Hill grew up in Hot Springs, Ark., decades after its 20th-century heyday as the boozy, freewheeling hangout of choice for gamblers, mobsters and crooked politicians; his book recreates the giddy era with a delightfully light touch and a focus on the nightclub of the title. In this magisterial account, Gewen, a longtime editor at the Book Review, traces the historical and philosophical roots of Kissinger’s famous realism, situating him in the context of Hannah Arendt and a cohort of other Jewish intellectuals who escaped Nazi Germany. Bennett balances the literary demands of dynamic characterization with the historical and social realities of her subject matter. Covering the years 1944 to 1956, Anderson’s enthralling history of the early years of the Cold War follows four C.I.A. Kuhn highlights one day, May 8, 1970, when blue-collar workers went on a rampage against antiwar protesters, noting that the country’s politics have never been the same. Since then, becoming a New York Times bestseller has become a dream for virtually every writer. Book E-Book Yuzu is in for a surprise when she is sent to live with her uncle and discovers that he runs a hospital for sick, injured, and lost pets. Since 1931, The New York Times has been publishing a weekly list of bestselling books. A sense of estrangement pervades this assured debut novel, which opens as a man flies to Osaka to care for his terminally ill father, leaving his visiting mother and his Black boyfriend to keep each other company. FICTION. In her captivating and evocative first book, she tells “the full story” of what that means — relying not just on her own experience but on interviews with immigrants across the country. His is a feat of narrative journalism but also a study in empathy; he unspools the stories of the Galvin siblings with enormous compassion while tracing the scientific advances in treating the illness. From "Friends and Strangers" to "The Boys’ Club," here are the 30 best books to read this summer. With the pared-down quality of a fable, the final novel in Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy makes a case for the fantastical worldview of Don Quixote. This is a short book but a rich one with a profound theme. The comments section is closed. Pain — physical and emotional — is everywhere in this potent, sure-footed debut, which makes as strong a case as any for love’s redemptive power. ... Rebecca Serle's New York Times bestselling novel… This first novel — about a 23-year-old New Yorker who becomes entangled with a white suburban couple and their Black daughter — feels like summer: sentences like ice that crackle or melt into a languorous drip; plot suddenly, wildly flying forward like a bike down a hill. An easy, elegant writer, he studs his narrative with affectionate family anecdotes and thumbnail sketches of world leaders and colleagues. This fascinating biography of the former secretary of state and consummate insider, who was once called “the most important unelected official since World War II,” reveals both Baker’s accomplishments and the compromises he had to make. Fiction | W.W. Norton & Company. Presidential memoirs are meant to inform, to burnish reputations and, to a certain extent, to shape the course of history, and Obama’s is no exception. This first novel by an Indian journalist probes the secrets of a big-city shantytown as a 9-year-old boy tries to solve the mystery of a classmate’s disappearance. $27. This unsparing, beautifully written novel takes as its subject the Vardo witch trials in 17th-century Norway, which even the infamous hysteria in Salem, Mass., several decades later could not match when it came to brutality. Sarid tells the story of a tour guide to the Nazi death camps and how his mind begins to slowly unravel as his knowledge of the mechanics of genocide becomes an obsession. Dec. 9, 2020 6:26 pm ET Fiction | Alfred A. Knopf. This evocative and elegantly paced examination of the murders takes a prism-like view. New York Times 10 Best Books of 2020; New York Times 25 Best Children's Books of 2020; New York Times Notable Fiction of 2020; New York Times Notable Memoirs of 2020; New York Times Notable Nonfiction of 2020; New York Times Notable Poetry of 2020 Young David enters an orphanage, finds followers and imparts wisdom before falling terminally ill — a Christ figure, sure, but not one with easy or predictable parallels. Onda’s strange, engrossing novel — patched together from scraps of interviews, letters, newspaper articles and the like — explores the sweltering day that 17 members of the Aosawa family died after drinking poisoned sake and soda. 136 books — 60 voters. But Millet’s light touch never falters; in this time of great upheaval, she implies, our foundational myths take on new meaning and hope. This magnificent collection captures his wit, style, ambition and personal travails, as well as his powerful insights into Black artistic expression. MacMillan argues that war — fighting and killing — is so intimately bound up with what it means to be human that viewing it as an aberration misses the point. | Read the review | Read our profile. | Read the review. Nonfiction | Random House. Sweet Dreams by Dylan Jones. The four converging narratives of this astounding novel (Klay’s first, after his National Book Award-winning story collection “Redeployment”) capture the complexities of Colombia’s five-decade war. Chang’s new collection explores her father’s illness and her mother’s death, treating mortality as a constantly shifting enigma. Shibli turns her astonishing command of sensory detail into a rich study of memory and violence. B. S. Haldane, The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir, Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town, The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking), Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III, Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America, Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl, A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith, The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War — a Tragedy in Three Acts, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future, The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World, Soul Full of Coal Dust: A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe, The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Who Gets in and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions, A Woman Like Her: The Story Behind the Honor Killing of a Social Media Star, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country. Demick tells a decades-long story about Ngaba, a small Sichuan town that has become the center of resistance to Chinese authority. In supple and casual prose, this celebrated Japanese novelist follows sisters in Osaka who are considering breast augmentation and sperm donation, causing two generations of women to reckon with the realities of their physical bodies and the pressures put on them by society. For all its political and literary plotting, the book is most memorable for its portraiture, with Henry’s secretary, Thomas Cromwell, as our master painter. It’s all around us, influencing everything we see and do; it’s in our bones. Drawing analogies with the social orders of modern India and Nazi Germany, she frames barriers to equality in a provocative new light. 73 $26.99 $26.99 The elastic plot expands to encompass rival drug crews, an Italian smuggler, buried treasure, church sisters and Sportcoat’s long-dead wife, still nagging from beyond the grave. From Southeast Asia to a forgotten school in South Carolina, he evokes the sense of place with a light but sure hand. Hamby powerfully recounts two stories, both miserable: the effect that working in coal mines has had on the health of miners, and the decades-long battle for federal help to force companies to pay for their medical care. Anappara impressively inhabits the inner worlds of children lost to their families, and of others who escape by a thread. Our expert critics have trawled through the thousands of books published in 2020 to pick their favourite reads: from Welcome to The Times and The Sunday Times list of the best books … | Read the review | Listen: Lydia Millet on the podcast. ATY 2020 - A book from the New York Times ‘100 Notable Books’ list for any year. The latest novel from Akhtar is about the dream of national belonging that has receded for American Muslims in the years since 9/11. A husband and wife try to escape their problems by packing up their small children and taking to the open sea on a boat they barely know how to sail. But what begins as generational comedy soon takes a darker turn, as climate collapse and societal breakdown encroach. Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, died at 11, a few years before the playwright wrote “Hamlet.” O’Farrell’s wondrous new novel is at once an unsparingly eloquent record of love and grief and a vivid imagining of how a child’s death was transfigured into art. One of the great themes of “Memorial” is the immense power parents wield over their children, even well into adulthood. The best-seller list has been ongoing since April 9, 1942. Kunzru’s wonderfully weird novel traces a lineage from German Romanticism to National Socialism to the alt-right, and is rich with insights on surveillance and power. Here, alphabetically by author, the best books of 2020 so far. This painstakingly reported and beautifully written book, Murdoch’s first, examines the effects of fracking on a North Dakota reservation through the eyes of a remarkable Native American woman who, determined to solve a murder related to the oil boom, exposes the greed and corruption that fueled it. Trouble follows, but not necessarily the kind you’re expecting. The 31st book in the Prey series. This slim, haunting novel begins with the rape and murder of a Palestinian girl in 1949, then shifts to present-day Ramallah, where a young woman tries to piece together what happened. Illustration by Luis Mazon. 15 Books | ePUB. He returns frequently to the subject of his father, a Pakistani immigrant and onetime doctor to Donald Trump, seeking in his life the answer to a burning question: What, after all, does it take to be an American? To submit a letter to the editor for publication, write to, The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. Thirty years in the making and encompassing hundreds of original interviews, this magisterial biography of Malcolm X was completed by Les Payne’s daughter after his death in 2018. O’Farrell, an Irish-born novelist, conjures with sensual vividness the world of the playwright’s hometown: the tang of new leather in his cantankerous father’s glove shop; the scent of apples in the storage shed where he first kisses Agnes, the farmer’s daughter and gifted healer who becomes his wife; and, not least, the devastation that befalls her when she cannot save her son from the plague. Months into lockdown, it feels creepily prescient: We are all in the desert now. Sofer’s second novel traces a man’s path from “baffled revolutionary” in Iran to complicit actor in a ruthless regime sure he can undermine the system from inside. Its strengths lie in its finely shaded, penetrating portrait of the Black activist and thinker, whose legacy continues to find fresh resonance today. In this brilliant book, McNeil charts roving personal histories of the internet, tracing the path from forums and Friendster to today’s caustic cesspool. Sportcoat, veteran resident of the Causeway Housing Projects, widower, churchgoer, odd-jobber, home brew-tippler and, now, after inexplicably shooting an ear clean off a local drug dealer, a wanted man. Beneath the polished surface and enthralling plotlines of Bennett’s second novel, after her much admired “The Mothers,” lies a provocative meditation on the possibilities and limits of self-definition. Shapiro has long created Shakespeare treats for the common reader, but this time he outdoes himself. The sole survivor: 12-year-old Edward Adler. Gorra’s complex and thought-provoking meditation on Faulkner is rich in insight, making the case for the novelist’s literary achievement and his historical value — as an unparalleled chronicler of slavery’s aftermath, and its damage to America’s psyche. For such a book to center on a cast of powerful women characters seems as appropriate to its historical context as it is to our time. $28. 