The Bookshelf's Kate Evans and the Book Show's Claire Nichols joined forces onstage at the 2025 Sydney Writers Festival — with a panel of international writers — to talk favourite and influential books from the 21st century, in the lead up to the inaugural Top 100 Books countdown of the twenty-first century. This live broadcast happened in May 2025 — with Emirati poet Afra Atiq, English chronicler of gay lives, Alan Hollinghurst, Argentinian purveyor of all things dark and surprising, Mariana Enriquez, and New Zealand novelist with a dystopian edge, Catherine Chidgey.

This discussion was first broadcast live on Friday 23 May 2025

For more details of the final Top 100 Books of the 21st Century countdown, follow the link here

BOOKS MENTIONED in this program

ALAN HOLLINGHURST

Alice Munro, Runaway

David Szalay, All That Man Is

Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang

Bryan Washington, Lot

Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These; Foster

MARIANA ENRIQUEZ

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Dennis Cooper, The Sluts

Jorge Luis Borges, works

Horacio Castellanos Moya, Senselessness

CATHERINE CHIDGEY

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

John D'Agata and Jim Fingal, The Lifespan of a Fact

Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie

Anna Smaill, The Chime

OTHERS

Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

Kate Grenville, The Secret River

Sarah Winman, Still Life

Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

Melissa Lucashenko, Too Much Lip

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words

Trent Dalton, Lola in the Mirror

Robbie Arnott, Limberlost

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonder

Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

CREDITS

•    Presenter: Kate Evans, Claire Nichols

•    Producer: Kate Evans, Sarah Corbett

•    Sound engineer: Emrys Cronin, Hamish Camilleri, Harvey O'Sullivan

•    Executive producer, Rhiannon Brown