Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 2020
2020 was the year everything stopped. The books that arrived into it were written for a different world — and several of them turned out to be exactly what that moment needed. A Booker Prize debut from Glasgow that rejected every sentimentality available to it about poverty and love. A novel set in a Welsh village in 1596 that became one of the most urgent books about grief in recent memory. A singular, brief novel about a man living in an impossible house who does not know who he was before. And the nonfiction that reframed the American racial hierarchy in terms that stuck. Eight books, all worth your time — and all of them, for different reasons, better read now than they were then.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 books · Fiction · Nonfiction · Memoir · Published 2020
Shuggie Bain
Shuggie Bain won the Booker Prize 2020 on its debut, after being rejected by more than thirty publishers. It is set in 1980s Glasgow and follows Shuggie — a sensitive, isolated boy — as he navigates his mother Agnes’s alcoholism across the decade of his childhood. Agnes Bain is one of the great characters in recent British fiction: charismatic, self-destructive, capable of enormous tenderness and enormous damage, entirely herself. The novel is partly based on Douglas Stuart’s own childhood in Glasgow, and the specificity that comes from that — the particular texture of a particular place, time, and family — is what makes it unlike any other novel about poverty and love that I know.
Shuggie Bain is on this list because it refuses both available sentimentalities: the redemptive arc and the political explanation. It simply shows what it looks like to live inside this specific material and emotional circumstance, and what a child learns to want and to expect from love inside it. Shuggie loves his mother. She cannot stop destroying herself. The novel holds both of those facts without resolving them — which is the only honest thing to do with them. One of the finest novels of the decade.
Hamnet
In 1596, the eleven-year-old son of a glover in Stratford-upon-Avon died, probably of bubonic plague. His name was Hamnet. His father — a playwright working in London — wrote a play a few years later with a title so close to his son’s name that it can only have been deliberate. Maggie O’Farrell reconstructs the life of that boy and, more centrally, of his mother Agnes — the woman who barely appears in any historical record and whose grief Shakespeare’s play was almost certainly trying to process. Hamnet won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020. O’Farrell’s prose is extraordinary: sensory, precise, and emotionally exact in a way that makes the past feel genuinely inhabited rather than reconstructed.
Hamnet is one of the finest historical novels ever written about grief because O’Farrell refuses to modernise her subject. Agnes is not a sixteenth-century woman made legible for a contemporary reader; she is a woman in her own world, with her own knowledge and her own ways of understanding what has happened to her. The grief is specific to her, and that specificity is what makes it universal. It arrived in 2020 and was immediately understood as the book the year needed — and it remains one of the best novels O’Farrell has written, which is saying a great deal.
→ More on fiction and nonfiction about grief: my books about grief list
The Vanishing Half
Twin sisters from a small, light-skinned Black community in rural Louisiana take completely different paths when they leave: one stays, marries a dark-skinned man, and raises a daughter who is unambiguously Black; the other moves to another city, passes as white, and builds an entirely different life. Brit Bennett follows both sisters and their daughters across decades, making the question of racial identity — what it is, what it is performed to be, what it costs to sustain a performance across a lifetime — into a multigenerational family saga that is simultaneously intimate and structurally ambitious. It was the most widely read and recommended American literary novel of 2020 by a significant margin.
The Vanishing Half earned its readership because it found a structure that made a familiar subject feel entirely fresh. Bennett writes about choice — the specific choices available to a person based on how the world reads them — and about what those choices cost the people who make them and the people they leave behind. The two sisters live out an experiment in identity across a lifetime, and their daughters inherit the consequences of choices neither of them fully understood at the time. One of the essential American novels of the decade.
→ More on fiction about identity and what families conceal: my family secrets list
Piranesi
Piranesi lives in a house of infinite halls filled with statues and tides and birds. He does not know who he was before. He catalogues the world around him with meticulous, loving attention — uncontaminated by the self he has forgotten — and the novel operates according to its own flawless internal logic. Susanna Clarke spent sixteen years writing it, in the fragments available to her during a debilitating illness, and the result has the quality of something that could not have been written any faster. It won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2021 and is, at 272 pages, one of the most singular reading experiences in recent fiction.
Piranesi is on this list because it is unlike anything else — before or since. Its central quality is a mind encountering the world fresh, without the weight of other people’s explanations, and the effect of reading it is something like what that must feel like: complete, specific attention to what is actually there. You finish it and immediately want to press it into someone’s hands. Give it twenty pages and it will have you completely. Read it in a day, which is exactly the right amount of time.
→ Piranesi is on my Books Like Poor Things list — more fiction that operates on its own terms
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Isabel Wilkerson — the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Warmth of Other Suns — argues in Caste that the United States is not best understood through the framework of race but through the framework of caste: a rigid, hereditary hierarchy that assigns worth and determines opportunity before a person can make a single choice. She draws comparisons between the American racial caste system, the caste system of India, and Nazi Germany — and the comparison to the latter is the most unsettling and the most carefully documented section of the book. Barack Obama named it one of his favourite books of 2020. It became one of the essential texts of the year and has not dated.
Caste changed the terms of the conversation in 2020 — a year when the terms of the conversation about race in America were already changing rapidly. Wilkerson’s argument is structural rather than personal: she is not writing about individual racism but about a system that operates independently of individual intention, and her evidence for the persistence and specificity of that system is forensic and compelling. The reframe from race to caste is not a softening — it is a sharpening. One of the most important American nonfiction books of the decade.
A Promised Land
The first volume of Barack Obama’s presidential memoir covers his childhood, early political career, and the first two and a half years of his presidency — from the financial crisis through the passage of the Affordable Care Act to the killing of Osama bin Laden. It is, by a wide margin, the best-written memoir by a sitting or former head of state in recent decades: reflective, honest about failure and self-doubt, and written with the attention to language that has characterised Obama’s public voice throughout his career. It sold more than 3.3 million copies in its first month of publication.
