Shelf Awareness Best Books of 2020

What a year. These are the 10 fiction and 10 nonfiction titles that really stood out to us at Shelf Awareness for helping us make it through, sometimes make sense of, and find some pleasurable moments in 2020. (Reviews appear below; our Best Children's/YA list is here.)

Fiction
City We Became by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford (Grove)
Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar (Little, Brown)
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, trans. by Sophie Hughes (New Directions)
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu (Pantheon)
Luster by Raven Leilani (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones (Gallery/Saga)
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)
Real Life by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead)
Revolutions of All Colors by Dewaine Farria (Syracuse University)

Nonfiction
African American Poetry, edited by Kevin Young (Library of America)
The Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper (Riverhead)
The Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson (Ecco)
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House)
Homie: Poems by Danez Smith (Graywolf)
Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad (Sourcebooks)
Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey (Ecco)
Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford (Little, Brown)
Something that May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel Mallory Ortberg (Atria)
Veritas by Ariel Sabar (Doubleday)

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