But The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is also a timeless inquiry into our tragic proclivity for hate and war, our abiding need for stories and our persistent longing for magical powers and transcendence.” (Random House)įranzen’s edgy multigenerational family saga, winner of a US National Book Award, was among the first novels to capture the zeitgeist of the century’s first decade. Chabon’s novel has greatly influenced other outstanding works of 21st Century fiction. “It can also be seen as a bridge between the 20th and 21st centuries in its perspective on WWII and the birth of comic-book superheroes as a new, potent form of mass myth-making carried forward on the rising technological wave. “Chabon’s capacious, propulsive and many-storied novel is exquisitely written, emotionally rich and historically and morally profound,” says Booklist senior editor Donna Seaman, who made the Pulitzer Prize winner her number-one choice.
With his Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay he invents a superhero character called the Escapist and launches the golden age of comic books. Joe Kavalier, a Houdini-like escape artist, smuggles himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague in 1939 and ends up in New York City. As McEwan follows these characters through six decades, Briony’s search for redemption evolves into a meditation on the power of art. Realising she has ruined Cecilia and Robbie’s lives, Briony works as a nurse during the Blitz in a third section. In a second section, McEwan gives a panoramic account of the harrowing evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940, with Robbie among those saved. Her testimony implicates Robbie, her sister Cecilia’s boyfriend from Cambridge and son of the family house maid, and he is jailed. “Nothing came near it for satisfaction, all else was dreams and frustration.” That evening, Briony witnesses her 15-year-old cousin Lola being assaulted in the darkened woods. “Briony was hardly to know it then, but this was the project's highest point of fulfillment,” McEwan writes. McEwan’s haunting and beautifully crafted novel opens on a summer day in 1935, when 13-year-old Briony shows her mother a play she’s written to perform with her three young cousins the next evening. Her continuing work includes two other novels named by critics in the BBC Culture poll – NW, which ranked at number 18, and On Beauty. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks", Smith writes. As White Teeth unfolds, it is chockablock with vivid scenes and characters, a portrait of postcolonial multicultural London: "Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. He’s chosen suicide on New Year’s Day 1975, his car parked in front of a halal butcher’s shop, only to be saved by the owner. Smith opens as Archie, divorced by his second wife, sits in his “fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate face down on the steering wheel”.
White Teeth, which won Whitbread and Guardian first book awards, is set in London, where Archie Jones and Samal Iqbal, friends who met while serving in World War Two, have settled to raise their families. Smith, then a 23-year-old prodigy, wowed the literary world with her first novel, which introduced a writer of inimitable wit and scope.
Middlesex bridged the gap between critical and commercial acclaim, as well, winning a Pulitzer and selling millions of copies. (They have their own genetic secret.) Ultimately Cal’s condition gives him a near mythic gift – “the ability to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both”.
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In often exuberant language, Eugenides layers questions of fate and free will onto Cal’s coming-of-age story and the tale of the entrepreneurial rise of his parents, Desdemona and Lefty. Claiming her “male brain”, she shifts genders and becomes Cal. At 14, Calliope Stephanides discovers she has a rare recessive mutation that renders her a pseudo-hermaphrodite. "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960 and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974,” Eugenides writes in the opening lines of his novel. The critics named 156 novels in all, and based on the votes these are the top 12. We asked each to name the best novels published in English since 1 January 2000. What are the greatest novels of the opening years of this tumultuous century? In search of a collective critical assessment, BBC Culture contributor Jane Ciabattari polled several dozen book critics, including The New York Times Book Review’s Parul Sehgal, Time magazine's book editor Lev Grossman, Newsday book editor Tom Beer, Bookslut founder Jessa Crispin, C Max Magee, founder of The Millions, Booklist's Donna Seaman, Kirkus Reviews' Laurie Muchnick and many more.