Listen to the New York Times Best Books of the 21st Century
October 9, 2024
RBmedia is the audiobook home for 25 of the New York Times “100 Best Books of the 21st Century,” as voted on by hundreds of literary luminaries. Across its audio brands, RBmedia published the audiobooks for a quarter of the titles on the list, including eight of the top 25. Listen to excerpts from the audio editions of some of the most important, influential books of the era.
Wolf Hall (Wolf Hall Trilogy, Book 1)
Written by Hilary Mantel
Performed by Ben Miles
Published by W. F. Howes
Winner of the Man Booker Prize
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
The basis for the TV series on BBC and PBS Masterpiece starring Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell.
From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion, suffering and courage.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Written by Junot Diaz
Performed by various narrators
Published by W. F. Howes
Winner of The Pulitzer Prize
Winner of The National Book Critics Circle Award
Winner of The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
Winner of The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize
A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read and named one of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he’s sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J.R.R Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku – the curse that has haunted his family for generations.
Written by Joan Didion
Performed by Barbara Caruso
Published by Highbridge
New York Times Bestseller
National Book Award Winner
With vulnerability and passion, Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience of love and loss. The Year Of Magical Thinking will speak directly to anyone who has ever loved a husband, wife, or child.
Written by Cormac McCarthy
Performed by Tom Stechschulte
Published by Recorded Books
National Bestseller
Pulitzer Prize Winner, 2007
The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece. A father and his son walk alone through burned America.
Written by Min Jin Lee
Performed by Allison Hiroto
Published by W. F. Howes
New York Times Bestseller
New York Times Notable Book of 2017
A USA Today Top Ten of 2017
July Pick for the PBS Newshour – New York Times Book Club Now Read This
Finalist for the 2018 Dayton Literary Peace Prize
Winner of the Medici Book Club Prize
Roxane Gay’s Favorite Book of 2017, Washington Post
Yeongdo, Korea – 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child: their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja falls pregnant by a married yakuza, the family face ruin. But then, Isak, a Christian minister, offers her a chance of salvation: a new life in Japan as his wife. Following a man she barely knows to a hostile country in which she has no friends, no home, and whose language she cannot speak, Sunja’s salvation is just the beginning of her story.
Written by Paul Beatty
Performed by Prentice Onayemi
Published by W. F. Howes
Winner of the Man Booker Prize
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction
Named one of the best books of by The New York Times Book Review and the Wall Street Journal
Born in Dickens, Los Angeles, the narrator of The Sellout spent his childhood as the subject in his father’s racially charged psychological studies. He is told that his father’s memoir will solve their financial woes. But when his father is killed, he discovers there never was a memoir.
Written by Percival Everett
Performed by Sean Crisden
Published by Tantor
One of The Atlantic‘s “Great American Novels”
Percival Everett’s blistering satire about race and publishing, now as the Oscar-nominated film, American Fiction, directed by Cord Jefferson and starring Jeffrey Wright and Tracee Ellis Ross.
Written by Richard Powers
Performed by Suzanne Toren
Published by Recorded Books
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
Winner of the William Dean Howells Medal
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize
A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post, Time, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
Written by Ian McEwan
Performed by Jill Tanner
Published by Recorded Books
National Bestseller
Ian McEwan has received prestigious awards and international praise for his novels, including Enduring Love. In Atonement, three children lose their innocence–as the sweltering summer heat bears down on the hottest day in 1935–and their lives are changed forever.
Written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Performed by Adjoa Andoh
Published by W. F. Howes
National Bestseller
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
From the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, a powerful story of love, race and identity. Fearless, gripping, spanning three continents and numerous lives, the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Americanah is a richly told story of love and expectation set in today’s globalized world.
Written by Claudia Rankine
Performed by Allyson Johnson
Published by Tantor
Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
Winner of the NAACP Image Award
Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize
Winner of the PEN Open Book Award
One of the Best Books of the Year for The New Yorker, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, NPR, Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29, and many more . .
Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media.
Written by Annie Ernaux
Performed by Anna Bentinck
Published by Dreamscape Media
Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature
Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize
The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present – even projections into the future – photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries.
Written by Claire Keegan
Performed by Aidan Kelly
Published by Highbridge
Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize
Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.
