The 50 best books of 2020
The Telegraph's regular book reviewers – as well as writing specialist guides to 2020's best history, crime fiction, poetry, music books and other genres – have each put forward their own ranked list of suggestions for the best books of the year. Compiled by the Telegraph Books team from those suggestions, here is our definitive guide to this year's essential reading. Please use the comments section to suggest your own favourites.
50. English Pastoral by James Rebanks: The author of The Shepherd’s Life returns with this wonderful, nostalgic tale of how farming has changed for his family in Cumbria over three generations. Read the full review. Buy the book.
49. Summer by Ali Smith: The final novel in Smith’s seasonal quartet is a triumph of storytelling, setting the bitter rifts in post-referendum England against the connective possibilities of art. Read the full review. Buy the book.
48. My Wild and Sleepless Nights by Clover Stroud: In her electrically candid memoir, Stroud explains why, at 38, she decided to have a fifth child. Her account of childbirth is raw, elemental and beautiful. Read the full review. Buy the book.
47. Stephen Hawking by Leonard Mlodinow: Physicist Mlodinow provides a warm and three-dimensional portrait of his friend Hawking, showing him not just as a genius but as a mischievous and stubborn human being. Read the full review. Buy the book.
46. Haldane by John Campbell: A superb study of the Scot who transformed Britain’s universities and overhauled its army in time for the 1914 war, but was hounded out of office for supposed German sympathies. Read the full review. Buy the book.
45. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett: Old-fashioned epic meets modern identity politics in this excellent novel about the mixed fortunes of light-skinned black twins born in 1950s Louisiana. Read the full review. Buy the book.
44. Let’s Do It by Jasper Rees: “I wasn’t quite normal, so I exaggerated my oddness,” said Victoria Wood. This impeccable official biography shows how the comic scavenged her strange childhood for material. Read the full review. Buy the book.
43. Going Dark by Julia Ebner: Ebner goes undercover to investigate the web’s wild-eyed subcultures, from jihadi brides and subservient “Trad Wives” to neo-Nazi hipsters and QAnon conspiracy theorists. Read the full review. Buy the book.
42. Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders by Jane Robinson: A cracking history of the British women who broke glass ceilings – like Margaret Partridge, the first woman to wire an English village for electric light. Read the full review. Buy the book.
41. Broken Greek by Pete Paphides: The rock critic’s memoir is a love letter to cheesy 1970s pop, which “rode into my interior world like the cavalry” and helped him – after nearly four years mute – to speak. Read the full review. Buy the book.
40. Mussolini’s War by John Gooch: Gooch lays bare the sheer incompetence with which Il Duce ran Italy’s campaigns, and his preposterous belief that a “strong fascist spirit” would create an invincible army. Read the full review. Buy the book.
39. Hollywood’s Eve by Lili Anolik: A stylish biography of the forgotten LA writer Eve Babitz, who ate muffins with Warhol, drank chartreuse with Dalí, played chess naked with Duchamp and slept with Jim Morrison. Read the full review. Buy the book.
38. The Great Pretender by Susannah Cahalan: David Rosenhan, whose 1973 paper “On Being Sane in Insane Places” shook the world of psychology, is revealed as a fraud in this remarkable study. Read the full review. Buy the book.
37. Head, Hand, Heart by David Goodhart: We put too much value on university education (“head”), and underrate the “hand” and “heart” industries – i.e. key workers – Goodhart argues, in a book every MP should read. Read the full review. Buy the book.
36. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell: Set in Stratford in 1596, O’Farrell’s Women’s Prize-winning novel spirals out from the death of Shakespeare’s son into an enchanting, richly detailed portrait of his family life. Read the full review. Buy the book.
35. Britain’s War: A New World, 1942-1947 by Daniel Todman: Todman’s history puts the thoughts and feelings of ordinary men and women at the forefront, capturing the public mood. Read the full review. Buy the book.
34. Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils by David Farrier: What might survive of us in the distant future? Mostly chicken bones, says Farrier, in a study that is as much about stories as sediments. Read the full review. Buy the book.
33. Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler: Tyler’s irresistibly readable 23rd novel follows Micah, a socially inept, OCD-ish IT man whose orderly life is turned upside down by the arrival of a son. Read the full review. Buy the book.
32. Greed is Dead by John Kay and Paul Collier: In a provocative but thought-provoking and nuanced argument, Collier and Kay argue that our culture of hyper-centralisation is choking us. Read the full review. Buy the book.
31. Ravenna by Judith Herrin: Herrin takes us back to the sixth-century city where European Christendom was forged, in a captivating history of the Western Roman Empire’s glittering capital. Read the full review. Buy the book.
30. Cleanness by Garth Greenwell: A companion piece to his What Belongs to You, Greenwell’s touching novel is a series of elegant, introspective vignettes from the life of a gay American teacher in Sofia. Read the full review. Buy the book.
29. Putin’s People by Catherine Belton: Ex-Financial Times correspondent Belton reveals the staggering extent of post-Soviet graft: how City of London lawyers and money-launderers have salted away billions. Read the full review. Buy the book.
28. The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante: Ferrante’s follow-up to the Neapolitan novels exposes a tangle of deceit in a middle-class family, seen through the eyes of the teenage Giovanna. Read the full review. Buy the book.
27. Difficult Women by Helen Lewis: Lewis’s “history of feminism in 11 fights” celebrates trailblazing 20th-century women, without simplifying their complex lives or glossing over their personal faults. Read the full review. Buy the book.
