I f you like to read fiction set in the United States or written by American authors, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, normally awarded annually by Columbia University in New York, is a great place to start. These are books that have literary merit but are also accessible and enjoyable to read. Some are very funny (The Netanyahus All the Light We Cannot See The Pale King ,
“Jayne Anne Phillips won a Pulitzer Prize for this a mother-daughter story set in a West Virginia asylum in the aftermath of the American Civil War. In it, a severely wounded Union veteran, a young girl and her traumatised mother struggle to process all that they have experienced. The judges praised it as a ‘beautifully rendered’ novel.” Read more...
Award-Winning Novels of 2024
Cal Flyn ,
Five Books Editor
“It was criticised as being poverty porn, but I don’t really see that. It does risk being wildly sentimental, but I kind of like that. It’s old school. It has a confident, Dickensian snap and brio, a broad, swinging-for-the-fences ambition, and it worked for me. And the ending is the complete clichéd happy ending. Yet, because it’s such an enormous book, when you get there you feel like you’ve earned the big sentimental pay-off. I really liked it. It had me welling up.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in the American South
Xan Brooks ,
Novelist
🏆 Joint winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Hernan Diaz's award-winning second novel is set in a world of extreme wealth in New York throughout the 20th-century. The New York Times called it "intricate, cunning and consistently surprising."
Read expert recommendations
“Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It’s a genre-bending campus comedy about the Jewish-American experience which has attracted rave reviews. Writing in The Guardian, Leo Robson described it as ‘a comic historical fantasia’ that reads ‘like an attempt, as delightful as it sounds, to cross-breed Roth’s The Ghost Writer and Nabokov’s Pale Fire .'” Read more...
Award-Winning Novels of 2022
Cal Flyn ,
Five Books Editor
🏆 Winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Erdrich's sixth novel follows one community’s efforts to halt the 'Indian termination policies' of the United States in the 1950s. The Pulitzer Prize jury described it as "rendered with dexterity and imagination."
Read expert recommendations
🏆 Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Colson Whitehead's much anticipated follow-up to The Underground Railroad The Nickel Boys was recently adapted for the screen by RaMell Ross; the acclaimed film stars Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson.
Read expert recommendations
“I had the experience of having the revelation that the author clearly hoped a reader would have, which is that what appears to be a book about distinct individuals—almost a book of short stories— turns out to be something more complex, in which all the characters are linked through time and space.” Read more...
The Best Climate Books of 2019
Sarah Dry ,
Science Writer
🏆 Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
A beloved satirical novel about a heartbroken man who now travels the world, from mid-list literary festival to failing arts residency, in a bid to avoid his ex-partner. The Pulitzer jury described it as "a generous book, musical in its prose and expansive in its structure and range, about growing older and the essential nature of love."
Read expert recommendations
🏆 Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
🏆 Winner of the 2017 Arthur C Clarke Award
Colson Whitehead transforms 'the Underground Railroad'—the nickname for the network of safe houses used by fugitive slaves escaping the American South—into a very real rail system in this stunning work of speculative fiction. Since publication in 2016, it was an international bestseller, garnered praise from (among others) Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey, and won a number of major literary prizes.
Read expert recommendations
“Viet Thanh Nguyen is a powerful new voice for the Vietnamese who left the country after the end of the war in 1975, mainly South Vietnamese who fled after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and settled in the US. The protagonist is half French, half Vietnamese. He’s a spy working undercover for the communists in Saigon and then in the US. When he returns to post-war communist Vietnam, he is imprisoned by his own side. The novel ends at sea with the narrator leaving Vietnam among a crowd of boat people. Viet Thanh Nguyen illustrates the complexity of divided loyalties that come from Vietnam’s history—from being a colony for 100 years, then at war for over 30 years, with families split between supporters of the North and supporters of the South.” Read more...
The Best Vietnamese Novels
Sherry Buchanan ,
Journalist
🏆 Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
The Pulitzer Prize jury described Doerr's mega-bestselling book as "an imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology."
Read expert recommendations
🏆 Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Tartt's third, sprawling novel is a coming-of-age story that centres on a grieving boy's obsession with a famous painting, saved from destruction during a terrorist attack and never returned. It was adapted into a 2016 film directed by John Crowley.
