Neal Stephenson

Ken Follet: Pillars of the Earth. Historical fiction. You’re transported back to the 1200s. Cathedral building with raunchy politics, a bit of HBO Game of Thrones mixed in. It was extremely visual… and fondly memorable for me.

David Foster Wallace

Stephen King

Haruki Murakami

Kurt Vonnegut

Toni Morrison

Just a few names that popped into my head

Edit: some of these are based on popular opinions. For example, I never really got into Toni Morrison

Andy Weir -from a not too avid reader

William Gibson. He’s a huge influence on modern scifi

Really love how nobody is hating on any of the replies here.

Neil Gaiman

Douglas Adams is undoubtedly one of the greatest writers of the period.

He is known for light, surrealistic science fiction comedy, not a genre generally considered “high art” but his mastery of language is superb. He is a master of analogies in a way that is both funny but also makes the reader think about the roles and conventions of symbolism in language.

I would say Robin Hobb. She writes easy to read, character driven fantasy novels that gracefully deal with a gamut of difficult topics (e.g., orphanism, otherness, sexual violence, mortality, etc.). The books really helped me build empathy for people and concepts that were far afield of my own experience.

Brandon Sanderson

The man is a top flight book generating machine. Where he’s taking the Cosmere, I don’t know, but I’m gladly awaiting for the novels he’ll write the in future to find out. Reading the Stormlight Archive and Mistborn is a joy.

I also really enjoyed how he wrapped up The Wheel of Time. He is much less reluctant to kill off characters than many other authors, and that series needed some serious character culling to bring closure.

Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy, wrote some books you might have seen as movies such as The Road and No Country for Old Men.

Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West is a crazy good book.

So many good answers already that I agree with. So I’ll add James Ellroy and Clive Barker

For Ellroy, the entire LA Quartet remains a pivotal sea change in “hard boiled” crime fiction; taking a lot of the conventions created by the likes of Hammett and Chandler and updating them for a modern audience.

Barker is a more personal choice. But his writing is just so evocative and descriptive that I couldn’t NOT mention him. Imajica literally changed my literary life, with Weaveworld being (in my opinion) a less dense, more reader friendly version of Imajica.

This isn’t a perfect example but Cormac McCarthy has been my favourite author for years now, and his first major work Suttree was from '79.

My all time favourites novel is Blood Meridian from 1985. If you’re familiar with metamodernism, which is basically very modern works that have their cake and eat it when it comes to modernist ideals and postmodern critique, you’d clock that practically every western is either a modernist white hat western or a metamodern “the west is grim and hard, but also fucking cool” western. The only straight postmodern takes on the west that I know of are either Blood Meridian or pieces of work that take direct notes from it, such as the films Dead Man from ‘95 (except maybe the Oregon Trail video game from. 85’). Blood Meridian otherwise is a fantastic novel which meditates on madness and cruelty, religion and fate, race, war and conquest and so many other themes. It also has one of the best antagonists ever written in Judge Holden, a character who I would have called a direct insert of Satan if not for the fact that his deeds and the novel as a whole are closely inspired by true events. I feel the novel takes inspiration from Apocalypse Now, specifically the '79 film and not Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness. If you enjoy that film, you’re likely to enjoy this book. The opening and closing chapters are fantastic, but I often find myself re-reading chapter 14. It has some of the best prose and monologues of the entire novel, and encompasses in my opinion the main turning point of the novel.

His other legendary work is The Road, a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel. I’ll talk on this one less but as our climate crisis grows and our cultural zeitgeist swings more towards this being the critical issue of our time, the novel fantastically paints itself as both a fantastic warning to our 21st century apocalypse and the unresolved 20th century shadow of nuclear winter. Despite this, it hones in on a meditation of parenthood and could be considered solely about that, with other themes of death, trauma, survival and mortality being explored through parenthood. Of course the unsalvageable deatg of the world that make the setting also makes this theme extra tragic. There is an adaptation into a film from 2008 but it isn’t anywhere near as potent as the novel and I’d suggest should only be seen in tandem with reading the novel. The prize of this novel has really evolved to fit the novel too. McCarthy is renowned for his punctuation lacking prose, but where Blood Meridian is practically biblical in its dramatic and beautiful prose which juxtaposes the plain and brutal violence, The Road sacrifices no beauty in it’s language but is so somber and meanders from mostly terse to so florid, while also always perfectly feels like how the protagonists are seeing their world.

I hesitate to call her a great author in her own right and I detest her attitude towards transwomen. That said, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series transformed the young adult fiction genre from a bit of a wasteland of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy novels into a quality genre with significant cross-generational appeal.

I’ll mention Orson Scott Card as well, but his books have worn thin over time as he squeezes every penny out of the Enderverse. Ender’s Game got me through a miserable hospital stay as a young child, so it will always have a special place in my heart. Speaker for the Dead I also loved.