Reading List · Lisanne Swart
The Best Books of 2018
2018 is the year nonfiction won. Becoming outsold every other book in America, of any kind, in any category. Educated and Bad Blood were the two books everyone seemed to be reading at once, and both were first books by people who had never written one. The novels were extraordinary too — Anna Burns took the Booker with Milkman and became the first Northern Irish writer to win it; Richard Powers wrote five hundred pages about trees and took the Pulitzer the year after; Sally Rooney published her second novel, the one that turned her into a name everyone knew. And in Stockholm, for the first time since 1949, the Nobel Prize in Literature was held over to the following year.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Published 2018
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Educated
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 2014 she had a PhD in intellectual history from Trinity College, 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. Her publisher puts it past four million copies. It 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.
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
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 whose first article on Theranos ran on 15 October 2015, 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.
Milkman
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
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 2018 Costa Novel Award, announced in January 2019, and was longlisted — not shortlisted — for the Booker Prize that year. BBC Three and Hulu adapted it for television in April 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. It is not her debut — Conversations with Friends came out in 2017 — but it is the book that made her name.
The Overstory
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 was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019, and is one of the most formally ambitious American novels of the decade. Barbara Kingsolver, reviewing it for The New York Times, called it a “magisterial new novel” in which “humans are merely underbrush”.
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
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. Bertelsmann reported ten million copies across the publisher’s English, Spanish and German-language markets within five months of publication, and it was the best-selling book of any kind in the United States that year. 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.
Circe
Circe is the daughter of the sun god Helios — despised by her divine family for her weakness, banished by Zeus to a deserted 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 was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2019 — it did not win; An American Marriage did — and won the Indies Choice Book Award for adult fiction that 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
Twelve Native American narrators 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, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, born and raised in Oakland, 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 was his first book. 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.
Where to begin with the best of 2018
If you want the memoir that made the whole genre feel new again
→ Educated by Tara Westover. On my bookshelf. A young woman who taught herself out of a world her family had built to keep her in. One of the essential memoirs of the decade.
If you want nonfiction that reads like a thriller and matters like journalism
→ Bad Blood by John Carreyrou. Also on my bookshelf. The complete story of the Theranos fraud — not as cartoon villainy, but as the slow accumulation of concessions everyone made to avoid the conversation they should have had.
If you want the Booker Prize winner — demanding, formally extraordinary, worth every page
→ Milkman by Anna Burns. Belfast during the Troubles, told in a stream of consciousness that replicates exactly the experience of trying to think clearly inside a world that punishes clarity.
If you want the novel that introduced Sally Rooney to the world
→ Normal People. Connell and Marianne, four years, the gap between what people feel and what they can bring themselves to say. Her second novel, and the one that made her name.
If you want the mythological retelling done as it should be done
→ Circe by Madeline Miller. Not a symbol. A person, with centuries to discover what she actually is.
Two books from this year are on my bookshelf with full reviews: Educated and Bad Blood. Both are the kind of books I recommend regularly and return to often.
Novels published in 2018
Thirteen novels whose first publication genuinely falls in 2018, and under them the three books of nonfiction that outsold and outlasted most of them. The line under each is what it is for, not what it is about.
Milkman
Booker Prize
Anna Burns · Faber & Faber, May
The Booker winner, and the first by a writer from Northern Ireland.
Normal People
Sally Rooney · Faber & Faber, August
Her second novel. Longlisted for the Booker, and the Costa Novel Award for 2018.
The Overstory
Richard Powers · W. W. Norton, April
Booker shortlist in 2018, Pulitzer in 2019. Nine people and a great many trees.
Circe
Madeline Miller · Little, Brown, April
Women’s Prize shortlist the following year.
There There
Debut
Tommy Orange · Knopf, June
Twelve narrators, one powwow, and a first book that was a Pulitzer finalist.
An American Marriage
Tayari Jones · Algonquin, February
Won the Women’s Prize the year Circe was shortlisted for it.
The Friend
Sigrid Nunez · Riverhead
National Book Award for Fiction, 2018. A woman, a dead friend, and a Great Dane.
The Great Believers
Rebecca Makkai · Viking, June
Chicago in 1985 and Paris in 2015, in one book.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Ottessa Moshfegh · Penguin Press, July
A woman decides to sleep through a year. It is funnier and colder than that sounds.
Washington Black
Esi Edugyan · Knopf, September
Booker shortlist, and the Giller Prize that year.
Everything Under
Daisy Johnson · Jonathan Cape
Booker shortlist. She was the youngest writer ever on it.
The Mars Room
Rachel Kushner · Scribner
Also Booker-shortlisted. A women’s prison in the Central Valley.
The Long Take
Robin Robertson · Picador
A novel in verse, Booker-shortlisted, which had not happened before.
Educated
Nonfiction
Tara Westover · Random House, February
Not a novel, and the book of 2018 that most people mean when they say 2018.
Bad Blood
Nonfiction
John Carreyrou · Knopf, May
Not a novel either, and it reads faster than most of the ones above.
Becoming
Nonfiction
Michelle Obama · Crown, November
The best-selling book of any kind in America that year.
First books published in 2018
Three of the writers on this page published their first book in 2018 — an unusually high number for one list. Two of the other five are regularly called debutants online and are not: Michelle Obama had published American Grown in 2012, and Sally Rooney Conversations with Friends in 2017.
Educated
Tara Westover
Her first book, and the one she is still best known for.
Bad Blood
John Carreyrou
His first book, after twenty years of reporting for the Wall Street Journal.
There There
Tommy Orange
His first book. It won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a Pulitzer finalist the following year.
2018 in books, in short
- Nobel Prize
- None. In May 2018 the Swedish Academy announced it would not award the prize that year, the first time since 1949 that the prize was held over to the following year. It was given retroactively in October 2019 to Olga Tokarczuk, “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”. See every Nobel winner
- Pulitzer, fiction
- Less, Andrew Sean Greer — awarded in 2018 for a book published in 2017. See every Pulitzer winner since 1980
- National Book Award
- The Friend, Sigrid Nunez — a 2018 book winning in 2018
- Booker Prize
- Milkman, Anna Burns, the first Northern Irish writer to win it. See every Booker winner since 1980
- Women’s Prize
- Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie — awarded in 2018 for a book published in 2017
- Best seller
- Becoming, with 3,428,409 print copies in the United States — the best-selling book of any kind that year, in any category
Only four adult fiction titles made the American top twenty of 2018, and the highest of them was The President Is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson, at number ten. The year belonged to nonfiction.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 2018
What books were published in 2018?
2018 was a strong year at both ends of the shelf. Milkman by Anna Burns won the Booker Prize. The Friend by Sigrid Nunez won the National Book Award. The Overstory by Richard Powers was Booker-shortlisted and took the Pulitzer the following year. Normal People by Sally Rooney and Circe by Madeline Miller were the novels everyone was passing around. Outside fiction, Educated by Tara Westover, Bad Blood by John Carreyrou and Becoming by Michelle Obama made it one of the strongest nonfiction years of the decade — Becoming outsold every other book in America. Further down this page there is a longer list of the books published in 2018.
What is the best book from 2018?
If you read one 2018 book, read Educated. It is the book from that year I recommend most often and the one I have reread. The other 2018 book people name is Bad Blood, which reads faster than any novel on this page. If you want a novel rather than nonfiction, the best 2018 novel is Milkman — demanding, and worth every page of the demand.
Which novels were published in 2018?
Among the novels published in 2018: Milkman (Anna Burns), Normal People (Sally Rooney), The Overstory (Richard Powers), Circe (Madeline Miller), There There (Tommy Orange), An American Marriage (Tayari Jones), The Friend (Sigrid Nunez), The Great Believers (Rebecca Makkai), My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Ottessa Moshfegh), Washington Black (Esi Edugyan), Everything Under (Daisy Johnson), The Mars Room (Rachel Kushner) and The Long Take (Robin Robertson). The last four of those were all on the same Booker shortlist.
Who won the Booker Prize in 2018?
Anna Burns won the Booker Prize 2018 for Milkman, a novel set in an unnamed city during an unnamed conflict, unmistakably Belfast during the Troubles. She was the first writer from Northern Ireland to win it. The chair of the judges, Kwame Anthony Appiah, said: “None of us has ever read anything like this before.” The shortlist also held Washington Black (Esi Edugyan), Everything Under (Daisy Johnson), The Mars Room (Rachel Kushner), The Overstory (Richard Powers) and The Long Take (Robin Robertson).