A Promised Land belongs on this list because it is rare for a political memoir to be a genuinely literary text — and this one is both. Obama writes about power, responsibility, race, family, and the specific loneliness of being the first person to occupy a role with a self-awareness that most political memoirs deliberately suppress. The most revealing sections are about the gap between what a president can and cannot control — and what it feels like to make decisions whose consequences you will not live to see fully. It is also, quietly, one of the most honest accounts of the cost of ambition available in memoir.
Exciting Times
Ava is a twenty-two-year-old Irish teacher living in Hong Kong, simultaneously involved with Julian — a British banker who lets her live in his flat — and Edith, a Hong Kong lawyer who sees her with a clarity Julian cannot manage. Naoise Dolan’s debut novel is written in a voice of forensic, deadpan intelligence that is entirely her own: it observes the grammar of power and affection and class in relationships with a precision that is funny and sharp and occasionally devastating. It was shortlisted for several prizes and immediately compared to Normal People — a comparison it both invites and earns on its own terms.
Exciting Times is on this list because it shows what a debut can do when the author has a voice distinctive enough to commit to completely. Dolan writes about the specific power dynamics of relationships between people who each have something the other wants — money, visibility, clarity, warmth — with more precision than almost any other novelist of her generation. The novel does not resolve neatly, which is the only honest ending available to the situation it describes. One of the finest Irish debuts of the decade.
The Midnight Library
Nora Seed, having decided that life is not worth living, finds herself in a library between life and death that contains every book representing every life she could have lived. She can open any of them and step inside. The Midnight Library is a philosophical novel about regret, choice, and what makes a life feel worth continuing — and it became one of the bestselling novels of 2020 and 2021 because it arrived at precisely the moment when a very large number of people were asking exactly those questions, in exactly those terms. Haig writes with warmth and accessibility, and the novel’s emotional sincerity is genuine throughout.
The Midnight Library belongs on this list not because it is the most formally ambitious novel of the year — it is not — but because it was the right book at the right moment, and the scale of its readership is itself a form of evidence that matters. Haig has spent years writing seriously about mental health and the question of what makes life feel worth living, and this is his most fully realised expression of those themes. In a year when many people were asking what their lives were for, this book answered carefully and with genuine kindness.
Where to begin with the best of 2020
If you want the Booker Prize winner and one of the most honest portraits of poverty and love in recent fiction
→ Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. A boy, his alcoholic mother, 1980s Glasgow. Rejected by thirty publishers before winning the Booker. One of the great novels of the decade.
If you want the novel about historical grief that became the book its year needed
→ Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. Shakespeare’s dead son, his mother’s grief, the silence history left around her. The finest prose of any novel on this list.
If you want something completely unlike anything else — read in a day, unforgettable for years
→ Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Infinite halls, statues, tides. A mind without its past. 272 pages. Start it this afternoon.
If you want the nonfiction that most changed how you think about power and inequality
→ Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. The argument that race is not the right lens for understanding the American hierarchy — and the forensic evidence for what the right lens is.
If you want the American literary novel that became the most read and most discussed of the year
→ The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. Twin sisters, two completely different lives built from the same origin. One of the essential American novels of the decade.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 2020
What were the best books of 2020?
The Booker Prize 2020 went to Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart — a debut novel set in 1980s Glasgow, rejected by more than thirty publishers before winning. The Women’s Prize went to Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. The most widely read American literary novel was The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. In nonfiction, Caste by Isabel Wilkerson and A Promised Land by Barack Obama were the most significant titles. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke was the most singular reading experience of the year.
Who won the Booker Prize in 2020?
Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize 2020 for Shuggie Bain, his debut novel about a boy navigating his mother’s alcoholism in 1980s Glasgow. Stuart had been rejected by more than thirty publishers before the novel was accepted. He based it partly on his own childhood. The judges called it a heartbreaking portrait of tenderness and resilience in the face of addiction. It is one of the finest Booker winners of the decade.
What is Piranesi about and is it worth reading?
Piranesi lives in a house of infinite halls filled with statues and tides and birds. He does not know who he was before. The novel operates according to its own flawless internal logic and won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2021. It is 272 pages long and can be read in a day. It is worth reading because it is unlike anything else — before or since. Give it twenty pages and it will have you completely. The answer to whether it is worth reading is: start it and find out, which will take you less time than deciding.
What is Caste by Isabel Wilkerson about?
Caste argues that the United States is better understood through the framework of caste — a rigid, hereditary hierarchy — than through the framework of race alone. Wilkerson draws comparisons between the American racial hierarchy, India’s caste system, and Nazi Germany, using each to illuminate the others. Her argument is that the hierarchy operates independently of individual intention, which is why individual goodwill has not been sufficient to dismantle it. One of the most important American nonfiction books of the decade.
How does Hamnet connect to Shakespeare?
Hamnet was the name of Shakespeare’s son, who died in 1596 aged eleven. A few years later, Shakespeare wrote a play called Hamlet — a name so close that the connection is widely considered deliberate. Maggie O’Farrell’s novel reimagines the life of that boy and, more centrally, of his mother Agnes — the woman history has largely ignored — and her grief. O’Farrell does not dramatise Shakespeare directly; the playwright appears as a peripheral figure. The novel is about Agnes, about what she knew and felt and did in the months after her son died, and about the particular silence that surrounds a mother’s grief in a world that did not keep her records.
More from the shelf
From the bookshelf
“She was a drinker of the kind people called a character, until it stopped being funny.” — Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain
More hand-picked recommendations on my personal bookshelf — books from every year that stay with you long after the last page.
