UPDATE: The New York Times Book Review’s list of the the 100 best books of the 21st century wrapped up a week of slow reveals on Friday (July 12) with the top 20 finalists. And surprisingly, no further Canadians appeared in the final batch, leaving CanLit stars and their critically-acclaimed, award-winning books – such as Margaret Atwood (The Testaments, 2019), Esi Edugyan (Washington Black, 2018, and Half-Blood Blues, 2011) Patrick deWitt (The Sisters Brothers, 2011), Lawrence Hill (The Book of Negroes, 2007), Michael Ondaatje (Anil’s Ghost, 2000) and many more – off of the list.

Of course, such lists are subjective, and three titles by two different Canadian authors did ultimately make the overall cut. Read on below for the details.

The New York Times Book Review is unveiling their list of the 100 best books of the 21st century, revealing 20 books each day this week beginning on Monday, with entries number 100-81.

According to the publication, the list was “voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers” and was completed with input from The New York Times Book Review staff as well.

Naturally, some of Canada’s most talented writers made the ranks.

Here, we track the Canadian literary exports that have been highlighted so far.

Emily St. John Mandel

Ranking: 93

Book: Station 11

No stranger to the New York Times Best Seller list, Canadian novelist and essayist Emily St. John Mandel, 45, nabbed the 93rd spot on the list for her novel Station Eleven, and was the first Canadian included among the first 20 picks revealed.

“Increasingly, and for obvious reasons, end-times novels are not hard to find. But few have conjured the strange luck of surviving an apocalypse – civilization preserved via the ad hoc Shakespeare of a traveling theatre troupe; entire human ecosystems contained in an abandoned airport – with as much spooky melancholic beauty as Mandel does in her beguiling fourth novel,” the publication wrote.

Station Eleven was nominated for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Toronto Book Award. The novel also made its way to the small screen in 2021 when it was adapted into a 10-episode limited mini-series on HBO.

Alice Munro

Ranking: 53 and 23

Books: Runaway; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Coming in at number 53 is Alice Munro’s 2004 Giller Prize-winning short story collection Runaway, while Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage – which provided the source material for two feature films,  Away from Her (2006) and Hateship, Loveship (2013) – ranks 23rd on the list.

The selection was revealed after Munro’s daughter Andrea Robin Skinner penned a first-person essay published in the Toronto Star, detailing sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin. The essay was published just weeks after Munro’s death on May 13 at the age of 92.

As this news redefines her legacy, Munro remains Canada’s only recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature – which she won at age 82 in 2013. In awarding her, the Swedish Academy praised Munro as the “master of the contemporary short story.” She earned several other literary honours throughout her career, including the Man Booker International Prize, as well as two Scotiabank Giller Prizes (1998’s The Love of a Good Woman and the aforementioned Runaway), three Governor General’s Literary Awards (for her 1968 debut Dance of the Happy Shades, 1978’s Who Do You Think You Are? and 1986’s The Progress of Love) and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

As is the case with the other books on the list, the New York Times Book Review’s write-up on the selection focuses on the merit of the title itself and the writer’s craftsmanship, making no mention of the recent controversy surrounding the Canadian literary icon.

Of Runaway, they wrote: “On one level, the title of Munro’s 11th short-story collection refers to a pet goat that goes missing from its owners’ property; but — this being Munro — the deeper reference is to an unhappy wife in the same story, who dreams of leaving her husband someday. Munro’s stories are like that, with shadow meanings and resonant echoes, as if she has struck a chime and set the reverberations down in writing.”

And of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, they added: “Munro’s stories apply pointillistic detail and scrupulous psychological insight to render their characters’ lives in full, at lengths that test the boundaries of the term ‘short fiction.’ (Only one story in this book is below 30 pages, and the longest is over 50.) The collection touches on many of Munro’s lifelong themes — family secrets, sudden reversals of fortune, sexual tensions and the unreliability of memory — culminating in a standout story about a man confronting his senile wife’s attachment to a fellow resident at her nursing home.”