The 6 Best Books Released Since 2020, Ranked

Image via Bloomsbury Publishing Published Sep 5, 2026, 6:05 PM EDT Sign in to your Collider account Fiction since 2020 has had an almost unfair amount of reality to compete with. Pandemic isolation, political fracture, economic anxiety, addiction, technology, race, and the feeling that ordinary life can change shape overnight were already sitting outside the window. The stand-out novelists, therefore, did something more interesting than chase the headlines. They found voices and structures capable of making that instability intimate. That is what links these six. One family can contain decades of secrets. Two friends can spend thirty years loving each other through the video games they create. These are books you finish with more than admiration. They alter the furniture in your head. Lock in if you want something to stick with. 6 'The Bee Sting' (2023) Image via Macmillan Publishers The Barnes family is falling apart in The Bee Sting, although everybody has a different explanation for when the trouble started. Dickie’s car dealership is collapsing and he responds by disappearing into the woods to build a bunker. Imelda begins selling her jewelry. Their teenage daughter Cass is drinking through the final stretch of school, while twelve-year-old PJ is quietly preparing to run away. Paul Murray keeps widening the family history until financial disaster starts looking like the newest expression of problems that were already waiting underneath marriages, friendships, sexuality, parenthood, and old choices. The novel was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. Its long length becomes an advantage because every Barnes eventually gets enough room to challenge what the others believe about them. Perspective changes the emotional meaning of scenes we thought we understood, and even punctuation shifts with the consciousness telling the story. Murray can be extremely funny about people behaving terribly while keeping their private fears painfully legible. The looming environmental anxiety also echoes Dickie’s bunker obsession without reducing the family to a metaphor. You start wondering who broke this household. Eventually the more interesting question becomes whether a family can survive after everybody finally understands what happened. 5 'Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow' (2022) Image via Knopf Publishing Group Sam Masur and Sadie Green first connect as children through video games, reunite years later in Cambridge, and eventually become creative partners whose games turn them into major industry figures. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow follows that partnership across roughly three decades of friendship, competition, disability, artistic ambition, success, jealousy, and grief. Their first breakout game, Ichigo, changes their professional lives, while producer and friend Marx Watanabe becomes crucial to the human ecosystem around them. Gabrielle Zevin understands something anyone who has created with another person will recognize. Collaboration can produce an intimacy every bit as complicated as romance. The gaming material has real substance because the fictional games reflect what Sam and Sadie struggle to communicate outside them. Design becomes argument, affection, ego, and occasionally a way of repairing damage that conversation cannot reach. Sam’s disability is woven into how he moves through both physical and digital spaces, while Sadie’s ambition brings its own compromises around mentorship and authorship. The book became a huge crossover success and won Goodreads’ 2022 fiction vote, though popularity barely explains its hold. Readers who have ever loved a creative partner, lost one, resented one, or desperately wanted to make something beautiful with somebody will find plenty here. 4 'The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store' (2023) Image via Penguin Random House A skeleton discovered in a well in 1972 opens The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, then the novel reaches backward into Chicken Hill, a poor neighborhood in Pottstown, Pennsylvania where Black residents and Jewish immigrants have built lives beside one another. At its center are Moshe and Chona Ludlow. Moshe integrates his theater by booking Black entertainers, while Chona runs the neighborhood grocery store. Their community eventually closes ranks around Dodo, a deaf Black boy whom state authorities want to institutionalize. The mystery gives the book forward pull, but Chicken Hill itself becomes the real reason to stay. James McBride fills that neighborhood with gossip, grudges, generosity, hustlers, workers, musicians, religious differences, and people who know exactly whose door to knock on when official systems become dangerous. The story takes institutional racism and antisemitism seriously while retaining enormous warmth and comic life. Dodo’s situation also gives the community theme practical stakes. Protecting somebody requires organization, trust, and people willing to risk their own safety. The novel was named both Amazon’s and Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year for 2023, and its appeal is easy to understand. Chicken Hill gradually becomes one of those fictional neighborhoods where even minor characters seem capable of walking into another novel of their own. 3 'Piranesi' (2020) Image via Bloomsbury Publishing Piranesi lives inside the House, an apparently endless structure of vast halls filled with statues, birds, clouds, and seawater that rises through the lower levels with the tides. He carefully catalogs what he sees in Piranesi, records everything in journals, tends to the dead, and meets another living person he calls the Other at scheduled times. His world initially feels strange yet perfectly ordered to him. Then messages and inconsistencies begin suggesting that his understanding of the House may be incomplete. That is about as much as anyone should know before opening Susanna Clarke’s novel. The astonishing thing is how quickly this impossible place starts feeling peaceful. Piranesi’s attention gives dignity to birds, statues, weather, and daily rituals, so curiosity about the mystery develops alongside genuine affection for the House itself. Questions about memory and knowledge eventually become inseparable from questions about exploitation, innocence, and whether understanding more always improves a life. Clarke returned seventeen years after Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell with something dramatically smaller and stranger, then won the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction for it. It is only a few hundred pages long. Take them slowly. Wandering through these halls is half the pleasure. 2 'Demon Copperhead' (2022) Image via Harper Charles Dickens sent David Copperfield through poverty and exploitation in Victorian England. Demon Copperhead relocates that basic architecture to contemporary Appalachia, where Demon is born to a teenage mother in a trailer and grows up navigating foster care, hunger, unstable adults, school, football, and eventually the opioid epidemic. Barbara Kingsolver gives him a voice sharp enough to understand the absurdity around him even when he has almost no power to change his circumstances. The Pulitzer committee described the novel as a recasting of David Copperfield centered on poverty, addiction, institutional failure, and survival. It shared the 2023 Fiction prize with Hernan Diaz’s Trust. Demon’s narration is the book’s great weapon. He can be funny while describing something awful because humor is part of how he stays mentally ahead of adults who repeatedly fail him. His talent for drawing, athletic ability, friendships, and hunger for belonging keep opening possible versions of a future, while systems supposedly designed to help children often push him toward another danger. The Dickens connection adds richness without requiring homework. Readers who know David Copperfield will recognize the bones. Everyone else still gets a complete, furious American story about a boy learning how expensive survival can become. Once Demon starts talking, six hundred pages move frighteningly fast. 1 'James' (2024) Image via Doubleday Most readers already know the river journey. Huck Finn escapes his violent father, Jim flees enslavement, and the two travel together down the Mississippi. James changes the entire moral center of that familiar story by letting Jim speak for himself. Here he is James, an intelligent husband and father whose immediate fear is being sold away from his wife and daughter. One of Percival Everett’s smartest choices appears in James’s language. Enslaved people speak differently among themselves and deliberately perform the dialect white people expect whenever white listeners are present. Even speech becomes a survival skill. That change reaches far beyond perspective. Events inherited from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn acquire different danger once the person who can legally be bought, beaten, or killed is controlling the narrative. James reads, thinks, strategizes, protects Huck, and understands the absurdity of racial supremacy with a clarity the society around him cannot afford to acknowledge. The humor can be savage because language itself exposes who is performing ignorance and who actually possesses it. Everett won the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction, followed by the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for James. Those honors fit a novel that does something extremely difficult. It enters one of America’s most famous books and permanently changes whose mind we hear when we remember the journey. Collider Exclusive · Universe Personality Quiz Which Iconic Universe Do You Belong in the Most? Star Wars · Lord of the Rings · Harry Potter · Game of Thrones · Star Trek Five legendary universes. Five completely different visions of what the world could be — or already was. One of them is the world your instincts, your values, and your particular way of existing were built for. Eight questions will tell you which one. 🚀Star Wars 💍Lord of the Rings 🧙Harry Potter 👑Game of Thrones 🖖Star Trek FIND YOUR UNIVERSE → 01 What gives your life its deepest sense of meaning? Every universe is built around a different answer to this question. ABeing part of something larger than myself — a cause, a rebellion, a fight for freedom that outlasts me. BThe journey itself — the places I'll go, the companions beside me, the world I'll discover on the way. CLearning — unlocking what I'm capable of, understanding the world's hidden mechanics, growing into something more. DLegacy — the name I leave behind, the power I build, the mark I make before the world moves on without me. EUnderstanding — exploring what exists beyond the horizon and asking what it means to be alive in a universe this vast. NEXT QUESTION → 02 Which kind of world do you most want to inhabit? The environment shapes who you become. Choose carefully. AA galaxy of planets, each with its own culture — connected by conflict, trade, and the Force. BAncient lands of breathtaking beauty, deep history, and a creeping darkness at the edges. CA world hidden inside our own — full of wonder, community, and magic waiting to be learned. DA brutal, beautiful continent where power is everything and every alliance is a calculation. EA future where humanity has reached the stars — and must decide what kind of species it wants to be. NEXT QUESTION → 03 How do you prefer your conflicts resolved? The shape of a world's conflicts tells you everything about its soul. AThrough sacrifice and courage — someone has to make the impossible choice so others don't have to. BThrough fellowship — the impossible becomes possible when the right people walk the same road. CThrough growth — confronting what you fear, understanding what you lack, and becoming equal to the challenge. DThrough strategy — outthinking, outmaneuvering, positioning yourself so the outcome was never in doubt. EThrough dialogue — finding the third option, the peaceful resolution, the answer that doesn't require a body count. NEXT QUESTION → 04 Who do you want beside you when things get difficult? Your ideal companions reveal the world you were made for. AA small crew — a pilot, a rogue, a warrior — each broken in their own way, unbeatable together. BA fellowship of different kinds of people, bound by purpose and deepened by the long road. CFriends who grew up alongside me — who knew me before I knew myself, and stayed anyway. DAllies whose