The 2010s were a decade of expanding the range of who gets to tell important stories. The most significant literary development of the decade was not a new formal technique or a new philosophical preoccupation but a shift in whose experience the dominant literary culture recognized as universally significant. The best books of the decade reflect that shift — not by replacing one kind of literary excellence with another, but by adding to the stock of available perspectives on what a human life actually contains.
Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns (2010) is the most important nonfiction book of the decade and perhaps the most important American nonfiction of the century so far. It tells the story of the Great Migration — the movement of six million Black Americans from the South to northern and western cities between 1915 and 1970 — through three individual lives followed over decades. Wilkerson spent fifteen years on the research, conducting 1,200 interviews, and the result is a book that does what only narrative can do: makes the aggregate statistical reality of a mass movement feel as it was actually experienced, one person making one decision at a time. The narrative history shelf at byallo carries it alongside the other books that changed how we understand significant events.
Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me (2015) is the most important political essay of the decade: a letter to his teenage son about the experience of living in a Black body in America, written in the tradition of James Baldwin and carrying it forward with the specificity of a writer who has done the historical and intellectual work to justify the tradition he's claiming. Coates's argument is not a comfortable one — he offers no easy optimism, no patriotic resolution — and that honesty is what made the book both necessary and controversial. It won the National Book Award in 2015. The essays and memoir shelf at byallo carries it alongside the Baldwin books that established the tradition Coates continues.
Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) is the decade's most important work of nature writing: a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation weaving Indigenous plant knowledge with Western science to argue for a different relationship between humans and the natural world. Kimmerer's argument is formal as much as philosophical — she proposes that the English language, with its insistence on nouns and objects rather than verbs and relations, actively prevents the kind of attention that would make ecological thinking possible. The book demonstrates the argument in its prose: sections on asters and goldenrod, on sweetgrass and strawberries, written in a way that changes how you look at those plants. The nature writing shelf at byallo carries it alongside the other writers who have used close natural observation to make philosophical arguments.
Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk (2014) won the Samuel Johnson Prize (now the Baillie Gifford Prize) for nonfiction and the Costa Book Award. It is a grief memoir braided with falconry history and the story of T.H. White's failed attempt to train a goshawk, told as Macdonald herself trains a goshawk in the months after her father's death. The book works because Macdonald is genuinely expert in her subject and because her understanding of what hawking can do — offer a relationship with non-human intelligence that temporarily suspends the demands of social existence — is clear-eyed rather than romantic. The nature writing shelf at byallo carries it alongside The Peregrine and other writers in that tradition.
Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score (2014) is the decade's most culturally significant work of popular science: a psychiatrist's thirty-year investigation into how trauma reshapes the brain and body, and what actually helps. The book's influence is difficult to overstate — it changed how a generation of therapists, educators, and general readers understand trauma, which is to say, understand a significant portion of human experience. The mind and behavior shelf at byallo carries it alongside other works in the tradition of writing that uses science to make human experience more legible.
In fiction, the decade's landmark novels include Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet (My Brilliant Friend, 2011, and its three sequels), which follows two women from a poor Naples neighborhood from childhood through old age. The books' ambition is enormous — they are about friendship, class, education, politics, violence, and time — and their method is to render the interior of a consciousness with complete fidelity to its contradictions. Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life (2015) is the decade's most formally ambitious American novel: an account of four friends who meet at college and follow one of them — who has survived severe childhood trauma — through his adult life. It is extremely long and extremely difficult in its emotional demands, and it provoked considerable disagreement about what fiction is permitted to do to its readers.
Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) is the decade's best popular science book: a Nobel laureate's account of the two cognitive systems that drive human thinking, and where each reliably fails. It provides a vocabulary — System 1 and System 2, anchoring, availability heuristic, overconfidence — that has entered general use, which means most readers know the concepts but haven't read the original argument. The original is worth reading: more rigorous, more surprising, and more specific about the evidence than the simplified versions that circulate second-hand. The mind and behavior shelf at byallo carries it alongside Flow, GEB, and the other books in that tradition of rigorous popular science.