The S quadrant includes a huge range of earning power, all the way from the teenage freelance baby sitter or landscaper just starting out in life to the highly paid private-practice lawyer, consultant, or public speaker. Anna digs tank traps and dodges patrols as she scavenges for wood, but the hand of history is hard to escape. The title is the question Winterson’s adoptive mother asked as she threw her daughter out, aged 16, for having a girlfriend. Skloot skilfully tells the extraordinary scientific story, but in this book the voices of the Lacks children are crucial – they have struggled desperately even as billions have been made from their mother’s “HeLa” cells. The British novelist combines fiction and non-fiction to form a searing essay on grief and love for his late wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh.

best books of the 21st century | Books | The Guardian The 100 best books of the 21st century | Books | The Guardian

Emotional and artistic complexity are perfectly poised in this account of a listless 36-year-old office dogsbody who is thrown into an existential crisis by an encounter with his estranged dad. The author started out as the “poet laureate of Twitter”; her language is brilliant, and she has a completely original mind. Viscerally focused and intense, yet imbued with the grandeur of the landscape, the book explores love, gender and survival with a rare, luminous power. The result is both sharp and dreamy, sliding in and out of different phases of Dylan’s career but rooted in his earliest days as a Woody Guthrie wannabe in New York City. Barker brings her customary linguistic invention and wild humour to a tale about history’s hold on the present, as contemporary Ashford is haunted by the spirit of a medieval jester.

When the economy slows down, entrepreneurialism heats up like a stoked-up wood stove on a cold winter night. The surface details are sensuously, vividly immediate, the language as fresh as new paint; but her exploration of power, fate and fortune is also deeply considered and constantly in dialogue with our own era, as we are shaped and created by the past. The companies that make up the network marketing industry now offer millions of people just like yourself the opportunity to build their own network rather than spend their lives working for someone else’s network. This and the three novels that followed documented the ways misogyny and violence could determine lives, as well as the history of Italy in the late 20th century. Rooney’s second novel, a love story between two clever and damaged young people coming of age in contemporary Ireland, confirmed her status as a literary superstar.

The Business of the 21st Century | Robert T Audio Book | The Business of the 21st Century | Robert T

But this isn’t just about changing the type of business you’re working with; it’s also about changing you. A father and his young son, “each the other’s world entire”, trawl across the ruins of post-apocalyptic America in this terrifying but tender story told with biblical conviction. An exploration of misogyny, the origins of “gendered speech” in the classical era and the problems the male world has with strong women, this slim manifesto became an instant feminist classic. No character acts as at first expected in Munro’s stories, which are attuned to the tiniest shifts in perception. A thrilling, genre-bending tale of escape from slavery in the American deep south, this Pulitzer prize-winner combines extraordinary prose and uncomfortable truths.In other words, is it generating money that goes into your pocket, or is it taking money out of your pocket? The deliciously dark US crime thriller that launched a thousand imitators and took the concept of the unreliable narrator to new heights. The high-level intrigue beguiled millions of readers, brought “Scandi noir” to prominence and inspired innumerable copycats.

The Business of the 21st Century - Robert Kiyosaki, Book The Business of the 21st Century - Robert Kiyosaki, Book

The fates of three young people are altered by a young girl’s lie at the close of a sweltering day on a country estate in 1935. Robinson’s meditative, deeply philosophical novel is told through letters written by elderly preacher John Ames in the 1950s to his young son who, when he finally reaches an adulthood his father won’t see, will at least have this posthumous one-sided conversation: “While you read this, I am imperishable, somehow more alive than I have ever been. Confiding and self-deprecating, she has a way of always managing to sound like your best friend – even when writing about her apartment on New York’s Upper West Side. From a 19th-century seafarer to a tale from beyond the end of civilisation, via 1970s nuclear intrigue and the testimony of a future clone, these dizzying narratives are delicately interlinked, highlighting the echoes and recurrences of the vast human symphony.

In his Olympian history of humanity, Harari documents the numerous revolutions Homo sapiens has undergone over the last 70,000 years: from new leaps in cognitive reasoning to agriculture, science and industry, the era of information and the possibilities of biotechnology. Strikingly honest, originally written, with a galaxy of intellectual reference points, it is essentially a love story; one that seems to make a new way of living possible. He comes up against the IMF, the European institutions, Wall Street, billionaires and media owners and is told how the system works – as a result, his book is a telling description of modern power.