The Greatest Books Since 1980


How is this list generated?


This list is generated from 130 "best of" book lists from a variety of great sources. An algorithm is used to create a master list based on how many lists a particular book appears on. Some lists count more than others. I generally trust "best of all time" lists voted by authors and experts over user-generated lists. On the lists that are actually ranked, the book that is 1st counts a lot more than the book that's 100th. If you're interested in the details about how the rankings are generated and which lists are the most important(in my eyes) please check out the list details page.

If you have any comments, suggestions, or corrections please feel free to e-mail me.


  1. 551 . The Sluts by Dennis Cooper

    Set largely on the pages of a website where gay male escorts are reviewed by their clients, and told through the postings, emails, and conversations of several dozen unreliable narrators, The Sluts...

    - Google
  2. 552 . Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

    Five women. One question. What is a woman for? In this ferociously imaginative novel, abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grant...

    - Google
  3. 553 . The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers

    The Time of Our Singing (2003) is a novel by American writer Richard Powers. It tells the story of two brothers involved in music, dealing heavily with issues of prejudice. Their parents met at Mar...

  4. 554 . The Needle's Eye by Fanny Howe

    Fanny Howe's The Needle's Eye: Passing through Youth is a sequence of essays, short tales, and lyrics that are intertwined by an inner visual logic. The book contains filmic images that subvert the...

    - Google
  5. 555 . The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse: A Novel by Louise Erdrich

    A New York Times Notable Book For more than a half century, Father Damien Modeste has served his beloved Native American tribe, the Ojibwe, on the remote reservation of Little No Horse. Now, nearin...

    - Google
  6. 556 . Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta

    Dana Spiotta, whom Michiko Kakutani called "wonderfully observant and wonderfully gifted...with an uncanny feel for the absurdities and sadness of contemporary life" (The New York Times), has writt...

    - Google
  7. 557 . Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

    Super Sad True Love Story is the third novel by American writer Gary Shteyngart. The novel takes place in a near-future dystopian New York where life is dominated by media and retail.

  8. 558 . Boyhood: Scenes from provincial life by J M Coetzee

    In Boyhood, J. M. Coetzee revisits the South Africa of half a century ago, to write about his childhood and interior life. Boyhood's young narrator grew up in a small country town. With a father he...

    - Google
  9. 559 . The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories by Denis Johnson

    Twenty-five years after Jesus' Son, a haunting new collection of short stories on mortality and transcendence, from National Book Award winner and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Denis Johnson The...

    - Google
  10. 560 . Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays by Eula Biss

    Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial identity Notes from No Man's Land...

    - Google
  11. 561 . Home Land by Sam Lipsyte

    Catamount Notes, the Eastern Valley High School alumni newsletter, is filled with tales of success from the school's graduates, until Lewis "Teabag" Miner, class of 1989, sends a hilarious confessi...

    - Google
  12. 562 . Sleeping It Off in Rapid City by August Kleinzahler

    The first broad retrospective of August Kleinzahler's career, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City gathers poems from his major works along with a rich portion of new poems that visit different voice regi...

    - Google
  13. 563 . All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg

    Who is Andrea Bern? When her dippy therapist asks the question, Andrea knows the right things to say: she’s a designer, a friend, a daughter, a sister. But it’s what she leaves unsaid—she’s alone, ...

    - Google
  14. 564 . Fine Just the Way It Is by Annie Proulx

    A collection of nine western-themed tales features an array of pioneer country inhabitants from different backgrounds.

    - Google
  15. 565 . The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

    THE NO. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY - Book 1 Fans around the world adore the bestselling No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the basis of the HBO TV show, and its proprietor Precious Ramotswe, Bo...

    - Google
  16. 566 . Boy's Life by Robert R. McCammon

    In Zephyr, Alabama, a bizarre murder is only the beginning Small town boys see weird sights, and Zephyr has provided Cory Jay Mackenson with his fair share of oddities. He knows the bootleggers who...

    - Google
  17. 567 . Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier

    Tanuja Desai Hidier's fantastically acclaimed cross-cultural debut comes to PUSH! Dimple Lala doesn't know what to think. Her parents are from India, and she's spent her whole life resisting their ...

    - Google
  18. 568 . Chanda's Secrets by Allan Stratton

    This is the powerful story of one girl's struggle for survival amid the African HIV/AIDS pandemic a story of harsh realities and hard-won hopefulness, leavened with humour and the possibility of ch...

    - Google
  19. 569 . City of the Beasts by Isabel Allende

    Fifteen-year-old Alexander Cold accompanies his fearless grandmother, a magazine reporter for International Geographic, on an expedition to the dangerous, remote world of the Amazon to document the...

    - Google
  20. 570 . Crow Lake by Mary Lawson

    Mary Lawson's debut novel is a shimmering tale of love, death and redemption set in a rural northern community where time has stood still. Tragic, funny and unforgettable, this deceptively simple m...

    - Google
  21. 571 . Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje

    Anil’s Ghost is the critically acclaimed fourth novel by Michael Ondaatje. It was first published in 2000 by McClelland and Stewart. Anil’s Ghost follows the life of Anil Tissera, a native Sri L...

  22. 572 . He, She and It by Marge Piercy

    "A triumph of the imagination. Rich, complex, impossible to put down." Alice Hoffman In the middle of the twenty-first century, life as we know it has changed for all time. Shira Shipman's marriage...

    - Google
  23. 573 . Selected Poems II: 1976 - 1986 by Margaret Atwood

    Celebrated as a major novelist throughout the English-speaking world, Atwood has also written eleven volumes of poetry. Houghton Mifflin is proud to have published SELECTED POEMS, 1965-1975, a volu...

    - Google
  24. 574 . A Dog's Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron

    This is the remarkable story of one endearing dog’s search for his purpose over the course of several lives. More than just another charming dog story, A Dog’s Purpose touches on the universal ques...

    - Google
  25. 575 . Collected Poems by Allen Ginsberg

    Irwin Allen Ginsberg; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture that soon would follow. He vi...

  26. 576 . Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems by Ingeborg Bachmann

    Greatly expanded bilingual edition of the 1994 Marsilio edition, Songs in Flight.

    - Google
  27. 577 . The Physician by Noah Gordon

    Read by millions in thirty-two countries, soon to be a major motion picture, and voted “one of the ten most-beloved books of all time,” here is the first English-language digital edition of Noah Go...

    - Google
  28. 578 . The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat

    It is 1937 and Amabelle Désir, a young Haitian woman living in the Dominican Republic, has built herself a life as the servant and companion of the wife of a wealthy colonel. She and Sebastien, a c...

    - Google
  29. 579 . Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín

  30. 580 . World's Fair by E. L. Doctorow

    The astonishing novel of a young boy's life in the New York City of the 1930s, a stunning recreation of the sights, sounds, aromas and emotions of a time when the streets were safe, families stuck ...

  31. 581 . It: A Novel by Stephen King

    More information to be announced soon on this forthcoming title from Penguin USA

    - Google
  32. 582 . LaRose by Louise Erdrich

    LaRose is a novel by the author Louise Erdrich, published in 2016 by HarperCollins Publishers. The book was reviewed by multiple publications, including The New York Times, The Kansas City Star, Wi...

  33. 583 . All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

    A blind French girl on the run from the German occupation and a German orphan-turned-Resistance tracker struggle with their respective beliefs after meeting on the Brittany coast.

    - Google
  34. 584 . A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines

    A Lesson Before Dying is Ernest J. Gaines' eighth novel, published in 1993. "A Lesson Before Dying" is a story of two African-American men scrabbling to attain their manhood in a deeply prejudic...

  35. 585 . Let the Great World Spin: A Novel by Colum McCann

    In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is runnin...

    - Google
  36. 586 . The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel by Adam Johnson

    The son of an influential father who runs an orphan work camp, Pak Jun Do rises to prominence using instinctive talents and eventually becomes a professional kidnapper and romantic rival to Kim Jon...

    - Google
  37. 587 . The Echo Maker by Richard Powers

    On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister, Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their h...

  38. 588 . Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler

    Breathing Lessons is a 1988 novel by American author Anne Tyler. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989 and was also Time Magazine's book of the year. It describes joys and pains of the o...

  39. 589 . Empire Falls by Richard Russo

    A small, fictional mill town in Maine called Empire Falls, though once booming in industry, is quickly deteriorating. Owned by the powerful Whiting family, the town can no longer sustain itself. Se...

  40. 590 . Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg

    A collection of short works includes the tales of a group of friends whose efforts to acquire a luxurious Manhattan sublet are halted by the September 11 attacks, a teacher's Roman holiday in the w...

    - Google
  41. 591 . Killshot by Elmore Leonard

    Killshot, the 1989 novel by author Elmore Leonard, tells the story of a married couple who find themselves in Cape Girardeau, Missouri while on the run from a pair of hitmen.

  42. 592 . Mislaid by Nell Zink

    Elizabethan comedy meets saw-toothed social satire in Nell Zink’s 2015 novel, which follows the improbable and very ill-starred couple of Lee Fleming (gay) and Peggy Vaillancourt (lesbian, his stud...

  43. 593 . Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon

    "In a wasteland born of rage and fear, populated by monstrous creatures and marauding armies, earth's last survivors have been drawn into the final battle between good and evil that will decide the...

    - Google
  44. 594 . The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang

    The Vegetarian is a South Korean three-part drama novella written by Han Kang and first published in 2007. Based on Kang's 1997 short story "The Fruit of My Woman", The Vegetarian is set in modern-...

  45. 595 . Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

    Ready Player One is a 2011 LitRPG science fiction novel, and the debut novel of American author Ernest Cline. The story, set in a dystopian 2040s, follows protagonist Wade Watts on his search for a...

  46. 596 . Looking for Alaska by John Green

    Sixteen-year-old Miles' first year at Culver Creek Preparatory School in Alabama includes good friends and great pranks, but is defined by the search for answers about life and death after a fatal ...

    - Google
  47. 597 . Ghost by Jason Reynolds

    Aspiring to be the fastest sprinter on his elite middle school's track team, gifted runner Ghost finds his goal challenged by a tragic past with a violent father.

    - Google
  48. 598 . Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado

    Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction “[These stories] vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange.”—Roxane Gay “In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged t...

    - Google
  49. 599 . The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel

    From the author of Fun Home -- the lives, loves, and politics of cult fav characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and others For twenty-five years Bechdel’s path-breaking Dyk...

    - Google
  50. 600 . The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks

    The Notebook is a 1996 romantic novel by American novelist Nicholas Sparks, The novel was later adapted into a popular film of the same name, in 2004. The Indian Bollywood film, Zindagi Tere Naam, ...