These Are the Best Books of 2020, According to O, The Oprah Magazine
Books are both solace and inspiration. 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 offer.
Czech writer Milan Kundera once said, “The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals.” The 13 transporting, captivating novels on this list provide some of that paradise right now. But if you prefer your literary trysts brief and brilliant, you’ll be seduced by the two standout short story collections featured here.
This year was also remarkable for prescient, perspective-altering nonfiction—guides that help us navigate the seismic cultural shifts we face and find the way forward—as well as for wondrous poetry that rabble-rouses or prompts stillness and awe.
2020 also had some particularly unprecedented challenges for bookstores amid this pandemic. Many have innovated to survive, substituting in-store author signings for remote events, communicating with their customers via Instagram and other platforms, and doubling down on their online distribution efforts. Others have had to close.
It is our hope, however, though that some of our 2020 favorites will become yours as well—and that you’ll nourish the businesses that do so much to raise our consciousness and feed our imaginations by purchasing some or all of these books for you, your family, and friends.
The more things change, the more at least one thing remains the same: As Oprah puts it, "every page of every new book can open us up to a new universe." Books open our eyes, expand our hearts, and deepen our understanding of one another. Happy reading.
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song ed. by Kevin Young
This monumental volume, assembled by the poet and newly appointed director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, is long overdue. It opens with verse, first published in 1773, by Phillis Wheatley, who was sent to America via the Middle Passage and enslaved yet went on to learn English and commence the African American poetic tradition. The late June Jordan described the proliferation of Black poetry in America as “the difficult miracle,” and that miracle receives glorious tribute here.
A Beautiful Crime by Christopher Bollen
Imbued with the chiaroscuro intrigue of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley series, Bollen’s fourth novel centers on a pair of new lovers who travel to Venice—a place of “fugitive magic” that’s “built to trick and confuse”—in an attempt to con a rich man out of his fortune. What unfurls across this seductive mystery, like the Floating City itself, is “a labyrinth of deceits.” Read our full review of A Beautiful Crime.
The Boy in the Field by Margot Livesey
Teenage siblings Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan stumble upon a young man, bleeding and unconscious, amid bales of straw near their home outside Oxford, England, in the fall of 1999. Their discrete reactions to the discovery—chronicled in chapters from each of their points of view—force family secrets into the open, destabilizing relationships that had seemed unshakable. With a pointillist’s eye and a detective’s nose, Livesey has produced a novel that is gorgeous in its lyricism and as kinetic as a whodunit.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
The second book by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Warmth of Other Suns is truly a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, a mind-shifting historical epic that upends views of our country’s foundations, especially surrounding inequality. “Race, in the United States,” Wilkerson writes, “is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin.” Drawing parallels between India’s ancient caste system, the Third Reich, and Jim Crow, the 86th Oprah’s Book Club selection offers a blueprint for comprehending—and rehabilitating—the flawed structures we’ve inherited. Read an excerpt of Caste and an interview with Wilkerson.
The Cold Millions by Jess Walter
The former reporter and author of Beautiful Ruins has devised an electrifying historical adventure–cum–social novel centered on a 1909 labor dispute and free speech battle in Spokane, his hometown. The Dolan brothers—charismatic, headstrong Gig and the sweet-tempered, younger Rye—are drawn into a brutal conflict, spurred on by hoboes, vaudevillians, and protofeminists amid a booming city that’s “like the intersection of Frontier and Civilized, the final gasp of a thing before it turned into something else.” Read our full review of The Cold Millions.
Deacon King Kong by James McBride
National Book Award–winning author McBride is also a jazz musician, and this raucous, poignant, humanity-embracing novel set in a Brooklyn housing project in 1969 reads like a sax solo, all riffs, unlikely juxtapositions, and sweet, piercing high notes. The backdrop for this ode to hard-swilling pals Sportcoat and Hot Sausage and saintly, no-nonsense Hettie—and the many other colorful characters who inhabit these pages—is a poor churchgoing community that welcomes all form of sinner. That may explain the sense of joy and love emanating from every page. Read an excerpt of Deacon King Kong.
A Girl is A Body of Water by Jennifer Mansubuga Makumbi
In 1970s Uganda under Idi Amin, a girl can expect only to grow up to be a wife and mother, silent and supportive no matter what. And yet Kirabo, raised by her grandparents and others (including a villager believed to be a witch), hears and heeds the call of female ancestors and the women warriors of her country’s folklore. Kirabo’s odyssey makes for a riveting, exuberant novel, a coming-of-age like no other.
Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
In this piercing, propulsive autofiction, a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, the son of Pakistani Muslim immigrants, dissects his father’s bizarre attraction to Donald Trump and uses that infatuation as a metaphor through which to excavate—and explode—the notion of the American dream: “We have been the earthly garden, the abundant idyll.... It’s always been a myth, of course, and one destined for rupture sooner or later.” Read our full review of Homeland Elegies.
To Be a Man by Nicole Krauss
This debut collection by the author of The History of Love is filled with indelible instances of strangeness, eroticism, and loneliness. All ten stories have the quality of waking dreams—an otherworldly stillness—and examine why we are drawn to another, how excruciating it is to let go of a parent who’s died, or the moments when instinct overrules reason. Set in Berlin, Tokyo, Geneva, Tel Aviv, New York, and beyond, these individual tableaux are united by Krauss’s unparalleled ability to convert what at first seem like digressions into crescendos of the sublime.
Intimations by Zadie Smith
While quarantined amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Smith penned six dazzling, trenchant essays burrowing deep into our contemporary culture of disease and upheaval and reflecting on what was “once necessary” that now “appears inessential”—as well as on banana bread, pedicures, and tulips. Referencing Wordsworth, Marcus Aurelius, and...Mel Gibson, among many others, Smith ponders our confounding current moment and offers musings like this one: “I do feel comforted to discover I’m not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.”
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
To unshackle herself from an arranged marriage, a desperate young woman from a French village in 1714 makes a plea to the spirit world, trading her soul for centuries of freedom. The hidden cost: Everyone she encounters will forget her, “erased by a closed door, an instant apart.” But 300 years later, she meets a man who recognizes her. Dreamy and thrilling, Schwab’s swoonworthy saga is a love story for the ages. Read a personal essay by Schwab about coming out.
Just Us by Claudia Rankine
George Floyd’s murder—on top of so many others, before and since—has forced a reckoning, and the new book by the poet, playwright, and MacArthur “genius” grant recipient provides a road map for the essential conversations that now need to transpire. Rankine’s multilayered, multidisciplinary work embraces divisiveness as an opportunity to explore our differences and recognize our similarities. Through essays, poems, images, and records of chats with, say, white male airline passengers in first class, there emerges an unexpected intimacy and the message that, yes, we’re all in this together. Read our interview with Rankine.
Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin
2020, meet 1984. The acclaimed Argentine author spins an Orwellian tale of online culture in this enthralling, voyeuristic parable. Furby-like toys with cameras for eyes scramble lives from Mexico to Hong Kong, exposing the dangers lurking behind our screens. The moral: Disconnect while you still can. Read an excerpt of Little Eyes.
Luster by Raven Leilani
Leilani’s wildly assured debut features a Black millennial who becomes involved with an older white man in an open marriage. It’s an audacious and tantalizing story about the “gray, anonymous hours” of one’s 20s, when, for better or worse, anything and everything can happen—“when I am desperate, when I am ravenous, when I know how a star becomes a void.” Read our full review of Luster.
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
“The truth is difficult,” an older woman advises the teenage protagonist of Ferrante’s latest, “growing up you’ll understand that, novels aren’t 'sufficient' for it.” The Italian maestro behind My Brilliant Friend returns to the splendid squalor of Naples in this cutting and cunning bildungsroman, a more-than-sufficient tale of a girl whose epic adolescent rebellion paves the way for a fully realized life. Read our full review of The Lying Life of Adults.
The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans
There are whiffs of both tragedy and comedy in these hilarious, blistering tales whose themes are race, sex, and family in a fractious America. From one narcissistic artist’s bevy of ex-girlfriends to an anxious drug smuggler to a college student caught in a Confederate-flag-bikini scandal on social media, Evans’s characters detonate relationships’ land mines. This master of irony and nuance, whose 2010 debut was the celebrated Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, triumphs again with one of the year’s finest story collections.
Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth
Danforth’s colossal second novel—in which filmmakers shoot a movie (on location) centered around the eerie doings at an elite girls’ school in 1902 Rhode Island—might collapse under the weight of its grand ambition if it weren’t so damned fun. A cinematic pulp saga alive with the power of the written word, not to mention forbidden Victorian romance and metafictional thrills and chills. Read our interview with Danforth.
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark
Since her death by suicide in 1963, Sylvia Plath has been shrouded in the morbid obsession of a cult, a queen of the underworld who yearns to “eat men like air.” This magisterial biography—exhaustively researched and beautifully written—restores Plath’s true legacy, mining letters, archives, and interviews with the poet’s intimates to reveal her as a peerless talent who reinvented the form. Read our full review of Red Comet.
Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn
When a Hawaiian boy from an impoverished family is discovered to possess supernatural gifts, including the ability to heal others, his parents and siblings must learn to live in his shadow. Steeped in the Big Island’s mysticism, Washburn’s debut novel is a ravishing modern opus rendered in prose as lush, vivid, and extraordinary as the landscape in which it is set. Read our full review of Sharks in the Time of Saviors.
What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez
The 2018 National Book Award winner for fiction returns with an immersive, deeply interior novel of a woman whose dying friend enlists her help in her final days, culminating in a planned suicide. If that sounds depressing, it isn’t. Nunez’s prose is conspiratorial and elegant, whimsical and wise. Alongside a contemplation of mortality are winks: For all its pain and seriousness, life is absurd, comical; we humans are impossible to figure out—and yet so tender.
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