20 Most Underrated Books of the Last Decade

A Russian count is placed under house arrest in a luxury Moscow hotel in 1922 and proceeds to live a full life entirely within its walls. Towles writes with a precision and warmth that makes every sentence worth lingering over — this is a book about how to live beautifully under constraint.

Why underrated: Published the same year as multiple blockbuster thrillers, it took three years to find its audience. Now one of the most-loved hidden gems in literary fiction.

A communist spy embedded in the South Vietnamese army flees to America at the fall of Saigon and navigates a double life with black humor and moral ambiguity. Won the Pulitzer Prize and still isn't read nearly enough — perhaps because its unflinching satire of American imperialism makes comfortable reading impossible.

Why underrated: Pulitzer wins don't always translate to mainstream readership. This one deserves a far wider audience than it has.

A man lives alone in a vast, impossible house filled with infinite halls, tidal seas, and statues. He keeps meticulous journals. Something is very wrong — or perhaps not wrong enough. A puzzle-box novel unlike anything else published this decade, completely sui generis in tone and construction.

Why underrated: Defies genre categorization, which makes algorithmic recommendation essentially useless for surfacing it. Word-of-mouth only, yet it has a fiercely devoted readership.

A true crime narrative about the murder of Jean McConville, a Belfast mother of ten, and the IRA operatives who killed her. Reads like the best thriller you've ever read while being scrupulously, uncomfortably true. One of the best books of the 2010s by any measure.

Why underrated: Nonfiction about the Troubles is a hard sell to American audiences. Those who read it are evangelical about it.

A novel about the real-life 12th-century abbess Marie de France, cast out from court and sent to govern a crumbling English abbey. Groff's prose is visionary — dense, rhythmic, ecstatic. It's about power, faith, ambition, and what women build when the world gives them nothing. Not for the faint-hearted, entirely for the serious reader.

Why underrated: Medieval setting and literary density put off casual readers who might love it if they gave it 30 pages.

A collection of essays about pain — physical, emotional, borrowed, performed — that redefined what personal essays could do. Jamison interrogates her own emotional responses with the rigor of a scientist and the honesty of a diarist. Read it once and you'll think differently about empathy for years.

Why underrated: Essay collections sell less than novels at every price point, regardless of quality. This is one of the best of the decade.

An astrobiologist raises his neurodivergent son alone in a near-future America. When a neurofeedback treatment offers hope, the father must weigh his love for his son against his fear of what the world is becoming. Powers writes about science with the lyricism of a poet and the accuracy of a researcher — this one will break you quietly.

Why underrated: Powers is a critical favorite but a commercial longshot. Bewilderment sat in The Overstory's shadow despite being a completely different kind of novel.

Molly Gray, a meticulous hotel maid who navigates social cues with difficulty, discovers a dead body in one of the rooms she's cleaning. A murder mystery with a protagonist who is genuinely original — not quirky-for-effect, but written with specificity and warmth. The kind of book you recommend to everyone and they all love it.

Why underrated: Got some attention on BookTok but missed the mainstream thriller readership that would devour it. Cozy mystery as a label undersells its emotional depth.

Wilkerson spent 15 years interviewing over 1,200 people to document the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South to the North. Told through three specific lives, it reads like three interlocking novels while being impeccably researched history. One of the most important American books of the century — still criminally under-read.

Why underrated: Long (622 pages), serious in subject, published in 2010 before social media boosted this kind of narrative nonfiction. Essential reading.

Witness statements from crew members aboard a spaceship — half human, half humanoid robots — about mysterious objects brought from a distant planet. A formally inventive novel about what it means to feel, to work, to want things. One of the best science fiction novels of the 2020s that almost nobody has read.

Why underrated: Translated from Danish, 160 pages, no traditional plot arc. Everything that makes algorithmic recommendation fail it.

A memoir about an abusive same-sex relationship told in second person, structured as genre chapters — the Dream House as haunted house, as choose-your-own-adventure, as Gothic horror. It rewrites what memoir is allowed to do and documents an experience that has almost no literary precedent. Strange, devastating, essential.

Why underrated: The experimental form and queer subject matter limited its mainstream reach. Every reader who finds it calls it one of the best books they've ever read.

A 17-year-old girl in a palliative care ward befriends an 83-year-old woman. Together, they have lived exactly 100 years. They decide to paint one picture for every year of their combined lives. Quietly devastating, genuinely funny, and one of the warmest books published this decade.

Why underrated: A debut novel about death and illness has an extremely hard time finding its readership through algorithms. This one rewards anyone who gives it a chapter.

Pollan investigates the science and history of psychedelics — not as a drug story, but as a serious inquiry into consciousness, mental health, and the nature of the self. Rigorous, personal, and genuinely mind-altering to read. Changed how a generation thinks about the brain without appearing on any mainstream "best of" list.

Why underrated: The subject matter kept it out of mainstream gift lists despite being one of the most important science books of the decade.

A man must solve the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle before midnight — but he wakes up each day in the body of a different guest at the party. An Agatha Christie-meets-Groundhog Day puzzle novel of extraordinary ingenuity. If you love locked-room mysteries, this is the best one published in 20 years.

Why underrated: Debut novel from a British author that got modest US release. Now has a cult following among mystery readers who found it through word-of-mouth.

Two boys survive a brutal reform school in Jim Crow Florida. Whitehead won a second Pulitzer for this — but The Underground Railroad absorbed all the attention. The Nickel Boys is slimmer, more controlled, and in some ways more devastating. A 224-page novel that takes 20 years to shake off.

Why underrated: Overshadowed by its own author's previous Pulitzer. Readers who found it rate it higher than The Underground Railroad.

Westover grew up in a survivalist family in Idaho, never attended school, and eventually earned a PhD from Cambridge. The memoir that followed is about education in the broadest sense — what we inherit, what we learn to question, and what it costs to leave. One of the best memoirs in decades, though many assume they already know what it says.

Why underrated: Paradoxically, this one did sell well — but it's misread. Most people summarize it as "girl escapes cult" and miss what it's actually about. Revisit it if you've read it.

A blind French girl and a German soldier converge in occupied France during WWII through the signal of a radio broadcast. Doerr spent 10 years writing this — and you feel every year on every page. The prose is luminous in a way that makes most literary fiction look like rough draft. Won the Pulitzer and then quietly disappeared from conversation.

Why underrated: Won the Pulitzer in 2015, peaked in conversation, and then vanished. Readers who find it now call it the best WWII novel they've ever read. It holds up.

Burkeman's argument is that you will never get everything done, and this is fine — what matters is choosing what to do with the roughly four thousand weeks of an average human life. An anti-productivity book that dismantles productivity culture more effectively than any "do less" manifesto. Smart, funny, and deeply useful.

Why underrated: Self-help readers expect answers and systems. Burkeman offers something harder: acceptance. The readers who love this are unusually evangelical about it.

Two friends who met as children bond over video games, lose each other, reconnect in their twenties, and build a game studio together over three decades. A novel about creativity, collaboration, love-that-isn't-romance, and what we make and why. Zevin does something almost impossible: she makes you feel the act of creation as a reader.

Why underrated: The video game setting put off readers who don't play games. This is not a book about video games. It's one of the best novels about creative partnership ever written.

A neurosurgeon is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and writes a memoir about what makes life meaningful — written while he was dying, and completed posthumously. In 228 pages, Kalanithi distills a life of literature, philosophy, surgery, and fatherhood into something that reads like a gift. Genuinely one of the most important books of the decade.

Why underrated: Published once and then left to find its own readers. No sequel, no series, no author tour. Lives entirely on word of mouth. Every reader passes it on.