new york times book review best books of 2020

The New York Times Names Their 10 Best of 2020

Kelly Jensen

Kelly is a former librarian and a long-time blogger at STACKED. She's the editor/author of (DON'T) CALL ME CRAZY: 33 VOICES START THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and the editor/author of HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD. Her next book, BODY TALK, will publish in Fall 2020. Follow her on Instagram @heykellyjensen .

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The editors of The New York Times Book Review have named their top ten books of 2020.

• A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet
• Deacon King Kong by James McBride
• Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
• Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
• The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
• Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker
• A Promised Land by Barack Obama
• Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro
• Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
• War by Margaret MacMillan

The first five titles on the list showcase the best in fiction — all which might be categorized under the broad label “literary” (though arguably, Deacon King Kong lies closely within mystery and crime fiction) — while the second five titles are all nonfiction, including a memoir, an Oprah’s Book Club selection, an insider’s story of life inside Silicon Valley, and two histories.

Forty percent of the choices are by authors of color.

Amazon released their best books of 2020 last week, and among their top 20 are three on the New York Times list: The Vanishing Half , Hidden Valley Road , and Deacon King Kong .

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To read more about why these were the New York Times selections for 2020, dig into the editors’ commentary on their site. Readers who have access can also enjoy the New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2020 .

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The Best of 2020

December 26, 2020

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Jupiter and Saturn appear about one-tenth of a degree apart during what was called the Great Conjunction, Mt. Tamalpais, Larkspur, California, December 21, 2020

It has been an anxious, painful, and demanding year—from the global pandemic that continues to threaten the health and wellbeing of millions, while the most basic stimulus relief is further delayed, to a national confrontation with our country’s history of racialized inequality, and the most divisive and high-stakes US election in modern times.

As Covid-19 spread in New York City in March, and we at The New York Review of Books began, like millions of others, to work remotely, we asked a range of writers across the world to contribute to our pandemic journal , from March through mid-May. We published entries from Tokyo , Japan, Rome , Italy, Niamey , Niger, New Orleans , Louisiana, Bogotá , Colombia, and elsewhere; including contributions about reading amid uncertainty , from a pediatric doctor in Texas , the virus at Rikers , intimacy and social distancing , and the chasm between those working from home and those without any work, support, acknowledgment.

This fall, in collaboration with our magazine colleagues, we published a series of entries leading up to the presidential election , with Hari Kunzru on our siloed disinformation age , Bill McKibben on what Biden must do about the climate crisis , Astra Taylor on why voting is integral but never enough , and Wallace Shawn’s reflections on developments since his birth .

Below, our own Best of 2020 showcases more excellent work we published online during this harrowing year. As grateful as we are to our contributors, we thank you, our readers, for making this work possible, as we look forward to continuing it in 2021.

In chronological order:

Daniel Drake: The Slog Comes in on Little Cat Feet

Tamsin Shaw: William Barr: The Carl Schmitt of Our Time

Jenny Uglow: David Bomberg’s ‘Desire to Emancipate’

Anastasia Edel: A Winter’s Night at the Bolshoi, 1985

E. Tammy Kim: Moms 4 Housing: Redefining the Right to a Home in Oakland

Matt Seaton: The Righteous Mayor of Vibraye

Vivian Gornick: What Endures of the Romance of American Communism

Jiwei Xiao: Fearing For My Mother in Wuhan, Facing a New Sinophobia in the US

Asad Hussein: Chasing the Mirage: From Nairobi to New York City

Etgar Keret: Eating Olives at the End of the World

Maeve Higgins: The Essential Workers America Treats as Disposable

Nicole R. Fleetwood: Creation in Confinement: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

April Zhu: A Lost ‘Little Africa’: How China, Too, Blames Foreigners for the Virus

Vincent Bevins: How ‘Jakarta’ Became the Codeword for US-Backed Mass Killing

Gary Younge: What Black America Means to Europe

Joyce Johnson: My Abortion War Story

Annette Gordon-Reed: The Problem of Police Powers for People Living While Black

Willa Glickman: New York’s Rising Tides: Climate Inequality and Sandy’s Legacy

Amna A. Akbar: How Defund and Disband Became the Demands

Mohamed Abdulkadir Ali: An African’s Education in Being Black in America

Sarah Churchwell: American Fascism: It Has Happened Here (with earlier weigh-ins on the issue by Samuel Moyn and Peter Gordon )

Krithika Varagur’s three-part series on policing in Minneapolis (parts 2 , and 3 )

Rebecca Haw Allensworth: Licensed to Pill

Jay Neugeboren: Dickens in Brooklyn

Seema Jilani: Broken Glass, Blood, and Anguish: Beirut After the Blast

Danny Lyon: My Friend John Lewis

Christopher Benfey: Missed Steps

Adam Shatz: The Stanley Crouch I Knew

Elizabeth Tsurkov: The Syrian Mercenaries Fighting Foreign Wars for Russia and Turkey

Sławomir Sierakowski: The Women’s March of Belarus

Susannah Jacob: The West Wing We Knew

Jay Rosen: America’s Press and the Asymmetric War for Truth

Jehad al-Saftawi: The Gaza I Grew Up In

Shirley Elizabeth Thompson: Georgia On My Mind

Menaka Guruswamy: In Modi’s India, the ‘Love Jihad’ Myth Is Made Law

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The Best Books We Read in 2020

By The New Yorker

“ Cleanness ,” by Garth Greenwell

The casual grandeur of Garth Greenwell’s prose, unfurling in page-long paragraphs and elegantly garrulous sentences, tempts the vulnerable reader into danger zones: traumatic memories, extreme sexual scenarios, states of paralyzing heartbreak and loss. In the case of “Cleanness,” Greenwell’s third work of fiction, I initially curled up with the book, savoring the sensuous richness of the writing, and then I found myself sweating a little, uncomfortably invested in the rawness of the scene. The cause was a story titled “Gospodar,” in which the narrator, an American teacher living in Bulgaria, hooks up with a man who begins by play-acting violence and then veers toward the real thing. The transition from fantasy to horror is accomplished with the deftness of a literary magician, and Greenwell repeats the feat even more unnervingly in a later story, “The Little Saint,” in which his likable narrator takes the role of the aggressor rather than the victim. These stories are masterpieces of radical eroticism, but they wouldn’t have the same impact if they didn’t appear in a gorgeously varied narrative fabric, amid scenes of more wholesome love, finely sketched vistas of political unrest, haunting evocations of a damaged childhood, and moments of mundane rapture. Tenderness, violence, animosity, and compassion are the outer edges of what feels like a total map of the human condition. —Alex Ross

“ Stranger Faces ,” by Namwali Serpell

In an age of totalizing theories, it’s nice to watch someone expertly pull a single idea through a needle’s eye. “Stranger Faces,” by Namwali Serpell, is one such exercise. The book’s catalytic inquiry—“what counts as a face and why?”—means to undermine the face, the way its expressive capabilities give it the cast of truth. We seek meaning in a shallow arrangement of eyes, nose, cheeks, and mouth, despite how often faces lie, or how often they cloak the world-ordering phenomena of race, gender, and class. Rather than depress or shame readers with these facts, Serpell delights in them. Unencumbered by truth, the face becomes interesting, motile—a work of art. (“Unruly faces” are especially intriguing, according to Serpell, because they invite viewers to sever ties with the placidity of an ideal.) Serpell, a Harvard professor and critic capable of close-reading people just as well as novels or films, includes a dancing range of examples. Her first essay considers the moniker given to Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, whose features aren’t, in fact, so elephantine; another essay, on Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man,” becomes a study of Keanu Reeves’s himbo appeal. Serpell can reanimate any subject, be it Hitchcock or emojis, and her bright, brainy collection is a model for how to surface the fun in a critical question. —Lauren Michele Jackson

“ Want ,” by Lynn Steger Strong

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

New York novels are as various as the city they describe. But “Want,” a subtly glorious new entry in the genre by Lynn Steger Strong, is set in a town whose qualities—unaffordable, unrelenting, unquittable—many readers will recognize. The book’s narrator is a writer who lives with her husband and two young daughters in a cramped Brooklyn apartment; to keep them in it, she teaches at a charter school by day and in an M.F.A. writing program by evening, though her half-hearted hustling doesn’t stop the family from capsizing into bankruptcy. (The husband quit a job in finance to become an artisanal carpenter, a phrase that would fit nicely on a Green-Wood Cemetery tombstone.) The virtue of this life is its being defiantly chosen. To counteract the claustrophobic privacy of subway commutes, and the slights of rubbing up against the city’s rich and oblivious, we get sticky memories of Florida, where the narrator grew up in a repressive, bourgeois household. There, her closest friend was Sasha, a beautiful, daring girl a year older, whose fate has been uncomfortably linked with hers ever since. Strong uses the friendship as a tether, returning to it to mark time’s passing; her technique is so sophisticated that the murk of the present and the sharply remembered past hold seamlessly together. Her biggest triumph is the transmission of consciousness. I loved the tense pleasure of staying pressed close to her narrator’s mind, with its beguiling lucidity of thought and rawness of feeling. There is much anxiety and ache to be found here—but also, when it is most needed, radiance, humor, love, and joy. —Alexandra Schwartz

