The Irish Times assembled a panel of 60 experts – authors, critics, academics, festival curators, booksellers and journalists – to decide the best Irish novels and short story collections of the years 2000-2025. The result was a ranked list of 100 works of fiction, with Milkman by Anna Burns (2018) decided as the best Irish book of the 21st century.
We then asked readers to have their say on what they consider to be the best books from the top 25 – the result of which was quite different from our experts’ ranking.
With almost 2,000 votes cast, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (2021) was chosen by readers as the best book. While the majority of voters were Irish, people from 26 other countries are also represented within the 1,993 votes.
Although the expert panel favoured Milkman, Keegan’s haunting story of institutional abuse by the Catholic Church was not far behind in fourth place. Keegan was a firm favourite among the groups, with her novella Foster (2010) also in the top five of each list.
Experts and readers agreed on only two rankings; John McGahern’s That They May Face The Rising Sun (2002) in second place and The Green Road by Anne Enright (2015) at number 21.
The biggest upward movers within the readers version of the top 25 were Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting (2023), which moved up 15 places from 22 to seven; Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (2009), also jumping 15 places from its spot at 25 on the expert list to 10 on the readers’ list; and Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018), which was ranked 14 places higher by readers, coming in fifth.
The books which appealed less to our readers, compared to the expert ranking, were Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (2016), Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy (2023) and Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty (2017). Out of those, Solar Bones saw the biggest shift downwards, dropping 17 places from three to 20. Soldier Sailor moved 13 places and Midwinter Break took a loss of 12.
To determine the best books of the 21st century so far, our experts initially each submitted 50 favourites. We collated this into a list of the 100 most popular titles, ranked in descending order based on the number of nominations each received.
Finally we asked the panel to fine-tune the list by reordering the titles from one to 100, to reflect their own personal preferences and establish which books were most loved.
