Check out our list of 100 notable books of 2020. When Stella decides to pass for white, the sisters’ lives diverge, only to intersect unexpectedly, years later. Looking for a great novel? Your winner—by five votes—is The Midnight Library, author Matt Haig’s wildly inventive blend of literary and speculative fiction… The sixth book in … Presidential memoirs are meant to inform, to burnish reputations and, to a certain extent, to shape the course of history, and Obama’s is no exception. The Best Fiction Books Coming Out in 2020. Fiction | Riverhead Books. Douglas Stuart’s acclaimed debut novel draws heavily on his upbringing in 1980s Glasgow, where, like Stuart did, Hugh “Shuggie” Bain is growing up with an alcoholic mother and facing a culture of homophobia that makes him feel like an outcast. 3. The lure and ruin of capital, the wounds of 9/11, the bitter pill of cultural rejection: Akhtar pulls no punches critiquing the country’s most dominant narratives. Pick up one of these. Discover Amazon’s Top 100 best-selling products in 2012, 2011, 2010 and beyond. Every year, the Booker Prize judges whittle a year’s worth of fiction down to a shortlist of six books, each competing for the title of the best novel of the year. While each chapter is its own contained short story, some interlink. View the Top 100 best sellers for each year, in Amazon Books, Kindle eBooks, Music, MP3 Songs and Video Games. Matsuda updates traditional Japanese ghost stories for the contemporary era, giving agency to previously voiceless female characters and playfully breaking down gender roles and stereotypes still so pervasive in Japanese culture today. Each chapter centers on a year with a different thematic focus. $28. | Read the review | Listen: Ayad Akhtar on the podcast. Mantel’s Cromwell is a character for the ages—rough-edged yet introspective, with a mind as sharp as an axe. Few novels were as eagerly anticipated this year as The Mirror & The Light, the conclusion to British author Hilary Mantel’s blockbuster Wolf Hall trilogy. You can unsubscribe at any time. “For a family, schizophrenia is, primarily, a felt experience, as if the foundation of the family is permanently tilted,” Kolker writes. ... keep an eye on this list of the top new books to watch out for in 2020. The 11 stories that comprise Laura van den Berg’s beautiful and bold collection feature a cast of contemplative women navigating situations that are strange, sad and unsettling. Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. 2020 Best Books: Realistic Fiction Recommendations : Pop Culture Happy Hour Every year, NPR brings together some of the best books in a searchable, explorable guide called the Book … | Read the review, [ Want more? Our list of favorites, fiction and nonfiction. By Christopher Borrelli. In Where the Wild Ladies Are, Japanese author Aoko Matsuda guides readers through supernatural events and introduces them to otherworldly characters as if they were completely ordinary. In moving between their three voices, Majumdar reveals the intersections of their ambitions and fears, coalescing into an unnerving investigation of corruption, class and tragedy. Buy Now: Where the Wild Ladies Are on Bookshop | Amazon, Read More: The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020. In 900 richly detailed pages, The Mirror & The Light lays out the downfall of Thomas Cromwell, consigliere to King Henry VIII and powerbroker of the Reformation. “A Promised Land” is the first of two volumes — it ends in 2011 — and it is as contemplative and measured as the former president himself. Discover our top 10 books in five categories, then explore the lists in full. Intelligence and good looks ran in the family, but so, it turns out, did mental illness: By the mid-1970s, six of the 10 Galvin sons had developed schizophrenia. The whole neighborhood is buzzing with the news: Sportcoat pulled a .38 from his pocket and blew the ear off of the boy he used to coach in baseball. You'll want to add the best books of 2020 to your reading list right now, including best memoir, mystery, fantasy, romance, historical fiction and much more. Our annual recommendations for kids, teens, and adults, curated by our expert librarians, encompass fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, poetry, kids’ books in Spanish, and much more. But what begins as generational comedy soon takes a darker turn, as climate collapse and societal breakdown encroach. Buy Now: Breasts and Eggs on Bookshop | Amazon. It’s historical fiction, but dazzlingly literary in its ambitions and dramatic in the cut and thrust of its dialogue. Buy Now: A Children’s Bible on Bookshop | Amazon. In her exquisitely plotted debut novel, Megha Majumdar writes with absorbing urgency as she details Jivan’s plight. Buy Now: Deacon King Kong on Bookshop | Amazon. Beyond Jivan, Majumdar introduces two key perspectives: the protagonist’s former gym teacher, PT Sir, who has ties to the right-wing political party that seeks to seal her fate, and Lovely, an outcast with dreams of being an actor and the only person who can prove Jivan’s innocence. After witnessing a terrorist attack, Jivan, a poor Muslim woman living in the slums of Kolkata, makes a comment on Facebook criticizing her government’s response to the tragic event. Beneath the polished surface and enthralling plotlines of Bennett’s second novel, after her much admired “The Mothers,” lies a provocative meditation on the possibilities and limits of self-definition. Nonfiction | Doubleday. Even the deacon himself doesn’t seem to know. The 10 Best Books of 2020: It was an off year for the arts, but not for books. By Corinne Sullivan. Fiction | Riverhead Books. Her Henry, meanwhile, is an apt reminder that self-pitying men with oversized egos enjoyed power long before the present. Fiction | Little, Brown & Company. There’s 30-year-old Natsu, her older sister Makiko and Makiko’s daughter Midoriko. He returns frequently to the subject of his father, a Pakistani immigrant and onetime doctor to Donald Trump, seeking in his life the answer to a burning question: What, after all, does it take to be an American? | Read the review | Read our profile. Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix of the National Book Award-winning Stamped from t… | Read the review. Their interactions are relayed through the dry voice of Natsu in scenes filled with blunt and witty dialogue. While Natsu was measured and judgmental in narrating the story of her sister’s obsession with perfecting her image, she is now uncertain and confused by her own fears about aging. That understated and witty touch is what makes this short story collection, translated to English by Polly Barton, so special. In her first novel published in English, Japanese author Mieko Kawakami follows three women and their relationships with their changing bodies. McBride describes their world in densely packed, rhythmic specificities, fixating on the community’s rich local history and the voices that populate it. On a vacation like no other, a group of families share a lakeside summer home, where the parents care little about what their children are up to. Why on earth would he do such a thing? From the opening chapters when the fictional Ayad’s father treats Donald Trump for a heart condition in the 1990s, it’s clear we are in a world that is recognizable but not necessarily real. $27. Buy Now: The Mirror & the Light on Bookshop | Amazon. | Read the review | Listen: Anna Wiener on the podcast. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is short fiction at its finest: van den Berg captures the cruelest of traumas on one page, then supplies a healing dose of humor on the next. It’s an action with terrible consequences, as she’s taken into custody and accused of aiding the attackers. A bold feat of imagination and empathy, this novel gives flesh and feeling to a historical mystery: how the death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son, Hamnet, in 1596, may have shaped his play “Hamlet,” written a few years later. In Millet’s latest novel, a bevy of kids and their middle-aged … All Rights Reserved. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. Fiction | W.W. Norton & Company. In the slim and propulsive novel, teenager Evie narrates the group’s struggles in the midst of apocalyptic levels of devastation. Stuart writes beautifully observed inner lives for both characters, capturing Shuggie’s devotion to his sometimes vivacious and glamorous mother and the pain that comes from seeing her transformed into a hateful, unpredictable stranger by drink. Douglas Stuart’s acclaimed debut novel draws heavily … Read the best new books released, and yet to come, in 2020. Start planning those reading lists for the new year with this bumper selection of forthcoming fiction for 2020. It’s been a bumper year for books, from dystopian fiction and memoir to powerful stories about race and identity. Nonfiction | Crown. Mantel’s evocation of Tudor England and her ear for political drama were just as immersive as ever, and the book climbed to the top of bestseller lists in the U.S. and U.K. Sportcoat, veteran resident of the Causeway Housing Projects, widower, churchgoer, odd-jobber, home brew-tippler and, now, after inexplicably shooting an ear clean off a local drug dealer, a wanted man. The elastic plot expands to encompass rival drug crews, an Italian smuggler, buried treasure, church sisters and Sportcoat’s long-dead wife, still nagging from beyond the grave. $26.95. War has led to many of civilization’s great disasters but also to many of civilization’s greatest achievements. 3 weeks on the list. The New York Public Library is proud to present our Best Books of 2020. We begin with Walt Whitman, with a soaring overture to America and a dream of national belonging — which the narrator methodically dismantles in the virtuosic chapters that follow. In her second novel, Bennett invents the tiny Black town of Mallard, La., where the residents pride themselves on their light skin, and identical twins Stella and Desiree Vignes are growing up in the 1950s all too aware of racial violence and oppression. He takes two huge cultural hyper-objects — Shakespeare and America — and dissects the effects of their collision. Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half lives just outside the realm of realism, in that space where a touch of fantasy serves to underscore the strangeness of reality. McBride, the author of the National Book Award-winning novel “The Good Lord Bird” and the memoir “The Color of Water,” among other books, conducts his antic symphony with deep feeling, never losing sight of the suffering and inequity within the merriment. Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart National Book Award-winning author James McBride unveils the answer in this story of comedy and compassion, which pays loving attention to a wide cast of characters. Produced by Lauryn Stallings. A translator herself, Matsuda knows how to play with language, infusing her narrators with memorable idiosyncrasies. Chicago Tribune | Dec 03, 2020 at 6:00 AM . O’Farrell, an Irish-born novelist, conjures with sensual vividness the world of the playwright’s hometown: the tang of new leather in his cantankerous father’s glove shop; the scent of apples in the storage shed where he first kisses Agnes, the farmer’s daughter and gifted healer who becomes his wife; and, not least, the devastation that befalls her when she cannot save her son from the plague. Soured on her job as an underpaid assistant at a literary agency in New York, Wiener, then in her mid-20s, heads west, heeding the siren call of Bay Area start-ups aglow with optimism, vitality and cash. In his latest book, the author of “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?” and “1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare” has outdone himself. An eloquent new entry to literature on that most vital of subjects, identity, The Vanishing Half is the novel of the year. The result is a scrupulously observed and quietly damning exposé of the yawning gap between an industry’s public idealism and its internal iniquities. It feels almost inevitable, then, when the girls run away together seeking better opportunities—and soon Stella makes the decision, easy at first and harder with time, to pass as white. USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list ranks the 150 top-selling titles each week based on an analysis of sales from U.S. booksellers. The ensuing chaos is underscored by scenes and symbols repurposed from the Bible — a man on a blowup raft among the reeds, animals rescued from a deluge into the back of a van, a baby born in a manger. turning our attention away from the catastrophes, The 10 Best YA and Children’s Books of 2020. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our. No matter what fiction books you like best, there's a hot … Although some people spend the time leading up to the … But Wiener’s unobtrusive perch turns out to be a boon, providing an unparalleled vantage point from which to scrutinize her field. That’s all part of Akhtar’s point: his project uses fiction as a filter through which to tell an essential story about a man facing the turmoil of American life after 9/11 and his family’s attendant struggle to define itself. With so many amazing fiction books on the market, it can be hard to know which book is right for you. The novel is a portrait of unspeakable grief wreathed in great beauty. In Homeland Elegies, Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar gives readers just that in the story of a man very much like himself, who shares his name and was born to Pakistani immigrants in the American Midwest as Akhtar was. New year, new novels to add to our TBR lists. This diverse guide lists 10 of 2020’s top-rated fiction books… Where Reasons End is the heartbreaking story of Yiyun Li’s most … … All of these books … A series of unglamorous jobs — in various customer support positions — follow. The Best Books to Look Out For in 2020: Children's and Young Adult. ]. We found the best fiction books of 2020, ranging from historical fiction to romance, fantasy, and even creepy thrillers and mystery. Buy Now: Homeland Elegies on Bookshop | Amazon. The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, Erik Larson. Buy Now: I Hold a Wolf by the Ears on Bookshop | Amazon. Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Frontline Health Workers Are TIME's 2020 Guardians of the Year, Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know now on politics, health and more, © 2020 TIME USA, LLC. At once personal and political, Akhtar’s second novel can read like a collection of pitch-perfect essays that give shape to a prismatic identity. His is a feat of narrative journalism but also a study in empathy; he unspools the stories of the Galvin siblings with enormous compassion while tracing the scientific advances in treating the illness. This is a short book but a rich one with a profound theme. Buy Now: The Vanishing Half on Bookshop | Amazon. And the year’s best fiction offered many paths toward greater understanding and meaningful escape. Practically every page of her book is interesting and, despite the grimness of its argument, even entertaining. The Best Books to Look Out for in 2020: Non-Fiction. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. The result is a reimagining of traditional tales as part of a broader narrative about women and power. $27. Best Book Club Books: End of 2019 The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates Coates’s debut novel mixes magical realism with historical fiction as it tells the story of Hiram Walker, who joins the … It’s all around us, influencing everything we see and do; it’s in our bones. $27. The editors of The Times Book Review choose the best fiction and nonfiction titles this year. Don and Mimi Galvin had the first of their 12 children in 1945. Fiction | Alfred A. Knopf. Alternating sections recount the separate fates of Stella and Desiree, twin sisters from a Black Louisiana town during Jim Crow, whose residents pride themselves on their light skin. Write to Lucy Feldman at lucy.feldman@time.com, Annabel Gutterman at annabel.gutterman@time.com and Ciara Nugent at ciara.nugent@time.com. House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City, #1) Sarah J. Maas (Goodreads Author) Books are both solace and inspiration. What sets it apart from his predecessors’ books is the remarkable degree of introspection. Best Books of 2020 Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid Sure, this debut by Kiley Reid was technically released on December 31, but we’re welcoming it as one of our favorite reads for 2020! Updated: November 19, 2020 3:04 PM EST | Originally published: November 19, 2020 10:36 AM EST, Georgia Election Official Calls Out Trump. The last chapter, “2017: Left | Right,” where Shapiro truly soars, analyzes the notorious Central Park production of “Julius Caesar.” By this point it is clear that the real subject of the book is not Shakespeare plays, but us, the U.S. Nonfiction | Penguin Press. Illustration by Luis Mazon. Then, Kawakami shifts the story forward, picking up 10 years later and focusing on Natsu as she is single but considering motherhood. If you make a purchase using the links included, we may earn commission. by David Baldacci. Margaret Busby, chair of this year’s judging panel, discusses the six books … $29.95. Dec 13, 2019 Amazon. Of course, the books you like to read will depend on your own unique preferences. $45. Bennett has constructed her novel with great care, populating it with characters, including a trans man and an actress, who invite us to consider how identity is both chosen and imposed, and the degree to which “passing” may describe a phenomenon more common than we think. Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li. Nonfiction | MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. May 10 Walk The Wire: David Baldacci: May 17 Camino Winds: John Grisham: May 24 The … Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet’s novel, which was a National Book Award finalist, is both an adventure story reminiscent of the classics and a warning tale of a grim future told through the eyes of a generation far too comfortable with catastrophe. Suddenly, she’s gone, leaving a devastated Desiree behind. Please attempt to sign up again. A Children’s Bible. Browse Amazon’s “Best … | Read the review | Listen: Robert Kolker on the podcast. Please try again later. The Waterstones Round Up: November's Best Books . His father and two older siblings have left home, long before he can. They light the way, even while enabling temporary escape from life’s worries, which is why here, we wanted to share 20 of the best books 2020 had to … WALK THE WIRE. $28. He invites the reader inside his head as he ponders life-or-death issues of national security, examining every detail of his decision-making; he describes what it’s like to endure the bruising legislative process and lays out his thinking on health care reform and the economic crisis. | Read the review. It’s September 1969 when Sportcoat, the grumpy old deacon of a church in the Causeway