“ On Anger ,” edited by Agnes Callard

Unless you’re dealing with a hard-line Stoic, most philosophers tend to consider anger a morally justifiable response to being wronged—though too much anger, for too long , they might say, could start to hurt you or your community. In the explosive essay that kicks off this anthology, the philosopher Agnes Callard writes that such caveats defang the very point of anger. If anger is a valid response to being wronged, she argues, and if none of the ways we hold people accountable for wronging us—apologies, restitution, etc.—actually erase the original act, doesn’t it follow that “once you have a reason to be angry, you have a reason to be angry forever”? Cue the clamor of a dozen-plus philosophers debating the cause, function, and value of our most jagged emotion. There’s Myisha Cherry, whose work is always so marvelously elegant, on the irrelevance of virtue to the anger that fuels the anti-racist struggle—an anger she describes as “Lordean rage,” after the poet and writer Audre Lorde. Elsewhere, we get Judith Butler on anger as a medium: “[W]e view rage as an uncontrollable impulse that needs to come out in unmediated forms. But people craft rage, they cultivate rage, and not just as individuals. Communities craft their rage. Artists craft rage all the time.” I’m resistant to the idea that moral philosophy is just self-help dressed in tweed, but as this year lurched from one outrage to the next, and as I found myself becoming hoarse (metaphorically, but often literally) from what felt like shouting into a void, this collection became something of a workbook: a tool for parsing the more unwieldy parts of myself, and my loved ones, and the world. —Helen Rosner

“ Mexican Gothic ,” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

In the fall, I cracked open Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Mexican Gothic” in the bath and found myself reading until the water turned cold. “Mexican Gothic” is Moreno-Garcia’s sixth novel but the first to break through as a major hit. (It has already been optioned for television.) This is a function both of its timing and of its addictive prose, which is as easy to slurp down as a poisoned cordial. The book follows a glamorous young socialite with champagne taste named Noemí Taboada, who lives in Mexico City, in the nineteen-fifties, when women were not yet able to vote. Noemí intends to study at university, but her father has other plans: he wants her to check up on a distant cousin, Catalina, who’s living in a crumbling manse with a British man, in a small village, called El Triunfo, where the family operates a silver mine. Catalina has written a distressing note claiming that the house is suffocating her; the family assumes that she’s hysterical, but Noemí is meant to investigate the situation. What she finds is more shocking than she ever expected—the house is an entropic catastrophe, where something sinister (that I won’t spoil here) is literally growing under the baseboards. What makes “Mexican Gothic” so fresh is not only its cramped, crawly ambience—comparisons to “ Jane Eyre ” are not too generous—but also the fact that it’s steeped in a deep colonial history that haunts the narrative. Is the house in El Triunfo really sick? Or is it just tainted by colonizers who want to strip the land down to its bones? Moreno-Garcia deftly raises these questions and then brings them all together in a gory, monstrous, and utterly satisfying twist. —Rachel Syme

“ Blindness ,” by José Saramago

José Saramago’s “Blindness” came by mail, last winter, one month after COVID came to the U.S. It arrived in a box, with a half-dozen other books, including Camus’s “ The Plague ” and Defoe’s “ Journal of a Plague Year ,” about the literature of infection, for an assignment . I read the Saramago in a cabin in the woods, a sugarhouse, while tending a fire, boiling sap. I’d get lost in the story of a plague of blindness and then put the book down to throw another log in the fire. The pages of the paperback got hot in my hands. I started to sweat, reading about the blindness that fell upon everyone, so that they could see only white, and then I’d stare into the flames and at the sap, bubbling, and the steam, rising, a cloud of white. I took one last trip after that, to Rutgers, the first week of March. I remember being worried about the virus on the train, wearing winter gloves and a scarf, thinking I should have cancelled. I gave a lecture and went out to dinner with a dozen people, professors of English and history. We sat at a long table by a fire, a last supper, and I happened to ask if anyone had ever read “Blindness,” and, weirdly, everyone had. So we went around the table, sacramentally, talking about our favorite lines, characters, moments: the doctor’s wife, the story of the dog, how the infected escape, blindly, from the lunatic asylum where they’ve been quarantined, and the part where they find soap and, finally, wash themselves, naked, on a balcony, with buckets of rainwater. And then, it was all over. —Jill Lepore

“ Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings ,” by Neil Price

Reading the archeologist Neil Price’s beguiling book feels a little like time travel—and who, in 2020, didn’t feel tempted to drop into another epoch? Price achieves this feat with an accumulation of sensory detail, along with a grounded but game approach to conjuring the inner worlds of people whose cosmology, for starters, is utterly different from our own. (As he writes, we’ll never really know what it might have felt like “if you truly believed—in fact, knew —that the man living up the valley could turn into a wolf under certain circumstances.”) Not the least of Price’s achievement is to rescue Viking history from the grasp of white supremacists who claim a specious lineage with it. He does so not by asserting any sort of moral superiority for the Vikings—theirs was a brutal society that practiced human sacrifice and slavery, as Price makes abundantly clear—but by restoring their rich and strange particularity. As seafarers who travelled and traded widely, Vikings were, almost by definition, multiethnic. “There was never any such thing as a ‘pure Nordic’ bloodline, and the people of the time would have been baffled by the very notion,” Price writes. The book is full of such insights, but what has stuck with me are Price’s descriptions of a world enamored with beauty. Surfaces, including those of the body, were intricately decorated, tendrilled over with runic inscriptions and tiny pictures. (Vikings do not seem to have been the unkempt beasts of pop culture legend—the archeological record is heavy on, of all things, combs.) I’ll long remember Price’s evocation of the wafer-thin squares of gold, stamped with images of otherworldly beings, that adorned the great halls where visitors drank and fought and recited poetry. Firelight would have animated those static images. Price has done something similar here. —Margaret Talbot

“ Rodham ,” by Curtis Sittenfeld

I have always been amazed by the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld’s talent for selecting people who we think we already know and convincing us that they are far more complicated and interesting than we ever dreamed. Before I read “ American Wife ,” I had a basic smug liberal contempt for Laura Bush, who I perceived as her husband’s mute appendage. But in Sittenfeld’s telling, the former first lady—or someone quite like her—was a shy but sharp bibliophile with seething guilt and compelling self-doubt. Now I kind of love her. Similarly, a Republican friend told me that reading Sittenfeld’s latest, “Rodham,” caused her to question everything she’d believed about Hillary Rodham Clinton. We were both riveted by Sittenfeld’s brave, passionate, and diligent heroine navigating lust, ambition, Arkansas, the Ivy League, and, of course, Washington. Sittenfeld’s writing is so fine, her characters so vivid, her empathy so profound that she manages to absorb the reader on a level that transcends partisanship. In 2020, that was a remarkable achievement and an enormous gift to her readers. —Ariel Levy

“ The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn ,” by Richard Hamming

Richard W. Hamming was a mathematician by training, but he cut his teeth as a researcher working at Los Alamos, programming the I.B.M. computers that physicists used to solve equations as they worked on the atomic bomb. After the war, he joined Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he remained for thirty years. This was when big corporations such as I.B.M. and Bell led the charge of technological innovation, and Hamming’s fingerprints were all over the period’s advances. He invented so-called Hamming codes, now basic to digital processing, and co-created an early programming language, L2. After retiring, he taught at the Naval Postgraduate School, in California, giving courses in not just how to do things but how to think like a scientist and conduct a fruitful creative career. (He called it “style.”) In the mid-nineties, a few years before his death, Hamming turned his lecture notes into a book, “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn,” which has been republished by Stripe Press—a young publishing house, created by the eponymous payment-software company, that brings out interesting left-brained books in beautiful, right-brain-friendly editions. Parts of “The Art” get technical enough to include equations, but Hamming is interested mostly in the big picture, and his subjects range from the limits of mathematics (and of language) to the slipperiness of data (“You cannot gather a really large amount of data accurately. It is a known fact which is constantly ignored”). “The Art” would be a great gift for a young scientist-to-be, yet I also loved it as someone on the fuzzy side of things, who always enjoyed science but lost daily touch with it when I left school. His chapter on “creativity,” which draws not just from his field but from history and art, is both stirring and humane. “My duty as a professor is to increase the probability that you will be a significant contributor to our society,” he writes. He was one of the last geniuses who believed in innovation as a shared public project, and, when he imagined the future for which he was preparing students, he looked to the year 2020. He’d be pleased to find his lessons are still urgent here today. —Nathan Heller

“ Balzac’s Lives ,” by Peter Brooks

Honoré de Balzac’s “ La Comédie Humaine ,” grand in both ambition and scope, comprises approximately ninety titles, over whose course the occasionally intersecting stories of nearly two thousand five hundred characters form a portrait of France in the first half of the nineteenth century. In “Balzac’s Lives,” Peter Brooks—a professor emeritus of comparative literature at Yale—turns to nine of these characters to explore the author’s writerly obsessions with money and power, love and desire. To treat fictional characters as so-called real people, with their own lives and behavioral patterns, Brooks notes, has been considered a naïve, even gauche critical approach—at least since the time of the Russian Formalists, who encouraged us to analyze characters for their function as literary devices, rather than for their adherence to the rules that might govern flesh-and-blood individuals. But for Brooks, Balzac’s energetic, almost fevered attitude toward his characters—evident in their emergence and reëmergence over the course of many books, and in their dizzyingly varied social backgrounds, from courtesan to banker, baron to pauper—demands a closer critical look. As I read the book, I enjoyed Brooks’s sharp insights, which suggest the ways in which Balzac’s proto-modern world is not so different from our own. But I also felt a more basic, visceral pleasure. Though I consider myself a Balzac fan, I’ve read only a fraction of the author’s works, and so to be able to discover—or, in some cases, recall—what fates befall certain characters reminded me of the not unprimitive joy of tearing into a juicy morsel of gossip. In this case, it’s the kind that sends you on a mission to find out more—which means picking up a Balzac novel. —Naomi Fry

