Junot Díaz novel voted best 21st-century novel so far

Junot Díaz’s 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Faber) has been voted in a poll of US critics as the best novel published since 2000, reports the Guardian. The BBC Culture poll, which surveyed ‘several dozen’ US critics from the New York Times, Time magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist and other publications, has released a list of top 12 novels and eight runners-up. Edward P Jones’ The Known World (HarperPerennial, 2003), Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate, 2009), Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (Virago, 2004) and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (HarperPerennial, 2001) round out the top five. Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was described by critics as a ‘deft mash-up of Dominican history, comics, sci-fi, magic realism and footnotes’ and a book that ‘re-energised these questions: Who is American? What is the American experience?’. To see the full list, click here.

Category: International news