About this list

Télérama, 25 Books

This list presents a curated selection of literary works deemed to be the most significant of the 21st century thus far. It was compiled by the French magazine Télérama through a structured survey of sixty individuals including writers, editors, booksellers, translators, and literary critics from both French-speaking and international backgrounds.

Each participant was asked to nominate five books published since the year 2000 that had a lasting impact on their memory as readers. The resulting compilation reflects a wide range of professional literary perspectives and spans multiple languages and regions, aiming to identify contemporary masterpieces likely to shape the future of world literature. The methodology is notable for its qualitative, memory-based selection process rather than adherence to quantitative metrics or public popularity.

Note:
Télérama included the raw data, of which experts voted for each book. This got me curious because I would love to include ALL the books and not just the top 25. I ended up writing some code that aggregated the list based on their raw data and my results ended up being different in some ways to the list that was published. I am going to assume that I am a bit more experienced at aggregating book list data, than them, but maybe i'm wrong.

So this list will NOT match up exactly with what is on their website. It's very close though.

This particular list is 1-25
25-150~ will be in a followup honorable mention list:

This list was originally published in 2025 and was added to this site about 1 year ago.