Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 2019
2019 was the year the Booker Prize was shared for only the second time in its history — between a sequel that arrived thirty-four years after its predecessor and a formally radical novel about twelve Black British women whose lives are more interconnected than any of them knows. It was also the year Patrick Radden Keefe published the best nonfiction book about the Troubles that has ever been written, and Ocean Vuong published a debut novel that doesn’t really behave like a novel. Six books that still hold.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Updated June 2026
Fiction · Booker Winner
The Testaments
The sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale arrives thirty-four years later and from three perspectives: a girl growing up inside Gilead, a girl in Canada who has always known she came from there, and Aunt Lydia — whose testimony, written in secret and buried against the day it can be used, is the novel’s strangest and most compelling strand. It is a faster, more plot-driven book than its predecessor, less interested in the interiority of oppression than in its mechanism. Atwood gives you not the experience of being trapped but the architecture of the trap.
The Testaments earned its Booker on the strength of Aunt Lydia’s chapters. The women in The Handmaid’s Tale were prisoners; Aunt Lydia helped build the prison and has spent decades deciding whether to dismantle it. Her voice is the most surprising thing Atwood has done in decades — calculating, self-aware, and unforgiving about her own complicity. If The Handmaid’s Tale is about what it feels like to be inside a totalitarian system, The Testaments is about what it takes to understand one well enough to survive it.
Fiction · Booker Winner
Girl, Woman, Other
Twelve characters — all women, nearly all Black British, connected across generations and relationships in ways they often don’t know — told in a form that refuses standard punctuation and paragraph breaks, that reads somewhere between prose and poetry. Evaristo moves between a theatre director, her daughter, an Instagram influencer, a nonbinary schoolteacher, a Northumbrian farmer, a ninety-three-year-old woman whose century has contained more change than most history books acknowledge. The effect is cumulative: what begins as twelve separate lives becomes a single intricate picture of what it means to be a Black woman in Britain across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The formal choice — stream-of-consciousness without the usual markers, chapters that bleed into each other — enacts the novel’s argument that these lives are continuous, that experience flows rather than stops and starts. Evaristo is not asking you to read twelve separate portraits; she is showing you a web. This is one of the most structurally ambitious British novels of recent decades, and also one of the most generous and most entertaining to read. The co-Booker was deserved.
Nonfiction · Investigative
Say Nothing
The story of the IRA, the Troubles, and the murder of Jean McConville — a widowed mother of ten abducted from her home in Belfast in 1972 and never seen alive again — told primarily through Dolours Price, an IRA hunger striker and one of the most compelling figures of the conflict. Keefe spent years with those who survived and those who chose silence, and the book refuses the comfort of clear moral positions. It is about what happens to people who commit themselves entirely to violence in the service of an idea, and what happens to them after the idea is gone.
Say Nothing is the best nonfiction book about the Troubles in print. Keefe writes with the precision of a legal brief and the momentum of a thriller, and he never lets the political context obscure the human cost. The section on what became of the hunger strikers after the peace — the gap between who they were and who the peace required them to become — is the most affecting part of the book. If you’ve read his later Empire of Pain and are wondering where to go next, start here. If you haven’t read him at all, start here too.
Fiction · Pulitzer Prize 2020
The Nickel Boys
A reform school in Florida in the 1960s — based on the real Dozier School for Boys, where documented abuse, violence, and murder were hidden inside the language of correction and rehabilitation. Two Black boys, Elwood and Turner, whose friendship defines the novel, navigate a system designed to destroy them: one by belief in the promises of the Civil Rights movement, one by clear-eyed understanding of exactly how much those promises are worth. The ending is devastating in a way that completely reframes everything you have read before it.
Where The Underground Railroad was expansive and allegorical, The Nickel Boys is compressed and precise — a short novel that accomplishes more than most long ones. Whitehead takes a documented atrocity and makes it personal through two boys whose characters are so distinct that the horror lands in the specific rather than the historical. The Pulitzer was correct. This is a harder book to read than The Underground Railroad and a more important one.
Fiction · Autofiction · Debut
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
A letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Ocean Vuong — whose debut poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds had already established him as one of the most important new voices in American literature — writes to his Vietnamese immigrant mother about his childhood in Connecticut, his body, his sexuality, the violence he witnessed, and the tenderness he found where he didn’t expect it. It is not a novel in any conventional sense. It is a document of what language can do when the person writing it has run out of other ways to say what needs saying.
Vuong writes prose the way most writers write poetry — with close attention to every syllable, every image, the distance between one sentence and the next. The result is a book that takes an hour to read and days to leave. The letter structure gives it an intimacy that conventional first-person narration cannot reach: you are reading something not meant for you, which is the most honest position a reader can be put in. If you have any resistance to autofiction, this will dissolve it.
Nonfiction · Essays · JournalismOn my shelf
Our Women on the Ground
Nineteen Arab women journalists writing in the first person about covering war, displacement, and political upheaval across the Arab world — from Syria, Iraq, and Libya to Yemen, Lebanon, and Egypt. Each essay is an interior account of what it costs to report from within the societies being reported on: the risks specific to women, the cultural pressures, the question of belonging when you are covering your own country’s destruction, the choices made in situations where no choice is clean.
This collection does something that most war reporting cannot — it gives you the inside. Not just what happened but what it cost to be there, who helped, what had to be left behind. The writers include some of the most important voices in Arab journalism, and the range across countries and conflict types means that no single narrative dominates. It is the most honest book I have read about what journalism actually is and what it takes from the people who do it. The fact that it is almost never mentioned alongside the year’s major books says something about whose stories we consider significant.
→ Read my full thoughts on Our Women on the Ground
→ Find on Bol.com
Where to start with 2019
If you want to start with the most accessible book on the list
→ The Testaments. It is the most plot-driven book here — Atwood gives you pace and momentum alongside the ideas. You do not need to have read The Handmaid’s Tale first, though it helps.
If you want the book that will stay with you longest
→ Say Nothing. It is the one people press into other people’s hands. Keefe makes a political conflict personal without ever simplifying it.
If you want the shortest and most formally striking book
→ The Nickel Boys. Under two hundred pages. The ending changes the book you thought you had read.
If you want something that reads unlike anything else on the list
→ On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Vuong writes prose as if he is still writing poetry. There is nothing quite like it.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 2019
More reading lists
From the bookshelf
2019 was a year that asked whose stories get told — and who gets to tell them.
More books from every year — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
All years Get book recommendations