A year the world stayed home — and read. The books of 2020 ranged from a Booker winner of extraordinary rawness to cozy mystery debuts and one unforgettable fantasy novella.
A boy growing up in 1980s Glasgow, devoted to his mother Agnes — beautiful, funny, and self-destructive in her alcoholism. Stuart's debut is devastating in the truest sense of the word: it takes things apart and doesn't put them back. One of the great Booker winners.
Nora Seed finds a library between life and death containing every book of lives she could have lived. A novel about depression, regret, and possibility that managed to say something genuinely comforting without being false. One of the decade's bestselling literary novels.
Four retirees in a posh retirement village meet weekly to solve cold cases — until a real murder arrives on their doorstep. Osman's debut became one of the bestselling first novels in British history. Warm, funny, and shockingly well-plotted for a TV presenter's first book.
A man lives in a House of infinite halls and tides, cataloguing statues and the bones of the dead. He believes only two people exist in the world — until strange evidence suggests otherwise. Clarke's most formally inventive novel — a mystery box that opens onto something profound.
1950s Mexico City socialite Noemí Taboada travels to a remote mansion to rescue her cousin — and finds something deeply wrong with the house and the English family who own it. Gothic horror done with style, intelligence, and a keen awareness of colonial violence.
Shakespeare's son Hamnet dies of plague in 1596 — but this is the story of his mother, Agnes. O'Farrell writes about grief with extraordinary physicality, in language that makes grief literal, embodied, historical. Won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020.
A woman makes a deal with a dark god in 1714 France — she can live forever, but no one will remember her. Until, 300 years later, a man in a bookshop does. Schwab's most ambitious novel: romantic, melancholy, and spanning centuries with ease.
A romance writer and a literary fiction writer swap genres for the summer — and fall for each other while doing it. Henry's debut is metafictional and charming, with the same emotional intelligence that would make her one of romance's biggest names by 2023.
Two time-traveling agents on opposite sides of a war across time exchange letters that begin as taunts and become love. A novella — short enough to read in two hours, long enough to stay with you for years. Won the Hugo and Nebula.
Twin sisters who grew up in a small Louisiana town — one passes as white, one stays in her community — and the ripple effects of their different choices across generations. Bennett examines race, identity, and inheritance through the intimate lens of family.
A bank robber takes hostages at an apartment viewing — and the hostages turn out to be the strangest, most wonderful group of people. Backman's funniest and most structurally clever novel. The twist about who these people are to each other is enormously satisfying.
A wedding on a remote Irish island. A body. An impossible situation. Foley's breakout thriller — a locked-room mystery in the classic tradition, but written with contemporary psychological depth. The best of the "destination thriller" genre that dominated the 2020s.