The Ultimate Best Books
of 2019 List

‘Tis the season—of hot apple cider, gifts, and of course most importantly, love and family best-of year-end lists. After all, there seem to be more of them than just about anything else at the moment. So as is now tradition, I have collated every one I could find, tallied up their recommendations, and figured out which books were most often included. Does that make them the best? Well, I don’t know—it depends on how much stock you put in popular consensus. Perhaps you’ll just have to read them for yourself.

This year, I counted lists (often multiple lists) from 37 sources, tracking a total of 749 books. I’m sure I didn’t get every single list that’s out there, and more come every day. But for what it’s worth, my findings are below—and you’ll find the list of the sites I consulted at the very end.

21 lists:
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

20 lists:
Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is In Trouble
Sally Rooney, Normal People

17 lists:
Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again

16 lists:
Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
Ann Patchett, The Dutch House
Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror

15 lists:
Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

14 lists:
Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing

13 lists:
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer
Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

12 lists:
Margaret Atwood, The Testaments
Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House
Marlon James, Black Leopard Red Wolf
Ben Lerner, The Topeka School
Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive
Téa Obreht, Inland
Miriam Toews, Women Talking

11 lists:
Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other
Robert Macfarlane, Underland
Julia Phillips, Disappearing Earth
Zadie Smith, Grand Union

10 lists:
Chanel Miller, Know My Name
Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & the Six

9 lists:
Ted Chiang, Exhalation
Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives
Yoko Ogawa, tr. Stephen Snyder, The Memory Police
Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread
Helen Phillips, The Need
Bryan Washington, Lot: Stories

8 lists:
Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport
Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, She Said
Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist
Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias

7 lists:
Kristen Arnett, Mostly Dead Things
Jami Attenberg, All This Could Be Yours
Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House
Casey Cep, Furious Hours
Nicole Dennis-Benn, Patsy
Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars
Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic
Angie Kim, Miracle Creek
Stephen King, The Institute
Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything
Casey McQuiston, Red, White and Royal Blue
Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories
Jennifer Weiner, Mrs. Everything
Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

6 lists:
Jericho Brown, The Tradition
Candice Carty-Williams, Queenie
Steph Cha, Your House Will Pay
Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls
Laila Lalami, The Other Americans
Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway
Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King
Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises
David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee
Chuck Wendig, Wanderers
Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here
Nell Zink, Doxology

5 lists:
Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier
Adrienne Brodeur, Wild Game
Yangsze Choo, The Night Tiger
Helen Hoang, The Bride Test
Mira Jacob, Good Talk
Stephanie Land, Maid
Laura Lippman, Lady in the Lake
Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient
Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth
Rion Amilcar Scott, The World Doesn’t Require You
Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift
Chris Ware, Rusty Brown
Julie Yip-Williams, The Unwinding of the Miracle

4 lists:
Mona Awad, Bunny
Blake Crouch, Recursion
Jaquira Díaz, Ordinary Girls
Samantha Downing, My Lovely Wife
Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina
Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill
Anissa Gray, The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls
Tessa Hadley, Late in the Day
Isabella Hammad, The Parisian
Jane Harper, The Lost Man
Amy Hempel, Sing to It
Adam Higginbotham, Midnight in Chernobyl
Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes
Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End
Attica Locke, Heaven, My Home
Adrian McKinty, The Chain
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Gods of Jade and Shadow
Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard
Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall
Sandra Newman, The Heavens
George Packer, Our Man
Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink
Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept
Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist
Joanne Ramos, The Farm
Dani Shapiro, Inheritance
Ali Smith, Spring
David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, The Revisioners
Lara Williams, Supper Club
Ali Wong, Dear Girls
Albert Woodfox, with Leslie George, Solitary

Sources:

Amazon · BookPage · BookRiot · Books Are Magic · Chatelaine· The Chicago Tribune · CNN · ELLE · Entertainment Weekly · Esquire · The Gazette · Glamour · Good Housekeeping · Good Housekeeping (UK) · GQ · The Guardian · InsideHook · KCRW · Kirkus · Library Journal · Literary Hub · The New York Public Library · The New York Times · The New York Times Book Review · The New Yorker · NPR (Maureen Corrigan) · O: The Oprah Magazine · Publishers Weekly · Real Simple · Shelf Awareness · SheReads · Slate (Dan Kois) · Slate (Laura Miller) · TIME · Variety · Vogue · Vulture · The Washington Post