| 1 | My Brilliant Friend | Elena Ferrante | 2012 |
| 2 | The Warmth of Other Suns | Isabel Wilkerson | 2010 |
| 3 | Wolf Hall | Hilary Mantel | 2009 |
| 4 | The Known World | Edward P. Jones | 2003 |
| 5 | The Corrections | Jonathan Franzen | 2001 |
| 6 | 2666 | Roberto Bolaño | 2008 |
| 7 | The Underground Railroad | Colson Whitehead | 2016 |
| 8 | Austerlitz | W.G. Sebald | 2001 |
| 9 | Never Let Me Go | Kazuo Ishiguro | 2005 |
| 10 | Gilead | Marilynne Robinson | 2004 |
| 11 | The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao | Junot Díaz | 2007 |
| 12 | The Year of Magical Thinking | Joan Didion | 2005 |
| 13 | The Road | Cormac McCarthy | 2006 |
| 14 | Outline | Rachel Cusk | 2015 |
| 15 | Pachinko | Min Jin Lee | 2017 |
| 16 | The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay | Michael Chabon | 2000 |
| 17 | The Sellout | Paul Beatty | 2015 |
| 18 | Lincoln in the Bardo | George Saunders | 2017 |
| 19 | Say Nothing | Patrick Radden Keefe | 2019 |
| 20 | Erasure | Percival Everett | 2001 |
| 21 | Evicted | Matthew Desmond | 2016 |
| 22 | Behind the Beautiful Forevers | Katherine Boo | 2012 |
| 23 | Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage | Alice Munro | 2001 |
| 24 | The Overstory | Richard Powers | 2018 |
| 25 | Random Family | Adrian Nicole LeBlanc | 2003 |
| 26 | Atonement | Ian McEwan | 2002 |
| 27 | Americanah | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | 2013 |
| 28 | Cloud Atlas | David Mitchell | 2004 |
| 29 | The Last Samurai | Helen DeWitt | 2000 |
| 30 | Sing, Unburied, Sing | Jesmyn Ward | 2017 |
| 31 | White Teeth | Zadie Smith | 2000 |
| 32 | The Line of Beauty | Alan Hollinghurst | 2004 |
| 33 | Salvage the Bones | Jesmyn Ward | 2011 |
| 34 | Citizen | Claudia Rankine | 2014 |
| 35 | Fun Home | Alison Bechdel | 2006 |
| 36 | Between the World and Me | Ta-Nehisi Coates | 2015 |
| 37 | The Years | Annie Ernaux | 2018 |
| 38 | The Savage Detectives | Roberto Bolaño | 2007 |
| 39 | A Visit From the Goon Squad | Jennifer Egan | 2010 |
| 40 | H Is for Hawk | Helen Macdonald | 2015 |
| 41 | Small Things Like These | Claire Keegan | 2021 |
| 42 | A Brief History of Seven Killings | Marlon James | 2014 |
| 43 | Postwar | Tony Judt | 2005 |
| 44 | The Fifth Season | N.K. Jemisin | 2015 |
| 45 | The Argonauts | Maggie Nelson | 2015 |
| 46 | The Goldfinch | Donna Tartt | 2013 |
| 47 | A Mercy | Toni Morrison | 2008 |
| 48 | Persepolis | Marjane Satrapi | 2003 |
| 49 | The Vegetarian | Han Kang | 2016 |
| 50 | Trust | Hernan Diaz | 2022 |
| 51 | Life After Life | Kate Atkinson | 2013 |
| 52 | Train Dreams | Denis Johnson | 2011 |
| 53 | Runaway | Alice Munro | 2004 |
| 54 | Tenth of December | George Saunders | 2013 |
| 55 | The Looming Tower | Lawrence Wright | 2006 |
| 56 | The Flamethrowers | Rachel Kushner | 2013 |
| 57 | Nickel and Dimed | Barbara Ehrenreich | 2001 |
| 58 | Stay True | Hua Hsu | 2022 |
| 59 | Middlesex | Jeffrey Eugenides | 2002 |
| 60 | Heavy | Kiese Laymon | 2018 |
| 61 | Demon Copperhead | Barbara Kingsolver | 2022 |
| 62 | 10:04 | Ben Lerner | 2014 |
| 63 | Veronica | Mary Gaitskill | 2005 |
| 64 | The Great Believers | Rebecca Makkai | 2018 |
| 65 | The Plot Against America | Philip Roth | 2004 |
| 66 | We the Animals | Justin Torres | 2011 |
| 67 | Far From the Tree | Andrew Solomon | 2012 |
| 68 | The Friend | Sigrid Nunez | 2018 |
| 69 | The New Jim Crow | Michelle Alexander | 2010 |
| 70 | All Aunt Hagar's Children | Edward P. Jones | 2006 |
| 71 | The Copenhagen Trilogy | Tove Ditlevsen | 2021 |
| 72 | Secondhand Time | Svetlana Alexievich | 2016 |
| 73 | The Passage of Power | Robert Caro | 2012 |
| 74 | Olive Kitteridge | Elizabeth Strout | 2008 |
| 75 | Exit West | Mohsin Hamid | 2017 |
| 76 | Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow | Gabrielle Zevin | 2022 |
| 77 | An American Marriage | Tayari Jones | 2018 |
| 78 | Septology | Jon Fosse | 2022 |
| 79 | A Manual for Cleaning Women | Lucia Berlin | 2015 |
| 80 | The Story of the Lost Child | Elena Ferrante | 2015 |
| 81 | Pulphead | John Jeremiah Sullivan | 2011 |
| 82 | Hurricane Season | Fernanda Melchor | 2020 |
| 83 | When We Cease to Understand the World | Benjamín Labatut | 2021 |
| 84 | The Emperor of All Maladies | Siddhartha Mukherjee | 2010 |
| 85 | Pastoralia | George Saunders | 2000 |
| 86 | Frederick Douglass | David W. Blight | 2018 |
| 87 | Detransition, Baby | Torrey Peters | 2021 |
| 88 | The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis | Lydia Davis | 2010 |
| 89 | The Return | Hisham Matar | 2016 |
| 90 | The Sympathizer | Viet Thanh Nguyen | 2015 |
| 91 | The Human Stain | Philip Roth | 2000 |
| 92 | The Days of Abandonment | Elena Ferrante | 2005 |
| 93 | Station Eleven | Emily St. John Mandel | 2014 |
| 94 | On Beauty | Zadie Smith | 2005 |
| 95 | Bring Up the Bodies | Hilary Mantel | 2012 |
| 96 | Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments | Saidiya Hartman | 2019 |
| 97 | Men We Reaped | Jesmyn Ward | 2013 |
| 98 | Bel Canto | Ann Patchett | 2001 |
| 99 | How to Be Both | Ali Smith | 2014 |
| 100 | Tree of Smoke | Denis Johnson | 2007 |
