The Ultimate Best Books of 2018 List

It’s mid-December, and likely you are sick and tired of best-of lists. I know, because I am too—especially after reading 52 of them and tracking their contents for the very piece you are reading—so trust me when I say that the monstrosity below is the last best-books-of-2018 list you’ll ever have to read.

To put this together, as I did last year, I looked at all of the end-of-year best books lists I could find online, tallied up their picks, and figured out which individual books were the most often recommended. This year, I counted 52 lists from 37 sources, which added up to a grand total of 880 books. I didn’t include any books from the UK lists, since they often have slightly different publication schedules. I tried my best to balance fiction and nonfiction, but some places only offered one or the other at the time of writing, and the final compilation is probably a little heavy on the fiction side.

So while I’m sure I didn’t get every list, and more are no doubt appearing even as I write this, I feel I can reasonably attest that the books below are the ones that the literary world at large has deemed the “best” of 2018. Does that mean they are actually the best? You’ll have to read them and decide for yourself. But if you’re looking for a relatively sure bet for a gift or some holiday reading, this is a good place to start:

19 lists:

Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Tommy Orange, There There

18 lists:

Madeline Miller, Circe

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17 lists:

Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

16 lists:

Tara Westover, Educated

14 lists:

Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers
Richard Powers, The Overstory

13 lists:

Michelle McNamara, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark

12 lists:

R. O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

11 lists:

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black
John Carreyrou, Bad Blood
Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Tana French, The Witch Elm
Lauren Groff, Florida
Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry
Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

10 lists:

Esi Edugyan, Washington Black
David Sedaris, Calypso

9 lists:

Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know
Kiese Laymon, Heavy

8 lists:

Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists
Michael Ondaatje, Warlight
Shobha Rao, Girls Burn Brighter

7 lists:

Kate Atkinson, Transcription
David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass
Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone
Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon
Leslie Jamison, The Recovering
Barbara Kingsolver, Unsheltered
Ling Ma, Severance
Michelle Obama, Becoming
Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race
Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success
Zadie Smith, Feel Free
Olga Tokarczuk; tr. Jennifer Croft, Flights
Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

6 lists:

Tomi Adeyemi, Children of Blood and Bone
Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Small Fry
Melissa Broder, The Pisces
Rachel Cusk, Kudos
Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater
A. J. Finn, The Woman in the Window
Jasmine Guillory, The Proposal
Crystal Hana Kim, If You Leave Me
Jill Lepore, These Truths
Beth Macy, Dopesick
Terese Marie Mailhot, Heart Berries
Liane Moriarty, Nine Perfect Strangers
Sigrid Nunez, The Friend
Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind
Curtis Sittenfeld, You Think It, I’ll Say It

5 lists:

Sam Anderson, Boom Town
Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart
Patrick deWitt, French Exit
Nick Drnaso, Sabrina
Helen Hoang, The Kiss Quotient
Alan Hollinghurst, The Sparsholt Affair
Paula McLain, Love and Ruin
Fatima Farheen Mirza, A Place For Us
Sayaka Murata, tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori, Convenience Store Woman
Susan Orlean, The Library Book
David Quammen, The Tangled Tree
Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Heads of the Colored People
William Trevor, Last Stories
Laura van den Berg, The Third Hotel
Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil, The Girl Who Smiled Beads
Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh

4 lists:

Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X
Rumaan Alam, That Kind of Mother
Lucia Berlin, Evening in Paradise
Lou Berney, November Road
Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, the Serial Killer
Jamel Brinkley, A Lucky Man
Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River
Sloane Crosley, Look Alive Out There
Mark Dery, Born to Be Posthumous
Sally Field, In Pieces
Hank Green, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing
Sheila Heti, Motherhood
Greer Hendricks, The Wife Between Us
Daisy Johnson, Everything Under
Porochista Khakpour, Sick
R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War
Roque Larraquy, tr. Heather Cleary, Comemadre
Sabrina Orah Mark, Wild Milk
Neel Mukherjee, A State of Freedom
Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel, Ted Goossen, Killing Commendatore
Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra
Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox
Leila Slimani, The Perfect Nanny
Sarah Smarsh, Heartland
Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels
Nico Walker, Cherry
Lawrence Wright, God Save Texas
Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk
Kevin Young, Brown
Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

3 lists:

Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote
Katya Apekina, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish
Jesse Ball, Census
Shane Bauer, American Prison
Deborah Blum, The Poison Squad
Alice Bolin, Dead Girls
Anna Burns, Milkman
Anna Clark, The Poisoned City
Jennifer Clement, Gun Love
Bill Clinton and James Patterson, The President is Missing
Alyssa Cole, A Princess in Theory
Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree
Dave Eggers, The Monk of Mokha
Deborah Eisenberg, Your Duck Is My Duck
Roxane Gay, ed., Not That Bad
Abby Geni, The Wildlands
Casey Gerald, There Will Be No Miracles Here
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership
Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Vanessa Hua, A River of Stars
Dave Itzkoff, Robin
Uzodinma Iweala, Speak No Evil
N. K. Jemisin, How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?
Kirk Wallace Johnson, The Feather Thief
Lacy M. Johnson, The Reckonings
Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele, When They Call You a Terrorist
Maxwell King, The Good Neighbor
Mary Robinette Kowal, The Calculating Stars
Olivia Laing, Crudo
Jane Leavy, The Big Fella
Mira T. Lee, Everything Here is Beautiful
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die
Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living
Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk
Ada Limón, The Carrying
Laura Lippman, Sunburn
Jason Lutes, Berlin
Sujata Massey, The Widows of Malabar Hill
Jon Meacham, The Soul of America
Heather Morris, The Tattooist of Auschwitz
Idra Novey, Those Who Knew
Meaghan O’Connell, And Now We Have Everything
Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am
Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing
Sarah Perry, Melmoth
Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now
Frances de Pontes Peebles, The Air You Breathe
Andrew Roberts, Churchill
Elizabeth Rush, Rising
Chandler Klang Smith, The Sky is Yours
Tracy K. Smith, Wade in the Water
Domenico Starnone, tr. Jhumpa Lahiri, Trick
Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro
Lucy Tan, What We Were Promised
Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad
Ruth Ware, The Death of Mrs. Westaway
Paige Williams, The Dinosaur Artist
Kevin Wilson, Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine
Adam Winkler, We the Corporations
Bob Woodward, Fear

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The full source list:

The New Yorker’s “The Best Books of 2018,” The New York Times’s “100 Notable Books of 2018,” New York Public Library’s “Best Books of 2018,” TIME’s “The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2018” and “The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2018,” Literary Hub’s “Favorite Books of 2018,” The A.V. Club’s “10 Favorite Books of 2018,” EW’s “The 10 Best Books of 2018,” Vulture’s “The 10 Best Books of 2018,” Library Journal’s “Best Books 2018,” Chicago Tribune’s “Our 10 Best Books of 2018,” NYLON’s “The Best Books of 2018,” Slate’s “The 10 Best Books of 2018,” The Wall Street Journal’s “The Best Fiction and Nonfiction of 2018,” Real Simple’s “The Best Books of 2018,” Mental Floss’s “56 Best Books of 2018,” BuzzFeed’s “Best Fiction of 2018,” Southern Living’s “The Best Books of 2018, According to Independent Bookstores,” Entropy’s “Best Fiction Books of 2018” and “Best Nonfiction Books of 2018,” The Boston Globe’s “The Best Books of 2018,” People’s “The 10 Best Books of 2018,” Amazon’s “The Best Books of 2018,” NPR’s “Maureen Corrigan Picks the Best Books of 2018,” BookRiot’s “Best Books of 2018,” Electric Literature’s “15 Best Nonfiction Books of 2018,” Paste’s “The 12 Best Novels of 2018” and “The 16 Best Nonfiction Books of 2018,” Kirkus Reviews’s “Best Fiction of 2018,” The Washington Post’s “50 Notable Works of Fiction in 2018” and “50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2018,” Barnes & Noble’s “Best Fiction & Nonfiction of 2018,” HuffPost’s “The Best Fiction of 2018,” Publishers Weekly “Best Books 2018: Fiction” and “Best Books 2018: Mystery” and “Best Books 2018: Poetry” and “Best Books 2018: Nonfiction,” Goodreads’s “Best Fiction 2018” and “Best Mystery & Thriller 2018” and “Best Historical Fiction 2018” and “Best Fantasy 2018” and “Best Nonfiction 2018” and “Best Memoir & Autobiography 2018” and “Best History & Biography 2018” and “Best Science & Technology 2018” and “Best Poetry 2018,” Broadly’s “The 10 Best Books We Read in 2018,” Newsweek’s “61 Best Books from 2018,” O the Oprah Magazine’s “15 Favorite Books of 2018,” Popsugar’s “10 Incredible Books from this Year that Need to be on Your Reading List,” GooglePlay “Editor’s Choice Books,” and Boston’s “The 20 Best Books of 2018, According to Local Experts.”