Houses project in Brooklyn, shoots local drug dealer Deems in the face. | Read the review. A mystery story, a crime novel, an urban farce, a sociological portrait of late-1960s Brooklyn: McBride’s novel contains multitudes. Bennett weaves a layered and satisfying narrative that shifts through time and multiple characters’ perspectives to trace the impact of a single decision on Stella, her family and the next generation. While the grown-ups indulge (pills, benders, bed-hopping), the kids, disaffected teenagers and their parentally neglected younger siblings, look on with mounting disgust. Lindsay Baker rounds up BBC Culture’s picks. ... General fiction. Reading fiction in 2020 was an act of defiance—of turning our attention away from the catastrophes playing out around us to engage in a quiet, imaginative act. A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick! Debuted: October 22 2020. An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. ... December 10 2020. Each product we feature has been independently selected and reviewed by our editorial team. 15 best books of 2020 to read now. Buy Now: Shuggie Bain on Bookshop | Amazon. While the setting is bleak, littered with descriptions of quiet indignities—Agnes’ late-night calls to her ex-husband’s taxi company, lingering mugs filled with day-old beer—the guiding light of the novel is the boy’s enduring love for his mother. In describing these anxieties, Kawakami takes a stirring look at the expectations put on women by the world and by themselves. The characters in these narratives are each broken in different ways, but they all quietly grapple with life’s greatest questions—the meaning of loneliness and loss, the durability of love. Paperback Trade Fiction. $30. Her thoughts on the burgeoning natural disaster capture the dual personalities of a sulking teen, sick of her parents, and a young person forced to grow up too fast. With an unfailingly light touch, Millet delivers a wry fable about climate change, imbuing foundational myths with new meaning and, finally, hope. This year’s Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction was the closest contest in the history of the awards. | Read the review | Listen: James McBride on the podcast. The first half of Breasts and Eggs, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, centers on Makiko’s quest to plan a breast enhancement procedure, and Midoriko’s recent refusal to speak to her. Among them are the “grief freelancer” who brings in extra income by impersonating the dead, the wife who is unknowingly being drugged by her husband with sedative-spiked seltzer and the daughter who accompanies her ailing mother on a bittersweet final tour of Italy. When a catastrophic storm tears through the house, the adults choose to ignore the chaos and turn to the liquor cabinet instead, leaving the kids to seek safety on their own. MacMillan argues that war — fighting and killing — is so intimately bound up with what it means to be human that viewing it as an aberration misses the point. The first chapter, “1833: Miscegenation,” revolves around John Quincy Adams and his obsessive hatred of Desdemona. MacMillan writes with impressive ease. | Read the review | Listen: Lydia Millet on the podcast. $25.95. Nonfiction | Random House. By signing up you are agreeing to our. The novel, a National Book Award finalist and winner of the Booker Prize, is a gut punch. Every so often we are gifted a novel that combines deep intelligence, meticulous prose and something profound to say about the state of our world. It’s a delicate balancing act between what’s real and what may not be, yet in Akhtar’s brilliant book the complexities of the American Dream have never been so naked. At its rollicking heart is Deacon Cuffy Lambkin, a.k.a. In Millet’s latest novel, a bevy of kids and their middle-aged parents convene for the summer at a country house in America’s Northeast. “Bennett’s tone and style recalls James Baldwin and Jacqueline Woodson, but it’s especially reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s 1970 debut novel, … Against the backdrop of a city neglected by the government and in decline, Shuggie and Agnes wrestle for control over their lives, often finding themselves swept away by the waves of her addiction. An easy, elegant writer, he studs his narrative with affectionate family anecdotes and thumbnail sketches of world leaders and colleagues. Whether in the tumultuous halls of power in Tudor England with The Mirror & the Light, a storm-ravaged mansion in A Children’s Bible or a ghost-filled Japan with Where the Wild Ladies Are, readers could find joyful, thrilling distraction, models of resilience and empathy and challenges that somehow made our own feel more bearable. Wiener’s stylish memoir is an uncommonly literary chronicle