García Márquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize, and this Buendía saga set in Macondo remains the classic route into magical realism.
Prize-winning novels: Nobel, Booker, Pulitzer
Sixteen of our Top 21 books, grouped by the prize connection that brought them (or their authors) to wider attention. Scores are Goodreads averages ×20, verified on 5 October 2026. Prize years are the year the award was announced.
Novels by Nobel laureates
6 picks; highest score here: One Hundred Years of Solitude (83).
Toni Morrison’s Beloved won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and five years later she received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Kazuo Ishiguro won the 1989 Booker Prize for this restrained butler’s story, and the Nobel Prize in Literature followed in 2017.
Annie Ernaux won the 2022 Nobel Prize, and The Years, shortlisted for the 2019 International Booker, blends memoir with collective history.
Olga Tokarczuk received the 2018 Nobel Prize, and this funny Polish mystery about hunters was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker.
Han Kang’s The Vegetarian won the 2016 International Booker Prize, and the Korean author became the 2024 Nobel laureate in literature.
Booker winners and shortlisted
5 picks; highest score here: Small Things Like These (81).
Arundhati Roy won the 1997 Booker Prize with this Kerala debut about twins, and twenty years passed before her second novel.
Aravind Adiga won the 2008 Booker Prize with this debut, a comic confession from a driver climbing India’s brutal class ladder.
Shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize, Ishiguro’s quiet boarding-school novel slowly reveals a devastating truth about what its students are for.
Klara and the Sun, longlisted for the 2021 Booker, was Ishiguro’s first novel after his Nobel, narrated by a solar-powered companion.
Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, is a short Irish novel about the Magdalene laundries.
Pulitzer, Women’s Prize and Clarke Award
5 picks; highest score here: Half of a Yellow Sun (87).
Junot Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with this footnoted, Spanglish-laced saga of a Dominican American family’s inherited curse.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won the 2007 Orange Prize for this Nigerian Civil War novel, told through three characters caught in Biafra.
Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi won the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction, a short, strange novel set inside an endless house of statues.
Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award, following a travelling theatre troupe after a pandemic.
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale won the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987 and remains a defining modern dystopian novel.
How these scores work
Every card line is exactly 21 words, written for this guide from facts in our data and public records (founding dates, prizes, episode counts); each pick’s full verdict sits on its category Top 21. Scores (1–100) are mapped from named public aggregates, last checked 2026-11-02:
- Books: Goodreads average ×20
Links go to each subject’s official site. Disclaimer.