26. One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown: A brilliant humorist, Brown juxtaposes leading players in the pop revolution with forgotten figures like drummer Jimmie Nicol. Read the full review. Buy the book.
25. The Idea of the Brain by Matthew Cobb: Our fanciest new technology is always thought to explain the brain, but the organ is more mind-bogglingly complex than anything we can build, says Cobb. Read the full review. Buy the book.
24. The Nine Lives of Pakistan by Declan Walsh: Pakistan’s spy network, the ISI, kicked foreign correspondent Walsh out of the country. Find out why in his study of the state’s blood-soaked recent history. Read the full review. Buy the book.
23. Munkey Diaries by Jane Birkin: The actress’s eye-popping memoir takes her from lost teenager, trapped in a sexless marriage with John Barry, to France, and the whirlwind of Serge Gainsbourg. Read the full review. Buy the book.
22. Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald: Macdonald’s follow-up to H Is for Hawk is a lyrical study of swifts. Drinking, washing and mating on the wing, these birds are “the closest things to aliens on Earth”, she writes. Read the full review. Buy the book.
21. Motherwell by Deborah Orr: In this beautiful, funny and moving memoir, Orr, who died last year, told the story of her tumultuous life through the objects found in the drawers of her parents’ old bureau. Read the full review. Buy the book.
20. Red Comet by Heather Clark: Sylvia Plath’s story has been overshadowed by her death, but Clark’s surprisingly uplifting biography emphasises her lust for life, her ambition to succeed as wife, mother and poet. Read the full review. Buy the book.
19. Weather by Jenny Offill: Offill’s uncannily realistic novel is a triumph: it takes the form of a Brooklyn librarian’s jittery interior monologue about climate change and life under Trump. Read the full review. Buy the book.
18. Gladius by Guy de la Bédoyère: A remarkably precise picture of life in the Roman army – how they were armed and billeted, how they built their great, straight roads, and what they did for sexual relief. Read the full review. Buy the book.
17. Look Again by David Bailey: At 82, the celebrity photographer looks back at his wild life in a memoir that reveals him as a monstrous narcissist – but a wonderfully entertaining one. Read the full review. Buy the book.
16. Real Life by Brandon Taylor: This Booker-shortlisted debut novel follows the interior life of a black biochemist at a US university grappling with the racism of his peers, in luminously self-aware prose. Read the full review. Buy the book.
15. Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose: Rose’s brilliantly unconventional 1983 study of five Victorian marriages (including those of Charles Dickens and George Eliot) is finally back in print. Read the full review. Buy the book.
14. The Number Bias by Sanne Blauw: Dutch economist Blauw looks at the use and abuse of statistics, from Florence Nightingale’s virtuoso use of graphs in Crimea to tobacco companies’ deliberately misleading data. Read the full review. Buy the book.
13. Boris Johnson: The Gambler by Tom Bower: Catty, yet sympathetic towards its subject, Bower’s colourful biography traces the PM’s complex character back to his unhappily unorthodox childhood. Read the full review. Buy the book.
12. Black Wave by Kim Ghattas: With testimony from a remarkable range of interviewees, Ghattas charts the hostility between Saudi Arabia and Iran from the 1979 Islamic revolution to the present day. Read the full review. Buy the book.
11. Sing Backwards and Weep by Mark Lanegan: Singer-songwriter Lanegan’s starkly written and savagely honest addiction memoir rips the lid off rock’s romanticisation of heroin. Read the full review. Buy the book.
10. House of Glass by Hadley Freeman: A history of the Jewish 20th century in microcosm: Freeman traces her family’s progress from Polish shtetl to Paris and America, and their fates under Nazi occupation. Read the full review. Buy the book.
9. The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel: The final novel in Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy follows Thomas Cromwell’s last years – and vividly conjures every detail of life in Tudor England. Read the full review. Buy the book.
8. The Habsburgs by Martyn Rady: An epic, masterful history of the rise of the dynasty who within 500 years became the Holy Roman Emperors and the masters of Central Europe, Spain and even Mexico. Read the full review. Buy the book.
7. The Great Godden by Meg Rosoff: Rosoff’s young adult novel is a joyful, generous coming-of-age story about a teenager who falls for the son of a famous actress, during a family summer holiday by the sea. Read the full review. Buy the book.
6. The Less Dead by Denise Mina: The crime novel of the year – about reopening a decades-old serial killer cold case – has a genuine stink of sulphur, and black comedy is all you'll get in the way of comfort. Read the full review. Buy the book.
5. Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake: A fascinating survey of the wild and weird kingdom of fungi, which enable trees to talk to one another, humans to bake bread, and ants to become zombies. Read the full review. Buy the book.
4. The Lonely Century by Noreena Hertz: Social media isolates us, our work atomises us, even street furniture prevents us gathering. The economist delivers an eloquent call to arms: only connect. Read the full review. Buy the book.
3. Thinking Again by Jan Morris: The sparkling, painfully brave diaries of the late, great Jan Morris: “Watching my own decline, making fun of it, exploring its ironies and its moments of beauty – all this helps.” Read the full review. Buy the book.
2. The Ratline by Philippe Sands: Sands tracks down the truth about Nazi Otto Wächter, who oversaw a series of atrocities in wartime Poland. His chilling investigation takes us inside the mind of a committed racist. Read the full review. Buy the book.
1. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart: Our book of the year is this astonishing novel about a little boy in 1980s Glasgow’s filthy tenements. Look past the bleak précis: it will scramble your heart and expand your mind. Read the full review. Buy the book.
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