Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 2016
2016 was an exceptionally strong year — not because there were more books, but because several of the books that came out that year were the kind you don’t recover from. The Sellout won the Booker Prize and became the first American novel to do so. The Underground Railroad won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. When Breath Becomes Air was a memoir written by a dying man that somehow managed to be about living. The Girls, Lab Girl, Between the World and Me, Shrill — it was the year that serious nonfiction about race, gender, and science arrived all at once, and it was also the year that the novel felt most necessary. These are the eight books I’d press into your hands.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 books · Fiction · Memoir · Nonfiction · Updated June 2026
The Sellout
A Black man in the fictional Los Angeles suburb of Dickens reinstates slavery and racial segregation in his community — and ends up in front of the Supreme Court of the United States. The Sellout is one of the sharpest, funniest, most uncomfortable novels ever written about race and American identity. It won the Booker Prize in 2016, the first American novel to receive the award, and divided readers in exactly the way the best satire should: it is impossible to put down and impossible to be entirely comfortable with.
The Sellout is on this list because it does what no earnest novel about race can do: it makes you laugh at things you didn’t think you were allowed to laugh at, and then holds you responsible for the laugh. Beatty’s prose is genuinely wild — digressive, allusive, furious — and there is nothing else quite like it.
When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon completing his residency at Stanford when he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer at the age of thirty-six. He died before the book was published. When Breath Becomes Air is the memoir he wrote in the time he had left — part a reflection on what it means to be a doctor who faces death, part a meditation on what makes a life worth living, and part a love story told to his wife and the daughter born during his illness. It spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list.
This is the most serious book on this list and the one I recommend most often when someone asks me what to read when they’re facing something they can’t change. Kalanithi does not offer consolation. He offers honesty, and that turns out to be enough.
The Underground Railroad
Cora is a slave on a Georgia plantation who decides to run. Colson Whitehead reimagines the Underground Railroad as a literal railroad — tunnels, tracks, stations — running beneath the American South, and follows Cora from state to state, each one a different version of America’s relationship to race and freedom. The Underground Railroad won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award in 2016 and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. It remains one of the most significant American novels of the past decade.
Whitehead’s method — taking a historical metaphor literally — does something that straightforward historical fiction cannot. It makes the reader feel the specific texture of each state’s violence and hypocrisy as Cora moves through them. The novel is also compulsively readable in a way that more overtly literary books often are not. It earns both qualities without sacrificing either.
The Girls
The summer of 1969. Evie Boyd is fourteen, bored, and aching to be noticed. She falls in with a group of older girls orbiting a charismatic man named Russell on a Northern California ranch — a fictional echo of the Manson Family, though the novel is not really about him at all. It is about Evie, about female longing and the particular vulnerability of girlhood, about what it means to want to be seen so desperately that you stop seeing yourself. Emma Cline’s debut was one of the most celebrated first novels in years.
The Girls belongs on this list because of what it does with interiority. Evie’s voice — retrospective, precise, full of self-knowledge she didn’t have at fourteen — is the real subject of the novel. Cline understands exactly how girls become susceptible to manipulation, and she explains it without excusing it or sensationalising it.
Lab Girl
Hope Jahren is a geobiologist who has spent her career studying trees, seeds, and soil. Lab Girl is her memoir — part a lyrical account of plants and what they can teach us about survival and growth, part an honest and often funny account of what it is like to be a woman in science, and part a portrait of her friendship with her lab partner Bill, which is one of the most unusual and touching relationships in recent memoir. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography.
Lab Girl is on this list because it is genuinely two things at once: a beautiful piece of nature writing and a candid account of what it costs to build a career in a field that was not designed for you. The chapters about plants are interspersed with chapters about her life, and the two illuminate each other in ways you don’t expect.
Between the World and Me
Written as a letter to his teenage son, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay on what it means to inhabit a Black body in America was published in 2015 and spent most of 2016 at the centre of cultural conversation. It won the National Book Award and was described by Toni Morrison as required reading. Coates writes about the history of racial violence in America with the precision of a journalist and the urgency of a father who fears for his child’s safety every time he leaves the house.
Between the World and Me is on this list because it changed the terms of the conversation about race in America. It is not an argument — it is a testimony, and the form of the letter makes it impossible to read at a comfortable distance. You are the person being addressed.
Shrill
Lindy West is a journalist and critic who writes about feminism, fat acceptance, and popular culture. Shrill is her memoir in essays — about growing up fat in America, about the particular cruelty of internet misogyny, about abortion rights, about what it takes to stop apologising for existing. It is funny in the way that only very honest things can be funny, and it made a significant contribution to conversations about body image and online harassment that have since become central to public discourse.
Shrill is on this list because it says things that needed to be said in a way that actually reaches people. West does not lecture. She tells you about her own life, and the argument arrives through the telling. The chapter about her father is the best thing in the book and one of the best pieces of memoir writing of its year.
The Sympathizer
A communist spy embedded in the South Vietnamese army flees to America after the fall of Saigon in 1975. The Sympathizer is his confession — written in a re-education camp, addressed to a commandant who may or may not intend to kill him. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016 and is the most formally ambitious novel on this list: a spy novel, a war novel, a novel about identity and double consciousness, and a savage critique of America’s self-image as a force for good in the world.
The Sympathizer is the novel that most rewards rereading. On a first pass it is a gripping thriller. On a second pass it is a philosophical argument about what it means to see from two positions at once — to be, as the narrator says, a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Nguyen’s voice is unlike anyone else’s.
Not sure where to start?
If you want the memoir that changes how you think about time
→ Read When Breath Becomes Air. Paul Kalanithi wrote it while dying. That fact is not irrelevant to how it reads.
If you want the novel from 2016 that will still be read in fifty years
→ Read The Underground Railroad. It won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for a reason. The premise sounds gimmicky; the execution is not.
If you want to be simultaneously delighted and made deeply uncomfortable
→ Read The Sellout. It is the funniest book on this list and also the most savage. The Booker committee was right.
If you want nonfiction that arrived at exactly the right moment and still hasn’t left
→ Read Between the World and Me. A letter from a father to his son about what it means to be Black in America. The form is simple. The book is not.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 2016
From the bookshelf
“You are not the darkness you endured. You are the light that refused to surrender.” — John Mark Green
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.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations