A decade of Best Books of the Year, as chosen by the Amazon Editors
The Amazon editors are a nostalgic crew, and as we look forward to our annual Best Books of the Year unveiling (soon!), we thought it’d be fun to take a jaunt down (literary) memory lane and revisit the last ten years of our number one picks (to browse more Best Books from previous years, click right here).
Our #1 pick of 2023
Featuring a cacophonous cast of characters you will adore, and a story chock full of the social, racial, and ethnic politics of the small town in which they live, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is an irresistible novel—profound as it is ingeniously entertaining, making it one of the great American novels of our time, and why we named it the best book of 2023. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor
Our #1 pick of 2022
After devouring this novel, you’ll walk with a bounce in your step, a full heart, and the buzzy feeling that this is one of the best books about friendship—in all of its messy complexity and glory—you will ever read. Gabrielle Zevin wrote a novel perfect for its moment, when connection is what we craved and hope is what we needed. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor
Our #1 pick of 2021
Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow) delivers one of the greatest gifts of fiction: hope. Filled with 1950s nostalgia and the gentle naïveté and hijinks of those who are young, optimistic, and on a mission, The Lincoln Highway follows four kids whose paths collide as they search for their mother and a stashed wad of cash. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor
Our #1 pick of 2020
At times, Brittany K. Barnett’s memoir reads like page-turning crime fiction; at others, a galvanizing and redemptive portrait of a lawyer trying to defend Black lives that were never protected in the first place. Urgent, necessary, hopeful—and a knockout read. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor
Our #1 pick of 2019
Praise be! After almost 35 years, Margaret Atwood released the sequel to her pioneering work of speculative fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale, and it was well worth the wait. While The Handmaid’s Tale explored how totalitarian regimes come to power, The Testaments delves into how they begin to fracture. Of The Testaments, Atwood said: “While I'm no prophet, we seem doomed to live in stressful times. A tale of hope and courage narrated by three strong female voices appears to have connected to this crucial 2019 moment.” Or this one, for that matter. —Erin Kodicek, Amazon Editor
Our #1 pick of 2018
Tara Westover didn't see the inside of a classroom until she was seventeen, and it was an experience that dramatically changed the trajectory of her life. This rousing memoir chronicles how she survived her survivalist upbringing, eventually earning a PhD from Cambridge University. This isn’t a story about the making of a scholar, however—Educated is about the making of a person (and an extraordinary one at that). —Erin Kodicek, Amazon Editor
Our #1 pick of 2017
Smart, taut and gripping, Grann’s true tale of big oil and serial murder on the Osage Indian Reservation in the 1920s is sobering: at once unsurprising and unbelievable, full of the arrogance and inhumanity that our society has yet to overcome. —Jon Foro, Former Amazon Editor
Our #1 pick of 2016
Going on to win the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, this antebellum era novel is a brilliant, wise, fantastical yet grounded portrayal of a young slave seeking her freedom on a real underground railroad. —Chris Schluep, Former Amazon Editor
Our #1 pick of 2015
Many a therapist will tell you that honesty and transparency is the glue that keeps a relationship together. Lauren Groff cleverly turns this concept on its head in a novel that demonstrates that sometimes it’s what you don’t say—to protect your partner’s vanity, their reputation, their heart—that makes a marriage hum. (Until it doesn’t.) The title is a nod to Greek Tragedy, and The Fates and the Furies revels in the themes befitting one—passion, betrayal, vengeance, redemption…You will revel in it, too. —Erin Kodicek, Amazon Editor
Our #1 pick of 2014
Lydia is dead. From the first sentence of Celeste Ng’s stunning debut, we know that the oldest daughter of the Chinese-American Lee family has died. What follows is a novel that explores alienation, achievement, race, gender, family, and identity—as the police must unravel what has happened to Lydia, the Lee family must uncover the sister and daughter that they hardly knew. There isn’t a false note in this book, and my only concern in describing my profound admiration for Everything I Never Told You is that it might raise unachievable expectations in the reader. But it’s that good. Achingly, precisely, and sensitively written. —Chris Schluep, Former Amazon Editor
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