Best Books of 2018

Educated

Tara Westover · 2018

Tara Westover grew up in rural Idaho with a survivalist father who did not believe in schools, doctors, or the government. She had never set foot in a classroom. By her mid-twenties she had a PhD from Cambridge. Educated is the memoir of that passage — from a childhood that operated entirely outside every institutional structure to an adulthood spent inside the most prestigious institutions in the world — and it is one of the most honest accounts of what education actually is: not the accumulation of credentials but the process of being able to see your own life clearly enough to choose something different. It became one of the bestselling memoirs of the decade and has not lost a page of its power.

Educated is on my bookshelf because it is the most honest account I know of what it costs to leave a family that formed you — and of the specific, difficult love that survives that leaving. Westover does not stop loving the people she had to separate from. That is what makes the book devastating and true. It also appears on my Books About Love list for exactly that reason: it is a book about the most complicated form of love — the kind that exists between people who have also harmed each other.

→ Read my full thoughts on Educated
→ Books like Educated — what to read next

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

John Carreyrou · 2018

Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos at nineteen with the promise of revolutionising blood testing — diagnosing hundreds of diseases from a single drop. By her mid-thirties, the company was valued at nine billion dollars and she was the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire. The technology did not work. John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story, tells the complete account of how a fraud of this scale was sustained for so long — through investor psychology, legal intimidation, charismatic certainty, and the specific blindness that Silicon Valley’s culture of disruption produced in the people who should have been asking harder questions.

Bad Blood is on my bookshelf because it reads like a thriller and functions as something considerably more important: an analysis of how charisma, ambition, and the narrative of the visionary founder can override rational scrutiny at every level of an organisation, a board, and an entire investor class. Carreyrou writes with the precision of a journalist who spent years building an airtight case, and the result is one of the most gripping nonfiction books of the decade. I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how fraud actually works — not as cartoon villainy, but as the slow accumulation of small concessions everyone makes to avoid a conversation they don’t want to have.

→ Read my full thoughts on Bad Blood
→ Books like Bad Blood — more in this territory

Milkman

Anna Burns · 2018

An unnamed eighteen-year-old girl in an unnamed city — unmistakably Belfast during the Troubles — is being stalked by a paramilitary figure known only as the Milkman. Nobody around her will acknowledge this is happening; the community’s survival depends on collective silence, on not seeing, on the performance of normalcy inside a situation that is not normal at all. Burns tells the story in a dense, looping, run-on stream of consciousness that replicates exactly the experience of a person trying to think clearly inside a world that punishes clarity. Milkman won the Booker Prize 2018 and is one of the most formally ambitious novels to have won the prize in recent decades.

Milkman is demanding — the prose requires your full attention and refuses to simplify. But what it gives back is something no simpler novel could give: the experience of a community’s collective psychology from the inside, the way that political violence shapes not just what people do but what they are permitted to think, what they can allow themselves to see. The unnamed narrator’s attempts to maintain an interior life — to read while walking, to resist the Milkman’s reframing of their relationship — are some of the most extraordinary pages in recent literary fiction. It is not an easy read. It is a necessary one.

Normal People

Sally Rooney · 2018

Connell and Marianne meet in their final year of secondary school in a small Irish town — he is popular and well-liked, she is isolated and strange — and the novel follows their relationship across four years of university in Dublin: together, apart, and together again, in different configurations of power and need and misunderstanding. Rooney writes about desire and class with extraordinary precision, and Normal People became the novel that defined a generation’s literary conversation. It won the Costa Novel Award in 2018, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was adapted for television by Hulu and BBC Three in 2020.

Normal People is on this list because it does what the best literary fiction about young people does: it takes its characters’ inner lives completely seriously. Rooney does not condescend to Connell and Marianne, or to the specific experience of being young and in love and unable to say what you need. She is interested in the gap between what people feel and what they are able to communicate — and that gap, which is the cause of almost all the pain in the novel, is something any reader at any age will recognise. The most important Irish debut of the decade.