Who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018?
Nobody, in 2018. In May of that year the Swedish Academy announced it would not award the prize, after a sexual-abuse scandal and a wave of resignations. The last time it had been held over to the following year was 1949. The prize was not cancelled, though: it was awarded retroactively in October 2019, alongside the 2019 prize, to Olga Tokarczuk, “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”.
Is Educated by Tara Westover worth reading?
Yes — it is on my bookshelf, which I say about very few books. Educated is the most honest account I know of what it costs to leave a family that formed you. Westover grew up in rural Idaho without school, doctors or birth certificates, left at seventeen for Brigham Young University, and had a PhD in intellectual history from Trinity College, Cambridge by twenty-seven. She does not simplify her parents into villains, which is what makes the book devastating rather than comfortable.
What is Bad Blood about, and what happened to Elizabeth Holmes?
Bad Blood tells the story of Theranos, the blood-testing company Elizabeth Holmes founded at nineteen, which reached a valuation of more than nine billion dollars on technology that never worked. John Carreyrou is the Wall Street Journal reporter whose first article on the company ran on 15 October 2015. In January 2022 Holmes was convicted on four counts of defrauding investors and acquitted of every charge relating to patients; three further counts ended in a mistrial. She was sentenced in November 2022.
Which writers published their first book in 2018?
Three of the writers on this page. Educated was Tara Westover’s first book. Bad Blood was John Carreyrou’s first, after twenty years of reporting. There There was Tommy Orange’s first, and it won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. The other five had published before — including Michelle Obama, whose American Grown came out in 2012, and Sally Rooney, whose Conversations with Friends came out in 2017. Neither Becoming nor Normal People is a debut, whatever you read elsewhere.
Which book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2018?
Less by Andrew Sean Greer — but note the trap that catches almost every list of books released in 2018: the prize year is not the publication year. Less was published in 2017. The same goes for the Women’s Prize awarded in 2018, which went to Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, also a 2017 book. The National Book Award is the exception that year: The Friend really was published in 2018.
Footnotes
Educated 8 facts
Published by Random House on 20 February 2018.
Westover left her father’s junkyard at seventeen and enrolled at a university having never been in a classroom.
Her doctorate, in intellectual history, was taken at Trinity College, Cambridge in 2014.
Brigham Young University first, magna cum laude in 2008, then a Gates Cambridge Scholarship.
Her publisher states four million copies. Higher figures circulate without a named source, so this page uses the publisher’s.correction
It won the Indies Choice Book Award for adult nonfiction in 2019, the same year Circe won the fiction category.
Indies Choice Book Awards — American Booksellers Association
Her own site calls Educated her first book.
The line “the only way you can love anybody is if you don’t need them” circulates as a quotation from this book. It does not appear in the standard quotation collections for Educated, and no source for it can be found anywhere.correction
Bad Blood 5 facts
Published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2018.
Carreyrou’s first article on Theranos ran in the Wall Street Journal on 15 October 2015.
Hot Startup Theranos Has Struggled With Its Blood-Test Technology
Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos at nineteen; the company was valued at more than nine billion dollars.
Elizabeth Holmes, youngest self-made female billionaire — CBS News
Bad Blood won the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, announced on 13 November 2018 at the National Gallery in London. The prize is £30,000.
Bad Blood wins 2018 Business Book of the Year Award — McKinsey
In January 2022 Holmes was convicted on four counts of defrauding investors and acquitted of every charge relating to patients; three further counts ended in a mistrial. It is not true that she was convicted of defrauding patients.correction
United States v. Elizabeth Holmes et al. — U.S. Department of Justice
Milkman 4 facts
Published by Faber & Faber on 17 May 2018. The 20 September 2018 date that circulates is the paperback.correction
Won the Man Booker Prize 2018. Anna Burns is the first Northern Irish author to win it.
The judges did not call it a “mesmerising novel” that “captures the pain of a divided society”. What the chair, Kwame Anthony Appiah, said was: “None of us has ever read anything like this before.”correction
The narrator, middle sister, is eighteen, and no character or place in the novel is named.
Normal People 5 facts
Published by Faber & Faber on 30 August 2018.
