The modern novels everyone keeps pressing into your hands

Some books become recommendations that travel by word of mouth, passed hand to hand until half your friends have read them. These modern favorites earned that status honestly.

Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow is the one people describe as the most charming novel they've read in years, an aristocrat under house arrest in a grand hotel building a whole life within its walls. Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere lays out every character's motives so fairly you can't pick a side. Ann Patchett's The Dutch House is a quiet, decades-spanning meditation on family and the houses that haunt us.

For the books that ruled the charts, Delia Owens's Where the Crawdads Sing and Matt Haig's The Midnight Library sold in the tens of millions on pure momentum, and Bonnie Garmus's Lessons in Chemistry became the funny, furious book club pick of its year.

And if you want something stranger and quieter, Susanna Clarke's Piranesi is the one readers press on you with a slightly wild look in their eye, promising it will rewire something. They're right. Trust them, and it.