The Award-Winning Books of 2020

Winner of the 2020 National Book Award and soon to be a Hulu series: from the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.

Winner of the 2020 National Book Award in Translated Literature, Tokyo Ueno Station is a surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo’s busiest train stations.

In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative follow-up that won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet.

Set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, here are eight emotionally absorbing stories, rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Everything Inside explores with quiet power and elegance the forces that pull us together or drive us apart, sometimes in the same searing instant.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, Say Nothing is a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.

Winner of the Nebula Award, A Song for a New Day follows a global pandemic that makes public gatherings illegal and concerts impossible, except for those willing to break the law for the love of music—and for one chance at human connection.

The Newbery Honor Award Winner and Young Reader’s Choice Award, Roller Girl is a heartwarming graphic novel about friendship and surviving junior high through the power of roller derby.

Winner of the Michael L. Printz Medal, A.S. King exposes how a toxic culture of polite white supremacy tears a family apart and how one determined generation can dig its way out.