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The 100: book 1, common sense media reviewers.

Captivating tale about teens sent to recolonize Earth.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

Kids learn about the politics and ethical issues o

Moderation is key. Kids get a glimpse of the probl

Each of the four main characters displays great lo

One man is shot with a gun, and another boy is sho

It is revealed that teens engage in consensual sex

Lots of uses of “bulls--t," "sh-t," "bitch," "bast

Two of the three wings on the spacecraft are occup

Parents need to know that The 100: Book 1 closely follows four juvenile delinquents and their journey to recolonize Earth after only ever living in space. It's a futuristic dystopian novel that includes some violence. All crimes committed are punishable by death through lethal injection, and it's mentioned…

Educational Value

Kids learn about the politics and ethical issues of the death penalty. Readers also are encouraged to protect and care for the beautiful planet on which we live.

Positive Messages

Moderation is key. Kids get a glimpse of the problems that come with too much or too little government involvement. Also, at times, it's good to question authority to discover the truth for yourself.

Positive Role Models

Each of the four main characters displays great loyalty, bravery, and self-sacrifice. However, at times these characters make decisions based on hormonal impulses rather than analytical reasoning.

Violence & Scariness

One man is shot with a gun, and another boy is shot with a bow and arrow. It's discussed that many people have been executed by the government through lethal injection. A mother, who suffers from mental illness, commits suicide in front of her two children. There are fistfights and an attempted rape.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

It is revealed that teens engage in consensual sexual relationships, as one teen ends up pregnant. However, these scenes are not described in detail. Passionate kissing takes place among boys and girls.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Lots of uses of “bulls--t," "sh-t," "bitch," "bastard," and "ass."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Two of the three wings on the spacecraft are occupied by lower-income families known to suffer from alcohol and drug addictions. Also, a secondary character develops a drug addiction to sleeping pills, which were prescribed to her while she was in the hospital.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The 100: Book 1 closely follows four juvenile delinquents and their journey to recolonize Earth after only ever living in space. It's a futuristic dystopian novel that includes some violence. All crimes committed are punishable by death through lethal injection, and it's mentioned that countless people in the colony have already been executed. One character is shot with a gun, and another with a bow and arrow -- their fates are left unknown to the reader. A son finds his mother on the kitchen floor submerged in her own blood after she attempts to commit suicide. Teens engage in consensual sexual relationships, and there's passionate kissing. One of the main characters (a teen girl) becomes pregnant, which is a capital crime due to the strict population-control laws. There's an attempted rape. Drug and alcohol abuse are discussed, and one character battles an addiction to prescription pills. There's also a hefty amount of swearing ("bulls--t," "bitch," "s--t," "bastard," and "a--hole").

Where to Read

Community reviews.

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• Kids say (12)

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What's the Story?

THE 100: BOOK 1 is a dystopian sci-fi novel and the inspiration for the CW series of the same name. The story takes place 300 years after a nuclear war polluted all of Earth's sources, forcing surviving members of the human race to settle in space aboard a giant spacecraft. Due to the limited supply of natural resources such as oxygen, water, and food, the authoritarian government has implemented extreme measures, making all infractions capital crimes. This severe regulation applies only to adults, whereas minors can be retried at the age of 18. Apprehension that the spacecraft has only a few good years left, the Chancellor decides to send 100 juvenile delinquents on a mission to recolonize Earth. On this journey, the reader gets a close look at the four teens, whose lives are intertwined with love, hate, loyalty, and betrayal.

Is It Any Good?

The 100: Book 1 is a captivating novel about four teens who set out to survive the most impossible of circumstances. Author Kass Morgan effortlessly weaves the four narrators' tales while cascading between the past and present. Flashbacks don’t always work in novels, but here, scenes flow naturally and keep the reader anxious to learn more about each individual’s personal story. Morgan examines issues that could arise if there were a cataclysmic decline in society while subtly shedding light on contemporary real-life political issues. Also, readers must consider the ethical dilemma of whether to punish another human being by depriving him or her of life.

For sci-fi seekers, the only drawback is the hopelessly romantic one-liners topped with extra cheese, such as, “He tasted like joy and joy tasted better on Earth.”

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about dystopian novels. Why do you think books about oppressive futuristic governments are so popular?

Do you notice any similarities between political issues discussed in the novel and issues we face in America today?

How does The 100: Book 1 compare with other dystopian novels you've read? How is it different? How is it similar?

Book Details

• Author : Kass Morgan
• Genre : Science Fiction
• Topics : Adventures , Brothers and Sisters , Friendship , Space and Aliens
• Book type : Fiction
• Publisher : Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date : September 3, 2013
• Publisher's recommended age(s) : 13 - 17
• Number of pages : 336
• Available on : Paperback, Nook, Hardback, iBooks, Kindle
• Last updated : March 11, 2020

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

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Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

The 100 Must-Read Books of 2021

The fiction, nonfiction and poetry that shifted our perspectives, uncovered essential truths and encouraged us forward Annabel Gutterman, Cady Lang, Arianna Rebolini and Lucas Wittmann

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This project is led by Lucy Feldman and Annabel Gutterman, with writing, reporting and additional editing by Eliza Berman, Kelly Conniff, Mariah Espada, Lori Fradkin, Laurin-Whitney Gottbrath, Cady Lang, Nik Popli, Arianna Rebolini, Lucas Wittmann and Julia Zorthian; art and photography editing by Whitney Matewe and Jennifer Prandato; and production by Paulina Cachero and Nadia Suleman.

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Screen Rant

The 100: 10 things the show changed from the novels.

Not everything stays the same when making the jump from books to the screen. Here are ten things that were changed in The 100 when it became a show.

The 100 made a splash on the CW Network when the one-hundred juvenile delinquents landed on Earth . However, the novel released first in 2013. While characters such as Clarke, Bellamy, Octavia, and Wells made it into the CW's darker adaptation, not everything else made the cut.

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Jason Rothenberg took the series in a completely different direction than Kass Morgan's books. In a way, a fan is looking at two completely different storylines, even if they do share the same basis and characters. To create the story that developed on-screen, the minds behind the show diverted and changed details from the books.

On the show, Bellamy gets on the Dropship after making a deal to shoot Chancellor Jaha. However, the novel's version is more innocent. To get on the Dropship, Bellamy steals his friend's guard uniform. That is not the only difference between the counterparts of Bellamy Blake. While the show never confirms the identity of Bellamy's father, the novel does. In a turn of events, it is revealed that Chancellor Jaha is Bellamy's biological father. This is a detail that gets ignored or stripped entirely from the show. Bellamy and Jaha never share any moment that even hints that they could be related in any way.

While Wells does not make it past the third episode in the show, he does have a longer lifespan in the novels. Another significant difference between the two mediums is Wells' time spent with the Grounders.

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While in the show, Wells dies before spending any considerable time with the Grounders, the novel's portrayal shows him heavily interacting, and in a romantic relationship with one of the Grounders. The books also allow the time for Wells to move past his feelings for Clarke, while the show has he and Finn vying for her attention.

OCTAVIA'S BACKSTORY

Octavia is happy and open to the ground when she first steps off of the Dropship. Over time, Octavia grows into a more severe warrior, leaving the girl under the floor behind but not forgotten. She has one of the most massive character developments in the television show. In the books, Octavia does not have the same development. Rather than being spotted at a dance, she is discovered at five years old. Afterward, she is moved to an orphanage rather than being arrested. She would not be detained for another few years when she was caught stealing drugs.

CLARKE'S PARENTS

Clarke's biggest tragedy at the beginning of the television series is that her father, Jake Griffin, had been floated for revealing information to the rest of the Ark. The novel shows two completely different people as Clarke's parents. Rather than a doctor and engineer that the CW shows them to be, the books portray Clarke's parents as scientists who had been experimenting on children. However, they are doing it because Vice-Chancellor Rhodes is threatening them. Another plot twist shows that Clarke's parents were not dead, as she thought, but alive and wandering Earth. Another thing changed about them is their first names, initially named in the novels as Mary and David.

THE GROUNDERS

Everything that fans know about the Grounders from the television adaptation of  The 100 only exists on screen. The culture, language, and warrior lives are portrayed in the show instead of the novels.

Even the major rising war between the delinquents and Grounders doesn't exist. Instead, one of the most significant offenses they do is kidnap Octavia, which is relatively tame in the overall arc of the tv series. Another change regarding them is their name. In the novels, the Grounders are referred to as "Earthborns." In the books, the Earthborns had survived the apocalypse and its aftermath by living in Mount Weather. The storyline involving Mount Weather was done drastically different in  The 100's second season, showing scientists using the blood and bone marrow of Grounders to survive the outside radiation.

THE DELINQUENTS

Fans of the television series latched onto more than Clarke, Bellamy, Octavia, and Wells from the delinquents. Raven, Jasper, Monty, Miller, Harper, and more became a significant part of watching the series. However, in the novel , none of these other characters exist. Instead, they are replaced by other characters such as Glass. Glass could be considered the novel's equivalent of Raven in the early episodes of the show. Raven, like Glass, had stayed in space when the hundred delinquents were sent to the ground. While on the show, it is through Raven, Abby, Kane, and Jaha that the viewers understand what is happening on the Ark, in the novel, life in space is mainly seen through Glass' perspective.

