The Top 20 books of 2020 as rated by BookBrowse subscribers

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

by Victoria E. Schwab

Hardcover: Oct 2020 | Paperback: Apr 2023

Winner of the 2020 BookBrowse Fiction Award

In the vein of The Time Traveler's Wife and Life After Life, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is New York Times bestselling author V. E. Schwab's genre-defying tour de force.

Caste

The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

Hardcover: Aug 2020 | Paperback: Feb 2023

The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions.

How to Be an Antiracist

by Ibram X. Kendi

Hardcover: Aug 2019 | Paperback: Jan 2023

From the National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a bracingly original approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society - and in ourselves.

The Splendid and the Vile

A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz

by Erik Larson

Hardcover: Feb 2020 | Paperback: Feb 2022

Winner of the 2020 BookBrowse Nonfiction Award

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake delivers a fresh and compelling portrait of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz.

The Vanishing Half

A Novel

by Brit Bennett

Hardcover: Jun 2020 | Paperback: Feb 2022

From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white.

American Dirt

A Novel

by Jeanine Cummins

Hardcover: Jan 2020 | Paperback: Feb 2022

Hailed as "a Grapes of Wrath for our times" and "a new American classic", American Dirt is a rare exploration into the inner hearts of people willing to sacrifice everything for a glimmer of hope.

Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

Hardcover: Sep 2020 | Paperback: Jul 2021

Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national bestseller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.

The Exiles

by Christina Baker Kline

Hardcover: Aug 2020 | Paperback: Jul 2021

The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Orphan Train returns with an ambitious, emotionally resonant historical novel that captures the hardship, oppression, opportunity and hope of a trio of women's lives - two English convicts and an ...

Migrations

A Novel

by Charlotte McConaghy

Hardcover: Aug 2020 | Paperback: Jul 2021

For readers of Flight Behavior and Station Eleven, a novel set on the brink of catastrophe, as a young woman chases the world's last birds―and her own final chance for redemption.

The Pull of the Stars

by Emma Donoghue

Hardcover: Jul 2020 | Paperback: Jul 2021

In Dublin, 1918, a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu is a small world of work, risk, death, and unlooked-for love, in "Donoghue's best novel since Room" (Kirkus Reviews).

A Girl is A Body of Water

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Hardcover: Sep 2020 | Paperback: Jun 2021

International-award-winning author Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's novel is a sweeping and powerful portrait of a young girl and her family: who they are, what history has taken from them, and--most importantly--how they find their way back to each ...

Memorial Drive

by Natasha Trethewey

Hardcover: Jul 2020 | Paperback: Jun 2021

A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy.