The Best Contemporary Novels to Teach in High School

I have a love for most of the literature I read in high school and college.  I’m sure you’re familiar with the writers:  Austen, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Hughes, Marlowe, Wordsworth, Whitman, Joyce, Woolf, Swift, Kafka, Donne, Blake, Homer, Sophocles, Plath, Salinger, Hemingway, Ellison, Wiesel, Eliot, Thoreau, Achebe, Bishop, Stevens.  The list goes on.  The great stories, poems, essays, and novels of the past will always have a place in our classrooms.  Many novels get better over time and we make connections between their characters and plot lines with today’s politicians, celebrities, and popular culture.  They never get old and often get better with time.  But as time passes, we have to consider which contemporary (loosely defined) novels will have the same lasting impact of the literature we will always cherish.  Here is my list of twentieth and twenty-first century texts that I recommend (I provided a favorite quote from each):

Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

“Ali glanced my way and in his cold, unforgiving look, I saw that Hassan had told him.  He had told him everything, about what Assef and his friends had done to him, about the kite, about me.  Strangely, I was glad that someone knew me for who I really was; I was tired of pretending.”

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2018.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

“Saeed straightened and held up his phone, directing its camera at the heavens, consulting an application that indicated the names of celestial bodies he did not know.  The Mars it showed was more detailed as well, though it was of course a Mars from another moment, a bygone Mars, fixed in memory by the application’s creator.  In the distance Saeed’s family heard the sound of automatic gunfire, flat cracks that were not loud and yet carried to them cleanly.”

Hamid, Mohsin. Exit West: A Novel. New York, Riverhead Books, 2017.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

“Part of the problem is that the people who now know him as Nikhil have no idea that he used to be Gogol.  They know him only in the present, not at all in the past.  But after eighteen years of Gogol, two months of Nikhil feel scant, inconsequential.  At times he feels as if he’s cast himself in a play, acting the part of twins, indistinguishable to the naked eye yet fundamentally different.”

Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. New York: Mariner Books, 2004.

Afterlife by Julia Alvarez

“Antonia calls Izzy purportedly to report on her plans for her birthday.  Mostly, she wants to gauge her sister’s state of mind for herself.  Too often in their family, things are blown out of proportion.  Was it growing up in a dictatorship that skewed their temperaments toward doom and gloom?”

Alvarez, Julia. Afterlife. Waterville, ME, Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company, 2020.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

“I wanted also to tell her that if there was anything difficult, anything frightening, to be faced in her house, we would do so together.  But I didn’t know how to convey such a complex message through the glass without words, and so I clasped my hands together and held them up, shaking them slightly, in a gesture I’d seen a taxi driver give from inside his moving taxi to someone who’d waved from the sidewalk, even though he’d had to take both hands off his steering wheel.  Whatever Josie understood from it, it seemed to make her happy.”

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Klara and the Sun. First large print edition. New York, Random House Large Print, 2021.

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

“More than twenty-four hours after the speech that ended with those sentences, the media attention had barely died down.  Across the political spectrum, except at its extreme edges, the home secretary was being lionized for his truth-telling, his passion, the fearlessness with which he was willing to take on both the antimigrant attitudes of his own party and the isolationist culture of the community he’d grown up in.”

Shamsie, Kamila. Home Fire. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2018.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

“And yet – when one begins to search for the crucial, the definitive moment, the moment which changed all others, one finds oneself pressing, in great pain, through a maze of false signals and abruptly locking doors.  My flight may, indeed, have begun that summer – which does not tell me where to find the germ of the dilemma which resolved itself, that summer, into flight.  Of course, it is somewhere before me, locked in that reflection I am watching in the window as the night comes down outside.  It is trapped in the room with me, always has been, and always will be, and it is yet more foreign to me than those foreign hills outside.” 

Baldwin, James. Giovanni's Room: A Novel. New York, Dial Press, 1956.

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

“The missing photo leaves a gap in the page, a clear plastic window showing the blank white lining of the cover.  Their mother runs her hand down the column of the phone book, staining her fingertip gray.  Under cover of the tablecloth, Hannah stretches her legs and touches one toe to Nath’s.  A toe of comfort.  But he doesn’t look up.  Instead, he closes the album, and across the table, his mother crosses another name off the list.”

Ng, Celeste. Everything I Never Told You. New York: Penguin Press HC, 2014.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

“Shivering, Denver approached the house, regarding it, as she always did, as a person rather than a structure.  A person that wept, sighed, trembled and fell into fits.”

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage Classics, 2007.

Add your favorites in the comments!