Curated editorial lists and public reading lists from across our community.
The Nebula Award for Best Novel is presented annually by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, chosen by the genre’s own professional writers rather than by a fan convention - a useful counterpoint to the Hugo. Awarded since 1966, its winners run from Frank Herbert’s Dune (the very first) through Ursula K. Le Guin, Joe Haldeman and Samuel R. Delany to the field’s leading contemporary voices. This list collects the winning novels by year.
61 books
The Edgar Allan Poe Awards, presented each year by the Mystery Writers of America, are the most prestigious honours in crime and mystery fiction, and Best Novel is their flagship category. Named for the writer often credited with inventing the detective story, the award has recognised the finest crime novel of the year since 1954. Its winners run from Raymond Chandler and John le Carré to Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane and Stephen King, and take in the whole range of the genre, from hard-boiled detection and espionage to the modern literary thriller. This list collects the winning novels by year.
73 books
The World Fantasy Award for Best Novel has been presented each year since 1975 at the World Fantasy Convention, chosen by a panel of judges rather than by popular vote. It honours the year’s finest fantasy novel, drawing on the whole breadth of the field from high fantasy and fairy tale to its darker and more literary edges. Its winners run from Gene Wolfe and Ursula K. Le Guin to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and Haruki Murakami. Several years have ended in a tie, with two novels sharing the award. This list collects the winning novels by year.
57 books
The Women’s Prize for Fiction (known as the Orange Prize from 1996 to 2012 and the Baileys Women’s Prize from 2014 to 2017) is awarded each year to the best full-length novel written in English by a woman of any nationality. Founded in 1996 to celebrate fiction by women, it has become one of the most prominent literary awards in the United Kingdom. Its winners run from Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles and Barbara Kingsolver, the only writer to have taken the prize twice. This list collects the winning novels by year.
30 books
The Hugo Award for Best Novel is the premier honour for science fiction and fantasy novels, voted on annually by members of the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) since 1953. It is one of the field’s highest distinctions - past winners span foundational works from Ursula K. Le Guin and Isaac Asimov to N.K. Jemisin, who won three years running. This list collects the winning novels by year.
74 books
The Booker Prize is the most prominent award for literary fiction written in English, awarded annually since 1969. Since 2014 it has been open to any novel published in the UK or Ireland, whatever the author’s nationality; before that it was confined to the Commonwealth and Ireland. Its winners run from Iris Murdoch and William Golding to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Hilary Mantel, who took the prize twice for consecutive volumes of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. This list collects the winning novels by year.
60 books
Since 1918, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has attempted something quietly audacious: naming, each year, a single work of fiction by an American author, preferably one dealing with American life. The result is less a list of perfect books than a running argument about what American fiction is for, taking in undisputed landmarks like The Grapes of Wrath, Beloved and To Kill a Mockingbird alongside forgotten winners, controversial choices and the occasional year when the board, notoriously, awarded nothing at all. Read in sequence, the winners form an accidental history of the United States itself: its wars, migrations, families and reinventions, told one novel at a time. Whether you're chasing the canon or hunting for the overlooked gems between the giants, this list is one of the great structured reading projects in American literature.
Seven novels on the American West and the hard country along the Texas-Mexico border, from two of its greatest chroniclers. Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy follows young cowboys riding south into Mexico as the old range life fades, told in spare, haunting prose. Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove quartet sweeps from the Rio Grande to Montana across cattle drives, Comanche raids, and the long friendship of two ageing Rangers. Together they trace the myth and the reality of the frontier as it slips into memory - violent, elegiac, and unforgettable.
7 books
Five centuries of England, told through the people who shaped it. This list runs from the turn of the last millennium, where Ken Follett's The Evening and the Morning builds Kingsbridge out of a lawless, Viking-haunted Anglo-Saxon world, through the plague years and soaring ambition of the 14th century in World Without End, and on to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy and the sharp, dangerous heart of Henry VIII's court, seen through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell. Cathedrals and coronations, the Black Death and betrayal, ordinary lives caught up in the making of a nation. Epic historical fiction for readers who like their past vivid, human, and hard to put down.
5 books
12 books