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. Forty percent of the choices are by authors of color. A series of unglamorous jobs — in various customer support positions — follow. Bennett’s gorgeously written second novel, an ambitious meditation on race and identity, considers the divergent fates of twin sisters, born in the Jim Crow South, after one decides to pass for white. His focus is more political than personal, but when he does write about his family it is with a beauty close to nostalgia. This discovery leads to a mystery that will change the lives of all involved. A serene acceptance of grief emerges from these poems. A mystery story, a crime novel, an urban farce, a sociological portrait of late-1960s Brooklyn: McBride’s novel contains multitudes. Ocean Prey by John Sandford. Set to be a major 2020 debut fiction launch from the US publishers of My Absolute Darling, this remarkable novel comes with praise from Sebastian Barry to Emma Donoghue. View the Top 100 best sellers for each year, in Amazon Books, Kindle eBooks, Music, MP3 Songs and Video Games. In prose that swirls with lyrical wonder, she recalls formative moments in her life and career. It’s also a profound statement on the inequities in medical care today. Hers is a story of outsiders coming together in surprising and uplifting ways. The New York Times Best Sellers: Fiction – May 10, 2020. Soured on her job as an underpaid assistant at a literary agency in New York, Wiener, then in her mid-20s, heads west, heeding the siren call of Bay Area start-ups aglow with optimism, vitality and cash. For the second consecutive year, the most frequent weekly best seller of the year was Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens with 7 weeks at the top of the list. The result is a scrupulously observed and quietly damning exposé of the yawning gap between an industry’s public idealism and its internal iniquities. It is published weekly in The New York Times Book Review magazine, which is published in the Sunday edition of The New York Times and as a stand-alone publication. 14).”Chain of Gold (The Last Hours #1)” by Cassandra Clare 15).”House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City # 1)” by Sarah J. Maas 16).”Writers & Lovers” by Lily King Intelligence and good looks ran in the family, but so, it turns out, did mental illness: By the mid-1970s, six of the 10 Galvin sons had developed schizophrenia. 46 books — 44 voters. In 2015, Sandler was volunteering at a homeless shelter when she met Camila, a pregnant resident who was determined to find a permanent, safe place to raise her child. Marie Claire's picks for the best new books of 2020. But Wiener’s unobtrusive perch turns out to be a boon, providing an unparalleled vantage point from which to scrutinize her field. But this haunting elegy by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet is also a work of great beauty and tenderness, an atmospheric evocation of innocence and loss. 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 2021. Mustafah rewinds from the shooting to the principal’s childhood as a newly arrived immigrant. Taylor, a cultural documentarian, traveled to thousands of sites mentioned in the Green Book, the essential guidebook for Black travelers braving American roads during Jim Crow. Fiction | Little, Brown & Company. “For a family, schizophrenia is, primarily, a felt experience, as if the foundation of the family is permanently tilted,” Kolker writes. A former golf prodigy turned waiter and writer is lonely, broke, directionless — and grieving for her mother, who has died suddenly. “The Beauty in Breaking” is her memoir of becoming an emergency room physician. In his ninth book, this self-described “lapsed but listening” Irish Catholic travels 1,200 miles from Canterbury to Rome along the Via Francigena and tries to decide what he believes. The last chapter, “2017: Left | Right,” where Shapiro truly soars, analyzes the notorious Central Park production of “Julius Caesar.” By this point it is clear that the real subject of the book is not Shakespeare plays, but us, the U.S. Nonfiction | Penguin Press. This collection of short pieces by an author widely considered to be France’s leading nonfiction writer underscores Carrère’s incisive style and moral stance; whether he’s writing about a murderer or a movie star, he is also investigating himself, part of a deeply empathetic quest to understand our species. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/b/the-new-york-times-bestsellers/_/N-1p3n New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020 The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. This depression-era novel still holds modern appeal and reaches the best books 2020 list with its loving reminder of why we read in … $30. After the traumas of childhood, in adulthood they seek to abandon society -- a.k.a. King’s hopeful novel follows this young woman’s hardscrabble quest for solvency, peace and passion. But Mack, a theoretical cosmologist, is interested in how it all ends. In his latest book, the author of “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?” and “1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare” has outdone himself. Zhang’s mesmerizing tale of two Chinese-American siblings crossing the West during the gold rush, with their father’s corpse in tow, unfolds in a landscape of desolation and struggle that recalls Steinbeck and Faulkner, and in a voice that is all her own. Johnson expertly layers the Gothic atmosphere with dread, grief and guilt. War has led to many of civilization’s great disasters but also to many of civilization’s greatest achievements. Little, Brown and Virago Press's lead literary fiction launch of 2020.