A Brief History of Seven Killings
Written by Marlon James
Performed by Robertson Dean, Johnathan McClain, Ryan Anderson, Dwight Bacquie, Cherise Boothe, and Robert Younis
Published by Highbridge
Winner of the Booker Prize
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
One of Entertainment Weekly’s Top 10 Books of the Decade
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters—assassins, journalists, drug dealers, and even ghosts—A Brief History of Seven Killings is the fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time and its bloody aftermath, from the streets and slums of Kingston in the 1970s, to the crack wars in 1980s New York, to a radically altered Jamaica in the 1990s.
Written by George Saunders
Performed by George Saunders
Published by W. F. Howes
New York Times Bestseller
National Book Award Finalist
Named one of Time’s Ten Best Fiction Books of the Decade
Named one of the Best Books of the Decade by Entertainment Weekly and Buzzfeed
Named one of the ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review
From the undisputed master of the short story comes a dazzling and disturbing new collection. A family member recollects a backyard pole dressed for all occasions; Divisional Director Todd Birnie sends round a memo to employees he thinks need some inspiration; and in an auction of local celebrities Al Roosten hides his own internal monologue behind a winning smile. Although, as a young boy discovers, sometimes the voices fade and all you are left with is a frozen hill on a cold day in December.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Written by Barbara Ehrenreich
Performed by Cristine McMurdo-Wallis
Published by Recorded Books
New York Times Bestseller
This engrossing piece of undercover reportage is a New York Times best-seller. With nearly a million copies in print, Nickel and Dimed is a modern classic that deftly portrays the plight of America’s working-class poor. Author Barbara Ehrenreich decides to see if she can scratch out a comfortable living in blue-collar America. What she discovers is a culture of desperation, where workers often take multiple low-paying jobs just to keep a roof overhead.
10:04Written by Ben Lerner
Performed by Eric Michael Summerer
Published by Dreamscape Media
Winner of The Paris Review’s 2012 Terry Southern Prize
A Finalist for the 2014 Folio Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award
Exploring sex, friendship, medicine, memory, art, and politics, 10:04 is both a riveting work of fiction and a brilliant examination of the role fiction plays in our lives.
Written by Michelle Alexander
Performed by Karen Chilton
Published by Recorded Books
Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora
Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Written by Tayari Jones
Performed by Sean Crisden and Eisa Davis
Published by Highbridge
A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book
A 2018 Best of the Year Selection of NPR, Time, Bustle, O – The Oprah Magazine, The Dallas Morning News, Amazon.com
Oprah’s Book Club 2018 Selection
Winner of the 2019 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Fiction
Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction
An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward—with hope and pain—into the future.
The Other Name (Septology I-II)
Written by Jon Fosse
Performed by Kyle Snyder
Published by Tantor
Winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature
New York Times Editors’ Choice
Longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize
A writer at the zenith of his career, with The Other Name, the first two volumes in his Septology, Fosse presents us with an indelible and poignant exploration of the human condition that will endure as his masterpiece.
When We Cease to Understand the World
Written by Benjamin Labatut
Performed by Adam Barr
Published by Dreamscape Media
Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature
When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Written by Lydia Davis
Performed by Thérèse Plummer, Mia Barron, and Jonathan Davis
Published by Recorded Books
“Among the true originals of contemporary American short fiction.” ―San Francisco Chronicle
This volume contains all her stories to date, from the acclaimed Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance.
Bring Up the Bodies (Wolf Hall Trilogy, Book 2)
Written by Hilary Mantel
Performed by Ben Miles
Published by W. F. Howes
“The finest works of historical fiction in contemporary literature.” ― The Washington Post
Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2012 Bring Up The Bodies chronicles the downfall of Anne Boleyn through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to Henry VIII. Sir Peter Stothard, chairman of the judges, hailed Mantel as ‘the greatest English prose writer of modern times’.
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
Written by Saidiya Hartman
Performed by Allyson Johnson
Published by Highbridge
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, 2019
The Publishing Triangle Award Winner, 2020
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Written by Ali Smith
Performed by John Banks
Published by Recorded Books
Man Booker Prize Finalist
A Best Book of the Year: NPR, Financial Times
Winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction
Winner of the 2014 Costa Novel Award
Winner of the Saltire Literary Book of the Year Award
How to Be Both is a novel all about art’s versatility. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it’s a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions.
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