The Greatest Books of All Time Set in 2119)
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This list represents a comprehensive and trusted collection of the greatest books. Developed through a specialized algorithm, it brings together 759 'best of' book lists to form a definitive guide to the world's most acclaimed books. For those interested in how these books are chosen, additional details can be found on the rankings page.
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"2119)" is a label for near-future speculative fiction set roughly a century ahead, where everyday life and big-picture politics have been reshaped by advanced AI, biotech, climate consequences, space infrastructure and new economic/social contracts. Books in this category explore how technologies like neural augmentation, synthetic organisms, ubiquitous surveillance, and orbital or undersea settlements alter identity, labor, intimacy and governance, while also wrestling with runaway climate, migration and resource reconfiguration. Narratives range from intimate domestic dramas about parenting and memory in a transhuman age to wide-angle geopolitical or corporate thrillers, and the tone can be hopeful (solarpunk-style rebuilding) or cautionary (corporate-controlled megastates); stylistically it blends hard science plausibility with social thought experiments, ethical dilemmas and sensory worldbuilding that shows how humans adapt, resist, and reinvent themselves in a world neither utopian nor irredeemably dystopian.
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1. What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
Set between 2014 and a flooded near-future, the novel centers on a mysterious poem read at a dinner and a lone scholar, Thomas Metcalfe, who becomes obsessed with finding it. His search through archives and lives unearths love, loss and a violent secret, as the book probes how we piece together the past and what can truly be known across time.
The 8703rd Greatest Book of All TimePurchase from Bookshop.org or Amazon
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If you're interested in downloading this list as a CSV file for use in a spreadsheet application, you can easily do so by clicking the button below. Please note that to ensure a manageable file size and faster download, the CSV will include details for only the first 500 books.
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