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LitHub's Top Novels of the Decade
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chose their top novels of the decade. How many of these have you read?
Updated December 4, 2023
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Cabarrus County Public Library
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All my puny sorrows
Toews, Miriam
Ebook
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The Buddha in the attic
Otsuka, Julie
Paper Book
Finalist for the 2011 National Book Award Julie Otsuka's long awaited follow-up to When the Emperor Was Divine ("To watch Emperor catching on with teachers and students in vast numbers is to grasp what must have happened at the outset for novels like Lord...
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Dept. of speculation
Offill, Jenny
Paper Book
Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged...
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The fifth season
Jemisin, N. K.
Paper Book
At the end of the world, a woman must hide her secret power and find her kidnapped daughter in this "intricate and extraordinary" Hugo Award winning novel of power, oppression, and revolution. (The New York Times) This is the way the world ends. . .for the last time. ...
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Imagine me gone : a novel
Haslett, Adam
Paper Book
From a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, a ferociously intimate story of a family facing the ultimate question: how far will we go to save the people we love the most? When Margaret's fiancée, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a...
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In the distance
Díaz, Hernán
Paper Book
Finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction A young Swedish immigrant finds himself penniless and alone in California. The boy travels East in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing West. Driven back again and again, he meets...
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A little life : a novel
Yanagihara, Hanya.
Paper Book
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the...
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Milkman : a novel
Burns, Anna
Paper Book
Winner of the Man Booker Prize "Everything about this novel rings true. . . . Original, funny, disarmingly oblique and unique."--The Guardian In an unnamed city, middle sister stands out for the wrong reasons. She reads while walking, for one. And she has...
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Outline
Cusk, Rachel
Paper Book
Literary Hub, Best Books of the Decade, A Finalist for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction One of The New York Times' Top Ten Books of the Year Named a A New York Times...
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The overstory : a novel
Powers, Richard
Paper Book
An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent...
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Salvage the bones : a novel
Ward, Jesmyn.
Paper Book
Winner of the National Book AwardThe National Book Award winning novel from the author of Let Us Descend and Men We Reaped--a gritty but tender story of family and poverty in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina.A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico,...
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The sellout : a novel
Beatty, Paul.
Paper Book
Winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction Named one of the best books of 2015 byTheNew York Times Book Reviewand theWall Street Journal A biting satire about a...
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The sympathizer
Nguyen, Viet Thanh
Paper Book
Now an HBO Limited Seriesfrom Executive Producers Park Chan-wook and Robert Downey Jr., StreamingExclusively on Max Winner of the 2016Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Winner of the 2016 EdgarAward for Best First Novel Winner of the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medalfor...
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The thousand autumns of Jacob De Zoet : a novel
Mitchell, David
Paper Book
By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas | Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize In 2007, Time magazine named him one of the most influential novelists in the world. He has twice been short-listed for the Man Booker...
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The tiger's wife : a novel
Obreht, Téa.
Paper Book
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "Spectacular . . . [Téa Obreht] spins a tale of such marvel and magic in a literary voice so enchanting that the mesmerized reader wants her never to stop."--Entertainment Weekly Look...
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Train dreams
Johnson, Denis
Paper Book
ANew York Times Notable Book for 2011 One ofThe Economist's 2011 Books of the Year One of NPR's 10 Best Novels of 2011 Denis Johnson'sTrain Dreams is an epic in miniature, one of his most evocative and poignant fictions. Robert Grainer is a day...
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Trust exercise : a novel
Choi, Susan
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION NATIONAL BESTSELLER "Electrifying" (People) * "Masterly" (The Guardian) * "Dramatic and memorable" (The New Yorker) * "Magic" (TIME) * "Ingenious"...
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The Underground Railroad : a novel
Whitehead, Colson
Paper Book
From prize-winning, bestselling author Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but...
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A visit from the Goon Squad
Egan, Jennifer.
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER * With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption "features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously,...
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