Read expert recommendations
🏆 Winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
The Pulitzer jury described The Orphan Master's Son as "an exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart."
Read expert recommendations
No Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded in 2012
“I love this novel. It is wonderfully written, brilliantly imaginative and engaging, funny and sad and smart. I also love it because of what it says about SF. That in a genre often caricatured (by those who don’t know it very well) as being about the wish-fulfillment fantasies of adolescent boys – huge space weapons, scantily clad astro-girls and so on – some of the very best work is being written by women.” Read more...
Science Fiction Classics
Adam Roberts ,
Novelist
🏆 Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Paul Harding's Faulkneresque debut novel was a surprise bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winner. It tells the story of a father and son from New England, as recalled by the son on his deathbed.
Read expert recommendations
🏆 Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Elizabeth Strout’s novel, Olive Kitteridge , published in 2008, follows the life of an acerbic retired schoolteacher and her husband in a small coastal town in Maine. Olive is refreshingly not a people-pleaser. The novel has been made into an award-winning TV series starring Frances McDormand. The unsentimental journey of Olive Kitteridge continues in Olive Again
Read expert recommendations
“The places he describes in his fiction are places where I grew up. In the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , there’s a scene where Oscar Wao tries to kill himself by jumping off a rail bridge across the Raritan river. That bridge is just down the street from my house. To this day, I can’t take a train across it without thinking of that incident. As far as I’m concerned, it happened. Oscar Wao is very real to me. When I read Wao, I think, there but for the grace of God go I.” Read more...
Kushanava Choudhury on Calcutta Influences
Kushanava Choudhury ,
“The Road is a very spare novel by Cormac McCarthy. Humanity has been wiped out, for the most part. There’s a man and his son traveling on a road to try to get to where it’s rumored that sprouts of civilization are starting to grow again. It’s a very minimalistic book. It’s very sparse and elegiac, just with those two characters.” Read more...
The Best Apocalyptic Fiction
Elliot Ackerman ,
Military Historians & Veteran
🏆 Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Geraldine Brooks' March tells the story of the father from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, who had left them to fight for the Unionist cause in the American Civil War. A lushly written work of historical fiction and a tragic love story. The LA Times described it as "a beautifully wrought story about how war dashes ideals, unhinges moral certainties and drives a wedge of bitter experience and unspeakable memories between husband and wife."
Read expert recommendations
“It’s a remarkably empathetic and beautifully written book…It deals with a lot of the anxieties about physical failings, and anxieties about legacy. It really makes you feel that you’re being put in the mind of someone who hasn’t got long and is coping with that.” Read more...
The best books on Ageing
Kathleen Taylor ,
Science Writer
🏆 Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Eugenides' million-copy-selling novel Middlesex, in which schoolgirl Calliope Stephanides is discovered at puberty to be intersex, turns into a sprawling family saga, as it slips back in time to follow the transmission of the responsible gene through several generations of a family of Greek immigrants to the United States. Of its writing, Eugenides once recalled : "The entire structure for the novel appeared in my head, fully formed, as ravishing as a crystal palace on a distant hill."
Read expert recommendations
🏆 Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
In the small, post-industrial town of Empire Falls, Maine, a huge cast of characters are just trying to get by. There's Miles, the burger flipper at Empire Grill; David, Miles's addict brother; Tick, Miles's struggling teenage daughter; and Francine Whiting, the rich heiress who still tries to run the town. Russo's warmhearted portrait of blue collar America interweaves the lives of the town's inhabitants—before an unexpected twist shows the whole story in a new light.
Read expert recommendations
🏆 Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
A twisting, turning adventure about two fiction pioneers of the 'golden age' of comic books —two Jewish cousins who escape Nazi-occupied Prague before reinventing themselves in the United States.
Read expert recommendations
“Lahiri’s characters are often knowledge workers, of one kind or another, whose worlds are diasporic. I think she has a great knack for showing both the closeness and the distance of peoples and cities. They seem so close together at the same time, they’re incredibly far apart.” Read more...
The best books on Boston
Jane Kamensky ,
Historian
Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]
Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount .
