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The books everyone should read in their 20s

The books everyone should read in their 20s

16 March 2022

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For most people, your twenties is the decade in which you learn how to be an adult: you have your first serious relationships, take your first career steps and learn your first difficult lessons about yourself and the world. Naturally, all of this is reflected in great literature.

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson (2021)

Caleb Azumah Nelson’s bestselling Open Water has already established itself as something of a modern classic for readers in their twenties. A Costa First Novel Award winner in 2021, the book follows two young Black British artists, a photographer and a dancer, who meet in a pub in South East London and kindle a romantic flame – only to have it threatened to be snuffed out by the racist, violent world and the way it manifests fear, self-doubt, and self-loathing.

A gorgeous but unflinching love story suffused with music and art, but packed with heady questions about the nature of creativity and rooted in a gritty, true-to-life reality, Open Water is a rare artistic feat – and an essential read for anyone in their twenties.

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff (2015)

Fate and Furies is the story of a marriage seen from two sides. The first half ('Fates') is the husband's perspective. For him, things are fine, mostly happy, quite complacent. The second is the wife's ('Furies'). For her, things aren't great at all.

It is a masterful exploration of how living with each other, side by side, doesn't necessarily mean knowing each other inside out. Or, as the American critic Laura Miller wrote, "They are at that point in life when they realise that a wedding is less the end of a fairytale than the beginning of a mystery, and sometimes an ugly one." It is by no means the first marriage-under-the-microscope novel, but it is so clever and insightful that it's easy to feel like it is.

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920)

F. Scott Fitzgerald was 23 when he wrote this, his first novel. More than a century on, his prose still feels beautiful and elegant. The semi-autobiographical tale follows an idealistic Princeton student named Amory Blaine through his painful sexual and intellectual awakening. It is stuffed with great sentences that float from the page, such as this line, which captures the innocence of young love: "There is a moment – Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word – something that makes it worth while."

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890)

This is the tale that never grows old. When naïve young Dorian is introduced to a fashionable society painter, the artist is compelled to paint his portrait. So overcome by the result's beauty is Dorian that he declares he'd give anything to look like that forever. His wish is granted, but there's a catch: while his looks will remain unblemished by time, the portrait will suck up all the awful energy of his ugly character.

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (1956)

"You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back." So goes some advice to protagonist David in this soaring classic of gay literature, about a young American man coming to terms with his sexuality through a tortured love affair with an Italian barman in Paris.

It's not just that Baldwin's writing is knock-you-sideways gorgeous at all times, which it is. It's also that Giovanni's Room grabs you by the heart and squeezes with a strength few books can muster. It blows open ideas about lust and desire, love and loyalty, but it is also about growing up, losing innocence and accepting who we are for ourselves. We may be the sum of our choices, but we are the sum of our changes, too. Home, in other words, is who we are, not where we're from.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (2007)

About race and identity in post-9/11 world, this Booker-shortlisted novel follows a starry-eyed college student from Pakistan who makes a new life in America. Only, after a disastrous love affair followed by the World Trade Center attacks, he is thrown into a tumble drier of racism and unfounded animosity, until he comes out shrunken by disenchantment with the capitalist dream. Years later, he's in Lahore, telling an American how the event changed his life.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a transformative book for anyone in a tussle with identity and ideology within the ever-shifting matrix of global politics, plus a useful lesson in the paradox of control: the more we try to master what happens in our lives, the harder it gets. But it's also a thought-provoking exploration of the concept of prejudice, and how it infects our world, a subject as relevant now as it was then.

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)

This was the book that, more than any other of its time, changed the way the Western World thought, and talked, about sex. It follows a young female erotic poet called Isadora Wing who, bored with her second marriage, ditches her husband at a psychoanalysts' conference in Vienna to travel through Europe in search of herself, and great sex (so long as the latter comes with no strings). The only thing holding her back: a crippling fear of flying.

A big part of the push towards second wave feminism in the 1970s, Jong's witty and quiveringly explicit account of Isadora's escapades, according to the New York Times, "electrified and titillated the critical establishment." John Updike called it "fearless." And Henry Miller said it would "make literary history" for its "wisdom about the eternal man-woman problem." A soaring exploration of sex and self.

NW by Zadie Smith (2012)

"I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me," says someone on the radio at the beginning of Zadie Smith's fourth novel. It raises a question mark that hangs over NW like a whispering ghost.

The story weaves in and out of the lives of four Londoners – Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan – as they navigate the choppy waters of life after they leave their childhood council estate in northwest London. Each have gone their separate ways, but a chance encounter brings them back together, forcing them to confront their choices, their pasts and who they're trying to be.

It is, in some ways, a love letter to big-city living in all its beauty and brutality. But it's also about class, race and gender, and how attitudes to all three evolve. NW was, Smith has said, her attempt at writing the first "black existential novel" that asks: to what extent, really, are we the "sole authors" of our lives?

The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon (1956)

In this classic of Black British literature, author Sam Selvon focuses on the lives of a host of new Londoners from the West Indies as they do their best to make new lives in a city that is cold, if not outright hostile, to them. At the book’s outset, main character Moses Aloetta is meeting new emigrant and fellow Trinidadian Henry ‘Sir Galahad’ Oliver at the train station, having been asked by a mutual friend to introduce the newcomer to London; from there, Selvon introduces us to some of the first working class Black immigrants seen in British literature, in a tale that dramatises their Sisyphean task and humanises their struggle.

Told with pathos and humour – and in a stylish vernacular all its own – Selvon’s short masterpiece encourages readers to think deeply about immigration and racism.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1916)

This is James Joyce’s first novel, published when he was in his early thirties. It begins in the early childhood of its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, and follows him as he grows into (you guessed it) a young man. Not only is the prose-style unique and gorgeous, but Dedalus’s journey through young adulthood remains as relevant now as when it was written.

As the celebrated Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgåard put it in 2016, Portrait, simply, is about "a young man’s soul." But what makes Joyce’s novel so magical, according to the My Struggle author, is that "his conquest of what belongs to the individual alone … is also a conquest of what belongs, and is unique, to each of us." It's powerful stuff; vivid, beautiful and swelling with mood.

Supper Club by Lara Williams (2019)

One of 2019's biggest bestsellers, Supper Club could be seen as a feminist retort to Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Only, rather than using violence to quell their existential ennui, Williams' heroines use food.

Roberta, 29, has a boring job at a fashion website where she meets bisexual Stevie. They decide to launch a supper club for "hungry women" who've been let down by men. As the group's numbers grow, so does the party – they gorge on food, dance, drink, do drugs, strip, have sex, vomit, and begin to break the law. They deliberately put on weight in a bid to become "living art projects". But it's not all fun and frivolity; there are serious messages, not least a stomach-churning thread about sexual abuse.

It is a powerful and original critique of women's oppression by men, but it's also supremely funny, uniquely smart and wincingly well-observed. And, in places, it's extremely moving. Will the club fill the void in Roberta's life? Or is that something she needs to find elsewhere?

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (2006)

A moving tale of sexual discovery in young marriage, the fragility of young love and ultimately, about the difficult transition from childhood to adulthood, On Chesil Beach is a post-nuptial psychodrama that lingers like a sad song.

Set in July 1962, as Britain teetered on the brink of the Swinging Sixties, Edward and Florence, 22 and 23, are on honeymoon, about to lose their virginities. Only, each has a vastly different view on how it should go down. He is excited but nervous, she is terrified. Neither can tell the other how they really feel. So they sit there over dinner, silent. "Even when Edward and Florence were alone, a thousand unacknowledged rules still applied," writes McEwan early on. "It was precisely because they were adults that they did not do childish things."

They are new to adulthood, and don't understand it. So to suppress their sexual anxieties, among other big emotions, they treat it like a game. And for that they must pay the price with their happiness.

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