21st Century

Three friends grow up at an idyllic English boarding school, only to discover the horrifying purpose for which they were created. Ishiguro tells their story with devastating restraint, turning a science-fiction premise into a meditation on love and mortality.

Thomas Cromwell rises from blacksmith's son to Henry VIII's chief minister, navigating a court where a wrong word means the scaffold. Mantel makes Tudor politics feel as immediate and dangerous as a knife fight in an alley.

A father and son walk through a scorched, lawless America, pushing a shopping cart and clinging to each other as the last proof of goodness. McCarthy strips language to its bones to ask what survives when everything else is gone.

Four academics, a journalist, and a reclusive novelist converge around a Mexican border city haunted by the unsolved murders of hundreds of women. Bolaño's sprawling posthumous masterpiece charts the violence lurking beneath the surface of civilisation.

A thirteen-year-old's misunderstanding on a hot summer evening in 1935 destroys the lives of two lovers. McEwan then follows the consequences through war, separation, and a lifetime's attempt to make amends through fiction.

Based on a true story, a Jewish man survives the Holocaust by interpreting for the Gestapo, later converting to Christianity and becoming a priest in Israel. Ulitskaya assembles letters, diaries, and documents into a mosaic about faith, identity, and reconciliation.