Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 2015
2015 was an unusually strong year. A Little Life divided critics but consumed everyone who read it. Between the World and Me appeared on nearly every list and was received as something more than a book — as a document of a particular American moment. H Is for Hawk had already won the Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book of the Year in the UK the year before, and arrived in American paperback to an audience that was not ready for how strange and extraordinary it was. The five books on this list are not simply the most praised of the year. They are the ones that, ten years on, still seem like the books of that year — the ones that opened something, or named something, or refused to let go.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 books · Fiction · Non-Fiction · Memoir · Updated June 2026
A Little Life
Four men meet at a small New England college and move to New York, where their lives unfold over decades. At the centre is Jude St Francis — a lawyer of devastating brilliance, whose childhood the novel withholds and then reveals with increasing precision and increasing horror. A Little Life is 720 pages long, was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, and divided critics more sharply than almost any novel of the decade: some found it manipulative, some found it the most emotionally demanding and important novel they had ever read. Almost nobody found it forgettable.
This is the book from 2015 that people still talk about in terms of what it did to them. Not what they thought of it — what it did to them. Yanagihara is interested in the absolute limits of suffering and of love, and she is not interested in making either comfortable. If you read it, read it knowing that it will ask more of you than most books do. It is also, in the ways that matter, a novel about chosen family and the specific quality of friendship between people who have survived things they cannot name.
Between the World and Me
Written as a letter to his teenage son, Coates’s book is a meditation on what it means to inhabit a Black body in America — the specific vulnerability of that body to state violence, the history that produced that vulnerability, and the inadequacy of the myths America tells itself about race and justice. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Toni Morrison called it “required reading.” It was written before the events that would make it feel even more urgently necessary in the years that followed.
The form — a father’s letter to his son — gives the book an intimacy that statistics and argument cannot. Coates is not trying to persuade you of something you do not already know is happening. He is asking you to feel the weight of it, in a body, over a life. It is a short book and a devastating one, and it matters that it was written before the events of 2020, because it demonstrates that what happened then had a history that was already fully legible to those paying attention.
H Is for Hawk
After her father’s sudden death, Macdonald — a Cambridge academic and lifelong falconer — buys a goshawk and spends a year training it. What sounds like a grief memoir becomes something far stranger: a book about wildness and control, about the nature of grief itself, about T.H. White and his own failed attempt to train a goshawk, about England and its landscape and what humans project onto predatory birds. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year, and it writes about nature with a precision and strangeness that almost no nature writing achieves.
This is the book on this list that is most likely to surprise you with what it actually is. It announces itself as a grief memoir and a falconry book, and it is both of those things, but it is also a book about how we understand other minds — animal and human — and what we risk when we try to enter them. Macdonald’s prose is exact in a way that is also constantly surprising. A decade on it reads like a classic of the form, which is what it is.
A Brief History of Seven Killings
The Man Booker Prize winner, and one of the most ambitious novels on this list: a vast, polyphonic account of Jamaica from the 1970s to the 1990s, centred on the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976 and radiating outward to encompass the CIA, the drug trade, Kingston gang warfare, American crack cocaine culture, and the decades that followed. James writes in multiple voices — gang members, CIA operatives, journalists, ghosts — and the novel requires sustained attention and offers sustained reward.
This is the kind of novel that reminds you what fiction can do when it takes historical scope seriously — when it refuses to reduce complex political and social forces to individual protagonists and moral lessons. James is interested in systems and in the people caught inside them, and the result is a novel that feels more like living through something than reading about it. It is long and dense and violent, and it is exceptional. The Booker judges called it the best winning novel since The Line of Beauty in 2004.
Fates and Furies
A novel in two halves: the first follows Lancelot Satterwhite — called Lotto — a golden, charmed playwright whose life has the quality of myth; the second follows Mathilde, his wife, and the same marriage from the inside of a very different consciousness. What looks from the outside like a perfect life looks from the inside like something else entirely, and the gap between those perspectives is where the novel lives. Barack Obama named it his favourite book of the year. It was a finalist for the National Book Award.
What Groff does here is formally precise and emotionally unsettling in ways that stay with you. The first half is rich and propulsive and golden; the second half turns that gold cold. The book is about the stories marriages tell themselves and each other, about what we withhold from the people closest to us and why, and about the difference between a life as it is perceived and a life as it is lived. It is also beautifully written, which matters — some novels earn your attention; this one holds it.
Not sure where to start?
If you want the book from 2015 that people still talk about as an experience rather than a reading
→ Start with A Little Life. Go in knowing what it asks of you. It is not for every moment, but if you read it in the right one it will not leave you.
If you want something shorter that lands with equal force
→ Read Between the World and Me. It is 150 pages and it does not waste a single one of them. Start it in the afternoon and you will finish it before sleep.
If you want the most surprising book on the list — the one that is unlike anything else
→ Read H Is for Hawk. Give it twenty pages to become what it is. It will earn everything it asks.
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From the bookshelf
“The world is not a wish-granting factory.” — Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
If this list resonated with you, you'll find more books like these on my personal bookshelf — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
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