“ The Year of the French ,” by Thomas Flanagan

I’m not a recreational reader. I need a reason—usually, it’s something I’m writing—to read a book. But the semi-lockdown last spring seemed to me, as it did to many people, a reason to read a book for no reason, other than pleasure or distraction. So I pulled one off the shelf: “The Year of the French,” by Thomas Flanagan. The novel, published in 1979, is about the invasion of Ireland by the French in 1798. France was revolutionary France, and Ireland was effectively a colony of Britain. The French were hoping to combine forces with an Irish insurrection and liberate the island in the name of liberté, fraternité, and égalité. It didn’t quite work out. I was lucky that I knew nothing about this invasion, not even that it had happened, because Flanagan’s method is to plunge the reader into a strange, wild, poetic, cruel, and finally hopeless world of Irish peasants, absentee British landlords, revolutionary terrorists, and men and women trying to hold on to what they have in a universe threatening to turn upside down. You have to make your own way through this landscape, so the stranger everything is for you, the more adventurous the experience. The story Flanagan tells makes our own dark times seem eminently manageable. I wanted to be taken somewhere else by a book, and I was. And there: I’ve written about it, too! —Louis Menand

“ So Long, See You Tomorrow ,” by William Maxwell

During these long months of hiding out at home—of being thrown back upon recollections of the past, in place of new experience—I’ve been thinking about how to make literary use of memory. How might one capture the way that images or encounters lodge in the imagination and become, over time, layered with meaning? The title of William Maxwell’s short, stunning novel, “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” is a phrase that is said lightly but that comes to be freighted with tragedy; the book itself, which was published in 1980 after being serialized in The New Yorker , is a virtuosic blend of memoir and fiction. Maxwell, who was a fiction editor at this magazine for some four decades, and who died in 2000 at the age of ninety-one, drew in this book, as in a number of others, upon recollections of his hometown of Lincoln, Illinois. In part, it is a true-crime narrative: a jealous husband murders his wife’s lover, who is also his best friend. But the book is also about how that crime stays alive in the narrator’s memory, and how it becomes a means for him to explore his own experience of loss and of guilt. This is a book filled with passages that I wanted to transcribe in a hedge against the failings of my own memory, among them this pronouncement, about midway through: “If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it. I would be content to stick to the facts if there were any.” As well as encountering Maxwell on the page, I recommend listening to the audiobook, which was recorded in 1995. It’s beautifully read by the author, whose voice a listener can hear cracking with emotion upon reaching the novel’s final, breathtaking sentence. —Rebecca Mead

“ Corregidora ,” by Gayl Jones

When Toni Morrison first read the manuscript for what would become Gayl Jones’s début novel, “Corregidora,” she immediately heralded it as a turning point for fiction. “No novel about any black woman could ever be the same after this,” Morrison, then an editor at Random House, wrote. “Corregidora” was published in 1975. Set primarily in the late nineteen-forties, the novel follows Ursa Corregidora, a twenty-five-year-old Black blues singer from Bracktown, Kentucky. Ursa navigates tumultuous, occasionally violent relationships and works to carve out a place for herself as an artist. Following an unwanted hysterectomy, she also confronts her ancestors’ entreaty to “make generations,” which is key to continuing an oral tradition that can preserve, undiluted, the realities of slavery. (Her family carries the name of the Portuguese slave owner who fathered both Ursa’s mother and grandmother.) Storytelling, in this mode, becomes an intergenerational act—a way of maintaining evidence of violence, incest, and erasure. Jones’s writing resists self-conscious ornamentation in favor of casual, knowing vernacular, and her structure is unconventional but tightly controlled. Dialogue is often interrupted by memory or fantasy, and time turns in on itself. On a visit to Bracktown, Ursa’s mother offers an elliptical, bracing account of her own mother’s sexual abuse by Corregidora; later in the novel, which closes in the late nineteen-sixties, Ursa moves closer to reconciling with what has gone unsaid. And yet, despite this panorama, the novel’s actual spaces are intimate—relationships play out in bedrooms, kitchens, bars. Jones’s great achievement is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them. —Anna Wiener

“ Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World ,” by J. R. McNeill

J. R. McNeill’s “Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World” came out in 2000, but it’s just as relevant now as it was when it first appeared. It’s one of those rare books that’s both sweeping and specific, scholarly and readable. McNeill looks at how humans have, over the past hundred years, altered the atmosphere, the biosphere, and what he calls the “hydrosphere.” What makes the book stand out is its wealth of historical detail. The changes we have wrought, McNeill argues, have mostly been the unintentional side effects of economic growth. They’ve ushered in “a regime of perpetual ecological disturbance,” which will strain many species’ ability to adapt. How people will deal with this new “regime” will determine what the world looks like not just a century from now but for millennia. —Elizabeth Kolbert

“ The Known World ,” by Edward P. Jones

My reading life in 2020 was mostly distinguished by how hard it was for me to read. But my skittering stopped sometime this spring, when I opened “The Known World,” Edward P. Jones’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, from 2003. Reading it was like dropping anchor. My brain stabilized, and it felt like the only thing I could do, for a change, was focus in. This was the work of a genius. The clarity of Jones’s lines, the beauty of his descriptions, the mesmerizing character sketches: all of them were a function of the extreme specificity and intricacy of the world he had created. In a way, he’s a kind of cartographer. The book’s title is a reference to a map: “a browned and yellowed woodcut of some eight feet by six feet” that hangs behind the desk of a sheriff in antebellum Virginia. The seller of the woodcut—a Russian “with a white beard down to his stomach”—claimed it was the first time the word “America” had appeared on a map. The novel, which tells the story of a Black slave owner and his family, is also an account of territory—that marked out by the institution of slavery, which extends into the brains, bones, and souls of everyone it touches. After reading, I immediately picked up Jones’s other two books, both story collections, and raced through the more recent one, “ All Aunt Hagar’s Children .” I didn’t think it was possible for me to like a book as much as “The Known World,” but I began to think that I liked these stories even more. Now, the other collection, “ Lost in the City ,” is on my bedside table—a down payment on my next escape. —Jonathan Blitzer

2020 in Review

• The funniest cartoons , as chosen by our Instagram followers.
• Helen Rosner on the best cookbooks .
• Doreen St. Félix selects the year’s best TV shows .
• Richard Brody lists his top thirty-six movies .
• Ian Crouch recounts the best jokes of the year .
• Sheldon Pearce on the albums that helped him navigate a lost plague year.
• Sarah Larson picks the best podcasts .
• Amanda Petrusich counts down the best music .
• Michael Schulman on ten great performances .

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NYT Unveils Its Top 10 Books of 2020

BY Michael Schaub • Nov. 22, 2020

The New York Times unveiled its list of the 10 best books of 2020 on Monday, with former President Barack Obama, Brit Bennett, and Ayad Akhtar among the honored authors.

The top 10 list was announced during a live online presentation introduced by actress and author Mindy Kaling and hosted by Pamela Paul, editor of the New York Times Book Review .

Other nonfiction books making the list were Robert Kolker’s Oprah-approved Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family , James Shapiro’s Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future , Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley , and Margaret MacMillan’s War: How Conflict Shaped Us .

Bennett’s The Vanishing Half   and Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies   were among the five fiction books cited by the Times . The newspaper called Bennett’s book “a provocative meditation on the possibilities and limits of self-definition” and said that Akhtar’s novel “can read like a collection of pitch-perfect essays that give shape to a prismatic identity.”

The other fiction books to make the list were James McBride’s Kirkus Prize finalist Deacon King Kong , Lydia Millet’s National Book Award finalist A Children’s Bible , and Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet .

The Times list is short on surprises but long on books released by the Big Five publishers: Only one of the books, Millet’s novel, was published by an independent press.

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.

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The New York Times Fiction Bestseller List 2020

Go beyond just the current list of New York Times Fiction Best Sellers to discover every bestselling book listed on the NYT Bestseller List in 2020.

Since 1931, The New York Times has been publishing a weekly list of bestselling books. Since then, becoming a New York Times bestseller has become a dream for virtually every writer.

When I first started reading adult fiction, one of the first places I went for book recommendations was the New York Times Fiction Best Sellers. I wanted to know what books were the most widely read, and start with those.

However, scrolling through the list week by week on The New York Times website is rather annoying. I just wanted all the bestselling fiction books gathered together in one place.

When I couldn’t find it, I decided to create it.

Here are all the New York Times fiction bestsellers from 2020. Instead of just the current best seller list , which you can find all over the place, I’ve compiled a list of every book that has appeared on the New York Times Fiction Best Sellers list in 2020 for Hardcover Fiction. 

Note: The week count in this list stops on the last week of 2020. Visit the 2021 Bestseller List if you want to find out which books kept ranking into the next year.

Since this is a bit of a sprawling post, feel free to jump to the section that most interests you or take your time scrolling through the complete list of New York Times fiction best sellers.

Quick Links

• #1 Fiction Best Sellers of 2020
• Heavyweights (10+ Weeks)
• Fan Favorites (5+ Weeks)
• Honorable Mention (2+ Weeks)
• One Hit Wonders

#1 New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 2020

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

For years, Kya Clark has survived alone in the marshes of the North Carolina coast. Dubbed “The Marsh Girl” by the locals, she was abandoned by her family and has been raised by nature itself. Now, as she comes of age, she begins to yearn for something more than her loneliness – maybe even a connection with the locals. ( 119 Weeks ) Read more →

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

In Mexico, bookstore owner Lydia is charmed to meet Javier, a man who shares her taste in books, only to find he is the local drug lord. When her husband exposes Javier’s secrets, the wrath of the cartel falls upon her family. Lydia and her son Luca must flee from his wrath – all the way to American soil. ( 34 Weeks ) Read more →

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Growing up in a small black community in the Deep South, the Vignes sisters run away at age sixteen. Though identical twins, their lives end in completely different paths. One returns to live in their hometown while the other secretly passes as white. Bennett explores more than race, as she contemplates how the past affects future generations when their daughters’ lives intersect. ( 28 Weeks ) Read more →

If It Bleeds by Stephen King

A collection of four novellas. In “If It Bleeds,” a standalone sequel to The Outsider , a bomb at a middle school prompts an investigation into the lead reporter by Holly Gibney. Other stories include “Mr. Harriagan’s Phone,” “The Life of Chuck,” and “Rat.” ( 18 Weeks ) Read More →

Camino Winds by John Grisham

With Hurricane Leo approaching, bookstore owner Bruce Cable decides to ride out the storm. In the aftermath, his author friend Nelson Kerr is found dead. Did Nelson die in the storm? Or did someone use the hurricane to cover a murder? ( 17 Weeks ) Read More →

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

After a failed bank robbery, a banker robber on the run accidentally ends up with a room full of hostages at an open house. After letting all of the hostages go, the police storm the apartment, only to find it empty. Now the police must interview the dysfunctional group to figure out what exactly happened. Backman purposely plays on your assumptions and uses an unusual narration style that gives the story an allegorical feel. ( 14 Weeks ) Read more →

The Return by Nicholas Sparks

After being injured in a bombing in Afghanistan, a Navy doctor settles at his late grandfather’s cabin in North Carolina. While recuperating from his wounds, Trevor Benson never expects to find love, but he can’t fight the attraction he feels to deputy sheriff Natalie Masterson. However, Natalie remains distant, and a sullen teenage girl might be more connected to Trevor’s grandfather’s death than any suspected. (11 Weeks) Read more →

28 Summers by Elin Hilderbrand

At her brother’s bachelor party, Mallory meets Jake McCloud. Thus begins a love affair that lasts for decades, but only for one weekend a year. When Mallory his dying, she leaves instructions for her son to call Jake, who is now the husband of the leading presidential candidate. ( 11 Weeks ) Read more →

The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett

Thirty years after publishing The Pillars of the Earth , Ken Follett has written a prequel revealing the events that led up to his epic work. At the end of the Dark Ages in England, one man’s determination to make his abbey the center of learning changes the lives of a boatbuilder, a noblewoman, and the monk in unexpected ways. ( 10 Weeks ) Read more →

A Time For Mercy by John Grisham

John Grisham returns you to Clanton, Mississipi, the setting of his debut novel A Time to Kill . After appearing in the novel Sycamore Row , lawyer Jake Brigance is back, this time defending a teenager accused of killing a local deputy. With demand rising for a swift guilty verdict and the death penalty, Brigance realizes the town is against him as he pleads for mercy along with justice. ( 9 Weeks ) Read more →

The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult

When Dawn Edelstein is in a plane crash, her last thoughts are not of her husband, but of a man she hasn’t seen in fifteen years. When she miraculously survives, Dawn has a choice to make. Should she return to her husband and try to work out their marriage? Or should she run away to Egypt to pursue a man and a degree that she left behind? ( 8 Weeks ) Read more →

The Sentinel by Lee Child and Andrew Child

In the 25th Jack Reacher novel, Lee Child teams up with his younger brother Andrew. When Jack Reacher intervenes in an ambush in Tennessee, he meets an unassuming IT manager. Recently fired from his job after a cyberattack, Rusty Rutherford just wants to clear his name. Instead, they stumble upon a much larger conspiracy. (7 Weeks) Read more →

The Order by Daniel Silva

While holidaying in Rome, Gabriel Allon is shocked by the death of his friend Pope Paul VII. When the pope’s secretary insists he was murdered, Gabriel stumbles upon a long-hidden secret – a book containing a lost New Testament story that The Order of St. Helena will do anything to keep hidden. ( 7 Weeks ) Read more →

The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel’s third and final book of her Thomas Cromwell series. With Anne Boleyn dead, Thomas Cromwell continues to support King Henry VIII. However, when the Spanish ambassador points out that the King always turns on those closest to him, Cromwell starts to wonder if his turn is next. ( 7 Weeks ) Read more →

Fortune and Glory by Janet Evanovich

The 27th Stephanie Plum novel. After Grandma Mazur’s new husband dies, he leaves her the key to his massive fortune. As Stephanie and her grandma search for the treasure, they realize they aren’t the only ones looking. Stephanie’s old nemesis from Little Havana is hot on the trail. Can Stephanie outwit her? And will she finally decide between Joe Morelli and Ranger? ( 6 Weeks ) Read more →

Blindside by James Patterson and James O. Born

When the Mayor of New York’s daughter goes missing, he strikes a deal with Detective Michael Bennett, whose son is in prison. Bennett’s investigation leads him to a murder connected to a hacking operation, with national security implications. ( 6 weeks ) Read More →

The Law of Innocence by Michael Connelly

After a big courtroom win, Lincoln Lawyer Mickey Haller is pulled over by the police who find the body of a former client in his trunk. Unable to post bail, Haller must defend himself against murder charges from his jail cell while fending off enemies from the inside and out. Haller knows that it’s not enough to get a not guilty verdict. To be free of the charges, he must find out who really did it. ( 5 Weeks )

All the Devils are Here by Louise Penny

The 16th book in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series. While in Paris, Gamache investigates the attempted murder of his godfather, billionaire Stephen Horowitz. Now Gamache and his wife use the help of his former second-in-command to uncover secrets buried in the City of Lights. (4  Weeks ) Read more →

Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson

After forming a coalition against the enemy invaders, Dalinar Kholin and his Knights Radiant face a stalemate in the war. Until a technological advance creates an arms race with terrible consequences. The much-awaited fourth book in the Stormlight Archive is publishing in November. ( 3 Weeks ) Read more →

House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas

Sarah J. Maas kicks off her new Crescent City adult fantasy series with the story of half-Fae half-human Bryce Quinlan intent on avenging the death of her friends. She teams up with Fallen Angel Hunt Athalar for a tale of danger, romance, and magic. ( 3 weeks )  Read more →

Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline

Ernest Cline returns with a sequel to his science fiction bestseller, Ready Player One . After winning James Halliday’s contest, Wade Watts finds another easter egg hidden in Halliday’s vaults – a technological advance leagues ahead of the OASIS. Wade and his friends must solve this new riddle in a plot eerily reminiscent of the first book. And, yes, Wil Wheaton is narrating the audiobook. ( 3 Weeks ) Read more →

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Heavyweights (10+ Weeks on the NYT Bestseller List)

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

One night, famous painter Alicia Berenson shoots her husband in the face 5 times, and then never utters another word again. Now criminal psychotherapist Theo Faber is determined to get the truth from this silent patient while his own life is falling apart. ( 56 Weeks )  Read more →

The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes

Set during the Great Depression, Englishwoman Alice Wright marries a handsome American and finds herself transplanted to rural Kentucky. To escape her unhappy home life with her withdrawn husband and overbearing father-in-law, Alice agrees to become a traveling librarian, riding around the countryside bringing books to local residents. In her new job, she meets other fierce women and gains lasting friendships. ( 33 Weeks ) Read more →

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Shortly after World War II, a real estate mogul buys The Dutch House, a lavish estate outside of Philadelphia. This purchase changes everything for his children, Danny and Maeve – driving out their mother, and leading to Cyril’s remarriage and their exile from the house by their stepmother. A story of the bond between siblings, The Dutch House warns of the dangers of obsessive nostalgia. ( 32 Weeks ) Read More →

The Institute by Stephen King

In the middle of the night, Luke Ellis’s parents are murdered, and he is kidnapped only to awaken in The Institute. Here live children with the special abilities of telekinesis and telepathy who are tested and used at the hands of the ruthless director Mrs. Sigsby. Children who cooperate are given tokens for the vending machines. Those that don’t are brutally punished. As other children start to disappear to never be seen, Luke realizes his only hope is to escape. ( 22 Weeks )  Read more →

The Guardians by John Grisham

Over two decades ago, a jury convicted Quincy Miller for the murder of his lawyer Keith Russo. However, someone framed Miller, and Cullen Post, the founder of innocence group Guardian Ministries, takes up his case. As Post works to overturn Miller’s conviction, he realizes much more is going on. Powerful people do not want the truth of Russo’s murderer revealed, and they are willing to do anything to keep their secrets. ( 20 Weeks ) Read More →

The Guest List by Lucy Foley

On a remote Irish island, the perfect wedding turns deadly in this thrilling mystery. The high profile wedding between a television star and a magazine publisher is supposed to be the perfect event. Yet once the guests arrive, past conflicts come into play and someone turns up dead. Was it the bride? The best man? The wedding planner? ( 20 Weeks ) Read more →

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Sequel to Atwood’s classic The Handmaid’s Tale , set fifteen years after the events of the first book. Although the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead still rules, it’s power is beginning to slip. Following three women from inside and outside the system, the novel feels much more like the Hulu tv show than the original book. ( 16 Weeks )  Read more → 

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

Sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Olive Kitteridge . Continuing in the same vein as the first book, Olive, Again , shows Olive struggling to understand the various people in her hometown of Crosby, Maine. She interacts with a teenager dealing with the death of a parent, a pregnant young woman, a nurse with a secret crush, and a lawyer struggling with an inheritance. (14 weeks) Read More →

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s first novel follows Hiram, the black son of a white plantation owner. With no memory of his mother after she is sold away, Hiram tries to win the love of his father. After escaping death, Hiram realizes his father will never love him as a son. After a failed attempt to escape, Hiram eventually joins the Underground – where he aims to rescue others with a mysterious power he has developed. (14 weeks) Read More →

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

Blogger Alix Chamberlain has built herself a brand empowering women. When she moves to Philadephia, she feels overwhelmed by her two young daughters and comes to rely on her babysitter, Emira Tucker. While watching Alix’s two-year-old, Emira is shocked one day to be stopped by a grocery store clerk, only because she is black. (13 weeks)   Read More →

Blue Moon by Lee Child

Jack Reacher is just minding his business on a Greyhound bus when he makes the mistake of helping an old man. Now he’s caught in the between warring gangs, dodging loan sharks and assassins with the help of a fed-up waitress. (12 weeks) Read More →

A Minute to Midnight by David Baldacci

FBI Agent Atlee Pine and her assistant Carol Blum head back to Atlee’s hometown to investigate Atlee’s twin sister’s long-ago kidnapping Instead, they find bizarre ritualistic murders of a serial killer just getting started. (11 weeks) Read More →

Big Summer by Jennifer Weiner

Six years after a fight ended their friendship, Daphne Berg is shocked when her ex-best friend Drue Cavanaugh begs Daphne to be her maid-of-honor. No longer a shy side-kick, Daphne is now a confident plus-size influencer and a weekend in Cape Cod is too tempting to pass up. ( 11 Weeks ) Read more →

Fan Favorites (5+ Weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List)

The starless sea by erin morgenstern.

Amazon | Goodreads

(9 weeks) Graduate student Zachary Rawlins stumbles upon a mysterious book full of fantastical tales, only to find himself in the narrative. From there, he follows hints to a secret library, preserved by guardians intent on protecting it.  Read More →

Walk the Wire by David Baldacci

(8 weeks) FBI consultant Amos Decker investigates a gruesome murder in a small North Dakota fracking town.

Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano

Amazon | Goodreads  

(8 weeks) The coming-of-age story of Edward, the sole survivor of an airplane crash. Now an orphan, Edward must cope with the fact that he survived when so many did not. Read More →

Criss Cross by James Patterson

(8 weeks) Hours after watching the execution of a killer, Alex Cross and John Sampson are called to a copycat murder. Was the wrong man just killed, or is something even more sinister going on?

The invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab

( 8 Weeks ) A Faustian bargain comes with a curse that affects the adventure Addie LaRue has across centuries, for she must live a life where no one can remember her. Read more →

Twisted Twenty-Six by Janet Evanovich

(8 weeks) Grandma Mazur is a widow again. When his business associates turn up demanding a set of Jimmy’s keys, bounty hunter Stephanie Plum rises to the task.

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

(8  Weeks ) In 1950s Mexico, a debutante travels to a distant mansion in the mountains where family secrets of a faded mining empire have been kept hidden. Read more →

The Boy From the Woods by Harlan Coben

(7 weeks) Found as a boy in the woods, Wilde has never really integrated into society. With two teenage disappearances in his town, Wilde must discover what happened to them, and to himself, all those years ago. Read More →

In Five Years by Rebecca Serle

(7 weeks) Lawyer Dannie Cohan knows exactly where she’ll be in five years – until she has a vision of herself in five years engaged to someone else. She doesn’t think much of it until she later meets the same man.  Read More →

Fair Warning by Michael Connelly

(7  Weeks ) The third book in the Jack McEvoy series. A veteran reporter tracks a killer who uses genetic data to pick his victims only to become a suspect in the case.

The Searcher by Tana French

( 7 Weeks ) After a divorce, a former Chicago police officer resettles in an Irish village where a boy begs for help when his older brother goes missing and no one seems to care. Read more →

The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd

(6 weeks) Acclaimed author Sue Monk Kidd imagines a narrative about a fierce, intellectual Jewish woman named Ana who becomes the wife of Jesus.  Read More →

The Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate

(6 weeks) After the Civil War, freed slaves posted “Lost Friends” advertisements, seeking loved ones who had been sold off. In 1987, searching for a way to connect to her students, teacher Benedetta comes across a book and a story of three women living in 1875.  Read More →

The Summer House by James Patterson and Brendan DuBois

(6 Weeks) Jeremiah Cook, a veteran and former N.Y.P.D. cop, investigates a mass murder near a lake in Georgia.

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

(6 weeks) Fleeing the Spanish Civil War, pregnant widow Roser marries her brother-in-law out of necessity. Starting over in Chile, Roser and Victor find a way to make work a marriage neither one wanted.  Read More →

Near Dark by Brad Thor

(6  Weeks ) The 19th book in the Scot Harvath series. With a bounty on his head, Harvath, America’s top spy, makes an alliance with a Norwegian intelligence operative.

All Adults Here by Emma Straub

(5 weeks) After an accident, Astrid Strick realizes that she wasn’t the best mother. Watching her children struggle to parent, she contemplates the long-term consequences of her failures and whether she can set things right.  Read More →

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

(5 weeks) With the collapse of a Ponzi scheme and the mysterious disappearance of a woman at sea, Mandel combines two seemly unconnected events into a narrative of crisis and survival.  Read More →

Lost by James Patterson and James O. Born

(5 weeks) Detective Tom Moon and his FBI task force investigate a Russian crime syndicate operating in Europe and Miami. But operating in his hometown is risky for Moon when someone close to him is targeted.  

Hideaway by Nora Roberts

( 5 weeks ) After escaping her abductors, child star Caitlyn Sullivan gathers herself in western Ireland and returns to Hollywood hoping to act again only to find love and betrayal.

Sex and Vanity by Kevin Kwan

( 5 Weeks ) A nod to “A Room With a View” in which Lucie Tang Churchill is torn between her WASPy billionaire fiancé and a privileged hunk born in Hong Kong. Read more →

The Harbigner II by Jonathan Cahn

(5  Weeks ) Nouriel, Ana Goren and a figure known as “the prophet” return as revelations are unlocked in the sequel to The Harbinger .

1st Case by James Patterson and Chris Tebbetts

(5  Weeks ) After getting kicked out of M.I.T., Angela Hoot interns with the F.B.I. and tracks the murderous siblings known as the Poet and the Engineer.

One by One by Ruth ware

(5  Weeks ) An avalanche tests the bonds of coworkers from a London-based tech startup on a corporate retreat in the French Alps. Could one of them be willing to resort to murder to get their way? Read more →

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

(5  Weeks ) A family vacation in an isolated part of Long Island is thrown into confusion when the home’s owners return claiming New York City is having a blackout. Read more →

Honorable Mention (2-4 Weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List)

One Hit Wonders (1 Week on the New York Times Best Seller List)

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Maureen Corrigan's 10 Books That Will Connect You In A Socially Distant Year

Maureen Corrigan

There's an underlying quality of solitude about this pandemic experience. Sealed into our little Zoom boxes, masked when we're in contact with others, many of us feel separated from the world by split-second time delays and a thin layer of lint.

Books break through. They enter directly into our heads, occasionally our hearts. Here are 10 of the books that broke through for me during this tough year.

Leave The World Behind

by Rumaan Alam

Leave The World Behind is an extraordinary, shape-shifting novel that begins, as so many stories do, with a journey: A white family is driving out to an Airbnb in the Hamptons on Long Island for vacation. What begins as a domestic tale soon morphs into a comedy of manners about race, when the Black couple who owns the Airbnb unexpectedly turns up. Slowly, that comedy of manners sours into a vision of global disaster that Alam's characters and readers alike will keep denying. Sound familiar?

Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

McBride is such a buoyant poet of a novelist that he could write a book about paper clips and I'd read it. Fortunately, Deacon King Kong is about so much more: Set in a Brooklyn housing project in the 1960s and focused on the apparently random murder of a neighborhood drug dealer, the novel captures the rough-edged communal life of a vanished New York.

The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

The Cold Millions was one of two vivid historical novels that carried me away this year. Walter, who's one of my favorite novelists, centers his tale on the free-speech demonstrations that erupted in Spokane, Wa., in 1910 and 1911, and pitted police against transient workers, many of whom identified as Wobblies. The story is reminiscent of sweeping novels by the likes of Herman Wouk and Howard Fast, tellers of big tales about the forgotten foot soldiers of the past.

The Pull of the Stars

by Emma Donoghue

The Pull of the Stars is set in a maternity ward in 1918, in Dublin, a city hollowed out by the Spanish Flu, the first World War and the 1916 Irish Uprising. Donoghue gives us a cityscape of empty schools and cafes, and the ubiquity of masks, here quaintly described as "bluntly pointed ... like the beaks of unfamiliar birds." This is an engrossing and inadvertently topical story about health care workers inside small rooms fighting to preserve life.

Interior Chinatown

by Charles Yu

Yu's novel, which just won the National Book Award , is an inventive satire about racial stereotyping, particularly of Asian Americans. His main character, Willis Wu, lives in a rooming house and has a bit part in a TV cop show, called Black and White . About his career in show business, Willis tells us:

First you have to work your way up. Starting from the bottom, it goes: 5. Background Oriental Male 4. Dead Asian Man [All the way up to the pinnacle:] Kung Fu Guy. Enlarge this image Grove Atlantic Grove Atlantic

But as Yu dramatizes, even "Kung Fu Guy" is outmatched by the crushing perceptions of white society .

Writers & Lovers

by Lily King

Casey Peabody, the 31-year-old main character of Writers & Lovers , aspires to be a novelist. In this story, King captures the chronic low-level panic of taking a leap into the artsy unknown — and the cost of sticking with the same dream for, perhaps, too long.

The Searcher

by Tana French

Mysteries, as always, kept me sane-ish this year and the best one I read was French's stand-alone suspense tale. A Chicago police detective moves to the rural west of Ireland and finds that evil follows wherever he goes. The beautiful and menacing landscape of The Searcher may make you feel better about spending more time indoors.

by Isabel Wilkerson

Caste is, deservedly, one of this year's big books to ruminate over and argue about. Wilkerson's central insight — that possibility in America is largely pre-determined by a racial caste system — is dramatized through what's become her signature style: argumentation through vivid anecdotes and charged metaphors.

We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

Check Out NPR's Book Concierge

NPR's Book Concierge returns with 380+ new books handpicked by NPR staff and critics — including recommendations from Maureen Corrigan and Fresh Air staffers Seth Kelley, Kayla Lattimore and Molly Seavy-Nesper. Click to find your next great read. NPR hide caption

NPR's Book Concierge returns with 380+ new books handpicked by NPR staff and critics — including recommendations from Maureen Corrigan and Fresh Air staffers Seth Kelley, Kayla Lattimore and Molly Seavy-Nesper. Click to find your next great read.

Maureen Corrigan Picks The Best Books Of 2018, Including The Novel Of The Year

Maureen Corrigan Picks Books To Close Out A Chaotic 2017

The 10 Best Books Of 2016 Faced Tough Topics Head On

Maureen Corrigan's Best Books Of 2015: Short(ish) Books That Pack A Big Punch

Sometimes You Can't Pick Just 10: Maureen Corrigan's Favorite Books Of 2014

Cooper presents a meticulously researched account of the murder of a female grad student that took place at Harvard in 1969 and remained unsolved until two years ago. In Cooper's narrative, the sexism and elitism of academia are the culprits that still remain at large.

Memorial Drive

by Natasha Trethewey

The violent death that poet Trethewey writes about in her harrowing memoir is that of her own mother, who was murdered by her stepfather when Trethewey was 19. Memorial Drive is about memory, race and the "phantom ache" that can't be laid to rest. Of all the books I read this year, this one was emotionally the hardest — and the one that felt most crucial to take in.

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The Best Books of 2020 So Far

These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser.

T he best books of the year so far explore themes of power, perseverance and hope through creative storytelling and glittering prose. Journalist Robert Kolker reports on the strife of an American couple in the 1970s, overwhelmed by their sons’ schizophrenia diagnoses. Poet Cathy Park Hong establishes herself as an energetic and necessary voice in the dialogue surrounding racism in the U.S. in her nonfiction debut. And Jenny Offill takes a clever approach to tackling the anxieties that are synonymous with life in the 21st century. These 10 books, from a biting collection of comedic essays to the final novel in a beloved trilogy , represent authors at the peak of their craft. Here, alphabetically by author, the best books of 2020 so far.

The Night Watchman , Louise Erdrich

Though she’s written more than 20 books for adults, Louise Erdrich ’s latest work is perhaps her most personal. Drawing on her Chippewa heritage, the National Book Award winner constructs a portrait of a community fighting for survival in The Night Watchman . The titular character, based on her maternal grandfather, leads the effort against proposed legislation that threatens the rights to his tribe’s land. Erdrich describes the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota in rich detail and illustrates the lengths that some will go to protect the ones they care for.

Buy Now: The Night Watchman on Bookshop | Amazon

Cleanness , Garth Greenwell

The second book from Garth Greenwell appears to feature the same unnamed narrator from his first — a gay American teacher living in the capital of Bulgaria. In nine interlinked stories, Greenwell dissects the expatriate’s relationships with his students, his sexuality and the city of Sofia in an aching examination of intimacy and power. As the narrator reflects on his time abroad before he returns home, Greenwell asks potent questions about how and why we long for love.

Buy Now: Cleanness on Bookshop | Amazon

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning , Cathy Park Hong

Blending cultural criticism with personal stories, poet Cathy Park Hong analyzes the impact of racism against Asian Americans in her debut nonfiction collection. Her voice is urgent and raw as she unpacks what it’s like to experience prejudice that doesn’t fit into the exact mold of oppression faced by other minorities in the U.S. From reflecting on her childhood in California to her evolving attitude towards the English language, Hong is brutally self-aware and embraces her anger as she captures how she’s struggled to make sense of her identity.

Buy Now: Minor Feelings on Bookshop | Amazon

Wow, No Thank You ., Samantha Irby

Reading Samantha Irby is a welcome relief from what’s going on in the world, even though she’s picking apart every single aspect of it. “Over the last couple years I have had to learn to live in a house, and that is one of the hardest and most boring things I’ve ever had to do,” she writes in an essay that lists off hilarious questions related to maintaining a home. In another, she mines our obsession with skin care and declares: “I don’t drink water and my blood type is pizza.” Her collection is riddled with punchy lines as she contemplates everything from trying to make new friends in adulthood to working in a television writers’ room for the first time. Wow, No Thank You. is signature Irby — honest, dry and the kind of funny that truly induces laughter.

Buy Now: Wow, No Thank You. on Bookshop | Amazon

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family , Robert Kolker

“Even if just one child has schizophrenia, everything about the internal logic of that family changes,” journalist Rober Kolker writes in his bestselling book, which traces the plight of a Colorado-based family devastated by the mental disorder. By the mid-1970s, six of the 12 Galvin children had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Kolker traces the family’s suffering in Hidden Valley Road , which focuses on how the Galvins were studied to help better understand the disease. Though so much of the story is rooted in tragedy — abuse, violence, death — Kolker’s voice remains empathetic as he balances breaking down the science behind schizophrenia and describing the gutting details of one family’s unthinkable circumstances.

Buy Now: Hidden Valley Road on Bookshop | Amazon

The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz , Erik Larson

The latest book from Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City , is an engrossing account of Winston Churchill’s first year as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In gripping and propulsive terms, Larson depicts the horrors of Hitler’s bombing campaign, which killed tens of thousands of Britons. Though the end of World War II is no mystery, The Splendid and the Vile reads like a thriller, demanding attention with pages that illuminate the strength of leadership in times of grave crisis and uncertainty.

Buy Now: The Splendid and the Vile on Bookshop | Amazon

The Mirror & the Light , Hilary Mantel

One of the most anticipated novels of the year — Hilary Mantel’s conclusion to her celebrated Wolf Hall trilogy — lived up to expectations and then some. Beginning in the wake of Anne Boleyn’s death, The Mirror & the Light captures the final years of 16th-century English lawyer Thomas Cromwell, scheming aide to King Henry VIII. The Booker Prize winner masterfully completes her years-long character study of Cromwell, again fusing history and fiction to create a mesmerizing narrative centered on a man whose obsession with power leads him to his brutal, and inevitable, end.

Buy Now: The Mirror and the Light on Bookshop | Amazon

Deacon King Kong , James McBride

It’s September 1969 in the projects of Brooklyn when a church deacon shoots an ear off a local drug dealer in front of the whole neighborhood. The seemingly random act of violence is just the start of James McBride’s humorous, electric and heartfelt book — his first novel since the 2013 National Book Award winner The Good Lord Bird . From the white neighbors to the Latinx and African American witnesses of the crime, McBride introduces a diverse cast of characters to deliver nuanced commentary on race and class in New York City. McBride’s voice is rhythmic and compassionate as he asks how communities come together and support each other in the face of adversity.

Buy Now: Deacon King Kong on Bookshop | Amazon

Weather , Jenny Offill

It would be an understatement to declare that Weather , a story fixated on a woman’s anxieties regarding both the mundanities of life and the end of the world, feels prescient. Lizzie Benson, the narrator of Jenny Offill’s kaleidoscopic third novel, is increasingly worried about everything from her young son’s experience at a new school to the impact of climate change on the planet. The absorbing power of Offill’s spare but striking prose grounds the book’s frenetic structure, culminating in an unnerving look at a world where a constant flow of disquieting information can’t be escaped.

Buy Now: Weather on Bookshop | Amazon

Run Me to Earth , Paul Yoon

In Run Me to Earth , three orphaned teenagers linked by grief live in a bombed-out hospital in 1960s Laos, where they assist a doctor and transport supplies to those in need. The coming-of-age premise leads to something much larger as Paul Yoon propels his young characters into adulthood, where they’re haunted by the pain of their shared past. Yoon seamlessly connects his characters’ storylines over time and across continents, all the while highlighting the subtle yet piercing tensions that accompany life after childhood trauma.

Buy Now: Run Me to Earth on Bookshop | Amazon

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The Ultimate Best Books of 2020 List

Reading all the lists so you don't have to since 2017.

This year has been “unprecedented” and “unusual” and “an outlier” and “anomalous” and “freakish” and “extraordinary” in many ways. The Covid-19 pandemic has upended our way of life, our topics of conversation, and our entire world. However, some things will always be the same. What I mean to say is: Nothing can stop listicle season.

Yet again, I have scoured he internet to find out which books were recommended most on the “best of the year” lists, consulting 2020 roundups published by everyone from Literary Hub (that would be us) to Apartment Therapy. I read a total 41 lists, which recommended a whopping 952 different books. But a few were mentioned repeatedly, and you will find those ranked below, by order of frequency of inclusion. Does this mean these books are The Best? Only as much as any popularity contest ever does, I suppose. But if you’re looking to add some books to your holiday reading list, you could do a lot worse.

Here are the results:

Brit Bennett,  The Vanishing Half  

Rumaan Alam,  Leave the World Behind

Yaa Gyasi,  Transcendent Kingdom

Raven Leilani,  Luster James McBride,  Deacon King Kong

Maggie O’Farrell,  Hamnet Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Bryan Washington,  Memorial

Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies Megha Majumdar, A Burning Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & The Light Jenny Offill, Weather

Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections Garth Greenwell, Cleanness Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults N. K. Jemisin, The City We Became Lydia Millet, A Children’s Bible Barack Obama, A Promised Land Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley: A Memoir C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills is Gold

Susanna Clarke, Piranesi Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You: Essays Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel Kiley Reid, Such a Fun Age

Akwaeke Emezi, The Death of Vivek Oji Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings Lily King, Writers & Lovers Brandon Taylor, Real Life Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic Les Payne and Tamara Payne, The Dead are Arising V. E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue Karla Corejo Villavinencio, The Undocumented Americans Jess Walter, The Cold Millions

S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland Emily Danforth, Plain Bad Heroines Anne Enright, Actress Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile Marilynne Robinson, Jack Kawai Strong Washburn, Sharks in the Time of Saviors Kevin Young, ed., African-American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song

Alyssa Cole, When No One is Watching Diane Cook, The New Wilderness Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians Peace Adzo Medie, His Only Wife David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue Wayétu Moore, The Dragons, The Giant, The Women: A Memoir Aimee Nezhukumatathil, illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham Danez Smith, Homie: Poems Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays Adrian Tomine, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist

Full list of lists surveyed:

TIME’ s 100 Must Read Books of 2020 ;  Vanity Fair ‘ s 15 Best Books of 2020 ; The New York Times Book Review’ s 100 Notable Books of 2020 ; Vulture’s 10 Best Books of 2020 ; Literary Hub’s 65 Favorite Books of the Year ;  Esquire’ s Best Books to Elevate Your Reading List in 2020 ;  Los Angeles Time’ s 10 Best Books of 2020 ; Slate’s Best Books of 2020 (Laura Miller); Slate’s Best Books of 2020 (Dan Kois); Refinery29’s The Best Books of 2020, So Far ; The Washington Post’ s 50 notable works of nonfiction in 2020 ; The Washington Post’ s 50 notable works of fiction in 2020 ; The New York Times’ Critics’ Top Books of 2020 ; The Chicago Public Library’s Best Books of 2020 ; Book Riot’s Best Books of 2020 ; BuzzFeed’s Best Books We Read in 2020 ; Publishers Weekly’ s Best Books of 2020 ; Library Journal’ s Best Books 2020 ;  O, The Oprah Magazine ‘ s 20 Best Books of 2020 ; Chicago Tribune’ s 10 Best Books of 2020 ;  EW’ s 10 Best Books of 2020 ;  Teen Vogue’ s Best Books of 2020 You Should Be Reading Right Now ; Apartment Therapy’s Must-Read Books of 2020 ; Amazon’s Top 100 Books of 2020 ; Barnes & Noble’s 10 Best Books of 2020 ;  Real Simple’ s Best Books of 2020 (So Far) ; Kirkus Reviews’s Best of 2020 ( Fiction and Nonfiction ); Marie Claire’ s The 2020 Books You Should Add to Your Reading List ; Town and Country’ s Best Books of 2020 ; Parade’ s 40 Best Books of 2020 ; The New York Public Library’s Best Books of the Year ;  The Wall Street Journal’ s 10 Best Books of 2020 ;  USA TODAY’ s Best Books of 2020 ;  People’ s Top 10 Books of 2020 ;  The Guardian’ s Best Books of 2020 ; The Undefeated’s 25 Can’t-Miss Books of 2020 ; Men’s Health’ s 14 Best New Books of 2020 ; BBC’s Best Books of the year 2020 ; and The Telegraph’s 50 Best Books of 2020 ; and The Independent’ s 20 Best Books of 2020 .

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New York Times 10 Best Books of 2020

Hamnet (Hardcover)

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait delivers a luminous portrait of a marriage, a family ravaged by grief, and a boy whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time.

A Children's Bible: A Novel (Hardcover)

Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction One of the New York Times ' Ten Best Books of the Year Named one of the best novels of the year by Time , Washington Post , NPR, Chicago Tribune , Esquire , BBC, and many others National Bestseller

Homeland Elegies: A Novel (Hardcover)

This "profound and provocative" work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and American Dervish follows an immigrant father and his son as they search for belonging—in post-Trump America, and with each other ( Kirkus Reviews ). "Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable." —Salman Rushdie ​ A deeply

Deacon King Kong (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel (Hardcover)

Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction   Winner of the Gotham Book Prize One of Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of the Year" Oprah's Book Club Pick Named one of the Top Ten Books of the Year by the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly and TIME Magazine A Washington Post Notable Novel

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family (Hardcover)

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • ONE OF GQ 's TOP 50 BOOKS OF LITERARY JOURNALISM IN THE 21st CENTURY • The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir (Hardcover)

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2020.

Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future (Hardcover)

One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • A New York Times Notable Book A timely exploration of what Shakespeare’s plays reveal about our divided land.

War: How Conflict Shaped Us (Hardcover)

Is peace an aberration? The New York Times bestselling author of Paris 1919 offers a provocative view of war as an essential component of humanity. NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

The Vanishing Half: A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel) (Hardcover)

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST *  NPR *  PEOPLE * TIME MAGAZINE* VANITY FAIR * GLAMOUR  2021 WOMEN'S PRIZE FINALIST

A Promised Land (Hardcover)

A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making—from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINEE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND PEOPLE

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The 10 best books of 2020

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The Year's Best Books

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This was supposed to be a banner year for big literary names — an apocalyptic DeLillo , a gossipy Amis , the grand finale of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy. And yet the brightest, most invigorating work came from outside the aristocracy. Authors from across the spectrum of notoriety and experience turned up with writing that cut particularly deep in this most horribilis of all the anni. Quiet debuts crept out and captured top prizes. Heavy hitters returned after almost a generation away from publishing. Legends in the making pushed themselves into uncharted territory. The lesson here? Trust your gut and not the dazzle of a fancy persona, and you’ll be amply rewarded. Or just read this list of the best books of 2020, in alphabetical order.

10 great books that got lost in the noise of 2020

In a noisy 2020, it was too easy to overlook these 10 literary gems, from Miranda Popkey’s “Topics of Conversation” to Mieko Kawakami’s “Breasts and Eggs.”

Dec. 10, 2020

Deacon King Kong By James McBride Riverhead: 384 pages, $28

Shouldn’t we just get it over with and declare McBride this decade’s Great American Novelist? Following up a radiant hit like “ The Good Lord Bird ” could have proved tricky for a writer with a more limited repertoire, but this one can apparently shift like the wind. “ Deacon King Kong ” bursts with energy in the story of Sportcoat, a church deacon and a drunk, who shoots a drug dealer and accidentally sets off a chain of desperation and absurdity. McBride has a way of inflating reality to comical sizes, the better for us to see every tiny mechanism that holds unjust systems in place.

Leave the World Behind By Rumaan Alam Ecco: 256 pages, $28

Remember that scene in “ Pulp Fiction ” when John Travolta’s character jams a syringe of adrenaline straight into Uma Thurman’s stopped heart? She shoots up and gasps: hhhhhhuuuu! That’s how it feels, approximately every 15 pages, as you pick your way through the artful wreckage Alam has sculpted in “ Leave the World Behind .” A family on a Hamptons vacation is surprised when their Airbnb’s owners show up, relaying news of a blackout across the East Coast. Then cell service disappears and a series of otherworldly events punctuate the story — massive herds of roaming deer, unexplained ailments, a piercing sound in the sky. This isn’t an apocalypse novel (2020 is too complicated for that); it’s a high-RPM meditation on how it feels to experience collapse.

Review: Apocalypse now: A funny, terrifying end-of-the-world novel is as 2020 as it gets

Rumaan Alam’s “Leave the World Behind” starts as satire and becomes the anatomy of “normal” life during global disaster — and a dire warning to us all.

Oct. 2, 2020

Luster By Raven Leilani FSG: 240 pages, $26

In a year when the “Bad Sex Award” was mercifully canceled, it’s time to start thinking about rewarding the rare feat of good sex writing. It’s far too easy to go overboard on the groans and the stickiness, but in this simultaneously horny and contemplative debut, Leilani takes the awkwardness of clanking genitals as a given and runs with it. Edie, a struggling painter and publishing grunt who has slept her way through the office, meets Eric, who is twice her age and in an open marriage. This isn’t some paint-by-numbers plot of romance and rejection; Edie eventually moves in with Eric, his wife and their adopted daughter, and begins to wonder what exactly makes her such a sop for touch, need, desire. Leilani knows how to talk about wanting in ways that make you sweat.

Memorial By Bryan Washington Riverhead: 320 pages, $27

There’s something to be said for quiet writing, sentences that breaststroke forward, making only the softest waves. “Memorial,” Washington’s debut novel, hums along softly like a symphony preparing to perform. It revolves around a couple who are on the verge of disintegration when we meet them: Ben is Black and Mike is Japanese American, and time has opened up a chasm between them and the ways they each relate to the world. While Mike heads to Japan to sit with his dying father, Ben plays host to Mike’s visiting mother; all of them navigate feelings of displacement. Washington is one to watch.

Entertainment & Arts

Top ten lists for 2020: The year’s best movies, TV, music and more

Movie theaters closed. Broadway went dark. Concert venues fell silent.

Dec. 11, 2020

Memorial Drive By Natasha Trethewey Ecco: 224 pages, $28

This makes the top 10 for my entire reading life. When former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey was 19, her stepfather shot and killed her mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, outside their Atlanta apartment. Trethewey repressed memories of the murder, and the years of bruises and verbal lashings that preceded it, for decades. But this slim, transcendent memoir — covering her childhood as a biracial girl in the Deep South, the tension inside her mother’s house and the gut punch of the killing — gracefully brings the poet closer to something that looks like acceptance. Truly a work of genius.

Piranesi By Susanna Clarke Bloomsbury: 272 pages, $27

Fifteen years after the magnificent “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” reminded readers that fantasy belongs on the mainstream shelf, Clarke is back with a slimmer but equally riveting story about the cost of power. Piranesi lives in a never-ending colonnaded building with an Uffizi Gallery’s worth of statuary lining the walls. He visits the busts and occasionally sees The Other, an enigmatic man and the only other living being he knows. But has he always lived there? Why doesn’t he recall his young life? And what is he to make of his own diary entries, which tell a very strange tale about another world he’s never seen? “Piranesi” is vibrant, original, a true book lover’s novel.

35 years after her mother’s murder, a poet of Black struggle writes a monument

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey always wrote of public pain and private struggle. Her memoir, “Memorial Drive,” lets her mother speak.

July 22, 2020

Shuggie Bain By Douglas Stuart Grove: 448 pages, $27

I admit it: Though this novel was published in February, I only noticed it early this fall when it showed up on shortlists for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award and suddenly its debut author was everywhere. All for very good reason. “Shuggie Bain” is astonishingly good, one of the most moving novels in recent memory. The title character is a young boy in 1980s Glasgow shuttled from one public housing unit to another, starkly alienated from his already fractured family by his suppressed gay identity. Stuart writes so candidly, you’ll practically hear Shuggie’s mother’s beer cans clanking in her handbag, shiver from the chill of a childhood underheated in every way.

Want By Lynn Steger Strong Henry Holt: 224 pages, $26

Things weren’t so great in America before the pandemic, either. Reading Steger Strong’s swirling, incisive “Want” is like being caught in a windstorm of American familial crises: overpriced childcare, overlapping jobs, overreaching men. Elizabeth lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two small children; they’re filing for bankruptcy and constantly on the brink of financial collapse. They’d expected life to be … better than this, and therein lies the cruel slap so masterfully delivered in this novel. “Want” brilliantly exposes the daily exhaustion of generational decline.

Weather By Jenny Offill Knopf: 224 pages, $24

Offill’s fragmentary novels are like stepping-stones: You jump from one isolated phrase or anecdote to the next, sometimes sure-footed but occasionally thrown off balance. In “Weather,” a librarian named Lizzie is weighed down by the torrent of information she keeps encountering about our doomed planet. Slipping into what Offill calls “a kind of twilight knowing,” she confronts the fact that flooded New York streets and barren apple trees aren’t a possibility but a certainty. “Weather” isn’t a comfort or a little packet of wishes for a healthy planet — it’s a meticulously constructed (often hilarious, sometimes disconsolate) lament for our old modes of thinking.

This fall, we need books more than ever. Meet the authors making sense of a wild 2020

Perhaps no other medium has better helped us process 2020. Our fall books special brings you the books and authors who’ve helped make sense of it.

Oct. 9, 2020

Writers & Lovers By Lily King Grove: 320 pages, $27

Some novels are simply beautiful. That’s the word you exhale as you finish them. King’s fifth novel, a year-in-the-life of a waitress and almost-novelist in 1990s Cambridge, Mass., is one of them. Casey cycles around town, folds napkins for the dinner service, lingers awkwardly at literary parties — and parcels out her energy among two smitten men and her manuscript. It’s a traditional story, and it works on every level. There is nothing extraneous in the writing, just quiet dedication to shaping the story of a young woman adrift from herself.

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What’s Love Got to Do With It? This Lusty Tennis Novel May Know.

Teddy Wayne takes a swing at sex, class and sporty intrigue in his latest novel, “The Winner.”

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By Mary Pols

Mary Pols is a Maine-based writer and editor. She is the author of a memoir, “Accidentally on Purpose.”

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THE WINNER, by Teddy Wayne

Emily, one of three women in Teddy Wayne’s seductive sixth novel, “The Winner,” to sleep with Conor O’Toole during his summer as tennis pro in an exclusive gated community near Cape Cod, tells him he’s conventionally handsome — like a political candidate running for office mostly because he looks the part. Or, she says, “someone on a dating show who, I don’t know, sells condos in Florida, and likes jet-skiing, and uses the word badass .”

Someone less pretty, she implies, might actually have had time to develop an interior life. “And you think I’m the kind of person who gets whatever he wants without trying?” Conor asks. “Yes,” she replies. “You’re clearly a … winner .”

While Conor may be able to rely on the currency of his good looks, he probably wouldn’t agree with Emily. He arrives in the fictional hamlet of Cutters Neck in the summer of 2020, fresh out of a second-tier law school with $144,000 in student loan debt and no job prospects. His father died when he was young and his mother, recently laid off as a receptionist, barely makes enough in unemployment to keep their Yonkers rental. Even his extraordinary work ethic is no guarantee.

It was only through the good graces of a long-ago mentor — a kindly retired attorney who spotted him as a lonely eighth grader hitting a ball against a wall with an abandoned racket — that Conor developed the skills that earned him a college scholarship and ultimately led to this summer job, giving a wealthy man lessons. In exchange, he gets to live free in the man’s guesthouse and gain access to other rich people who might want to work on their backhands.

The chip on Conor’s shoulder is class-based, a narrative specialty of Wayne’s, and one heightened here by the contrast between the Covid-19 pandemic’s haves and have-nots. Conor’s mom is a Type 1 diabetic, and he needs every cent he makes to keep her on insulin. His plan is to hole up when he’s not on the court and study for the bar exam, but between various eager women and his own libido (highly muscular), the summer gets complicated.

One of his tennis pupils is the glamorous but chilly Catherine Havemeyer, who has the biggest house on Cutters Neck, a place populated almost exclusively by people with inherited wealth. She pays extra to give Conor lessons in intense sexual gratification.

And: She’s Emily’s mother. This is “The Graduate” with an advanced degree.

Wayne’s plot was made to gallop, and it does not disappoint. I read “The Winner” in two nights. It’s not just the sex that’s provocative; it’s the way the reader is steadily pulled into Conor’s dilemma — with Emily he genuinely feels romantic love for the first time, but the woman who turns him on is Catherine — to the point that some of his actions seem almost justifiable. It takes a long time narratively to root against him at all.

In contrast, souring on the physically unblessed protagonist of Wayne’s 2016 novel “Loner” was easy. The similarities between them abound: That book’s subject, David Federman, is a Harvard freshman with a chip on his shoulder, a disconnect from most emotions (except envy) and a crush on a classmate, a private school goddess not unlike Emily.

“Loner” read as an exceptionally creepy portrait of male entitlement and the toxicity of the male gaze. “The Winner” feels in many ways like the same story, but delivered in a more consistently fun package. Do we cut the emotionally inert but good-looking guy more slack because he frets about money and his diabetic mother, and is himself intensely subject to objectification? I’d judge Wayne on his easy access to the immoral and amoral, but given my own voracious consumption of this book, better to stay off my high horse.

THE WINNER | By Teddy Wayne | Harper | 309 pp. | $30

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John S. Jacobs was a fugitive, an abolitionist — and the brother of the canonical author Harriet Jacobs. Now, his own fierce autobiography has re-emerged .

Don DeLillo’s fascination with terrorism, cults and mass culture’s weirder turns has given his work a prophetic air. Here are his essential books .

Jenny Erpenbeck’s “ Kairos ,” a novel about a torrid love affair in the final years of East Germany, won the International Booker Prize , the renowned award for fiction translated into English.

Kevin Kwan, the author of “Crazy Rich Asians,” left Singapore’s opulent, status-obsessed, upper crust when he was 11. He’s still writing about it .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .