ny times book review 10 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 Books We Read in 2020

“ 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

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• Seen & Heard

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 Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field

The New York Times Best Books of 2020

• The Death of Jesus , J.M. Coetzee (Viking)
• The Death of Vivek Oji , Akwaeke Emezi (Riverhead)
• Red Pill , Hari Kunzru (Knopf)
• A Children’s Bible , Lydia Millet (Norton)
• Tokyo Ueno Station , Yu Miri, translated by Morgan Giles (Riverhead)
• Earthlings , Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Grove)
• Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 , Cho Nam-Joo, translated by Jamie Chang (Liveright)
• Little Eyes , Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell (Riverhead)
• Sharks in the Time of Saviors , Kawai Strong Washburn (Farrar, Straus, Giroux)
• Memorial , Bryan Washington (Riverhead)
• How Much of These Hills Is Gold , C Pam Zhang (Riverhead)

A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet (Norton) is also among their ten best books of the year . For more information, see  The New York Times  website .

©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.

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3 thoughts on “ the new york times best books of 2020 ”.

The link for A Children’s Bible shows the wrong book on Amazon.

Stay healthy 🙂

Tim Sollén Sweden

Thanks, we’ve corrected it!

How about NOT linking to Amazon and instead linking to Bookshop.org?

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The Best Books of 2020 So Far

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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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Write to Annabel Gutterman at [email protected]

Booklist Queen

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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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Five things to know about Tim Walz

On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris decided on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate in her bid for the White House.

Minnesota voters gathered outside Governor Tim Walz’s residence react as Walz was announced as the running mate of Kamala Harris in the U.S. presidential election. (AP Video by Mark Vancleave)

Vice President Kamala Harris has picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate, turning to a Midwestern governor, military veteran and union supporter who helped enact an ambitious Democratic agenda for his state.

FILE - Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, right, laughs as he stands with Fridley, Minn., Mayor Scott Lund during a visit to the Cummins Power Generation Facility in Fridley, Minn., Monday, April 3, 2023. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

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FILE - Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz applauds as President Joe Biden speaks at Dutch Creek Farms in Northfield, Minn., Nov. 1, 2023. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

FILE - Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz listens after meeting with President Joe Biden, July 3, 2024, at the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaks during a news conference for the Biden-Harris campaign discussing the Project 2025 plan during the third day of the 2024 Republican National Convention near the Fiserv Forum, Wednesday, July 17, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Joe Lamberti)

FILE - Minnesota Governor Tim Walz greets reporters before Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at Planned Parenthood, March 14, 2024, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/Adam Bettcher, File)

FILE - Rep. Betty McCullum, D-Minn., left, and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, listen as Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at Planned Parenthood, March 14, 2024, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/Adam Bettcher, File)

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MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris has decided on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate in her bid for the White House. The 60-year-old Democrat and military veteran rose to the forefront with a series of plain-spoken television appearances in the days after President Joe Biden decided not to seek a second term. He has made his state a bastion of liberal policy and, this year, one of the few states to protect fans buying tickets online for Taylor Swift concerts and other live events.

Some things to know about Walz:

Walz comes from rural America

It would be hard to find a more vivid representative of the American heartland than Walz. Born in West Point, Nebraska, a community of about 3,500 people northwest of Omaha, Walz joined the Army National Guard and became a teacher in Nebraska.

He and his wife moved to Mankato in southern Minnesota in the 1990s. That’s where he taught social studies and coached football at Mankato West High School, including for the 1999 team that won the first of the school’s four state championships. He still points to his union membership there.

Walz served 24 years in the Army National Guard, rising to command sergeant major, one of the highest enlisted ranks in the military, although he didn’t complete all the training before he retired so his rank for benefits purposes was set at master sergeant.

He has a proven ability to connect with conservative voters

In his first race for Congress, Walz upset a Republican incumbent. That was in 2006, when he won in a largely rural, southern Minnesota congressional district against six-term Rep. Gil Gutknecht. Walz capitalized on voter anger with then-President George W. Bush and the Iraq war.

During six terms in the U.S. House, Walz championed veterans’ issues.

He’s also shown a down-to-earth side, partly through social media video posts with his daughter, Hope. One last fall showed them trying a Minnesota State Fair ride, “The Slingshot,” after they bantered about fair food and her being a vegetarian.

He could help the ticket in key Midwestern states

While Walz isn’t from one of the crucial “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where both sides believe they need to win, he’s right next door. He also could ensure that Minnesota stays in the hands of Democrats.

That’s important because former President Donald Trump has portrayed Minnesota as being in play this year, even though the state hasn’t elected a Republican to statewide office since 2006. A GOP presidential candidate hasn’t carried the state since President Richard Nixon’s landslide in 1972, but Trump has already campaigned there .

When Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton decided not to seek a third term in 2018, Walz campaigned and won the office on a “One Minnesota” theme.

Walz also speaks comfortably about issues that matter to voters in the Rust Belt. He’s been a champion of Democratic causes, including union organizing, workers’ rights and a $15-an-hour minimum wage.

He has experience with divided government

In his first term as governor, Walz faced a Legislature split between a Democratic-led House and a Republican-controlled Senate that resisted his proposals to use higher taxes to boost money for schools, health care and roads. But he and lawmakers brokered compromises that made the state’s divided government still seem productive.

Bipartisan cooperation became tougher during his second year as he used the governor’s emergency power during the COVID-19 pandemic to shutter businesses and close schools. Republicans pushed back and forced out some agency heads. Republicans also remain critical of Walz over what they see as his slow response to sometimes violent unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.

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Things got easier for Walz in his second term, after he defeated Republican Scott Jensen , a physician known nationally as a vaccine skeptic. Democrats gained control of both legislative chambers, clearing the way for a more liberal course in state government, aided by a huge budget surplus.

Walz and lawmakers eliminated nearly all of the state abortion restrictions enacted in the past by Republicans, protected gender-affirming care for transgender youth and legalized the recreational use of marijuana.

Rejecting Republican pleas that the state budget surplus be used to cut taxes, Democrats funded free school meals for children, free tuition at public colleges for students in families earning under $80,000 a year, a paid family and medical leave program and health insurance coverage regardless of a person’s immigration status.

He has an ear for sound-bite politics

Walz called Republican nominee Donald Trump and running mate JD Vance “just weird” in an MSNBC interview last month and the Democratic Governors Association — which Walz chairs — amplified the point in a post on X . Walz later reiterated the characterization on CNN, citing Trump’s repeated mentions of the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter from the film “Silence of the Lambs” in stump speeches.

The word quickly morphed into a theme for Harris and other Democrats and has a chance to be a watchword of the undoubtedly weird 2024 election.

Hanna reported from Topeka, Kansas.

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Italian Boxer Quits Bout, Sparking Furor Over Gender at Olympics

The Italian, Angela Carini, stopped fighting only 46 seconds into her matchup against Imane Khelif of Algeria, who had been barred from a women’s event last year.

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By Tariq Panja and Jeré Longman

Reporting from Paris

An Italian boxer abandoned her bout at the Paris Olympics after only 46 seconds on Thursday, refusing to continue after taking a heavy punch from an Algerian opponent who had been disqualified from last year’s world championships over questions about her eligibility to compete in women’s sports.

The Italian boxer, Angela Carini, withdrew after her Algerian opponent, Imane Khelif, landed a powerful blow that struck Carini square in the face. Carini paused for a moment, then turned her back to Khelif and walked to her corner. Her coaches quickly signaled that she would not continue, and the referee stopped the fight.

Khelif, 25, was permitted to compete at the Olympics even though she had been barred last year after boxing officials said she did not meet eligibility requirements to compete in a women’s event. Another athlete also barred from last year’s world championships under similar circumstances, Lin Yu-ting, has also been cleared to fight in Paris.

The International Boxing Association, which ran those championships and ordered the disqualifications, offered little insight into the reasons for the boxers’ removal, saying in a statement that the disqualifications came after “the athletes did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test .”

The association said that test, the specifics of which it said were confidential, “conclusively indicated that both athletes did not meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors.”

Those rules, which the boxing association adopted for the 2016 Rio Games, are the same ones the International Olympic Committee is operating under as the authority running the boxing tournament at the Paris Games. But the rules, the I.O.C. confirmed, do not include language about testosterone or restrictions on gender eligibility beyond a single line saying “gender tests may be conducted.”

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