Both series have a sense of tragic foreboding about them. However, the television show ups the stakes and makes the entire feel of the world and characters much darker.  The 100 takes the essence of the novels and builds a world around war and moral repercussions of every action. A constant tone of oncoming doom and worry that death is near is part of the show, and not just a plot device. Two scenes that stick out include the Culling in the first season and the Dark Year in season five. The need to survive is a never-ending storyline, as are the questions surrounding what the main characters are willing to do to ensure it.

CLARKE AND WELLS' RELATIONSHIP

In the television show, Clarke and Wells were only ever best friends, at least in Clarke's perspective. Wells had harbored romantic feelings for Clarke, and his loyalty to her is the reason he ended up on the Dropship. Clarke hated Wells, thinking he was the cause behind her father's death, and made a point to avoid him when she could.

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Once Clarke learns that Wells was not to blame for her father's death, she forgives him. Unfortunately, shortly after, Wells is killed. However, their relationship in the books did include romantic involvement. They had been together until Clarke believed her parents were floated, leading to their breakup. Another difference shows that in the books, Wells had told his father about what Clarke's parents had been illegally doing.

While the novels tend to stay within the exploration of Earth, the tv show reaches beyond that. Politics, science, and future technology are always at play as the main characters attempt to navigate through each world. The show is continuously world-building, and the destruction of everything at the end of the fourth season pushes the boundaries once again, forcing everyone to learn what the new Earth looks like. However, that doesn't even last that long as it is soon blown up, and everyone moves to Sanctum. The novels do not have the level of emotional and moral depth or worry about characters' lives.

CLARKE AND BELLAMY'S RELATIONSHIP

In the television series, Clarke and Bellamy's relationship covers nearly every title other than romantic. They've been enemies, allies, partners, and friends. However, Bellamy and Clarke have not moved forward into romantic territory. Their novel counterparts differ from this. In the novels, Clarke and Bellamy quickly move from uneasy allies to love interests. At the end of the fourth book, the two have decided to get engaged. Yet, their relationship in the novels is not as dynamic as the television portrayals. The on-screen Bellamy and Clarke have been through much more, and much worse together.

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The 100 best books of the 21st century

Dazzling debut novels, searing polemics, the history of humanity and trailblazing memoirs ... Read our pick of the best books since 2000

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I Feel Bad About My Neck

By nora ephron (2006).

Perhaps better known for her screenwriting ( Silkwood , When Harry Met Sally , Heartburn ), Ephron’s brand of smart theatrical humour is on best display in her essays. 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. This wildly enjoyable collection includes her droll observations about ageing, vanity – and a scorching appraisal of Bill Clinton. Read the review

Broken Glass

By alain mabanckou (2005), translated by helen stevenson (2009).

The Congolese writer says he was “trying to break the French language” with Broken Glass – a black comedy told by a disgraced teacher without much in the way of full stops or paragraph breaks. As Mabanckou’s unreliable narrator munches his “bicycle chicken” and drinks his red wine, it becomes clear he has the history of Congo-Brazzaville and the whole of French literature in his sights. Read the review

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

By stieg larsson (2005), translated by steven t murray (2008).

Radical journalist Mikael Blomkvist forms an unlikely alliance with troubled young hacker Lisbeth Salander as they follow a trail of murder and malfeasance connected with one of Sweden’s most powerful families in the first novel of the bestselling Millennium trilogy. The high-level intrigue beguiled millions of readers, brought “Scandi noir” to prominence and inspired innumerable copycats. Read the review

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

By jk rowling (2000).

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A Little Life

By hanya yanagihara (2015).

This operatically harrowing American gay melodrama became an unlikely bestseller, and one of the most divisive novels of the century so far. One man’s life is blighted by abuse and its aftermath, but also illuminated by love and friendship. Some readers wept all night, some condemned it as titillating and exploitative, but no one could deny its power. Read the review

Chronicles: Volume One

By bob dylan (2004).

Dylan’s reticence about his personal life is a central part of the singer-songwriter’s brand, so the gaps and omissions in this memoir come as no surprise. 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. Fans are still waiting for volume two. Read the review

The Tipping Point

By malcolm gladwell (2000).

The New Yorker staff writer examines phenomena from shoe sales to crime rates through the lens of epidemiology, reaching his own tipping point, when he became a rock-star intellectual and unleashed a wave of quirky studies of contemporary society. Two decades on, Gladwell is often accused of oversimplification and cherry picking, but his idiosyncratic bestsellers have helped shape 21st-century culture. Read the review

by Nicola Barker (2007)

British fiction’s most anarchic author is as prolific as she is playful, but this freewheeling, visionary epic set around the Thames Gateway is her magnum opus. 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. Read the review

by Helen Dunmore (2001)

The Levin family battle against starvation in this novel set during the German siege of Leningrad. Anna digs tank traps and dodges patrols as she scavenges for wood, but the hand of history is hard to escape. Read the review

by M John Harrison (2002)

One of the most underrated prose writers demonstrates the literary firepower of science fiction at its best. Three narrative strands – spanning far-future space opera, contemporary unease and virtual-reality pastiche – are braided together for a breathtaking metaphysical voyage in pursuit of the mystery at the heart of reality. Read the review

by Jenny Erpenbeck (2008), translated by Susan Bernofsky (2010)

A grand house by a lake in the east of Germany is both the setting and main character of Erpenbeck’s third novel. The turbulent waves of 20th-century history crash over it as the house is sold by a Jewish family fleeing the Third Reich, requisitioned by the Russian army, reclaimed by exiles returning from Siberia, and sold again. Read the review

by Lorna Sage (2000)

A Whitbread prizewinning memoir, full of perfectly chosen phrases, that is one of the best accounts of family dysfunction ever written. Sage grew up with her grandparents, who hated each other: he was a drunken philandering vicar; his wife, having found his diaries, blackmailed him and lived in another part of the house. The author gets unwittingly pregnant at 16, yet the story has a happy ending. Read the review

Noughts & Crosses

By malorie blackman (2001).

Set in an alternative Britain, this groundbreaking piece of young adult fiction sees black people, called the Crosses, hold all the power and influence, while the noughts – white people – are marginalised and segregated. The former children’s laureate’s series is a crucial work for explaining racism to young readers.

Priestdaddy

By patricia lockwood (2017).

This may not be the only account of living in a religious household in the American midwest (in her youth, the author joined a group called God’s Gang, where they spoke in tongues), but it is surely the funniest. The author started out as the “poet laureate of Twitter”; her language is brilliant, and she has a completely original mind. Read the review

Adults in the Room

By yanis varoufakis (2017).

This memoir by the leather-jacketed economist of the six months he spent as Greece’s finance minister in 2015 at a time of economic and political crisis has been described as “one of the best political memoirs ever written”. 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. Read the review

The God Delusion

By richard dawkins (2006).

A key text in the days when the “New Atheism” was much talked about, The God Delusion is a hard-hitting attack on religion, full of Dawkins’s confidence that faith produces fanatics and all arguments for God are ridiculous. What the evolutionary biologist lacks in philosophical sophistication, he makes up for in passion, and the book sold in huge numbers. Read the review

The Cost of Living

By deborah levy (2018).

“Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want ... ” The second part of Levy’s “living memoir”, in which she leaves her marriage, is a fascinating companion piece to her deep yet playful novels. Feminism, mythology and the daily grind come together for a book that combines emotion and intellect to dazzling effect. Read the review

Tell Me How It Ends

By valeria luiselli (2016), translated by luiselli with lizzie davis (2017).

As the hysteria over immigration to the US began to build in 2015, the Mexican novelist volunteered to work as an interpreter in New York’s federal immigration court. In this powerful series of essays she tells the poignant stories of the children she met, situating them in the wider context of the troubled relationship between the Americas. Read the review

by Neil Gaiman (2002)

From the Sandman comics to his fantasy epic American Gods to Twitter, Gaiman towers over the world of books. But this perfectly achieved children’s novella, in which a plucky young girl enters a parallel world where her “Other Mother” is a spooky copy of her real-life mum, with buttons for eyes, might be his finest hour: a properly scary modern myth which cuts right to the heart of childhood fears and desires. Read the review

by Jim Crace (2013)

Crace is fascinated by the moment when one era gives way to another. Here, it is the enclosure of the commons, a fulcrum of English history, that drives his story of dispossession and displacement. Set in a village without a name, the narrative dramatises what it’s like to see the world you know come to an end, in a severance of the connection between people and land that has deep relevance for our time of climate crisis and forced migration. Read the review

Stories of Your Life and Others

By ted chiang (2002).

Melancholic and transcendent, Chiang’s eight, high-concept sci-fi stories exploring the nature of language, maths, religion and physics racked up numerous awards and a wider audience when ‘Story of Your Life’ was adapted into the 2016 film Arrival . Read the review

The Spirit Level

By richard wilkinson and kate pickett (2009).

An eye-opening study, based on overwhelming evidence, which revealed that among rich countries, the “more equal societies almost always do better” for all. Growth matters less than inequality, the authors argued: whether the issue is life expectancy, infant mortality, crime rates, obesity, literacy or recycling, the Scandinavian countries, say, will always win out over, say, the UK. Read the review

The Fifth Season

By nk jemisin (2015).

Jemisin became the first African American author to win the best novel category at the Hugo awards for her first book in the Broken Earth trilogy. In her intricate and richly imagined far future universe, the world is ending, ripped apart by relentless earthquakes and volcanoes. Against this apocalyptic backdrop she explores urgent questions of power and enslavement through the eyes of three women. “As this genre finally acknowledges that the dreams of the marginalised matter and that all of us have a future,” she said in her acceptance speech, “so will go the world. (Soon, I hope.)”

Signs Preceding the End of the World

By yuri herrera (2009), translated by lisa dillman (2015).

Makina sets off from her village in Mexico with a package from a local gangster and a message for her brother, who has been gone for three years. The story of her crossing to the US examines the blurring of boundaries, the commingling of languages and the blending of identities that complicate the idea of an eventual return. Read the review

Thinking, Fast and Slow

By daniel kahneman (2011).

The Nobel laureate’s unexpected bestseller, on the minutiae of decision-making, divides the brain into two. System One makes judgments quickly, intuitively and automatically, as when a batsman decides whether to cut or pull. System Two is slow, calculated and deliberate, like long division. But psychologist Kahneman argues that, although System Two thinks it is in control, many of our decisions are really made by System One. Read the review

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

By olga tokarczuk (2009), translated by antonia lloyd-jones (2018).

In this existential eco-thriller, a William Blake-obsessed eccentric investigates the murders of men and animals in a remote Polish village. More accessible and focused than Flights , the novel that won Tokarczuk the Man International Booker prize, it is no less profound in its examination of how atavistic male impulses, emboldened by the new rightwing politics of Europe, are endangering people, communities and nature itself. Read the review

Days Without End

By sebastian barry (2016).

In this savagely beautiful novel set during the Indian wars and American civil war, a young Irish boy flees famine-struck Sligo for Missouri. There he finds lifelong companionship with another emigrant, and they join the army on its brutal journey west, laying waste to Indian settlements. Viscerally focused and intense, yet imbued with the grandeur of the landscape, the book explores love, gender and survival with a rare, luminous power. Read the review

Nothing to Envy

By barbara demick (2009).

Los Angeles Times journalist Barbara Demick interviewed around 100 North Korean defectors for this propulsive work of narrative non-fiction, but she focuses on just six, all from the north-eastern city of Chongjin – closed to foreigners and less media-ready than Pyongyang. North Korea is revealed to be rife with poverty, corruption and violence but populated by resilient people with a remarkable ability to see past the propaganda all around them. Read the review

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

By shoshana zuboff (2019).

An agenda-setting book that is devastating about the extent to which big tech sets out to manipulate us for profit. Not simply another expression of the “techlash”, Zuboff’s ambitious study identifies a new form of capitalism, one involving the monitoring and shaping of our behaviour, often without our knowledge, with profound implications for democracy. “Once we searched Google, but now Google searches us.” Read the review

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

By chris ware (2000).

At the time when Ware won the Guardian first book award, no graphic novel had previously won a generalist literary prize. 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. Read the review

Notes on a Scandal

By zoë heller (2003).

Sheba, a middle-aged teacher at a London comprehensive, begins an affair with her 15-year-old student - but we hear about it from a fellow teacher, the needy Barbara, whose obsessive nature drives the narrative. With shades of Patricia Highsmith, this teasing investigation into sex, class and loneliness is a dark marvel. Read the review

The Infatuations

By javier marías (2011), translated by margaret jull costa (2013).

The Spanish master examines chance, love and death in the story of an apparently random killing that gradually reveals hidden depths. Marías constructs an elegant murder mystery from his trademark labyrinthine sentences, but this investigation is in pursuit of much meatier questions than whodunnit. Read the review

The Constant Gardener

By john le carré (2001).

The master of the cold war thriller turned his attention to the new world order in this chilling investigation into the corruption powering big pharma in Africa. Based on the case of a rogue antibiotics trial that killed and maimed children in Nigeria in the 1990s, it has all the dash and authority of his earlier novels while precisely and presciently anatomising the dangers of a rampant neo-imperialist capitalism. Read the review

The Silence of the Girls

By pat barker (2018).

If the western literary canon is founded on Homer, then it is founded on women’s silence. Barker’s extraordinary intervention, in which she replays the events of the Iliad from the point of view of the enslaved Trojan women, chimed with both the #MeToo movement and a wider drive to foreground suppressed voices. In a world still at war, it has chilling contemporary resonance. Read the review

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

By carlo rovelli (2014).

A theoretical physicist opens a window on to the great questions of the universe with this 96-page overview of modern physics. Rovelli’s keen insight and striking metaphors make this the best introduction to subjects including relativity, quantum mechanics, cosmology, elementary particles and entropy outside of a course in advanced physics. Read the review

by Gillian Flynn (2012)

The deliciously dark US crime thriller that launched a thousand imitators and took the concept of the unreliable narrator to new heights. A woman disappears: we think we know whodunit, but we’re wrong. Flynn’s stylishly written portrait of a toxic marriage set against a backdrop of social and economic insecurity combines psychological depth with sheer unputdownable flair. Read the review

by Stephen King (2000)

Written after a near-fatal accident, this combination of memoir and masterclass by fiction’s most successful modern storyteller showcases the blunt, casual brilliance of King at his best. As well as being genuinely useful, it’s a fascinating chronicle of literary persistence, and of a lifelong love affair with language and narrative. Read the review

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By rebecca skloot (2010).

Henrietta Lacks was a black American who died in agony of cancer in a “coloured” hospital ward in 1951. Her cells, taken without her knowledge during a biopsy, went on to change medical history, being used around the world to develop countless drugs. 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. Read the review

Mother’s Milk

By edward st aubyn (2006).

The fourth of the autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels finds the wealthy protagonist – whose flight from atrocious memories of child abuse into drug abuse was the focus of the first books – beginning to grope after redemption. Elegant wit and subtle psychology lift grim subject matter into seductive brilliance. Read the review

This House of Grief

By helen garner (2014).

A man drives his three sons into a deep pond and swims out, leaving them to drown. But was it an accident? This 2005 tragedy caught the attention of one of Australia’s greatest living writers. Garner puts herself centre stage in an account of Robert Farquharson’s trial that combines forensic detail and rich humanity. Read the review

by Alice Oswald (2002)

This book-length poem is a mesmerising tapestry of “the river’s mutterings”, based on three years of recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. From swimmers to sewage workers, boatbuilders to bailiffs, salmon fishers to ferryman, the voices are varied and vividly brought to life. Read the review

The Beauty of the Husband

By anne carson (2002).

One of Canada’s most celebrated poets examines love and desire in a collection that describes itself as “a fictional essay in 39 tangos”. Carson charts the course of a doomed marriage in loose-limbed lines that follow the switchbacks of thought and feeling from first meeting through multiple infidelities to arrive at eventual divorce.

by Tony Judt (2005)

This grand survey of Europe since 1945 begins with the devastation left behind by the second world war and offers a panoramic narrative of the cold war from its beginnings to the collapse of the Soviet bloc – a part of which Judt witnessed firsthand in Czechoslovakia’s velvet revolution. A very complex story is told with page-turning urgency and what may now be read as nostalgic faith in “the European idea”. Read the review

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

By michael chabon (2000).

A love story to the golden age of comics in New York, Chabon’s Pulitzer-winner features two Jewish cousins, one smuggled out of occupied Prague, who create an anti-fascist comic book superhero called The Escapist. Their own adventures are as exciting and highly coloured as the ones they write and draw in this generous, open-hearted, deeply lovable rollercoaster of a book. Read the review

by Robert Macfarlane (2019)

A beautifully written and profound book, which takes the form of a series of (often hair-raising and claustrophobic) voyages underground – from the fjords of the Arctic to the Parisian catacombs. Trips below the surface inspire reflections on “deep” geological time and raise urgent questions about the human impact on planet Earth. Read the review

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

By michael pollan (2006).

An entertaining and highly influential book from the writer best known for his advice: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” The author follows four meals on their journey from field to plate – including one from McDonald’s and a locally sourced organic feast. Pollan is a skilled, amusing storyteller and The Omnivore’s Dilemma changed both food writing and the way we see food. Read the review

Women & Power

By mary beard (2017).

Based on Beard’s lectures on women’s voices and how they have been silenced, Women and Power was an enormous publishing success in the “ #MeToo ”’ year 2017. 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. Read the review

True History of the Kelly Gang

By peter carey (2000).

