Amazon.com’s editors have pulled together the list for the Best Books of 2015, with Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies earning the top spot on this year’s list. “Fates and Furies, our #1 pick of 2015, is a novel about a marriage from two different points of view, but it’s no linear ‘he said, she said,’” noted Sara Nelson, Editorial Director of Books and Kindle at Amazon.com. “Groff’s language is electric and her ingenious plotting is fascinating and unlike anything I’ve read in years. Our editors adored it.”
In addition to the overall Best Books of 2015 list, the editors also compiled Best of lists in a variety of other categories. Waiting was named the winner in the Children’s Picture Books category, Circus Mirandus earned the top spot on the Middle Grade – ages 9-12 list, and An Ember in the Ashes was the top Young Adult book this year. My Kitchen Year is 2015’s best cookbook and Girl on the Train is the #1 Mystery book.
The full list of the 100 top books of 2015 and winners in other categories are available on amazon.com/bestbooks2015, but here’s the top 10 as selected by the editors who read hundreds of thousands of pages throughout the year.
2015’s Top 10 Books:
1. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff: An unusual, fascinating and intricate look at how two people can be married for years and still know so little about each other.
2. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates: A fiercely intelligent book about race in America, told by a father to his teenaged son.
3. Becoming Nicole by Amy Ellis Nutt: The inspiring true story of how one transgendered child began to change the world.
4. An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir: Addictive and harrowing, this Young Adult novel is about political power, crippling deceit, and, ultimately, hope.
5. The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah: Two French sisters cope very differently with WWII in this compulsively readable novel.
6. The Wright Brothers by David McCullough: This is classic McCullough: a complete, erudite and engagingly human story about the early days of aviation and the all-American boys who pioneered it.
7. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald: A brilliant memoir about the unusual, personal way one woman dealt with the loss of her father.
8. Purity by Jonathan Franzen: A big fat novel about disaffected youth, the Internet and journalism. Oh, and love and family, too.
9. Hold Still by Sally Mann: In her memoir, the award-winning and controversial photographer Sally Mann uses words to create pictures of her life.
10. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins: A wildly popular thriller about all the bad things that can happen when you step into other people’s lives.