loyalty I've earned — and tested — and whose ambitions align with mine, for now. EA crew of brilliant, curious, principled people from every corner of known space. NEXT QUESTION → 05 What is your relationship with power? How you seek, wield, or resist power is the map of who you are. AI want to use it to protect — and I'm terrified of what I might become if I'm not careful. BI distrust it. The most important power in this story is the courage to give it up. CI want to earn it — through knowledge, through effort, through becoming someone worthy of it. DI want to wield it. Preferably before someone else decides to wield it against me. EI want to understand it — its structures, its limits, its ethical dimensions. Power without accountability is the real threat. NEXT QUESTION → 06 How does your universe treat good and evil? A world's moral architecture tells you more about it than any map. AThere is a dark side and a light side — and the choice between them is always present, always personal. BEvil is real and ancient and patient — and goodness, however small, is the only thing that can undo it. CGood and evil are real, but they live inside people — and people are complicated, always capable of both. DGood and evil are mostly a matter of perspective and proximity. Power is the only honest currency. EEvil is usually the result of ignorance, fear, or broken systems — and understanding it is the first step to solving it. NEXT QUESTION → 07 What role would you naturally fall into? Every universe has archetypes. Which one fits you without trying? AThe reluctant hero — ordinary origins, extraordinary moment, changed forever by the choice to act. BThe unlikely carrier — the one nobody expected to matter most, quietly bearing the weight of everything. CThe student — not yet who I'll become, learning through every mistake, growing into something the world needs. DThe player — sharp enough to see the game for what it is, ambitious enough to try to win it. EThe explorer — drawn to the unknown, driven by curiosity, most alive when standing somewhere no one has stood before. NEXT QUESTION → 08 What do you ultimately believe about the future? The answer to this is the clearest window into which universe already lives inside you. AThat hope is real — that even in the darkest galaxy, a new hope is always possible. CThat even the smallest person can change the course of the future, if they have the courage to try. CThat love and friendship and doing what's right will matter in the end, even when everything says otherwise. DThat the wheel keeps turning — that power shifts, winters end, and what endures is those willing to fight for it. EThat humanity — or whatever we become — is capable of extraordinary things, if we choose to be. REVEAL MY UNIVERSE → Your Universe Has Been Chosen You Belong In…Your answers point to the iconic universe your values, your instincts, and your particular way of seeing the world were built for. This is where you would find your people — and your purpose. Star WarsYou believe in the cause — in the idea that freedom is worth fighting for even when the odds are impossible and the empire is vast. You are drawn to the moral clarity of a universe where hope itself is a form of resistance. You'd find your people in the Rebellion — a ragtag coalition of true believers held together by conviction more than resources. Star Wars is fundamentally a story about ordinary people choosing to matter in an extraordinary conflict — and that is exactly your kind of story. The Force may or may not be with you. But the will to use it for something larger than yourself certainly is. Lord of the RingsYou understand, in the deepest part of yourself, that the journey matters as much as the destination — and that the world's beauty is worth protecting even at great cost. Middle-earth is a world of ancient wonder, deep friendship, and a darkness that only retreats when enough small acts of courage accumulate. You would thrive here because you value the fellowship more than the glory — the road more than the arrival. Tolkien's universe rewards patience, loyalty, and the willingness to carry something heavy across a very long distance. Those are not burdens to you. They are simply how you move through the world. Harry PotterYou believe that love, loyalty, and doing what's right are not naive sentiments — they are the most powerful forces in any world, magical or otherwise. The Wizarding World is a place of wonder hidden in plain sight, where learning is transformative and the bonds you form at school follow you into every battle. You would flourish here because you take both the magic and the friendships seriously — and you understand that one without the other is incomplete. Harry Potter's universe ultimately rewards those who choose to stand for something even when standing is terrifying. That choice — made quietly, without guarantee — is something you understand completely. Game of ThronesYou see the world clearly — its power structures, its hypocrisies, its brutal arithmetic — and you are not paralysed by that clarity. You use it. Westeros is a world that rewards intelligence, adaptability, and the willingness to understand that every alliance is also a negotiation. You would survive here — possibly thrive here — because you don't confuse the world as it is with the world as you'd like it to be. Game of Thrones is a story about what happens when the idealists and the realists collide. You are sharp enough to know which one lasts longer. Winter always comes. You are already prepared. Star TrekYou believe the future is worth building — that curiosity, cooperation, and the expansion of understanding are not just ideals but the most practical path forward for any civilisation. Star Trek is a universe where the questions matter as much as the answers, and where encountering something utterly alien is cause for wonder rather than fear. You would belong here because you are fundamentally optimistic about what intelligence and decency can achieve — while being honest about how hard that achievement is. The Federation is the universe's most ambitious thought experiment: what if we actually got better? You don't just hope that's possible. You think it's the only thing worth working toward. ↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