Carey’s second Booker winner is an irresistible tour de force of literary ventriloquism: the supposed autobiography of 19th-century Australian outlaw and “wild colonial boy” Ned Kelly, inspired by a fragment of Kelly’s own prose and written as a glorious rush of semi-punctuated vernacular storytelling. Mythic and tender by turns, these are tall tales from a lost frontier. Read the review

Small Island

By andrea levy (2004).

Pitted against a backdrop of prejudice, this London-set novel is told by four protagonists – Hortense and Gilbert, Jamaican migrants, and a stereotypically English couple, Queenie and Bernard. These varied perspectives, illuminated by love and loyalty, combine to create a thoughtful mosaic depicting the complex beginnings of Britain’s multicultural society. Read the review

by Colm Tóibín (2009)

Tóibín’s sixth novel is set in the 1950s, when more than 400,000 people left Ireland, and considers the emotional and existential impact of emigration on one young woman. Eilis makes a life for herself in New York, but is drawn back by the possibilities of the life she has lost at home. A universal story of love, endurance and missed chances, made radiant through Tóibín’s measured prose and tender understatement. Read the review

Oryx and Crake

By margaret atwood (2003).

In the first book in her dystopian MaddAddam trilogy, the Booker winner speculates about the havoc science can wreak on the world. The big warning here – don’t trust corporations to run the planet – is blaring louder and louder as the century progresses. Read the review

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

By jeanette winterson (2011).

The title is the question Winterson’s adoptive mother asked as she threw her daughter out, aged 16, for having a girlfriend. The autobiographical story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit , and the trials of Winterson’s later life, is urgent, wise and moving. Read the review

Night Watch

By terry pratchett (2002).

Pratchett’s mighty Discworld series is a high point in modern fiction: a parody of fantasy literature that deepened and darkened over the decades to create incisive satires of our own world. The 29th book, focusing on unlikely heroes, displays all his fierce intelligence, anger and wild humour, in a story that’s moral, humane – and hilarious. Read the review

by Marjane Satrapi (2000-2003), translated by Mattias Ripa (2003-2004)

Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel follows her coming-of-age in the lead up to and during the Iranian revolution. In this riotous memoir, Satrapi focuses on one young life to reveal a hidden history.

Human Chain

By seamus heaney (2010).

The Nobel laureate tends to the fragments of memory and loss with moving precision in his final poetry collection. A book of elegies and echoes, these poems are infused with a haunting sense of pathos, with a line often left hanging to suspend the reader in longing and regret. Read the review

Levels of Life

By julian barnes (2013).

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. Barnes divides the book into three parts with disparate themes – 19th-century ballooning, photography and marriage. Their convergence is wonderfully achieved. Read the review

Hope in the Dark

By rebecca solnit (2004).

Writing against “the tremendous despair at the height of the Bush administration’s powers and the outset of the war in Iraq”, the US thinker finds optimism in political activism and its ability to change the world. The book ranges widely from the fall of the Berlin wall to the Zapatista uprising in Mexico, to the invention of Viagra. Read the review

Citizen: An American Lyric

By claudia rankine (2014).

From the slow emergency response in the black suburbs destroyed by hurricane Katrina to a mother trying to move her daughter away from a black passenger on a plane, the poet’s award-winning prose work confronts the history of racism in the US and asks: regardless of their actual status, who truly gets to be a citizen? Read the review

by Michael Lewis (2010)

The author of The Big Short has made a career out of rendering the most opaque subject matter entertaining and comprehensible: Moneyball tells the story of how geeks outsmarted jocks to revolutionise baseball using maths. But you do not need to know or care about the sport, because – as with all Lewis’s best writing – it’s all about how the story is told. Read the review

by Ian McEwan (2001)

There are echoes of DH Lawrence and EM Forster in McEwan’s finely tuned dissection of memory and guilt. 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. Lifelong remorse, the horror of war and devastating twists are to follow in an elegant, deeply felt meditation on the power of love and art. Read the review

The Year of Magical Thinking

By joan didion (2005).

With cold, clear, precise prose, Didion gives an account of the year her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, collapsed from a fatal heart attack in their home. Her devastating examination of grief and widowhood changed the nature of writing about bereavement. Read the review

White Teeth

By zadie smith (2000).

Set around the unlikely bond between two wartime friends, Smith’s debut brilliantly captures Britain’s multicultural spirit, and offers a compelling insight into immigrant family life.

The Line of Beauty

By alan hollinghurst (2004).

Oxford graduate Nick Guest has the questionable good fortune of moving into the grand west London home of a rising Tory MP. Thatcher-era degeneracy is lavishly displayed as Nick falls in love with the son of a supermarket magnate, and the novel records how Aids began to poison gay life in London. In peerless prose, Hollinghurst captures something close to the spirit of an age. Read the review

The Green Road

By anne enright (2015).

A reunion dominates the Irish novelist’s family drama, but the individual stories of the five members of the Madigan clan – the matriarch, Rosaleen, and her children, Dan, Emmet, Constance and Hanna, who escape and are bound to return – are beautifully held in balance. When the Madigans do finally come together halfway through the book, Enright masterfully reminds us of the weight of history and family. Read the review

by Martin Amis (2000)

Known for the firecracker phrases and broad satires of his fiction, Amis presented a much warmer face in his memoir. His life is haunted by the disappearance of his cousin Lucy, who is revealed 20 years later to have been murdered by Fred West. But Amis also has much fun recollecting his “velvet-suited, snakeskin-booted” youth, and paints a moving portrait of his father’s comic gusto as old age reduces him to a kind of “anti-Kingsley”. Read the review

The Hare with Amber Eyes

By edmund de waal (2010).

In this exquisite family memoir, the ceramicist explains how he came to inherit a collection of 264 netsuke – small Japanese ornaments – from his great-uncle. The unlikely survival of the netsuke entails De Waal telling a story that moves from Paris to Austria under the Nazis to Japan, and he beautifully conjures a sense of place. The book doubles as a set of profound reflections on objects and what they mean to us. Read the review

Outline by Rachel

Cusk (2014).

This startling work of autofiction, which signalled a new direction for Cusk, follows an author teaching a creative writing course over one hot summer in Athens. She leads storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She hears from other people about relationships, ambition, solitude, intimacy and “the disgust that exists indelibly between men and women”. The end result is sublime. Read the review

by Alison Bechdel (2006)

The American cartoonist’s darkly humorous memoir tells the story of how her closeted gay father killed himself a few months after she came out as a lesbian. This pioneering work, which later became a musical, helped shape the modern genre of “graphic memoir”, combining detailed and beautiful panels with remarkable emotional depth. Read the review

The Emperor of All Maladies

By siddhartha mukherjee (2010).

“Normal cells are identically normal; malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways.” In adapting the opening lines of Anna Karenina , Mukherjee sets out the breathtaking ambition of his study of cancer: not only to share the knowledge of a practising oncologist but to take his readers on a literary and historical journey. Read the review

The Argonauts

By maggie nelson (2015).

An electrifying memoir that captured a moment in thinking about gender, and also changed the world of books. The story, told in fragments, is of Nelson’s pregnancy, which unfolds at the same time as her partner, the artist Harry Dodge, is beginning testosterone injections: “the summer of our changing bodies”. 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. Read the review

The Underground Railroad

By colson whitehead (2016).

A thrilling, genre-bending tale of escape from slavery in the American deep south, this Pulitzer prize-winner combines extraordinary prose and uncomfortable truths. Two slaves flee their masters using the underground railroad, the network of abolitionists who helped slaves out of the south, wonderfully reimagined by Whitehead as a steampunk vision of a literal train. Read the review

A Death in the Family

By karl ove knausgaard (2009), translated by don bartlett (2012).

The first instalment of Knausgaard’s relentlessly self-examining six-volume series My Struggle revolves around the life and death of his alcoholic father. Whether or not you regard him as the Proust of memoir, his compulsive honesty created a new benchmark for autofiction. Read the review

by Carol Ann Duffy (2005)

A moving, book-length poem from the UK’s first female poet laureate, Rapture won the TS Eliot prize in 2005. From falling in love to betrayal and separation, Duffy reimagines romance with refreshing originality. Read the review

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

By alice munro (2001).

Canada’s observant and humane short story writer, who won the Nobel in 2013, is at her best in this collection. A housekeeper’s fate is changed by the pranks of her employer’s teenager daughter; an incorrigible flirt gracefully accepts his wife’s new romance in her care home. No character acts as at first expected in Munro’s stories, which are attuned to the tiniest shifts in perception. Read the review

Capital in the Twenty First Century

By thomas piketty (2013), translated by arthur goldhammer (2014).

The beautifully written product of 15 years of research, Capital made its author an intellectual star – the modern Marx – and opened readers’ eyes to how neoliberalism produces vastly increased inequalities. Full of data, theories and historical analysis, its message is clear, and prophetic: unless governments increase tax, the new and grotesque wealth levels of the rich will encourage political instability. Read the review

Normal People

By sally rooney (2018).

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. Her focus is on the dislocation and uncertainty of millennial life, but her elegant prose has universal appeal. Read the review

A Visit from The Goon Squad

By jennifer egan (2011).

Inspired by both Proust and The Sopranos , Egan’s Pulitzer-winning comedy follows several characters in and around the US music industry, but is really a book about memory and kinship, time and narrative, continuity and disconnection. Read the review

The Noonday Demon

By andrew solomon (2001).

Emerging from Solomon’s own painful experience, this “anatomy” of depression examines its many faces – plus its science, sociology and treatment. The book’s combination of honesty, scholarly rigour and poetry made it a benchmark in literary memoir and understanding of mental health. Read the review

Tenth of December

By george saunders (2013).

This warm yet biting collection of short stories by the Booker-winning American author will restore your faith in humanity. No matter how weird the setting – a futuristic prison lab, a middle-class home where human lawn ornaments are employed as a status symbol – in these surreal satires of post-crash life Saunders reminds us of the meaning we find in small moments. Read the review

by Yuval Noah Harari (2011), translated by Harari with John Purcell and Haim Watzman (2014)

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. Harari’s scope may be too wide for some, but this engaging work topped the charts and made millions marvel. Read the review

Life After Life

By kate atkinson (2013).

Atkinson examines family, history and the power of fiction as she tells the story of a woman born in 1910 – and then tells it again, and again, and again. Ursula Todd’s multiple lives see her strangled at birth, drowned on a Cornish beach, trapped in an awful marriage and visiting Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden. But this dizzying fictional construction is grounded by such emotional intelligence that her heroine’s struggles always feel painfully, joyously real. Read the review

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night‑Time

By mark haddon (2003).

Fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone becomes absorbed in the mystery of a dog’s demise, meticulously investigating through diagrams, timetables, maps and maths problems. Haddon’s fascinating portrayal of an unconventional mind was a crossover hit with both adults and children and was adapted into a very successful stage play. Read the review

The Shock Doctrine

By naomi klein (2007).

In this urgent examination of free-market fundamentalism, Klein argues – with accompanying reportage – that the social breakdowns witnessed during decades of neoliberal economic policies are not accidental, but in fact integral to the functioning of the free market, which relies on disaster and human suffering to function. Read the review

by Cormac McCarthy (2006)

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. The slide into savagery as civilisation collapses is harrowing material, but McCarthy’s metaphysical efforts to imagine a cold dark universe where the light of humanity is winking out are what make the novel such a powerful ecological warning. Read the review

The Corrections

By jonathan franzen (2001).

The members of one ordinarily unhappy American family struggle to adjust to the shifting axes of their worlds over the final decades of the 20th century. Franzen’s move into realism reaped huge literary rewards: exploring both domestic and national conflict, this family saga is clever, funny and outrageously readable. Read the review

The Sixth Extinction

By elizabeth kolbert (2014).

The science journalist examines with clarity and memorable detail the current crisis of plant and animal loss caused by human civilisation (over the past half billion years, there have been five mass extinctions on Earth; we are causing another). Kolbert considers both ecosystems – the Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon rainforest – and the lives of some extinct and soon-to-be extinct creatures including the Sumatran rhino and “the most beautiful bird in the world”, the black-faced honeycreeper of Maui. Read the review

Fingersmith

By sarah waters (2002).

Moving from the underworld dens of Victorian London to the boudoirs of country house gothic, and hingeing on the seduction of an heiress, Waters’s third novel is a drippingly atmospheric thriller, a smart study of innocence and experience, and a sensuous lesbian love story – with a plot twist to make the reader gasp. Read the review

Nickel and Dimed

By barbara ehrenreich (2001).

In this modern classic of reportage, Ehrenreich chronicled her attempts to live on the minimum wage in three American states. Working first as a waitress, then a cleaner and a nursing home aide, she still struggled to survive, and the stories of her co-workers are shocking. The US economy as she experienced it is full of routine humiliation, with demands as high as the rewards are low. Two decades on, this still reads like urgent news. Read the review

The Plot Against America

By philip roth (2004).

What if aviator Charles Lindbergh, who once called Hitler “a great man”, had won the US presidency in a landslide victory and signed a treaty with Nazi Germany? Paranoid yet plausible, Roth’s alternative-world novel is only more relevant in the age of Trump. Read the review

My Brilliant Friend

By elena ferrante (2011), translated by ann goldstein (2012).

Powerfully intimate and unashamedly domestic, the first in Ferrante’s Neapolitan series established her as a literary sensation. 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.

Half of a Yellow Sun

By chimamanda ngozi adichie (2006).

When Nigerian author Adichie was growing up, the Biafran war “hovered over everything”. Her sweeping, evocative novel, which won the Orange prize, charts the political and personal struggles of those caught up in the conflict and explores the brutal legacy of colonialism in Africa. Read the review

Cloud Atlas

David mitchell (2004).

The epic that made Mitchell’s name is a Russian doll of a book, nesting stories within stories and spanning centuries and genres with aplomb. 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. Read the review

by Ali Smith (2016)

Smith began writing her Seasonal Quartet, a still-ongoing experiment in quickfire publishing, against the background of the EU referendum. The resulting “first Brexit novel” isn’t just a snapshot of a newly divided Britain, but a dazzling exploration into love and art, time and dreams, life and death, all done with her customary invention and wit. Read the review

Between the World and Me

By ta-nehisi coates (2015).

Coates’s impassioned meditation on what it means to be a black American today made him one of the country’s most important intellectuals and writers. Having grown up the son of a former Black Panther on the violent streets of Baltimore, he has a voice that is challenging but also poetic. Between the World and Me takes the form of a letter to his teenage son, and ranges from the daily reality of racial injustice and police violence to the history of slavery and the civil war: white people, he writes, will never remember “the scale of theft that enriched them”. Read the review

The Amber Spyglass

By philip pullman (2000).

Children’s fiction came of age when the final part of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy became the first book for younger readers to win the Whitbread book of the year award. Pullman has brought imaginative fire and storytelling bravado to the weightiest of subjects: religion, free will, totalitarian structures and the human drive to learn, rebel and grow. Here Asriel’s struggle against the Authority reaches its climax, Lyra and Will journey to the Land of the Dead, and Mary investigates the mysterious elementary particles that lend their name to his current trilogy: The Book of Dust. The Hollywood-fuelled commercial success achieved by JK Rowling may have eluded Pullman so far, but his sophisticated reworking of Paradise Lost helped adult readers throw off any embarrassment at enjoying fiction written for children – and publishing has never looked back. Read the review

by WG Sebald (2001), translated by Anthea Bell (2001)

Sebald died in a car crash in 2001, but his genre-defying mix of fact and fiction, keen sense of the moral weight of history and interleaving of inner and outer journeys have had a huge influence on the contemporary literary landscape. His final work, the typically allusive life story of one man, charts the Jewish disapora and lost 20th century with heartbreaking power. Read the review

Never Let Me Go

By kazuo ishiguro (2005).

From his 1989 Booker winner The Remains of the Day to 2015’s The Buried Giant , Nobel laureate Ishiguro writes profound, puzzling allegories about history, nationalism and the individual’s place in a world that is always beyond our understanding. His sixth novel, a love triangle set among human clones in an alternative 1990s England, brings exquisite understatement to its exploration of mortality, loss and what it means to be human. Read the review

Secondhand Time

By svetlana alexievich (2013), translated by bela shayevich (2016).

The Belarusian Nobel laureate recorded thousands of hours of testimony from ordinary people to create this oral history of the Soviet Union and its end. Writers, waiters, doctors, soldiers, former Kremlin apparatchiks, gulag survivors: all are given space to tell their stories, share their anger and betrayal, and voice their worries about the transition to capitalism. An unforgettable book, which is both an act of catharsis and a profound demonstration of empathy.

by Marilynne Robinson (2004)

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.” This is a book about legacy, a record of a pocket of America that will never return, a reminder of the heartbreaking, ephemeral beauty that can be found in everyday life. As Ames concludes, to his son and himself: “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.” Read the review

by Hilary Mantel (2009)

Mantel had been publishing for a quarter century before the project that made her a phenomenon, set to be concluded with the third part of the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light , next March. To read her story of the rise of Thomas Cromwell at the Tudor court, detailing the making of a new England and the self-creation of a new kind of man, is to step into the stream of her irresistibly authoritative present tense and find oneself looking out from behind her hero’s eyes. 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. In this book we have, as she intended, “a sense of history listening and talking to itself”. Read the review

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Characters (Novel)

• View history

The following is a list of characters that have appeared on The 100 book series .

• 1 Colonists
• 2 Earthborns
• 3 Protectors

Colonists [ ]

Current and former members of the space habitat, The Colony .

Main characters :

• Clarke Griffin – A former medical student, she was charged with assisting her parents with radiation experiments on children. Works as a doctor for the kids in camp, Wells' ex-girlfriend, fell in love with Bellamy
• Wells Jaha – The son of the Chancellor and Clarke's ex-boyfriend. He intentionally got arrested to be sent to Earth with Clarke.
• Bellamy Blake – The paternal half-brother of Wells and maternal half-brother of Octavia. He became the primary hunter for the delinquents and fell in love with Clarke.
• Glass Sorenson – Best friend of Wells, she was arrested for getting pregnant through the pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage. In the commotion of Chancellor Jaha getting shot, she ran off the dropship and remained on the Colony for the first two novels.

Other delinquents :

• Octavia Blake – Bellamy's 14-year-old sister who was arrested for stealing drugs. She grew up in the Walden care center after being born as an illegal second child.
• Graham † – Phoenician boy, a bully, and one of the leaders at the delinquents' camp. He claims he was arrested for murder. He often accused Wells of spying on behalf of his father. In the fourth book , he was captured by the Protectors. After Graham broke one of the Protectors' rules, Wells was sent to kill him. But, when Wells could not go through with it, Graham pulled the trigger himself. Graham is most likely the inspiration for the TV-character John Murphy .
• Thalia † – Clarke's best friend in confinement. She got severely hurt during the dropship landing, after which Clarke found her. When her condition worsens, Clarke has to find more medicine that got lost. The medicine improves Thalia's condition, but when the medicine gets stolen, her life is in the balance again. Clarke saves her life, but Thalia remains too weak to leave the infirmary tent. Despite Clarke's attempt to save her friend, Thalia dies in the fire set by the rogue Earthborns, which Clarke blames herself for.
• Asher † – Arcadian boy killed by Earthborns' arrow. He was the first delinquent to have a fatal encounter with the Earthborns.
• Priya † – An 18-year-old girl that was helpful around camp. She was later found hanged with "Go Home" carved into her feet.
• Eric – Arcadian boy who is helpful around camp. This character could possibly be the inspiration of TV-show character Nathan Miller .
• Felix – Eric's boyfriend who became ill from eating wintershade berries.
• Molly – Thirteen-year-old girl who became ill from eating wintershade berries.
• Lila – Waldenite girl who sleeps with Graham.
• Tamsin – A blond girl who is friends with Lila.
• Dmitri – Arcadian boy and one of Graham's followers.
• Azuma – Arcadian boy and one of Graham's followers.
• Antonio – Waldenite boy with acne.
• Darcy – Arcadian girl.
• Eliza – A girl briefly mentioned that worked on building the tents in the first book.

Other teens and young adults :

• Luke – Glass's boyfriend and a Lieutenant in the Guards. He served in the engineering division. He had a brief relationship with Camille while Glass Sorenson was in lock-up.
• Lilly Marsh † – Bellamy's childhood friend and ex-girlfriend. She was one of the children in the radiation study and became friends with Clarke. As her radiation poisoning worsens she convinces Clarke to give her a lethal dose of drugs.
• Carter Jace † – Luke's best friend who was executed after Glass lied that he got her pregnant. He is very self-centered, and is also known to have stolen from the exchange. Glass believes Carter only took Luke in for the extra benefits he got from it.
• Camille – Luke's childhood friend and ex-girlfriend. She dated Luke while Glass was in lock-up
• Cora Drake – One of Glass' best friends and the daughter of the Resources Chief.
• Huxley – One of Glass' best friends.
• Lise – One of Clarke's former cellmates while in Confinement. It is unclear if she was one of the 100.
• Colton – Bellamy's former friend who became a prick when he became a guard. Bellamy bribed him for information about Octavia since her arrest.
• Scott – A Waldenite Guard who has a creepy fascination with Clarke.
• Lina – A girl captured by the Protectors
• Mary and David Griffin – Clarke's parents. They were forced by the Vice Chancellor to do radiation experiments on unregistered children. Clarke thought they were executed but they were actually sent on a secret trip to Earth.
• Sonja Sorenson † – Glass' mother who got her pardoned.
• Chancellor Jaha † – The Chancellor of the Colony. He is the father of Wells and Bellamy. He was shot right before the delinquents' dropship launched.
• Vice Chancellor Rhodes – The Vice Chancellor on the Colony. It is implied that he had feelings for Sonja. According to Bellamy, Rhodes is "the most corrupt leader the Colony had ever known".
• Officer Burnett † – A middle-aged guard and Rhodes' second-in-command.
• Dr. Lahiri – The Council's chief medical advisor. He was Clarke's mentor when she was a medical apprentice and one of her father's closest friends.
• Melinda Blake † – Mother of Bellamy and Octavia. She died by suicide when Bellamy was nine and Octavia was three.
• Mr. Drake – The Resources Chief in the Colony and Cora's father.
• Mr. Peters † – Biology tutor on Phoenix. He died due to the rough landing on Earth.
• Marin – An older woman whose leg was injured in the rough landing on Earth.
• Keith – A boy with broken ribs who is treated by Clarke. His parents didn't make it to Earth, leaving him orphaned.
• Leo – A little boy who survived the trip to Earth but was left orphaned. He is one of the children who Octavia takes care of.
• Thomas – Son of an injured Colonist who Glass tries to help.
• Cressida – A young Waldenite child Clarke treated when she was a medical apprentice on the Colony.

Earthborns [ ]

The Earthborns are a group of people who inhabited Earth since the Cataclysm . They survived within Mount Weather and moved to the ground 50 years before the start of the series.

• Kendall – A faux-Phoenix girl who turns out to be a spy from the violent faction of Earthborns.
• Sasha Walgrove † – An Earthborn girl who helps the delinquents. She falls in love with Wells but is later killed by Colonist Guards.
• Max Walgrove – Leader of the Earthborn village and father of Sasha. He was the last Mount Weather baby before the Earthborns moved to the ground.
• Tommy † – A young boy who died while taking the Colonists fishing.
• Delphine – A pregnant Earthborn in Max's village.
• Jane – An Earthborn woman Max leaves in charge when he leaves to find Sasha.
• Anna – Captured by the Protectors, became Octavia's girlfriend during the fourth book.

Protectors [ ]

The Protectors are a auxilary group made of people from The Colony and Earth. The Protectors lifestyle was about following what Earth wanted, capturing people to join their group and help them survive.

• Soren † – The leader of the Protectors. Trapped under rubble in the explosion of the gazebo, left by Glass to die.
• Oak – A high-ranking guard who ordered Wells to kill Graham.

See Also [ ]

• 1 Clarke Griffin
• 2 Octavia Blake
• 3 Bellamy Blake

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The Best Books to Read This November

Our picks for the 13 standout new releases of the month.

This month, pile your nightstand with a thrilling look inside the current state of the British royal family, a deep dive on the enduring legacy of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, a long-awaited biography from one of music's most iconic stars, and so much more. Here are T&C 's picks for the best books of November 2023.

CBK: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: A Life in Fashion

It's been more than two decades since her tragic death, but Carolyn Bessette Kennedy remains as legendary for her mystique as for her timelessly elegant style. With a foreword by Gabriela Hearst and a preface by Edward Enninful, this book is a photographed compilation of her most iconic looks, peppered with personal remembrance notes from the likes of Michael Kors, Tory Burch, and Calvin Klein.

The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture

In the late 1970s a group of Black women writers, including Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, and Alice Walker, began having monthly meetings at an apartment in Brooklyn to discuss their work. “The Sisterhood,” as they called themselves, quickly expanded and the event became a vital gathering spot for artists and activists. In her well-researched new book, Courtney Thorsson, an associate professor of English at the University of Oregon, combines first-hand accounts from attendees about the gatherings with analysis of how Sisterhood members went on to change the literary scene and American culture.

My Name Is Barbra

Endgame: Inside the Royal Family and the Monarchy's Fight for Survival

Royal correspondent Omid Scobie looks at the royal family in the aftermath of the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022. The book promises to go behind the scenes "on an institution in turmoil—exposing the chaos, family dysfunction, distrust and draconian practices threatening its very future." More details on Endgame here.

Feeding Dangerously

That José Andrés is a man of many talents is no surprise—he's a chef, a humanitarian, a professor, and an author, just to name a few. But have we ever seen him in graphic novel form before? Feeding Dangerously —which is co-writte with Steve Orlando and illustrated by Alberto Ponticelli—offers just that , telling the story of Andrés and the founding of his World Central Kitchen in some of the globe's most unforgiving areas. The story itself is inspirational, but to add to that, $5 from every book sold goes directly to WCK, making it the easiest decision you might have to make today.

Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America’s Original Ruling Class

In his previous books, journalist and author Michael Gross has investigated the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gone behind the mystique of 740 Park Avenue, and delved into the sordid world of fashion photography. Here, he puts his considering skill to use with a deeply researched history of America's relationship with the WASP, from the earliest days through the present. It's a thoughtful deep dive into the history of the country and who has wielded power here, but is kept lively thanks to Gross's ability to spin yarns that make even the Pilgrims feel exciting.

How can a family be falling apart when they're stuck so closely together? That's what this new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours wonders, as it charts the fates of one family—complicated, confused, perhaps slightly unhinged—from 2019 to 2021, as the world changed completely and they're forced to find out whether being together in the middle of a worldwide disaster is really better than not.

