The 15 Best Books of the Past 15 Years, According to PureWow's Books Editor

If I had to pick a single favorite book of the past 15 years, I’d have to go with Jennifer Egan’s 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner. This book is my Roman Empire (to borrow a trope from TikTok), based on how often I think about it. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a collection of 13 linked stories that are all connected to aging punk rocker and record company executive Bennie Salazar and his kleptomaniac assistant, Sasha. Jumping between the ‘70s, the present and the near future in New York City and San Francisco, it’s a whirlwind tour of the 20th-century music scene that’s rife with meditations on youth and recklessness (not to mention spectacular prose).

Most people are at least somewhat familiar with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, whether from reading the smash-hit My Brilliant Friend or by watching the HBO adaptation of the same name. But if you haven’t read the first installation in the four-book series, My Brilliant Friend, stop what you’re doing and do so immediately. Documenting  the decades-long friendship between two girls, Lila and Lenu, in post-war Naples, it takes an oft-discussed topic—growing up—and injects it with such immense minutiae that you get totally sucked into their world. Though not entirely relatable (the girls have to struggle to be considered “worthy” of an education in the 1950s), Ferrante’s vivid descriptions of teenage friendship will have you reaching for your phone to call your oldest pal. Plus, I’m hard-pressed to name a series that captivated scores of women quite like this one did in the early 2010s.

You could make the case that writer and cultural critic Roxane Gay’s 2014 essay collection Bad Feminist deserves a spot on this list. But I’m inclined to give it to Gay’s 2018 memoir, Hunger, in which she writes with unflinching honesty about her relationship with her body leading up to, during and after a violent childhood sexual assault. Twelve at the time, Gay kept her assault to herself for more than 20 years, and instead of getting help, she began eating, in the hopes that making her body bigger would keep her safe. She’s blunt about the depths of the pain caused not only by her assault, but by her size in a world that values thinness. From the travesty that is clothes shopping to detailing everyday injustices, Hunger is intensely moving, occasionally devastating and a book that paved the way for so much honesty in the space.

Published in 2016, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, to name a few. But it’s also simply an un-putdownable look at slavery through the lens of magical realism. A look at pre-Civil War era South, it follows two enslaved people in Georgia who escape and flee through what Whitehead reimagines as a literal network of underground railroad tracks, and it’s as much a commentary on the past as it is present-day America (even nine years after I first read it). Though it's by no means a pleasant read, Whitehead's genius portrayal of something we think we've learned about is a stunning example of the power fiction has to add depth to real life events.

Picture it: It’s the summer of 2018 and everyone and their mother is talking about one book: Irish author Sally Rooney's second novel (after 2017’s Conversations with Friends). The uber-popular Normal People follows two classmates in a small Irish town—one popular, one not. Despite their differences, they form an unlikely couple. They date, break up and make up—a few times over. Rooney’s genius is in her ability to take a classic love story and make it fresh, largely thanks to her knack for creating characters so real, you'd swear they're based on people you know. Like My Brilliant Friend, this is one of those books that seeped into our collective consciousness—and highlighted the deep importance of seemingly small moments.

Noticing a theme? Many of the books I’ve selected for this list are not only superbly written and utterly compelling, they’re also culture movers. In the past few years, we’ve seen a plethora of TV series, documentaries and movies about the opioid crisis in America. The impetus for this boon in drug-centric media? Patrick Radden Keefe’s infuriating, meticulously researched 2021 history of the Sackler family, whose company, Purdue Pharma, successfully made and marketed the catalyst for the opioid crisis, OxyContin. Covering three generations of the family’s history and the mark they’ve left on the world, Keefe’s Empire of Pain is a damning indictment of family secrets and corporate greed that reads like a real-life Succession.

I was a few years too old to watch the Nickelodeon show iCarly, so when I saw that one of its stars, Jennette McCurdy, was releasing a memoir, my first thought was Hmm, will I care about this? My second was, She’s swinging big with that title. I’m so glad I picked up a copy, because wow, this did not disappoint. McCurdy’s mother’s dream was for her daughter to become a star, sending her on her first audition at just 6 years old. McCurdy would do anything to make her mom happy, which ended up meaning extreme diets, sharing her diaries, emails and income and more. In I’m Glad My Mom Died, she recounts, in unflinching detail, her experience as a child actor, writing candidly about being riddled with anxiety, shame and self-loathing—issues that only get worse when her mother dies of cancer. But then, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, McCurdy embarks on recovery and decides, for the first time in her life, what she really wants. It’s funny, dark and way more insightful than I was expecting going into it. 

I distinctly remember the smug satisfaction I felt at reading that President Obama named Fates and Furies his favorite book of 2015—months after I’d read it myself (and shouted its praises from the rooftops). Groff has a handful of incredible books that are more than worth your time (I’m particularly fond of Florida), but Fates and Furies, in my opinion, is in a league of its own. An ideal blend of comedy and tragedy, it is, at its core, a marriage story. Particularly, it’s the marriage story of Lotto and Mathilde, who said I do at 22, after only a few weeks of dating. Following the couple’s 25 years of marriage through each partner's perspective, this ambitious novel touches on family, art and theater, as well as the devastating consequences of little white lies. Groff's knack for description is on full display, while her vivid descriptions of her characters gets readers thoroughly invested in their lives.

I went back and forth quite a bit when it came to including this title. I—like many book lovers—have been extremely disappointed by the transphobic comments made by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie over the past years. But I eventually opted to add Americanah to my list because it’s impossible to deny the book’s impact on 21st century literature. It’s about Ifemelu and Obinze, teenagers who fell in love in Lagos, Nigeria. Rather than live under a military dictatorship, Ifemelu moves to America to continue her education. Obinze hopes to join Ifemelu in the States, but is denied a visa post-9/11, so he moves to London. Years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in the newly democratic Nigeria while Ifemelu writes a successful blog about race in America. Despite living apart and experiencing the world in two very different ways, the two never forget the connection they had. It’s a poignant love story about a couple finding their way back after living different lives half a world away from each other.

You might know Michelle Zauner as the indie rock sensation Japanese Breakfast, but she’s also a lauded writer whose debut memoir, Crying in H Mart, shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. In it, she opens up about growing up one of the few Asian-American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon, struggling with her mother's high expectations of her and treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over food. Following her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, Zauner began to reckon with her identity and eventually reclaim the gifts of taste, language and history her mother had given her. Candid and beautifully written, this is the type of book that’ll make you call your mom if you’re lucky enough to be able to. 

In a time when trans rights are under attack, books by and about trans folks have never been more urgent, making Torrey Peters’s best-selling 2021 novel an absolute must. It centers on Reese, a trans woman who almost had it all. The only thing missing was a child, but when her girlfriend, Amy, detransitions and becomes Ames, everything falls apart. Ames isn't doing too well either. He thought detransitioning would make life easier, but it cost him his relationship with Reese, and he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames's boss (and lover) reveals that she's pregnant with his baby, Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Fearless and entirely original, Detransition, Baby is about gender, sex, relationships and all the messy, vulnerable aspects of each.

If 2016’s The Mothers was a promising debut, 2020’s The Vanishing Half cemented Brit Bennett as one of the most exciting talents writing right now. Identical twins Stella and Desiree grew up in in the late ‘30s, in a small Louisiana town founded by a freed slave for light-skinned Black folks who were shunned by both the white and darker-skinned Black communities. After running away to New Orleans at 16, the sisters’ paths diverge. Stella moves to California, where she decides to pass as white, while Desiree rebels against her hometown's colorism by marrying the darkest man she can find. Spanning 40 years, the novel is told from the perspectives of Desiree, Stella and their daughters, and explores how we grow into and change our identities.

The Interestings came to me at, for lack of a better term, an interesting time. I was just about to graduate from college, a couple months away from starting as an editorial assistant at PureWow and it hit me like a ton of bricks—in a good way. It centers on a group of friends who met at an exclusive arts camp in the ‘70s. Like teenagers sometimes do, they assume they’re bound for fame and greatness. Fast forward a couple decades and things haven’t gone as planned for some of the friends. Protagonist Jules, for example, who had dreams of being an actress, is working as a therapist, married to a nice guy and struggling with the rising costs of living in New York City. As the group navigates middle age, Wolitzer explores friendship, love, the nature of fame and making the best of a life that didn’t quite live up to your expectations.

I’m not the biggest fan of beach read-y titles (as you’ve likely gathered from the 13 books listed above), but I’d be remiss if I didn’t shout out Romantic Comedy, a book that fits within that genre that I loved. Sittenfeld (Prep) takes an oft-explored premise—boy meets girl, boy and girl have undeniable chemistry, boy (or girl) does something to screw it up, boy and girl live happily ever after—and injects her trademark wit to delightful effect. It’s about Sally, a 30-something who’s a writer at a weekly sketch comedy show a la Saturday Night Live. When Noah, an ultra-popular and handsome musician serves as host and musical guest on the show, he surprises Sally by being smart, sensitive and suspiciously interested in spending one-on-one time together. Over the course of the book, the two lose touch and reconnect as Sally continuously self-sabotages. All in all, it’s deliciously charming, whip-smart and just really damn fun to read.

Another more recent addition to my list, this 2023 novel has stayed with me (and more people should be talking about it). As kids in Houston, Cam and TJ were more than best friends. Now in their 20s, after a falling out, they reenter each other’s orbits. Their meandering path to reconciliation is at the center of this moving new novel by Houston-born writer Washington (Lot, Memorial). When Cam flees L.A. for Texas after the death of his boyfriend, his initial interactions with TJ are tense and raw. Both men are struggling in different ways as they attempt to navigate who they are to each other. Washington’s prose is sparse but affecting (some chapters are single sentences), and he beautifully explores self-destruction and self-discovery, queer love, what it means to heal and the power of personal connection.