This list was compiled by the editors at Oyster, an app for discovering and reading books.
When we started putting together this list, I think all the Oyster editors expected it to be easier.
A hundred books might sound like a lot, but in truth, it was difficult not make this a list of a thousand.
The past six years have seen an abundance of brilliant fiction and nonfiction.
But through lots of reading and re-reading, discussion and sometimes arguing, we've come up with a list of what believe are the very best books published since 2010.
If there was something that was strangely easy to decide on, it was our number one pick: Teju Cole's "Open City," a novel that explores one's sense of place with wit and imagination unlike anything to come before it. Cole has not only written an unforgettable piece of fiction, but also a story about a very specific time that will endure for decades to come.
People read for a lot of reasons—some to be enlightened, others entertained. But every great book resonates in its pursuit of some kind of truth.
Here are the 100 books from the past half-decade that do that best, according to the editors of Oyster.
1. "Open City" by Teju Cole
"Open City" is a novel of moments.
Its protagonist, psychiatrist-in-training Julius, whose mind we become very familiar with, interacts a number of friends and strangers that shape his relationship to New York City.
Teju Cole has penned an understated epic—a novel of big ideas about time and space written with humanity and humor. It's not just a triumph of narrative voice, but of what fiction is capable of.
2. "Just Kids" by Patti Smith
Patti Smith's gorgeous memoir is an ode to a long-lost creative community in New York. "Just Kids" isn't content to just celebrate bohemian culture. It’s a brilliant realization of what it means to be an artist of any kind.
3. "Life After Life" by Kate Atkinson
If the past six years saw the rise of crossover fiction, nothing broke the boundaries of genre more audaciously than "Life After Life," Kate Atkinson's unholy blend of mystery, war story, family drama, and science fiction.
4. "The Tiger's Wife" by Tea Obreht
Téa Obreht's novel draws on the history of war-torn Yugoslavia in her entrancing debut about two doctors trapped an unnamed Balkan country.
Threads of myth and memory run throughout, and there are fantastical moments so perfectly rendered that they’ll win over anyone who ordinarily rolls their eyes at the phrase "magical realism."
5. "The Emperor of All Maladies" by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies is a lot of things: a medical history, an account of scientific research, a Pulitzer Prize winner.
But perhaps the book's subtitle, "A Biography of Cancer," describes it best.
The notion of "cancer" as a character gives this lengthy, comprehensive book a sense of dramatic urgency, not unlike a mystery novel.
But all in all, "The Emperor of All Maladies" is a rich and thorough history about the disease that kills more than seven million people a year.
6. "Skippy Dies" by Paul Murray
The title is a bit of a spoiler. But Skippy's tragicomic death—on the floor of a doughnut shop—sets forward a teen drama at an Irish all-boys prep school in Paul Murray's hilarious and complex novel about adolescence.
7. "A Visit from the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan
In theory, "A Visit from the Goon Squad"'s multiple narratives sounds like an MFA workshop exercise. But in Jennifer Egan's very talented hands, her kaleidoscopic portrait of an aging music exec and his assistant feels inventive on every page.
8. "The Empathy Exams" by Leslie Jamison
In her existential search to understand pain, Leslie Jamison's collection tests the limits of empathy, as well as the boundaries of what essays can do (her pieces are part criticism, part memoir, part something else entirely).
Each essay is intellectually imaginative in its own right, but taken on the whole, "The Empathy Exams" is a risky and ultimately triumphant excavation of what it means to feel.
9. "The Unnamed" by Joshua Ferris
Tim—father, husband, lawyer—is possessed by a disorder that forces him to walk for miles in what Walter White might describe as a "fugue state."
But Joshua Ferris's divisive second novel turns out to be less about the condition itself and more about the havoc it wreaks on his family life.
"The Unnamed" is strange and moving, perhaps the most underrated book of the past half decade.
10. "The People Who Eat Darkness" by Richard Lloyd Parry
Podcast The Serial and HBO’s documentary The Jinx might signal a renewed interest in "true crime," but Richard Lloyd Parry’s investigation into the murder of a young British woman in Tokyo should remind us that the genre is best explored in the pages of a book.
"The People Who Eat Darkness" isn't just about a killer and his victim—it unpacks every sort of tension: familial, political, racial. Smart and savvy, it’s arguably the best piece of true crime since Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.