It was longlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize, not shortlisted.correction
It won the Costa Novel Award for 2018, announced in January 2019.
The Booker Prizes’ own library calls it “Sally Rooney’s second novel”. It is not her debut.correction
The television adaptation went out on BBC Three on 26 April 2020 and on Hulu on 29 April 2020.
The Overstory 3 facts
Published by W. W. Norton on 3 April 2018. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018.
Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019.
The New York Times never called it “a novel of enormous, perhaps even radical ambition”. The review is by Barbara Kingsolver and calls it a “magisterial new novel” in which “humans are merely underbrush”.correction
The Heroes of This Novel Are Centuries Old and 300 Feet Tall
Becoming 6 facts
Published by Crown on 13 November 2018. It sold more than 725,000 copies in the United States and Canada on its first day.
Becoming sells more than 725,000 units on first day — Penguin Random House
Ten million copies in the publisher’s English, Spanish and German-language markets within five months of publication, reported by Bertelsmann in March 2019 — not the seventeen million in a first year that circulates online, and not worldwide.correction
With 3,428,409 print copies it was the best-selling book of any kind in the United States in 2018.
Harvard Law School, JD 1988.
Princeton, class of 1985, sociology.
It is her second book. American Grown was published by Crown in 2012.correction
Circe 5 facts
Published by Little, Brown on 10 April 2018.
Circe is the daughter of Helios and is banished to a deserted island by Zeus — not, as is often written, by her own family.correction
It was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2019 and did not win. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones did.correction
It won the Indies Choice Book Award for adult fiction in 2019, voted by American independent booksellers — the award is often miscalled the Indie Choice Award.correction
Indies Choice Book Awards — American Booksellers Association
It is not Miller’s first book. The Song of Achilles came out in 2011 and won the Orange Prize in 2012.
There There 4 facts
Published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2018, and it is Tommy Orange’s first book. It won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize that year.
Tommy Orange wins the 2018 First Novel Prize — Center for Fiction
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019 — a finalist, not a winner. The Pulitzer board’s own text describes its “12 Native American narrators”.correction
Won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 2019.
His publisher describes him as an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, born and raised in Oakland, California.
The prizes of 2018 8 facts
There was no Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018. The Swedish Academy announced on 4 May 2018 that it would not award one.
Swedish Academy will not award the Nobel in Literature this year — NPR
The year usually named as the precedent is 1943, when the prize was withheld altogether. The closer parallel is 1949: that prize was reserved and awarded a year later, to William Faulkner, which is exactly what happened to the 2018 prize.correction
It was not cancelled. The 2018 prize was awarded retroactively on 10 October 2019 to Olga Tokarczuk, “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”.correction
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction awarded in 2018 went to Less by Andrew Sean Greer — a book published in 2017.correction
The Women’s Prize for Fiction awarded in 2018 went to Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie — also a 2017 book.correction
The National Book Award for Fiction 2018 went to The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, published that same year.
The 2018 Booker shortlist: Burns, Edugyan, Johnson, Kushner, Powers and Robertson.
Becoming was the best-selling title of any kind in the United States in 2018. Only four adult fiction titles reached the top twenty, the highest being The President Is Missing at number ten.
Other books of 2018 4 facts
An American Marriage, Tayari Jones, Algonquin, 6 February 2018.
The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai, June 2018.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh, Penguin Press, 10 July 2018.
Washington Black, Esi Edugyan, 2018, shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year.
Last verified 23 September 2026. Three quotations that were on this page before — one attributed to Tara Westover, one to the New York Times and one to the Booker judges — could not be found in any source and have been removed. Where a source contradicts the version that circulates, the source wins and the correction is on the page, marked above. Anything I could not source to a named publisher, prize body, court record or newspaper is not on this page.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.
Where to go next
Pages on this site that pick up where 2018 leaves off.
Overview
Best Books by Year
Every reading list on this site, organised by year.
By year
Best Books of 2017
Less and Home Fire — the books the 2018 prizes actually went to.
By year
Best Books of 2019
The year after, and where the 2018 Nobel finally turned up.
Author index
Books by Author
Every writer on the shelf, with their books in order.
From the bookshelf
Eight books from one very good year, and the two I keep going back to
More hand-picked recommendations on my personal bookshelf — books from every year that stay with you long after the last page.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations