The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020

TIME said #10: Kawakami takes a stirring look at the expectations put on women by the world and by themselves.

TIME said #9: A translator herself, Matsuda knows how to play with language, infusing her narrators with memorable idiosyncrasies. While each chapter is its own contained short story, some interlink. The result is a reimagining of traditional tales as part of a broader narrative about women and power.

TIME said #8: McBride describes their world in densely packed, rhythmic specificities, fixating on the community’s rich local history and the voices that populate it.

TIME said #7: In moving between three voices, Majumdar reveals the intersections of their ambitions and fears, coalescing into an unnerving investigation of corruption, class and tragedy.

TIME said #6: I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is short fiction at its finest: van den Berg captures the cruelest of traumas on one page, then supplies a healing dose of humor on the next.

TIME said #5: His project uses fiction as a filter through which to tell an essential story about a man facing the turmoil of American life after 9/11 and his family’s attendant struggle to define itself. It’s a delicate balancing act between what’s real and what may not be, yet in Akhtar’s brilliant book the complexities of the American Dream have never been so naked.

TIME said #4: Prize finalist Lydia Millet’s novel, which was a National Book Award finalist, is both an adventure story reminiscent of the classics and a warning tale of a grim future told through the eyes of a generation far too comfortable with catastrophe.

TIME said #3: Mantel’s Cromwell is a character for the ages—rough-edged yet introspective, with a mind as sharp as an axe. Her Henry, meanwhile, is an apt reminder that self-pitying men with oversized egos enjoyed power long before the present.

TIME said #2: Stuart writes beautifully observed inner lives for both characters, capturing Shuggie’s devotion to his sometimes vivacious and glamorous mother and the pain that comes from seeing her transformed into a hateful, unpredictable stranger by drink. The novel, a National Book Award finalist and winner of the Booker Prize, is a gut punch.

TIME said #1: Bennett weaves a layered and satisfying narrative that shifts through time and multiple characters’ perspectives to trace the impact of a single decision on Stella, her family and the next generation. An eloquent new entry to literature on that most vital of subjects, identity, The Vanishing Half is the novel of the year.