101* BEST BOOKS of 2020
*There were so many great books we couldn’t keep it to 100.
Fiction
AMERICAN DIRT
by Jeanine Cummins (Tinder Press)
A gripping, vividly imagined, compassionate (and controversial) story of a mother and son escaping a drug cartel to cross the Mexican border into the US.
THE ANIMALS IN THAT COUNTRY
by Laura Jean McKay (Scribe)
Narrated by a hard-drinking, hard-living grandmother called Jean, this funny, horrifying, poetic novel imagines an Australia where a flu pandemic enables humans to communicate with animals.
APEIROGON: A Novel
by Colum McCann (Bloomsbury)
An ambitious, big-hearted, Booker-longlisted novel, partly based on fact, in which two men, one Israeli and one Palestinian, who both lost a daughter in the conflict, become friends.
BUG WEEK
by Airini Beautrais (VUP)
Sharp, psychologically acute collection of stories that simmer with female outrage and defiance, yet are not without humour, employing the author’s background in poetry and ecological science.
BURNT SUGAR
by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton)
“I am grieving, but it’s too early to burn the body.” Unsettling, sharply written debut set in west India about a daughter forced to look after the rapidly fading mother who neglected her in childhood.
DADDY: Stories
by Emma Cline (Vintage)
A collection of sharply observed, beautifully crafted stories from the author of the bestselling The Girls that delve into the darker, complicated corners of relationships and human experience.
FAKE BABY
by Amy McDaid (Penguin Random House)
Three characters, by turns bereaved, baffled and unbalanced, crisscross this insightful and often drily funny debut novel – and the city of Auckland itself – in search of a kind of redemption.
A GHOST IN THE THROAT
by Doireann Ní Ghrí ofa (Tramp Press)
A genre-busting, ambitious prose debut from an Irish poet that combines honest autofiction and literary essay in the story of a young mother obsessed with an 18th-century poem.
THE GLASS HOTEL
by Emily St John Mandel (Picador)
The author of Station Eleven returns with the layered tale of a disastrous Ponzi scheme run by a New York financier and the repercussions among its large cast of victims in this unusual, deeply imagined, absorbing novel.
HAMNET
by Maggie O’Farrell (Hachette)
With lush, immersive prose, endless invention and a deep knowledge of the period that won her the Women’s Prize for Fiction, O’Farrell explores the brief life of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, and its aftermath of grief.