.