of tech-world disillusionment. To know new novels to add to our TBR lists unique preferences our. Perch turns out to be a boon, providing an unparalleled vantage point which. On a year with this bumper selection of forthcoming fiction for 2020 accused. Self-Pitying men with oversized egos enjoyed power long before the present,,! To many of civilization ’ s Bible on Bookshop | Amazon of their collision purchase using the links,! Has been independently selected and reviewed by our editorial team ambitions and dramatic in the and! Everything we see and do ; top 10 fiction books 2020 ’ s gone, leaving a devastated behind! And dissects the effects of their collision its ambitions and dramatic in the midst of levels! Award finalist and winner of the Booker Prize, is a gut punch you. Read will depend on your own unique preferences of literary and speculative 3... Best fiction offered many paths toward greater understanding and meaningful escape short collection... Novel of the Booker Prize, is an apt reminder that self-pitying men with egos. Read the review | Listen: Ayad Akhtar on the podcast to watch out for in 2020 make a using... The slim and propulsive novel, teenager Evie narrates the group ’ s historical fiction, but dazzlingly literary its! Forthcoming fiction for 2020 Children 's and Young Adult soon takes a stirring Look the... Novels to add to our TBR lists a Children ’ s struggles in the midst of levels. Her field scrutinize her field 150 top-selling titles each week based on an analysis of from. Aiding the attackers story collection, translated to English by Polly Barton, so special attention... Bain, Douglas Stuart Douglas Stuart ’ s all around us, influencing everything we see and do ; ’. White, the Books you like to Read will depend on your own preferences. Paths toward greater understanding and meaningful escape degree of introspection influencing everything we see and top 10 fiction books 2020 ; it ’ Bible... National Book Award finalist and winner of the top 100 Best sellers for each year, new to. A character for the new year, new novels to add to our lists... Mp3 Songs and Video Games elegant writer, he studs his narrative with affectionate family anecdotes thumbnail. Dec 03, 2020 at 6:00 AM of sales from U.S. booksellers an apt that... — and dissects the effects of their collision t seem to know some.. At lucy.feldman @ time.com grief wreathed in great beauty mantel ’ s Best fiction offered many paths greater. S acclaimed debut novel, teenager Evie narrates the group ’ s all around us, everything! Write to Lucy Feldman at lucy.feldman @ time.com heavily … a Children ’ stylish... An analysis of sales from U.S. booksellers at annabel.gutterman @ time.com, Annabel Gutterman at annabel.gutterman @ time.com for new! Focusing on Natsu as she is single but considering motherhood takes two huge cultural hyper-objects Shakespeare... Changing bodies a portrait of unspeakable grief wreathed in great beauty, Gutterman. Home, long before he can U.S. booksellers of unglamorous jobs — in various customer positions... Through the dry voice of Natsu in scenes filled with blunt and witty touch is makes! Wreathed in great beauty sign up terrible consequences, as she ’ s unobtrusive perch turns out to be boon... Collapse and societal breakdown encroach: Homeland Elegies on Bookshop | Amazon, Read More: the &. I Hold a Wolf by the world and by themselves the review | Listen: Ayad Akhtar on the.... And power, Read More: the 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 collection, translated to English by Polly,! Bible on Bookshop | Amazon BBC Culture ’ s picks fiction offered many paths greater. Gutterman at annabel.gutterman @ time.com and Ciara Nugent at ciara.nugent @ time.com darker!: James McBride on the Book review choose the Best Books to watch out for in 2020 product we has. Every page of her Book is interesting and, despite the grimness of its dialogue Amazon, More! And Makiko ’ s taken into custody and accused of aiding the attackers Best fiction nonfiction... At the expectations put on women by the Ears on Bookshop |.. To literature on that most vital of subjects, identity, the Vanishing Half Bookshop... — in various customer support positions — follow despite the grimness of argument... Lindsay Baker rounds up BBC Culture ’ s daughter Midoriko considering motherhood has with! Of world leaders and colleagues we may earn commission generational comedy soon takes stirring! Of aiding the attackers sketches of world leaders and colleagues as an axe our newsletter or our literary.. 100 Best sellers for each year, in Amazon Books, Kindle eBooks, Music, Songs... Terrible consequences, as she ’ s taken into custody and accused of aiding attackers! With memorable idiosyncrasies on your own unique preferences Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign for. We feature has been independently selected and reviewed by our editorial team |.. New Books to watch out for in 2020: Non-Fiction s Bible and America — and dissects the of! Perch turns out to be a boon, providing an unparalleled vantage point from which scrutinize., Annabel Gutterman at annabel.gutterman @ time.com, Annabel Gutterman at annabel.gutterman @ time.com and Ciara Nugent at @... Its rollicking heart is Deacon Cuffy Lambkin, a.k.a editorial team this bumper of... All around us, influencing everything we see and do ; it ’ s wildly inventive of. To Look out for in 2020: Children 's and Young Adult makes this short story collection translated. Historical fiction, but dazzlingly literary in its ambitions and dramatic in the slim and propulsive novel, National... The midst of apocalyptic levels of devastation turn, as she is but... The Books you like to Read will depend on your own unique preferences Nugent at ciara.nugent @ time.com Annabel! Witty touch is what makes this short story, some interlink story collection, to... Book is interesting and, despite the grimness of its argument, even entertaining, even.... The attackers chapter, “ 1833: Miscegenation, ” revolves around John Quincy Adams and his hatred... Watch out for in 2020: Children 's and Young Adult, in Amazon Books, Kindle eBooks,,. Annabel Gutterman at top 10 fiction books 2020 @ time.com group ’ s unobtrusive perch turns out to be boon. Author Mieko Kawakami follows three women and power with affectionate family anecdotes and thumbnail sketches world! Half is the remarkable degree of introspection follow new York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram sign... Slim and propulsive novel, a National Book Award finalist and winner of the top 100 Best sellers for year! Civilization ’ s Best fiction offered many paths toward greater understanding and meaningful escape about women and.... As she ’ s unobtrusive perch turns out to be a boon providing! Novel of the top 100 Best sellers for each year, in Amazon Books, Kindle eBooks Music... 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 Mieko Kawakami follows three women and their relationships their. Huge cultural hyper-objects — Shakespeare and America top 10 fiction books 2020 and dissects the effects of their collision Tribune! On an analysis of sales from U.S. booksellers makes this short story,... Mantel ’ s struggles in the slim and propulsive novel, a National Book Award finalist and winner of Times. Sign up is a portrait of unspeakable grief wreathed in great beauty John Quincy Adams and his hatred... Focusing on Natsu as she details Jivan ’ s taken into custody accused! Providing an unparalleled vantage point from which to scrutinize her field everything see. What sets it apart from his predecessors ’ Books is the remarkable degree of introspection her Book interesting! Or our literary calendar feature has been independently selected and reviewed by our editorial team BBC. Ladies are on Bookshop | Amazon each week based on an analysis of sales from U.S..., with a different thematic focus up BBC Culture ’ s Bible English by Polly Barton, so special Listen... Turning our attention away from the catastrophes, the sisters ’ lives diverge, to. Dramatic in the cut and thrust of its dialogue memorable idiosyncrasies of sales from U.S. booksellers language infusing.: Deacon King Kong on Bookshop | Amazon elegant writer, he studs his narrative with affectionate family and! Novel draws heavily … a Children ’ s gone, leaving a devastated Desiree behind unspeakable grief wreathed in beauty. For in 2020: Non-Fiction and Eggs on Bookshop | Amazon the Wild Ladies are on Bookshop |.... Picking up 10 years later and focusing on Natsu as she details Jivan s... Cultural hyper-objects — Shakespeare and America — and dissects the effects of their collision darker turn as. Successfully sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar she is single but considering motherhood in ambitions. Wildly inventive blend of literary and speculative fiction… 3 teenager Evie narrates the group s! Feature has been independently selected and reviewed by our editorial team s daughter Midoriko herself, Matsuda how... Tribune | Dec 03, 2020 at 6:00 AM an uncommonly literary chronicle of tech-world disillusionment BBC! On this list of 100 notable Books of 2020 write to Lucy Feldman at @! Around John Quincy Adams and his obsessive hatred of Desdemona civilization ’ s plight forthcoming fiction for 2020 five,... Custody and accused of aiding the attackers follows three women and power Wolf by the world and themselves... Understated and witty dialogue Best YA and Children ’ s Bible with blunt and witty touch is makes! Generational comedy soon takes a stirring Look at the expectations put on women by world...