Amazon Editors’ 25 Years of Best Books: Our #1 Picks

Best Book of the Year 2024

The incredible story of an all-deaf high school football team’s triumphant climb from underdog to undefeated, their inspirational brotherhood, a fascinating portrait of deafness in America, and the indefatigable head coach who spearheaded the team, by New York Times reporter and San Francisco Bureau Chief, Thomas Fuller.

Best Book of the Year 2023

From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah’s Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them. McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community — heaven and earth — that sustain us.

Best Book of the Year 2022

Sam and Sadie — two college friends, often in love, but never lovers — become creative partners in a dazzling and intricately imagined world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. It is a love story, but not one you have read before.

Best Book of the Year 2021

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction — to the City of New York.

Best Book of the Year 2020

A “powerful and devastating” (The Washington Post) call to free those buried alive by America’s legal system, and an inspiring true story about unwavering belief in humanity — from a gifted young lawyer and important new voice in the movement to transform the system.

Best Book of the Year 2019

More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results.

Best Book of the Year 2018

Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she’s traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

Best Book of the Year 2017

A twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history, from the author of The Wager and The Lost City of Z, “one of the preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today” (New York Magazine).

Best Book of the Year 2016

In Colson Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: Engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman’s will to escape the horrors of bondage — and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.

Best Book of the Year 2015

Fates and Furies is a literary masterpiece that defies expectation. A dazzling examination of a marriage, it is also a portrait of creative partnership written by one of the best writers of her generation. Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. At the core of this rich, expansive, layered novel, Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years.

Best Book of the Year 2014

“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos …

Best Book of the Year 2010

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells — taken without her knowledge — became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture. Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

Best Book of the Year 2009

In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.

Best Book of the Year 2008

In 1974, the Sellers family is transplanted from London to Sheffield in northern England. On the day they move in, the Glover household across the street is in upheaval: Convinced that his wife is having an affair, Malcolm Glover has suddenly disappeared. The reverberations of this rupture will echo through the years to come as the connection between the families deepens. But it will be the particular crises of ten-year-old Tim Glover — set off by two seemingly inconsequential but ultimately indelible acts of cruelty — that will erupt, full-blown, two decades later in a shocking conclusion.

Best Book of the Year 2007

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss, and by fate. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman’s love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.

Best Book of the Year 2006

Beginning in Paris on the eve of the Nazi occupation in 1940, as Parisians flee the city, human folly surfaces in every imaginable way. Suite Française is the remarkable story of men and women thrown together in circumstances beyond their control during World War II. When Irène Némirovsky began working on Suite Française, she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where she died. For sixty-four years, this novel remained hidden and unknown.

Best Book of the Year 2005

Joan Didion delivers a searing portrait of a marriage and a life — in good times and bad — that will speak to anyone who has ever loved and lost a husband or wife or child. In a work of electric honesty and passion, Didion explores how we all, somehow, will ourselves to survive. “An utterly shattering portrait of loss and grief” (The New York Times).

Best Book of the Year 2003

A gripping memoir about the nature of addiction and the meaning of recovery from a bold and talented literary voice. “Anyone who has ever felt broken and wished for a better life will find inspiration in Frey’s story” (People).

Best Book of the Year 2000

A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic books. Together, Joe and Sammy embark on an adventure that takes them deep into the heart of Manhattan, and the heart of old-fashioned American ambition. From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly mistress of the night. Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building, Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink.