It’s the most wonderful time of the year if you love great books. The year-end “best of lists” are starting to roll in, and Amazon’s editors have posted their top picks today.
What tops Amazon’s Best Books of 2015? Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies.
“Fates and Furies, our No. 1 pick of 2015, is a novel about a marriage from two different points of view, but it’s no linear ‘he said, she said,’ ” Sara Nelson, editorial director of books and Kindle at Amazon, said in the release about the groups’ top pick. “Groff’s language is electric and her ingenious plotting is fascinating and unlike anything I’ve read in years. Our editors adored it.”
To compile the year-end best-of lists, which also include the Best Kids’ Books, Best Cookbooks and more, Amazon states that its “team of editors reads hundreds of thousands of pages, choosing the best books of every month and then, finally, the best books of 2015.”
This year’s lists include Top 20 lists in over two-dozen categories.
Here are the top 10 Amazon editors’ picks and their brief descriptions of each for 2015:
- Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff: An unusual, fascinating and intricate look at how two people can be married for years and still know so little about each other.
- Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates: A fiercely intelligent book about race in America, told by a father to his teenaged son.
- Becoming Nicole by Amy Ellis Nutt: The inspiring true story of how one transgendered child began to change the world.
- An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir: Addictive and harrowing, this Young Adult novel is about political power, crippling deceit, and, ultimately, hope.
- The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah: Two French sisters cope very differently with WWII in this compulsively readable novel.
- The Wright Brothers by David McCullough: This is classic McCullough: a complete, erudite and engagingly human story about the early days of aviation and the all-American boys who pioneered it.
- H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald: A brilliant memoir about the unusual, personal way one woman dealt with the loss of her father.
- Purity by Jonathan Franzen: A big fat novel about disaffected youth, the Internet and journalism. Oh, and love and family, too.
- Hold Still by Sally Mann: In her memoir, the award-winning and controversial photographer Sally Mann uses words to create pictures of her life.
- The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins: A wildly popular thriller about all the bad things that can happen when you step into other people’s lives.
