Best Contemporary Literary Fiction: Essential Reading from the Last Decade

The best contemporary literary fiction is being written in a period of remarkable formal and thematic diversity — Irish, American, British, and Canadian writers are producing work that engages with friendship, creative collaboration, family collapse, political anxiety, and the specific texture of contemporary life with novelistic intelligence. The novels below are the most important of the last five years.

The Most Celebrated

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow — Gabrielle Zevin (2022)

The finest American novel of recent years — Sam Masur and Sadie Green’s decades-spanning creative collaboration as video game designers is simultaneously a story about friendship, artistic collaboration, love, envy, and what it means to make something that matters. Zevin’s novel is formally conventional (it does not experiment with structure) but emotionally complex in a way that few contemporary novels achieve: she makes the reader understand two people who love each other and keep failing to say so, and shows how creative work can both sustain and destroy intimacy.

Beautiful World, Where Are You — Sally Rooney (2021)

Rooney’s most ambitious novel — Alice and Eileen’s email exchanges about contemporary life provide the philosophical scaffolding for a story about two women in their thirties trying to decide what they believe in, what they want, and whether they can be happy. Rooney’s critics find her discursive; her admirers find her the most intelligent novelist of her generation. The novel’s directness about the difficulty of contemporary life (what is worth doing? can happiness be earned or only accidentally encountered?) makes it the most explicitly reflective of her three novels.

The Irish Fiction

The Bee Sting — Paul Murray (2023)

The most formally ambitious Irish novel of recent years — four perspectives on the collapse of the Barnes family in a small Irish town, each told in a different register that matches the character. Murray’s account of financial ruin, family secrets, and the specific texture of Irish small-town life is both panoramic and intimate. Longlisted for the Booker Prize.

Small Things Like These — Claire Keegan (2021)

At 120 pages, the most concentrated of the recent Irish fiction — a coal merchant in 1985 Ireland who discovers that the local convent is running a Magdalene laundry. What Keegan achieves in this space — the texture of small-town Catholic Ireland, the cost of knowing something that conflicts with social survival, the possibility of one small act of courage — is extraordinary.

The Marriage and Family Novel

The Marriage Portrait — Maggie O’Farrell (2022)

O’Farrell’s follow-up to her Booker Prize-winning Hamnet — a novel about Lucrezia de’ Medici, who at fifteen is married to Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara, and comes to believe that he intends to kill her. O’Farrell combines historical fiction, psychological thriller, and an examination of women’s constrained choices with the formal confidence of Hamnet.

The Recent Rooney

Intermezzo — Sally Rooney (2024)

Rooney’s fourth novel — two brothers in Dublin, Peter and Ivan Koubek, both dealing with the death of their father and with their romantic lives, in a novel that is less about Irish women’s experience (as her first three novels were) and more about men, grief, and the difficulty of intimacy. A departure from her earlier work while recognisably hers.

Reading Order

Start accessible: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow → Beautiful World, Where Are You → The Bee Sting.

Irish fiction: Small Things Like These → The Bee Sting → Beautiful World, Where Are You.

By recency: Small Things Like These (2021) → Beautiful World (2021) → Tomorrow (2022) → The Marriage Portrait (2022) → The Bee Sting (2023) → Intermezzo (2024).