The Vulnerables

Sigrid Nunez's ninth novel is set during the COVID-19 pandemic, when an unnamed New York City writer ends up taking care of a parrot named Eureka. It's a short, profound meditation on living through history, and what it means to write in the modern age.

Alice Sadie Celine

For those of us who grew up in the 1990s, the idea of seductive parents has always been lurking around the edges of the popular unconscious; just ask Stifler's mom or Stacy's mom. This debut adult novel from Sarah Blakley-Cartwright takes the idea a step further, when Alice starts to feel distant from her longtime best friend Sadie and unexpectedly finds herself tangled up in a romance with, you guessed it, Sadie's mother. But this isn't a cougar-joke comedy, instead it's a heartfelt, smart, and keenly observed take on friendship and fulfillment, and what it means to start thinking of parents as actual people.

The Happy Couple

There's a year until Celine and Luke's wedding, which should be plenty of time for them to prepare... or implode completely. Hot off a hit international release, this keenly observed comedy follows not just the bride and groom to be but also their nearest and dearest friends, in the months leading up to the big day. It exposes the messy truth about who they are behind their good manners, and begs the question: How much would our friends like us if they knew who we really are?

Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education

In 2019 Stephanie Land made headlines when Barack Obama selected her memoir, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive , for his annual summer reading list. The book became a New York Times bestseller and was adapted into a Netflix series starring Margaret Qualley. Her new memoir, Class , describes a later period in her life when she worked at earning a college degree and becoming a published author all while holding down low-paying jobs and raising a child.

Welcome to the O.C.: The Oral History

Twenty years after the hit teen drama The O.C. first aired, its creators are taking us all for a romp down memory lane with an oral history of the series, featuring interviews with its stars, writers, directors, and more. It's a fascinating peek behind the making of a megahit, and a delightful but of nostalgia for those of us who remember life before streaming TV.

Eternal Echoes: Erich Neumann's Timeless Relevance to Consciousness, Creativity, and Evil

In her latest, Jungian analyst Nancy Furlotti looks closely at the writings of Erich Neumann, C. G. Jung's close friend and collaborator, which have become so pertinent to our understanding of human nature. Eternal Echoes offers an overview of Neumann's examinations of the evil as witnessed during World War II, making the author's analysis more relevant now than ever.

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10 books to add to your reading list in November

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On the Shelf

10 books for your November reading list

If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and nonfiction, to consider for your November reading list.

Booklover’s Thanksgiving arrives early this year, with most of November’s notable releases out Nov. 7 (and one pushed forward to Halloween). That should make it easier to stock up on titles to hide behind after (or even during) long hours with friends and family. At least two novels bring perspective to the COVID pandemic, while another involves a surprising view of the Vietnam War. Nonfiction ranges even more broadly, from artificial intelligence to the war in Afghanistan and the pleasures of a quiet garden. Happy — and grateful — reading!

Absolution By Alice McDermott FSG: 336 pages, $28 (Oct. 31)

Set during the earliest days of American involvement in Vietnam , McDermott’s ninth novel focuses on narrator Tricia, a Navy spouse, and her friendship with Charlene, an American businessman’s wife. After Charlene’s daughter Rainey gets a miniature ao dai for her Barbie doll from the family seamstress, Charlene cooks up a scheme that will ultimately push Tricia to her limit. A firmly feminist accounting of the era’s sins against women from both West and East, this could be McDermott’s best novel yet.

Again and Again By Jonathan Evison Dutton: 336 pages, $28 (Nov. 7)

Eugene Miles, who’s 106, lives in an eldercare facility and spends a great deal of his time telling housekeeper Angel the stories of his past lives. Since Angel has romantic troubles of his own, Eugene’s long and complicated stories make him an unlikely male Scheherazade , trying to distract someone he cares about from his distress. Does it matter if he really lived as a thief named Euric in Moorish Spain, or as Oscar Wilde’s cat?

Cubicle crucible

Personal Days A Novel Ed Park Random House: 246 pp., $13 paper

May 25, 2008

Same Bed Different Dreams By Ed Park Random House: 544 pages, $30 (Nov. 7)

Alt-history novels abound; it’s high time Korea got its own. Park (“ Personal Days ”) posits that the real-life Korean Provisional Government (KPG), founded in exile in China, became a powerful underground group working toward a unified nation during and after the Korean War. When a technical writer finds an unpublished novel that might be a KPG document, the book breaks into three sections: the discovery of the manuscript, the novel itself and then the speculative ramblings of a Black Korean War veteran. The result is twisty and high-concept and impossible to put down.

The Vulnerables By Sigrid Nunez Riverhead: 256 pages, $28 (Nov. 7)

In her last novel, “ The Friend ,” Sigrid Nunez included a dog as an important character. “The Vulnerables” stars a macaw named Eureka. When a grown son of her friends abandons his birdsitting gig, the narrator, a writer who shares the author’s name, age and profession, takes over. And when the young man returns and the pandemic shuts things down, the trio must negotiate their new proximity.

Famous at last for her previous novel, “The Friend,” Sigrid Nunez strikes again

“What Are You Going Through” feels like a spiritual and in some ways literal sequel to Nunez’s National Book Award-winning novel, “The Friend”

Sept. 8, 2020

Day By Michael Cunningham Random House: 288 pages, $28 (Nov. 14)

On April 5 in the years 2019, 2020 and 2021, we visit two siblings inhabiting a Brooklyn brownstone. Robbie lives in the attic of the building Isabel owns with her husband, Dan, and their two children. The members of the family age, relationships change and COVID looms over everything. But Cunningham , a wondrous novelist concerned as always with human connection, keeps the pandemic on a short leash in a book that has less to do with isolation than how life changes us all, whether we want it to or not.

To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul By Tracy K. Smith Knopf: 288 pages, $27 (Nov. 7)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning former U.S. Poet Laureate (“Life on Mars”) wrote her first memoir, “Ordinary Light,” about her mother’s cancer diagnosis, in 2015. This second nonfiction work focuses on her father’s side of the family as a means of exploring Black strength and history, constructing a new way of tracing and talking about race in our country. Whether she’s in her father’s home of Sunflower, Ala., or teaching at Harvard, Smith reminds all Americans that without Black history, none of us have any history at all.

The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir By Jami Nakamura Lin Mariner: 352 pages, $30 (Nov. 7)

Hyakki Yagyo, or the Night Parade of 1,000 Demons, is a Japanese myth that once helped people account for the various states we now understand as mental illness. Lin lived for many years with undiagnosed bipolar syndrome, and often felt as if she existed in places where no one else did. The stories from her childhood about ghosts and demons comforted her, as those figures also seemed to live between worlds. Lin’s braiding of personal experience and cultural touchstones make this memoir very special.

Review: What a 1980 Japanese novel about a single mom foresaw about pandemic loneliness

Yuko Tsushima’s 1980 novel, ‘Woman Running in the Mountains,’ about a single mother’s struggles, gets a reprint just in time for a child care crisis.

Feb. 23, 2022

Cacophony of Bone: The Circle of a Year By Kerri ní Dochartaigh Milkweed: 312 pages, $26 (Nov. 14)

The Irish writer (“Thin Places”) and her partner moved to a landlocked railway cottage a year before the pandemic; within that year, she became pregnant after many years of trying, started a garden after years of never bothering and found a home after moving in each of her previous 35 years. Her chapters are lyrical and deliberately slow, the time allowed its dignified procession without literary tricks. “I can’t go back to who I was before that year,” the author writes, and readers who follow her also will be changed.

Whistles From the Graveyard: My Time Behind the Camera on War, Rage, and Restless Youth in Afghanistan By Miles Lagoze Atria/One Signal: 272 pages, $30 (Nov. 7)

When Lagoze joined the Marines, he signed on for the military occupational specialty of combat cameraman. Deployed to Afghanistan in 2011 at 18, he was meant to capture images the U.S. government could use, but he soon realized his photos were revealing the truth of war. Whether seeing the fear in combatants and civilians alike or observing how societal ills followed young servicemembers to the front, Lagoze startles in his prose just as he did in his 2019 documentary, “ Combat Obscura .”

Why this AI pioneer is calling for ‘human centered’ computing

Fei-Fei Li, author of ‘The Worlds I See’ and co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, joins the L.A. Times Book Club Nov. 14.

Oct. 20, 2023

The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI By Fei-Fei Li Flatiron Books: 336 pages, $30 (Nov. 7)

Li, a computer science professor at Stanford, is the founding director of that university’s Institute for Human-Centered AI and the creator of ImageNet, an innovation that paved the way for some forms of artificial intelligence. She and her family immigrated from China to face poverty and illness in the United States, but Li prevailed over hardships to triumph in her field. Now she wants to be sure that the rest of us understand both the challenges and the incredible possibilities of the technology she helped pioneer. (Li joins the L.A. Times Book Club on Nov. 14.)

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The best books to read in November 2023

Turns out Jeff Kinney, creator of the bestselling kids' series "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," has stellar book recommendations for adults , too.

Kinney stopped by the 3rd Hour of TODAY to share a few of the books he's reading this November. His picks include riveting nonfiction, a horror novel in time for spooky season and a celebrity memoir.

Of course, Kinney provided a book for kids, too. Get ready for some reading for all ages.

Best book to screen

"Killers of the Flower Moon"

Martin Scorsese's latest is based on this book about a series of murders and mysterious deaths in the Osage Nation after oil was discovered on their land in the early 1900s. David Grann spoke to TODAY.com in an interview about the true story. "It’s brilliant narrative non-fiction that reads like a thriller," she says.

Best funny book

"starter villain" by john scalzi.

"Starter Villain"

"This hilarious and heart-warming tale begins with a young man inheriting his late uncle’s business -- only it happens to be the business of a supervillain, complete with volcano island lair and spy cats," Only, the dolphin sentries are unionizing, his home has been destroyed, and every other super-villain wants him dead. It’s a rollicking romp and more fun than it has any right to be! Hugely enjoyable.  

Best kids' read

"the lost library" by rebecca stead and wendy mass.

The Lost Library

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Elena Nicolaou is a senior entertainment editor at Today.com, where she covers the latest in TV, pop culture, movies and all things streaming. Previously, she covered culture at Refinery29 and Oprah Daily. Her superpower is matching people up with the perfect book, which she does on her podcast, Blind Date With a Book.

Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations

• Genre: Entrepreneurship, Strategic Planning, Industries - Food Industry, Leadership
• Published: October 24, 2023
• Previous Rank: n/a
• Buy at Bookshop.org
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Ron Shaich, founder and former CEO of Panera Bread, shares the lessons he learned from a lifetime of asking what really matters and then making the transformations necessary to bring what really matters to life. Shaich is a business visionary who has been part of building three iconic restaurant brands: Au Bon Pain, Panera Bread, and now Cava. Along the way, he developed "fast casual," a $100 billion-plus segment of the industry. Now he reveals what he learned about entrepreneurship, running large enterprises, business transformation, and life itself. He illustrates these lessons with his experiences turning a 400-square-foot cookie store into 2,400 restaurants with $5 billion in revenue, delivering annual investor returns of 25 percent over two decades, and outperforming both Starbucks and Chipotle. How did Shaich succeed repeatedly in such a notoriously tough industry? By discovering today what will matter tomorrow and never hesitating to undertake sweeping transformations in order to get the job done. Shaich offers clear-headed lessons for the entire life cycle of an enterprise, from bootstrapping a startup to going public to managing large companies to selling a business. And the relevance of his message doesn't end in the boardroom. He challenges readers to grapple with how the business impacts life, sharing his own struggles and setbacks with as much candor as he describes his successes. Telling yourself the truth, knowing what really matters, and getting it done is the path to creating and sustaining a meaningful life, a market-leading business, and even a healthier society. Shaich's reflections are sometimes practical ("Make smart bets"), sometimes philosophical ("Conduct an annual pre-mortem"), often challenging ("You don't own the business, the business owns you"), and always incisive ("You take the money, I'll take control."). Know What Matters is a powerful guide to building transformative businesses while leading a life you respect and leaving a positive impact on the world.

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A Very Chinese Cookbook: 100 Recipes from China and Not China (But Still Really Chinese) Hardcover – October 24, 2023

• Kindle $17.99 Read with our free app
• Hardcover $31.44 18 Used from $30.27 27 New from $25.97

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• Two Generations of Storytelling: Jeffrey recounts a lifelong love of cooking that began in childhood, growing up in Hong Kong, cooking at his mother’s side, and exploring the street vendors and markets. Kevin dispenses practical wisdom that brings the recipes to life—why Beef Ho Fun is the mark of a great Cantonese chef; why Shu Mai is the world heavyweight champion of dumplings.
• Test Kitchen Techniques: From the basics of successful stir-frying to folding methods for Shanghai Soup Dumplings, careful instructions and abundant photos teach key steps.
• Chinatown Shopping Guide: From choosing the right soy sauce or vinegar to buying fresh noodles and seeking out superlative Buddhist-style chickens, let the Pangs be your trusted guides.
• Print length 384 pages
• Language English
• Publisher America's Test Kitchen
• Publication date October 24, 2023
• Dimensions 8.87 x 1.12 x 10.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1954210477
• ISBN-13 978-1954210479
• See all details

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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ America's Test Kitchen (October 24, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1954210477
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1954210479
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.32 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.87 x 1.12 x 10.25 inches
• #1 in Chinese Cooking, Food & Wine
• #1 in Wok Cookery (Books)
• #10 in Celebrity & TV Show Cookbooks

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To report an issue with this product, click here .

About the authors

America's test kitchen.

Our mission at America's Test Kitchen is to inspire confidence, community and creativity in the kitchen. We are a digital broadcast company which publishes award-winning cookbooks along with Cook's Illustrated and Cook's Country magazines. Our television shows, America's Test Kitchen TV and Cook's Country TV, are the longest running culinary shows in the US and we enjoy wide home cook appeal as the #1 and #2 shows on PBS. You can also watch our TV shows and original programming on ATK's YouTube and a wide variety of OTT channels. We have a unique creative process with over 50 professional cooks in our 15k square foot kitchen in Boston, MA and are rigorous in our quest to create the best recipes to exceed expectations every time.

Kevin Pang is the author of A Very Chinese Cookbook from America's Test Kitchen. He and his father Jeffrey are the hosts of ATK's Chinese cooking show, Hunger Pangs. Kevin, a James Beard Award-winner and 5-time finalist, was a longtime food writer at the Chicago Tribune, and has written for The New York Times, Esquire and Vanity Fair. He's the co-director of the critically acclaimed documentary For Grace, which premiered at South by Southwest Film Festival 2015.

Jeffrey Pang

Jeffrey Pang is the author of A Very Chinese Cookbook from America's Test Kitchen. His YouTube cooking channel became an unexpected hit and was featured in The New York Times Magazine in 2016. He's now the co-host of Hunger Pangs with his son Kevin for ATK. Jeffrey lives in Seattle with his wife Catherine.

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Android Police

Vote for your favorite apps on the play store this year.

Pick the winner of the Users’ Choice App and Games awards for 2023

• Voting is now open for Google's Users' Choice Awards 2023, allowing users to vote for their favorite apps, games, and books on the Play Store.
• Google curates a short list of nominations for each category, narrowing down the options for you to choose from.
• Voting closes on November 14, and users need to sign in to their Google account to cast their votes.

Every year, game and app developers add several thousand new apps to the Google Play Store. Some of these don’t take off like people hoped, but many others become worthy contenders for Google’s annual awards . However, users like you and me are allowed to vote only in one category — the User’s Choice Award. Voting is now open for this year’s awards, and you have two weeks to cast your votes.

Google rewards app developers with annual awards if their apps made an impression on billions of Android users worldwide. This keeps the lights on for the developers and incentivizes them to build more apps for Android. You can vote for apps you love under the Users’ Choice category, and the app with the most votes is declared the winner once voting closes. However, you don’t have free rein to vote for any random app on the Play Store — Google curates a short list of nominations to narrow things down for you. The company even created a short video about the awards this year.

Just like previous years, you can vote across three categories - Games , Apps , and Books . That said, please remember that Google’s lists of nominated apps seem to vary by region, so you may see different apps depending on which country your Google account is locked to.

In the US, you can vote for one of the following games on the Play Store:

• Street Fighter Duel – Idle RPG
• Mighty DOOM
• The Lord of the Rings: Heroes
• MONOPOLY GO!
• Viking Rise
• Aether Gazer
• Farlight 84
• Honkai: Star Rail
• Cat Snack Bar: Cat Food Tycoon
• Arena Breakout

To cast your vote for the best app from 2023, you can pick from the following list:

• Bumble For Friends: Meet IRL
• Artifact: Feed Your Curiosity
• AI Chatbot – Nova
• Max: Stream HBO, TV, & Movies
• AI Mirror: AI Art Photo Editor
• Character AI: AI-Powered Chat
• Threads, an Instagram app
• Reelsy Reel Maker Video Editor
• Voidpet Garden: Mental Health

You can also cast a vote for your favorite book on the Play Store. This category was present in the 202 awards, but was missed in 2021 and 2022. The segment is back this year, though.

• Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation (Light Novel) Vol. 21
• Night Angel Nemesis
• Overlord, Vol. 15 (light novel)
• A Soul of Ash and Blood
• Tress of the Emerald Sea
• Fourth Wing
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime 21
• Light Bringer

You need to sign in to your Google account to cast a vote. Vote through the link for any of the above categories mentioned, or just visit the Users’ Choice Awards homepage to manually peruse the categories in one place. Voting closes on November 14, at 11:59PM Pacific Time, so make sure to get your votes in before that.

This year’s Users’ Choice Awards revive the nominations for books, but we still don’t see expansive categories for games and apps like in 2021. Back then, Google allowed you to vote for sub-categories like Best Personal Growth Apps, Best Hidden Gem Apps, and Best Everyday Essential Apps. Gamers got to pick from categories like Best Competitive, Best Game Changers, Best Indie, and Best for Tablets.