11-20
11. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain
12. "This Is How You Lose Her" by Junot Diaz
13. "Salvage the Bones" by Jesmyn Ward
14. "Swimming Studies" by Leanne Shapton
15. "Eleanor and Park" by Rainbow Rowell
16. "The Imperfectionists" by Tom Rachman
17. "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot
18. "Blood, Bones and Butter" by Gabrielle Hamilton
19. "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" by David Mitchell
20. "Cleopatra: A Life" by Stacy Schiff
21-30
21. "Tenth of December" by George Saunders
22. "Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America" by Jill Leovy
23. "Boy, Snow, Bird" by Helen Oyeyemi
24. "11/22/1963" by Stephen King
25. "Swamplandia!" by Karen Russell
26. "Tiny Beautiful Things" by Cheryl Strayed
27. "Wild" by Cheryl Strayed
28. "Bark" by Lorrie Moore
29. "10:04" by Ben Lerner
30. "A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing" by Eimear McBride
31-40
31. "Citizen" by Claudia Rankine
32. "On Immunity" by Eula Biss
33. "Those Guys Have All the Fun" by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales
34. "Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
35. "The Boys in the Boat" by Daniel James Brown
36. "Bad Feminist" by Roxane Gay
37. "How Music Works" by David Byrne
38. "The Isle of Youth" by Laura van den Berg
39. "A Hologram for the King" by Dave Eggers
40. "Annihilation" by Jeff VanderMeer
41-50
41. "Going Clear" by Lawrence Wright
42. "The Son" by Philipp Meyer
43. "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel
44. "NW" by Zadie Smith
45. "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt
46. "Dare Me" by Megan Abbott
47. "Thank You For Your Service" by David Finkel
48. "Bossypants" by Tina Fey
49. "The Interestings" by Meg Wolitzer
50. "My Brilliant Friend" by Elena Ferrante
51-60
51. "Submergence" by J.M. Ledgard
52. "Dear Life" by Alice Munro
53. "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman
54. "The Good Lord Bird" by James McBride
55. "Before I Fall" by Lauren Oliver
56. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo
57. "Men We Reaped" by Jesmyn Ward
58. "The Middlesteins" by Jami Attenberg
59. "Ten Thousand Saints" by Eleanor Henderson
60. "Home" by Toni Morrison
61-70
61. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel
62. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn
63. "Being Mortal" by Atul Gawande
64. "We Were Liars" by E. Lockhart
65. "Pulphead" by John Jeremiah Sullivan
66. "The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace" by Jeff Hobbs
67. "All the Light We Cannot See" by Anthony Doerr
68. "Gulp" by Mary Roach
69. "The Information" by James Gleick
70. "The Art of Fielding" by Chad Harbach
71-80
71. "Redeployment" by Phil Klay
72. "The Flamethrowers" by Rachel Kushner
73. "The Magician King" by Lev Grossman
74. "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore" by Robin Sloan
75. "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon
76. "The Fault in Our Stars" by John Green
77. "Adam" by Ariel Schrag
78. "Sidewalks" by Valeria Luiselli
79. "The Buried Giant" by Kazuo Ishiguro
80. "The Sound of Things Falling" by Juan Gabriel Vasquez
81-90
81. "Daughter of Smoke and Bone" by Laini Taylor
82. "I'll Be Right There" by Kyung-Sook Shin
83. "The Black Count" by Tom Reiss
84. "And So It Goes, Kurt Vonnegut" by Charles J. Shields
85. "C" by Tom McCarthy
86. "The Round House" by Louise Erdrich
87. "Slow Getting Up" by Nate Jackson
88. "Everything I Never Told You" by Celeste Ng
89. "Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self" by Danielle Evans
90. "The Girl on the Train" by Paula Hawkins
91-100
91. "Flash Boys" by Michael Lewis
92. "Evil and the Mask" by Fuminori Nakamura
93. "Every Day" by David Levithan
94. "The Psychopath Test" by Jon Ronson
95. "The Sixth Extinction" by Elizabeth Kolbert
96. "Time Warped" by Claudia Hammond
97. "How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe" by Charles Yu
98. "Changing My Mind" by Zadie Smith
99. "The Drunken Botanist" by Amy Stewart
100. "Freedom" by Jonathan Franzen
