The Best Books of 2020 (So Far)

Morgan Jerkins, who was raised in New Jersey, traces the roots of her family tree and the way in which the Great Migration shaped the black experience in Wandering in Strange Lands. Traveling throughout the country, she explores the path her family took as well as her cultural identity as a black woman. Her desire to understand both her personal and cultural origins will inspire you to do the same. —AG

A husband eager to escape it all and his reluctant wife leave their Connecticut lives for a yearlong Caribbean voyage with their two children. The husband never returns. In her new novel Sea Wife, Amity Gaige depicts the journey from a dual point of view, interspersing the wife’s recollections of how it all went wrong with diary entries from the husband, both of which cut to the heart of mundane marital strife and the legacy of trauma. —AG

Early on in Drifts, Kate Zambreno’s new work of autofiction, the narrator writes to a friend that she wants the book to be “my fantasy of a memoir about nothing.” And it is, in the way that Seinfeld was a show about nothing and everything at the same time. Drifts makes discursive detours into loneliness, female friendship, writer’s block, and professional jealousy; the narrator looks to what she calls “the canon of the bachelor hermits” (Rilke, Kafka, Wittgenstein) for inspiration as she navigates pregnancy and career uncertainty. It’s the perfect reading for this isolated, indeterminate time—like reading a series of rambling postcards from your most erudite friend. –Véronique Hyland

Part memoir, part reckoning, Cornejo Villavicencio exposes the reality of life as an undocumented immigrant in six astounding essays. As she travels across the U.S., surveying and chronicling the experiences of immigrants living in New York, Miami, Cleveland, New Haven, and Flint, Cornejo Villavicencio introduces us to the people who perform some of America’s most essential services while unequivocally destroying the right-wing talking points that villainize the undocumented. For all who consider themselves Americans, The Undocumented Americans is an urgent must-read. —Julie Kosin

In her seventh book, Sittenfeld embraces an audacious but simple concept: What would the life of Hillary look like had she never married Bill? While Sittenfeld’s American Wife, which traced the experiences of a very Laura Bush-esque figure, used a similar approach, Rodham goes much farther, showing both the successes that Hillary could have achieved on her own and the trail Bill would’ve gone down without her by his side. Though they might be fictional, Sittenfeld’s piercing insights into the psychology of a woman whose feelings we know so little make for a fascinating reading experience. —AG

A memoir from the author of the best-selling novel Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler’s Stray chronicles both her tumultuous childhood as the daughter of two addicts and her adult life after releasing the book that made her famous. Upon returning to her California hometown to care for her newly disabled mother, Danler plunges back into the dynamics of her chaotic youth and becomes embroiled in an affair with a married childhood friend. —AG

You can’t judge a book solely by its cover, but occasionally a really fantastic book will be nestled inside an equally fantastic cover, delighting both eyes and mind. That’s the case with Camp, a YA romcom that is as inventive, cute, and glittery as its arts and crafts-centric cover. Randy, a gay high schooler and theater kid, pulls a Sandy from the end of Grease over the school year, changing his look and his demeanor to win the attentions of his gay summer camp’s masc jock lothario. In this masterful mix of rom-com hijinks, theater references, queer history, and gender theory, Rosen plays with tropes and expectations in a way that will absolutely delight you. —R. Eric Thomas

Born out of his 2018 New York Times op-ed “The Student Loan Serenity Prayer,” Arceneaux’s essay collection comes as unemployment soars and yet another economic crisis has many young people questioning whether they’ll ever experience life without crushing financial anxiety. I Don’t Want to Die Poor, a brilliant successor to his 2018 book I Can’t Date Jesus, explores how student loan debt has impacted every facet of Arceneaux’s life. The seeming impossibility of finding financial stability while pursuing creative passions will resonate in the hearts of so many. —AG

After years living in England, Lina returns to Colombia, where she spent her childhood years, eager to find the old friend she believes will help her unravel the secrets surrounding her mother’s death. He now runs the Anthill, a Medellín youth center that draws Lina in even as she senses darkness. Pachico’s frank second novel takes a stark look at a traumatized city and the way privilege corrupts. —AG

In Momplaisir’s terrifyingly dark first novel, Lucien leaves Haiti for Queens with his family and settles in a home he calls “My Mother’s House.” As he sinks into depraved evil and tortuous violence against women, the house is watching and waiting. Momplaisir’s brutal exploration of the immigrant experience, gender dynamics, and race is masterful and makes for a stunning debut. —AG

When Maggie Krause’s mother dies, she discovers five letters her mom wrote to mysterious men, and sets out on a road trip to work through her grief and discover the truths behind the missives. There’s a pretty big reveal that I don’t want to spoil, but let’s just say Maggie learns surprising things about her mom that force her to reevaluate everything she thought she knew about her parents, their marriage, and her own love life. It’s a remarkable debut and the kind of book you want to hug tight when it ends. —Kayla Webley Adler

Political journalist Ball puts out the most exhaustive bio of the first female Speaker of the House to date, tracking her childhood in a prominent Baltimore political family, her gradual entry into politics as a young mother, and the tenure in Congress that lasted through six presidencies. Seeing her career spread before you is striking, and Ball sheds light on Pelosi’s extreme tenacity, drive and commitment, with a few surprising details thrown in. —AG

Pochoda’s take on L.A. noir is a refreshing and innovative outlier. The young, female victims of a serial killer are the focus of this mystery and the unending sorrow carried by their working class families is put in sharp focus. The women of the title are not just those murdered—they are the witness, the investigating detective, and the grieving mother, whose perspectives are masterfully knit together for a deeply felt narrative of the toll violence takes on a community. —AG

A former Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, Ackerman focuses his novels on the effects of international conflict. Red Dress in Black and White spans a single day in Istanbul in which Catherine, an American with a young son, decides to flee her powerful Turkish husband to return to the States with the American photographer she’s fallen in love with. Her husband is unwilling to lose her and calls in powerful favors that cast a light on the shadowy geopolitical forces at work around the world. At once suspenseful and delicate, Red Dress in Black and White deftly depicts love in a brutal time. —AG

Release date: May 26

Cutting right to the heart of what it feels like to be alive in 2020, Jenny Offill’s Weather is a novel of both anxiety and love. A librarian with a young son reckons with what climate change means both in this moment and in the future while coming to terms with what she wants the world to look like for her child. Offill knows what it’s like to face the end of the world and a grocery list—how the enormous concerns and the minor annoyances can fuse together, rendering us exhausted and helpless. —AG

Fantasy writer N. K. Jemisin is the only person to have won a Hugo Award (science fiction’s most prestigious prize) three years in a row. In March, the author creates a new world for the first time since 2015. In The City We Became, human avatars of New York’s five boroughs must battle a force of intergalactic evil called the Woman in White to save their city. Like 2018’s Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the novel leans into social commentary—the foe presents as a literal white woman whom some mistakenly deem harmless—without slowing the action sequences that drive the plot forward. —Bri Kovan 

The only writer who can make me laugh with abandon in public, Samantha Irby follows her breakout collection We Are Never Meeting in Real Life with high-speed treatises on everything from relentless menstruation to “raising” her stepchildren and the stress of making friends in adulthood. Her signature irreverence is intact, of course, but it can’t mask the heart she leaves bleeding on the page. —JK

You may be tempted to rush through the seven essays in Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings; her prose, at turns accusatory, complicit, and castigating, is so urgent, there’s a fear the book will catch fire if you put it down for a moment. But Minor Feelings begs to be read and re-read, highlighted and underlined and margianalia-ed for decades to come. A scorching exploration of what Hong calls “minor feelings”—“the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed”—this collection cuts to the heart of the Korean-American experience, calling on everything from Richard Pryor’s body of work to a long-overdue elegy for the late artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha to document the cumulative effect of prejudice on generations of Asian Americans. —JK

Boasting arguably the most eye-catching cover of the year, Godshot, from debut author Chelsea Bieker, is an unnerving tour de force. Exploring the gritty, confounding ways innocence—especially girlhood—clash with spirituality, family, love, and gender, the story follows 14-year-old Lacey, who lives in a Californian town paralyzed by drought. The community is swept up in the words of a “pastor” who doles out “assignments” that promise to bring back the rain, and as Lacey navigates the confusion and horror of this false prophecy, she turns to a community of women to teach her the truth. —Lauren Puckett 

Hilary Mantel concludes her long-gestating Wolf Hall trilogy with the final installment in Thomas Cromwell’s saga. Following the execution of Anne Boleyn, the chief advisor to the king is safe—for now. But given the instability of Henry VIII’s court, nothing is certain except more death. —JK 

It’s surprising to learn that such a mysterious and delicate book was inspired by something so loud and sensational as the Bernie Madoff saga. The Glass Hotel beautifully depicts the many lives impacted by the collapse of an ambitious Ponzi scheme, most notably a woman who escaped her haunted past in rugged Canada for a gilded existence as the much younger wife of a financial kingpin. —AG 

Acclaimed poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo left Mexico with his family when he was five years old and grew up navigating the tenuous existence of life undocumented in the U.S. His California upbringing is full of fear and worry that come to a head when he witnesses his father’s arrest and deportation. Children of the Land depicts life on both sides of the border and the feeling of living between two nations and cultures; Hernandez Castillo’s depiction of the current crisis is vivid, empathetic and real. —AG

If we tell ourselves stories in order to live, what happens when those narratives miss the truth? Kate Elizabeth Russell probes this question in 
her debut novel, My Dark Vanessa, which reads like a contemporary reimagining of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The story begins in 2000 at a New England boarding school, where 15-year-old Vanessa Wye falls for her charismatic English teacher and re- counts their romance. The author alternates between the past and a present in which an adult Vanessa is forced to confront the limitations of her own story. —BK 

You know R. Eric Thomas from his must-read ELLE.com column “Eric Reads the News,” but his first book—a read-in-one sitting memoir about battling loneliness and finding your voice—will make you laugh out loud and break your heart in equal measure before leaving you with that oft-elusive desire: hope. —JK

The writer’s life is brought to life with scary accuracy in the story of a young woman desperate for literary success while working in secret on a novel six years in the works. As she struggles to pay the bills with a restaurant job, grieves her mother, and juggles two very different men, the readers gets a vivid, funny and altogether real look at what living a creative life means for a woman. —AG

Come winter, a bevy of novels use technology-gone-amuck as the premise for dystopia. In The Resisters, author Gish Jen combines that premise with the anxiety around climate change. Her America of the future, called AutoAmerica, breaks people into two groups: the Aryan “Netted” people live on dry ground, and the “Surplus” live in the flooded regions. (It’s like a twenty-first century update on H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.) Into all of this Gish throws baseball as a means of resistance. Says Ann Patchett, “The novel should be required reading for the country both as a cautionary tale and because it is a stone-cold masterpiece.” —BK 

In this debut collection, Peter Kispert takes a clever premise—stories about liars—and spins an extraordinary tapestry that questions why we lie and all the ripples (good, bad, and chaotic) that come from them. It’s a particularly…fertile area to explore at this moment in history, but I Know You Know Who I Am has a higher aim than simply scoring points off our fabulist leaders. In stories that are by turns blackly comic, speculative, romantic, and wistful, Kispert toys with the ideas of personal truth, deception (of self and other), and lies from so many angles that, taken as a whole, the collection wows with its insight, its daring, and its breadth of talent. —R. Eric Thomas

A Baltimore police officer, presiding over a neighborhood that has been devastated by the opioid epidemic, searches for her missing sister, an addict. Liz Moore has crafted a literary thriller that’s rapidly paced without compromising on depth. —AG

Since she published The House of the Spirits in 1982, Isabel Allende has time and again proven herself a master of magical realism. Her latest novel, A Long Petal of the Sea—about a couple who flee the Spanish Civil War to Chile, only to later find themselves endangered once again under the Pinochet dictatorship—is about refugees, displacement, and war, but also serves as a paean to human love and endurance. —Molly Langmuir

“In my published writing, I took stands. I made arguments. But in the very early morning, before anyone was awake, I was working on these notebooks,” writes Katie Roiphe at the beginning of The Power Notebooks, a series of entries reflecting on the author’s personal relationships and the ways in which power dynamics seep into them. In “Relatable,” Roiphe maligns the tendency for women writers to perform vulnerability, which, ironically, is the book’s greatest strength: As she works her way through complex, conflicting ideas, Roiphe demonstrates the very human conundrum of searching for answers in a world without them. —BK

When Anna Wiener moved to San Francisco at 25, the former sociology student dove headfirst into the Bay Area’s startup culture, in which twenty-somethings with little professional experience managed and stroked the egos of also-twenty-something CEOs. Her memoir reads like a literary ethnography of the rewards and risks of the sector’s early growth. —BK

In his shattering debut, Electric Literature and Literary Hub‘s Brandon Taylor explores the minor catastrophes and microaggressions of academia—here, a masters biochem program at an unnamed Midwestern university—through the eyes of Wallace, a black gay student grappling with the contrast between what his life looks like to others and what he actually wants from it. —JK

Douglas Stuart’s first novel steps into the literary lineage of Joyce’s Dubliners. Set nearly 70 years later, Stuart’s story tracks a mother and son as they search for social mobility and freedom in working-class Glasgow. The family battles alcoholism, sexuality taboo, and the constraints of domesticity, all packaged in the atmospheric lyricism of an epic. —BK

Apartment, by Teddy Wayne, a deftly composed novel about an unlikely friendship that develops, then devolves, between two men at an MFA program, is easy to speed through, but its ideas about masculinity, gender, and class will rattle around your mind for ages. —ML

Like Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, Miranda Popkey’s first novel revolves around conversations with the eccentric characters who populate her narrator’s life. But unlike Cusk, Popkey turns reflective, ruminating on dissatisfying relationships, cautious motherhood, substance abuse, and privilege with unflinching candor. —JK

Set amid the fraught intensity of a prestigious MFA program, We Wish You Luck by Caroline Zancan is a twisted campus novel told in the third person, which collectively expresses the perspective of three ambitious, brilliant students who take it upon themselves to present one of their professors as a plagiarist. It’s a rollicking read that offers a sharp take on the creative process, revenge, and envy. —ML

When anyone asks for a book recommendation, this is my default pick for the new year. Reid’s brisk, darkly funny debut follows Emira, a black, underemployed 25-year-old who splits her time between babysitting for a wealthy white family and working at Philadelphia’s Green Party office. When a late-night encounter with a grocery store security guard attracts unwanted attention, Emira’s life takes several unexpected turns. —BK

In this eye-opening anthology about climate change, an impressive cast of contributors including Edwidge Danticat, Mohammed Hanif, and Margaret Atwood reflect on how the grim horror of our current ecological reality is being felt around the world. —AG

The former Gawker writer and co-founder of the trailblazing (but recently discontinued) publishing house Emily Books, Emily Gould has long been a beloved staple of Literary Twitter. This year, she’s finally returned to publishing her own fiction, and her tale of mothers and musicians, Perfect Tunes, is a delight. In early-aughts New York City, songwriter Laura falls in love with the imperfect but enthralling musician Dylan. Fourteen years later, their daughter, Marie, seeks to discover the father she lost before she was born. —LP 

Ottessa Moshfegh follows her beloved 2018 title, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, with a fresh take on the archetypal murder mystery. The novel tracks an isolated widow’s descent into madness after finding a mysterious note in the woods. —AG

Release Date: August 11

Ferrante’s first novel since her Neapolitan quartet rocked book clubs around the world opens with this shattering sentence: ”Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.” The Lying Life of Adults returns Ferrante to Naples, this time through the eyes of Giovanna, who tasks herself with exploring the city’s dual identities as her beauty fades. —JK

Release Date: September 1