Years after these titles were popular, they’re still worth picking up.

Julien Magre / Gallery Stock

Hundreds of thousands of books are published in the United States each year, and this dramatic influx of titles largely runs the calendars of the publishing and media industries—usually to the detriment of any work that isn’t brand new. Even best sellers or novels by famous authors get lost in the deluge, and books that were beloved on release can fall off readers’ radar quickly. But many were popular or critically acclaimed for good reasons, and they’re worth revisiting.

Here is a list of 15 fiction titles from the past two decades that you may have forgotten about in the years since. Some are from familiar names such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, and Louise Erdrich; others are by authors you may not have heard of at all. These selections include plenty of drama, and there’s an undercurrent of gentle comedy, even in novels with dark themes or plots. Their characters define love in many different ways, and they seek fulfillment across geographies and time periods—contemporary London, Vichy France, Nigeria, North Korea. Ultimately, these stories are bound together by a compassion for their characters’ struggles and shortcomings—a quality that only our finest writers are able to cultivate.

Anchor Books

Atwood’s tenth novel, a science-fiction story wrapped in a whodunit, throws noir tropes into a thoroughly modern setting and dares readers to keep up. It sometimes loses readers to her more accessible titles, such as the justly famous The Handmaid’s Tale or the imaginative MaddAddam trilogy, but The Blind Assassin stands out for its complicated structure and themes. The dual narrative follows Iris Griffen, angry and elderly, and her sister, Laura, whose book, also called The Blind Assassin, has made Laura into a kind of martyr after her death by suicide. Iris describes the siblings’ strange post–World War I upbringing: Their mother died in childbirth, their father slowly pickled himself in whiskey, and tutors came and went. Thanks to the large number of people obsessed with the book, Iris decides to tell her side of the story—and the sisters’ very different lives converge. The literary pyrotechnics Atwood employs are great fun to read, as she asks: What do we owe our families, past and present?

Scribner

Ali’s debut novel feels Dickensian, thanks to a cast of various lively characters. It’s set in a Bangladeshi corner of London, but it begins in Bangladesh, when Nazneen, whose younger sister, Hasina, has fallen in love and eloped, bends to her parents’ will and marries an older man named Chanu. After he moves her to England and she has three children, Nazneen surprises everyone (herself included) by developing a new independence and starting to navigate the city on her own. She begins an affair with a younger Muslim man named Karim, which provides her with romance and sexual fulfillment, but offers no easy escape from her daily obligations. Hasina’s fate is no easier—her promising match deteriorates, and so do her job prospects; both sisters must forge strong bonds with the women in their lives to find hope for their futures.

Amistad

The enslaver in this dense, astonishing consideration of the rot at America’s core is a Black man, Henry Townsend, who was once enslaved himself. That’s meant to be shocking, but it’s also historically accurate; a number of Black slaveowners did exist in the pre–Civil War United States. Townsend lies on his deathbed at the novel’s beginning, his wife, Caldonia, by his side. The book’s agile, omniscient narration, structured as a series of interconnected stories, leaps back and forth in time as frequently as it jumps between characters. We learn about Henry’s father, Augustus, who disapproved of his son’s decision to keep people in bondage, and about Caldonia’s twin brother, Calvin, and his unrequited love for another man. Occasionally Jones inserts invented references to fictional documents, which unmoors readers and makes them question the history they’ve been taught. Jones’s story painfully illustrates how insidious the evil of slavery was for all in its path.

Vintage

The English residential school Hailsham first appears simultaneously quaint and menacing. Its students, including the book’s narrator, Kathy, engage in wholesome activities but are slowly introduced to their destiny: They are clones who will eventually have their organs harvested. Ishiguro isn’t writing pure science fiction, though; instead, he’s pursuing more elegant, metaphysical ideas. Do any of us have control over our own life? What do we do with the time we’re allotted? As Kathy grows up with, then takes a job caring for, her friends Tommy and Ruth, she knows that their bodies will be used until they die. Ishiguro writes a delicate dance between life’s moments of sheer joy—making art, learning to cook, falling in love—and their inescapable end. Tommy’s and Ruth’s coming of age is complicated by the state-sanctioned nature of the organ donation and the disturbed ethics of their existence, which destabilize our notions of what it means to be human. Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is better known, but Never Let Me Go might be his most tender work.

Vintage

The noted Ukrainian-French Jewish author Irène Némirovsky was arrested and deported to Auschwitz in 1942, where she died later that year. Her ambitious work Suite Française was planned as five novels, but only two exist; they were both published for the first time in 2004. (A third part was outlined but never completed.) They’re a master class in comic writing about small-town prejudice in wartime, filled with characters who bumble their way through important decisions. Storm in June, the first book, follows the invasion of France and its surrender to German forces through the eyes of two families, one upper-class, one middle-class. The second novel, Dolce, examines life in a village in Vichy France, where a woman whose house is commandeered by German officers must make a difficult choice between love and honor. Composed in the middle of the events it describes, Suite Française offers a surprising and incisive insider’s take on how the Nazis convinced so many French citizens to accept German rule.

Penguin

The especially precocious 16-year-old Blue van Meer enters her senior year at a new high school in North Carolina after moving there with her academic father, Gareth. The murder mystery she gets tangled in when she meets a group called the Bluebloods might remind readers of Donna Tartt’s work, but Pessl’s debut novel is compelling less because of its plot and more because of its unusual execution. Blue tells her story in a combination of arch references, allusions, and imperfect, sometimes clunky word collages, and she’s always telling readers that being a teen can get very old, very fast. Yet when the group starts investigating, the action gets very fast too, and we see that Pessl’s setup was a slow burn in service of a terrific denouement.