Best Contemporary Fiction Books of the Last 5 Years.
The last five years have produced an unusually strong run of contemporary fiction — Booker and Pulitzer winners, breakout bestsellers, and a few books that somehow managed to be both. Here are fifteen of the best, spanning literary prize-winners, book-club favorites, and a couple of buzzy hits that lived up to the hype.
1. James by Percival Everett (2024)
A retelling of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man Huck travels with, giving him interiority, wit, and agency Twain never allowed him. It won both the 2024 National Book Award and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and manages to be a sharp critique of a classic while working perfectly as a novel in its own right.
2. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2022)
A modern recasting of Dickens's David Copperfield, relocated to Appalachia and narrated by a boy navigating poverty, foster care, and the opioid crisis with a voice that's funny, furious, and impossible to look away from. It won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
3. Trust by Hernan Diaz (2022)
A dazzling structural puzzle of a novel — the same story of a 1920s Wall Street tycoon and his wife told four different ways, through four different documents, each version undermining the one before it. It shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is one of the smartest books written about money and the lies it tells.
4. Orbital by Samantha Harvey (2023)
A slim, meditative novel following six astronauts over a single day aboard the International Space Station, watching sixteen sunrises and sunsets while reflecting on Earth, distance, and what it means to be human from 250 miles up. It won the 2024 Booker Prize and is a rare example of literary fiction and science fiction working together with no friction at all.
5. Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (2023)
Set in a near-future Ireland sliding into authoritarianism, this novel follows a mother trying to hold her family together as the state grows more totalitarian around her. It won the 2023 Booker Prize and reads with an almost unbearable claustrophobic tension.
6. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (2022)
A darkly funny, genre-bending novel narrated by a dead photographer in the afterlife during Sri Lanka's civil war, who has seven moons (days) to contact the living and solve his own murder. It won the 2022 Booker Prize and blends satire, ghost story, and war reporting into something genuinely original.
7. The Promise by Damon Galgut (2021)
A South African family saga spanning four decades, following the slow, repeated failure of a white family to keep a promise made to their Black domestic worker — a broken promise that mirrors the country's own unfulfilled promises after apartheid. It won the 2021 Booker Prize.
8. Flesh by David Szalay (2025)
A spare, quietly devastating novel following a Hungarian man named István from a working-class adolescence through military service, London's elite social circles, and a hard-won adulthood. It won the 2025 Booker Prize for its unflinching look at class mobility and survival.
9. Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips (2023)
Set in a West Virginia asylum in the aftermath of the American Civil War, this novel follows a wounded veteran, a young girl, and her traumatized mother as they try to heal from the war's damage. It won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
10. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (2022)
A wickedly funny, quietly furious novel about Elizabeth Zott, a brilliant chemist in 1960s America who's pushed out of research due to sexism and ends up hosting a cooking show that accidentally turns into a feminist awakening for its viewers. One of the biggest word-of-mouth bestsellers of the decade.
11. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (2022)
A decades-spanning story about two friends, Sadie and Sam, who build a career together designing video games — a novel ostensibly about gaming that's really about creative partnership, ambition, disability, and the particular intimacy of people who make things together.
12. The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese (2023)
A multigenerational family saga set in Kerala, India, spanning much of the twentieth century, following a family affected by a mysterious condition that causes at least one person in every generation to drown. Sweeping, humane, and deeply researched, particularly on medicine and colonial-era India.
13. Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (2023)
A sharp, uncomfortable satire about a struggling white author who steals a dead Asian American friend's unpublished manuscript and passes it off as her own — a page-turner that's also a pointed takedown of publishing's relationship with race, appropriation, and ambition.
14. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (2023)
A tragicomic Irish family saga following the Barnes family as their car dealership business collapses and each family member's secrets and self-deceptions come apart alongside it. Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, it's both very funny and genuinely heartbreaking.
15. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (2021)
A short, quietly devastating novella set in 1980s Ireland, following a coal merchant who discovers the abuses taking place at the local Magdalene laundry and has to decide whether to look away. Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, it does more in under 120 pages than most novels manage in 400.
Where to Find These Books in Kenya
All the titles above are in stock at Readers' Republik, with delivery across Nairobi and the rest of Kenya. Explore more in these collections:
Frequently Asked Questions
Which of these books is the best starting point? Lessons in Chemistry and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow are the most accessible entry points — fast-moving, emotionally engaging, and widely loved without requiring much literary patience. Trust and Prophet Song are better suited to readers who enjoy more demanding, structurally ambitious fiction.
Which of these books have won major literary prizes? Six of the fifteen are Booker Prize winners (The Promise, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Prophet Song, Orbital, Flesh) or Pulitzer Prize winners (James, Demon Copperhead, Trust, Night Watch), and two more (The Bee Sting, Small Things Like These) were Booker-shortlisted.
Is Small Things Like These a full novel or a novella? It's a novella, under 120 pages — one of the shortest books to ever be shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Are any of these books part of a series? No — all fifteen are standalone novels, though several authors (like Percival Everett and R.F. Kuang) have other acclaimed books worth exploring afterward.
Which of these is the most emotionally difficult read? Demon Copperhead, Night Watch, and Prophet Song deal directly with addiction, war trauma, and authoritarian violence respectively, and are heavier reads than the others on this list.