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Best Books of 2022

25 articles from various types of sources were consulted to create a list of the most commonly listed best books for 2022.

The Best Fiction

Cover of Trust
Hernan
Diaz

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Available to download: eBook | eAudio

Cover of The Candy House
Jennifer
Egan

In spellbinding interlocking narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of a new technology that allows downloading or "externalizing" memories through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Intellectually dazzling, The Candy House is also extraordinarily moving, a testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption.

Available to download: eBook | eAudio

Cover of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, an
Gabrielle
Zevin

In this exhilarating novel two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

Available to download: eBook | eAudio

Very Good

Cover of The School for Good Mother
Jessamine
Chan

In this New York Times bestseller, one lapse in judgment lands a young mother in a government reform program where custody of her child hangs in the balance, in this debut novel.

Available to download: eBook | eAudio

Cover of Our Missing Hearts
Celeste
Ng

From the number one bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere, a deeply suspenseful and heartrending novel about the unbreakable love between a mother and child in a society consumed by fear.

Available to download: eBook | eAudio

Cover of The Marriage Portrait
Maggie
O'Farrell

The author of award-winning Hamnet brings the world of Renaissance Italy to jewel-bright life in this unforgettable fictional portrait of the captivating young duchess Lucrezia de' Medici as she makes her way in a troubled court.

Available to download: eBook | eAudio

Cover of Sea of Tranquility
Emily
St. John Mandel

The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from an island off Vancouver in 1912 to a dark colony of the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and planets.

Available to download: eBook | eAudio

Also Good

Cover of Either/Or
Elif
Batuman

From the acclaimed and bestselling author of The Idiot, the continuation of beloved protagonist Selin’s quest for self-knowledge, as she travels abroad and tests the limits of her newfound adulthood.

Available to download: eBook

Cover of Lessons in Chemistry
Bonnie
Garmus

Meet Elizabeth Zott: a scientist in 1960s California whose career takes a detour when she becomes the unlikely star of a beloved TV cooking show.

Available to download: eBook | eAudio

Cover of Vladimir
Julia May
Jonas

A provocative, razor-sharp, and timely debut novel about a beloved English professor facing a slew of accusations against her professor husband by former students—a situation that becomes more complicated when she herself develops an obsession of her own...

Available to download: eBook | eAudio

Cover of Demon Copperhead
Barbara
Kingsolver

In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.

Available to download: eBook | eAudio

Cover of All This Could be Differen
Sarah Thankam
Mathews

All This Could Be Different is a wise, tender, and riveting group portrait of young people forging love and community amidst struggle, and a moving story of one immigrant’s journey to make her home in the world. Set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Available to download: eBook | eAudio

Cover of Lessons
Ian
McEwan

The story of one man's life across generations and historical upheavals: a deeply affecting novel about love, loss, ambition, and resolution.

Available to download: eBook

Cover of Young Mungo
Douglas
Stuart

Both a page-turner and literary tour de force, it is a vivid portrayal of working-class life and a deeply moving and highly suspenseful story of the dangerous first love of two young men.

Available to download: eBook | eAudio

The Best Nonfiction

Cover of Strangers to Ourselves: un
Rachel
Aviv

The highly anticipated debut from the acclaimed award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv compels us to examine how the stories we tell about mental illness shape our sense of who we are.

Cover of Stay True: a memoir
Hua
Hsu

A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

Available to download: eBook

Cover of I'm Glad My Mom Died
Jeanette
McCurdy

A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor—including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother—and how she retook control of her life. 

Available to download: eBook | eAudio

Cover of An Immense World: how anim
Ed
Yong

A tour of the radically different ways that animals perceive the world that will fill you with wonder and forever alter your perspective, by Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Ed Yong.

Available to download: eBook | eAudio

The Good Nonfiction

Cover of Ducks: two years in the oi
Kate
Beaton

Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta's oil rush-part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed

Cover of The Escape Artist: the man
Jonathan
Freedland

In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba became the first Jew to break out of Auschwitz—one of only four who ever pulled off that near-impossible feat. He did it to reveal the truth of the death camp to the world—and to warn the last Jews of Europe what fate awaited them at the end of the railway line.

Available to download: eBook

Cover of Stolen Focus: why you can'
Johann
Hari

We think the inability to focus is a personal flaw, an individual failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: Our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces, and the science shows that these forces have been ramping up for decades-leaving us uniquely vulnerable, when social media arrived, to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit.

Available to download: eBook | eAudio

Cover of How Far the Light Reaches:
Sabrina
Imbler

Exploring themes of adaptation, survival, sexuality, and care, and weaving the wonders of marine biology with stories of their own family, relationships, and coming of age, How Far the Light Reaches is a shimmering, otherworldly debut that attunes us to new visions of our world and its miracles.

Cover of Constructing a Nervous Sys
Margo
Jefferson

In her much-anticipated follow-up to Negroland, Jefferson brings a cast of others–her parents and maternal grandmother, jazz luminaries, writers, artists, athletes, and stars– to life in a memoir of stunning originality, a performance of the elements that comprise and occupy the mind of one of our foremost critics.

Cover of We Don’t Know Ourselves:
Fintan
O'Toole

A celebrated Irish writer's magisterial, brilliantly insightful chronicle of the wrenching transformations that dragged his homeland into the modern world.

Available to download: eBook

Cover of Shy: the alarmingly outspo
Mary
Rogers

The memoirs of Mary Rodgers-writer, composer, Broadway royalty, and "a woman who tried everything."

Available to download: eBook

Cover of The Revolutionary: Samuel
Stacey
Schiff

Stacy Schiff brings her masterful skill as historian and storyteller to the life of Samuel Adams, examining his transformation from the listless, failing son of a wealthy family into the tireless, silver-tongued revolutionary who rallied the likes of John Hancock and John Adams behind him.

Available to download: eBook | eAudio

Cover of Solito: a memoir
Javier
Zavora

A memoir as gripping as it is moving, Solito provides an immediate and intimate account not only of a treacherous and near-impossible journey, but also of the miraculous kindness and love delivered at the most unexpected moments.

Available to download: eBook | eAudio | En Español