→ More fiction that takes love seriously: my Books About Love list

The Overstory

Richard Powers · 2018

Nine Americans whose lives become intertwined through their relationships with trees — and through a growing understanding that the world’s forests are dying while the humans around them are not paying attention. Richard Powers structures The Overstory like a tree: individual characters as roots, their stories as trunk, the collective movement they build as branches. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019 for work published in 2018, and is one of the most formally ambitious American novels of the decade. The New York Times called it “a novel of enormous, perhaps even radical ambition.”

The Overstory is on this list because it does something that almost no other contemporary novel attempts: it makes the non-human world the protagonist. Powers is not writing about trees as symbols or backdrop — he is writing about them as subjects with their own lives, their own timescales, their own relationships, and the novel’s central argument is that the human inability to perceive those lives is the source of our collective ecological failure. It is a long novel and a demanding one, but it changes what you see when you look at a tree afterwards, which is the test of whether a novel has done its work.

Becoming

Michelle Obama · 2018

Becoming covers Michelle Obama’s childhood on the South Side of Chicago, her education at Princeton and Harvard Law, her marriage to Barack Obama, her years as First Lady, and the specific challenges of raising two daughters inside the White House. It is one of the bestselling memoirs ever published — more than seventeen million copies sold in its first year — and it earned that readership by being exactly what the best memoirs are: honest about the cost of ambition, about the compromises that public life requires, and about the experience of being a Black woman navigating institutions that were not built with her in mind.

Becoming belongs on this list because it is a genuinely literary memoir from a figure who could have produced something much safer. Obama is honest about doubt, about the years she felt her own ambitions being subsumed into her husband’s career, about the particular strain of visibility she navigated as First Lady. It is also, quietly, one of the most useful books available on the question of how to build a life — what it requires, what it costs, and what makes the costs worth bearing. Warm, precise, and more candid than its public reception suggested.

→ More essential memoirs and biographies on my reading list

Circe

Madeline Miller · 2018

Circe is the daughter of the sun god Helios — despised by her divine family for her weakness, exiled to an island, and given centuries to discover that what her family called weakness was in fact something they did not have a framework for: power of a different kind. Madeline Miller takes the minor figure from Homer’s Odyssey and gives her a full interior life, a complete history, and a voice of extraordinary precision and feeling. Circe appeared on almost every best-of list of 2018 and remained on bestseller lists for over a year. It is the kind of novel that reminds you why mythology has survived: because the stories it tells about power, desire, transformation, and what women are permitted to become are the stories that have always been told and are still being told.

Circe is on this list because it does what the best mythological retellings do: it makes the myth stranger and more specific, not more familiar. Miller’s Circe is not a feminist symbol or a corrective to Homer — she is a person, with particular desires and particular failings and a long, slow process of understanding what she actually is. The novel is beautifully written, completely absorbing, and one of those books that stays with you for the quality of its central consciousness rather than the drama of its events.

There There

Tommy Orange · 2018

Twelve Native Americans converge on the Big Oakland Powwow, each carrying their own history, their own reasons for being there, and their own relationship to what it means to be Native and urban in contemporary America. Tommy Orange weaves their stories together in the novel’s first two-thirds, then detonates them in the final section with a structural violence that mirrors its subject. There There was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction, and has been compared to Colson Whitehead and Toni Morrison. Orange’s prologue — a compressed, incandescent essay about what has been done to Native people and how that history lives in the present — is one of the finest pieces of prose published in 2018.

There There is on this list because it answers a question that American literature has rarely asked directly: what does it mean to be Native and from a city, where the land is gone and the powwow is held in a stadium and the connection to tradition is real and complicated and not reducible to either pride or loss? Orange writes about his characters with complete specificity and complete respect — none of them represent, all of them are — and the novel’s structure, which builds and then breaks, is the most formally honest thing it could do with its subject.