50 of the Best Books of 2016

What It's All About: The Sun Is Also a Star transcends the limits of YA as a human story about falling in love and seeking out our futures. When Natasha's father is arrested — threatening the family with deportation back to Jamaica — she seeks out a way to stay in the NYC neighborhood she loves, meeting Daniel along the way.
Why It's on Our List: National Book Award finalist

What It's All About: In The Trespasser, Tana French returns with the sixth chilling novel in her "psychological slash literary mystery" Dublin Murder Squad series. This time, she follows a young female detective and her partner as they attempt to solve the murder of a young woman — while deciphering what's the truth and what's a setup.
Why It's on Our List: POPSUGAR editors' pick, New York Times bestseller

What It's All About: When a black nurse hesitates to save the newborn of white supremacists who shunned her, she sets in motion a series of events that upend her whole life. Jodi Picoult's talent for channeling some of the toughest challenges of our time through human stories shines in Small Great Things.
Why It's on Our List: New York Times bestseller

What It's All About: In Every Song Ever, a New York Times music critic takes a deep dive into what it means to listen to — and appreciate — music in the digital era.
Why It's on Our List: POPSUGAR editors' pick

What It's All About: Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty is a portrait of a wealthy family's disintegration once the money runs out — and the children are left to fend for themselves. The novel was called "weird and wonderful" by The New York Times.
Why It's on Our List: PEN Center Literary Award-winning author

What It's All About: In The Lonely City, Olivia Laing — who also wrote the captivating The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking — turns her attention to solitude. She questions technology, social mores, and the hidden beauty in being alone.
Why It's on Our List: POPSUGAR editors' pick

What It's All About: Touted as a "Freakonomics for feminism," Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? turns our ideas about economics and gender on their heads in this original — and fun — analysis.
Why It's on Our List: The August Prize shortlist

What It's All About: Do Not Say We Have Nothing spans generations of a Chinese family, both in the midst of Mao's Cultural Revolution and in its aftermath, and is at once specific and universal.
Why It's on Our List: Man Booker Prize finalist

What It's All About: From the author of Olive Kitteridge, My Name Is Lucy Barton is a brief book ablaze with emotion. When a daughter falls ill, her estranged mother rushes to her bedside — and brings up past wounds.
Why It's on Our List: Pulitzer Prize-winning author, New York Times bestseller

What It's All About: Michael Chabon's Moonglow was inspired by his own grandfather's life and is told in the form of a deathbed confession that spans from WWII to today.
Why It's on Our List: Pulitzer Prize-winning author

What It's All About: Anyone who read Antoine Leiris's indelible essay in Vogue earlier this year about the loss of his wife, Hélène Muyal-Leiris, in the Bataclan terror attack will be eager to pick up his memoir You Will Not Have My Hate. Antoine's story is one of hope and struggle, as he reckons with his new reality without Hélène and as a single parent to their young son.
Why It's on Our List: International bestseller, POPSUGAR editors' pick

What It's All About: Teju Cole brings his extraordinary writing talent and singular perspective to bear in this series of essays on politics, race, and history in Known and Strange Things.
Why It's on Our List: PEN Award-winning writer

What It's All About: Imagine Me Gone follows a married couple and their children as they struggle with mental illness and explores both the limits — and power — of love.
Why It's on Our List: Kirkus Prize finalist, longlisted for National Book Award

What It's All About: In the heartrending 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, Mona Awad turns a withering eye to our body-obsessed society just as easily as she finds the ridiculous humor in the very human struggle for self-acceptance.
Why It's on Our List: Giller Prize finalist

What It's All About: Leigh Stein, who cofounded the nonprofit literary organization Out of the Binders, shares a memoir about her emotionally abusive first love in Land of Enchantment. Publishers Weekly called it "A brave and poignant coming-of-age story."
Why It's on Our List: POPSUGAR editors' pick

What It's All About: Mr. Splitfoot is a thoroughly modern, creepy ghost story that's earned boatloads of praise for being as spooky as it is original.
Why It's on Our List: New York Times editors' choice, Publishers Weekly bestseller

What It's All About: Barbarian Days, William Finnegan's artful memoir of his surfing life, is so much more than you might expect. A meditation on nature, love, and the passions that drive us — sometimes blindly — his book is a moving ode to obsession.
Why It's on Our List: Pulitzer Prize winner, POPSUGAR editors' pick

What It's All About: Shrill, by Lindy West, has you laughing and crying as she shares painfully awkward moments from her life and harrowing examples of cyberbullying and sexism. Her story is all too relatable for any woman who has ever felt like she didn't live up to society's expectations.
Why It's on Our List: POPSUGAR editors' pick, New York Times bestseller

What It's All About: Eligible is an entertaining, cheeky 2000s spin on Pride and Prejudice that imagines the Bennet family in the era of CrossFit, text messages, and reality TV.
Why It's on Our List: New York Times bestseller

What It's All About: The short stories in Intimations are often about human connection — or lack thereof. Alexandra Kleeman's distinctive voice and unsettling observations made her debut novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, one of our favorite reads of 2015.
Why It's on Our List: POPSUGAR editors' pick

What It's All About: The slim yet poignant When Breath Becomes Air was written by Dr. Kalanithi in the short span of time he battled the cancer that would eventually kill him. A moving tribute to the wife and daughter he left behind, his memoir also raises questions about the meaning we seek in our day-to-day existence that will stir you to reexamine your own life.
Why It's on Our List: New York Times bestseller, POPSUGAR editors' pick

What It's All About: NPR called this short-story collection by 31-year-old Oyeyemi a "masterpiece." In nine interconnected tales, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours wades into worlds both strange and familiar — but always extraordinarily original.
Why It's on Our List: New York Times editor's choice

What It's All About: Heather Havrilesky's uplifting, swear-word-studded advice has made her online "Ask Polly" column a mainstay for many women, and How to Be a Person in the World compiles some of her best guidance in one reliable, hold-in-your-hands guide.
Why It's on Our List: POPSUGAR editors' pick

What It's All About: Jessi Klein, a writer on Inside Amy Schumer, looks back on her awkward coming-of-age with self-deprecating, relatable, witty, and sometimes cringe-inducing essays in You'll Grow Out of It.
Why It's on Our List: New York Times bestseller

What It's All About: Lisa Sugar, POPSUGAR's editor in chief and cofounder, doles out advice on life and work in her uplifting memoir, Power Your Happy.
Why It's on Our List: POPSUGAR editors' pick

What It's All About: Raymie Nightingale has a dream: to win Little Miss Central Florida Tire as a means to convince her wayward father to return to her family. But when she faces off with two very different competitors in the pageant, she finds an unexpected friendship that shifts her off course.
Why It's on Our List: National Book Award finalist

What It's All About: Homegoing follows the path of two families across many generations and 300 years of history — starting from the Gold Coast in Africa, where the slave trade thrived, to modern-day America.
Why It's on Our List: New York Times bestseller

What It's All About: Nadia is a senior in high school, mourning the suicide of her mother, when she finds herself pregnant. The Mothers meditates on the sway that secrets hold on us and whether we can break free of our pasts.
Why It's on Our List: New York Times bestseller

What It's All About: This story of a wife's rebellion — and her impossible desire to achieve a different, shall we say, less human form — has earned several comparisons to Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. If that doesn't spark your interest in The Vegetarian, we're not sure what will.
Why It's on Our List: Man Booker international prize winner

What It's All About: This ambitious satire appeared on nearly every awards shortlist this year, and for good reason. The Sellout is a timely takedown of America's failures and racism and a creative masterwork.
Why It's on Our List: Man Booker Prize winner, National Book Critics Circle Award winner

What It's All About: Colson Whitehead's epic, The Underground Railroad, is a history-tinged fiction that reimagines the Underground Railroad as a literal system of trains — and follows a runaway slave, Cora, as she navigates her escape.
Why It's on Our List: New York Times bestseller, Oprah's Book Club pick, National Book Award finalist

What It's All About: Innocents and Others is a tale of a friendship between two female filmmakers and the ways their lives pull them apart and fling them back toward each other. The novel plays with time and structure to create a world distinctly its own.
Why It's on Our List: Dana Spiotta is a former National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist

What It's All About: Lab Girl, a memoir about Hope Jahren's life in science, examines the world of plants . . . and in doing so, reveals much about our human existence.
Why It's on Our List: National bestseller

What It's All About: Another Brooklyn captures the childhood friendships and experiences that shape a life and examines both the hopeful and harrowing sides of Brooklyn in the 1970s.
Why It's on Our List: National Book Award finalist, New York Times bestseller

What It's All About: In Commonwealth, old friends come together to reckon with their past after one family's story is mined for the plot of a bestselling novel.
Why It's on Our List: New York Times bestseller

What It's All About: News of the World is set in Texas in 1870 and follows a soldier tasked with returning a young girl to her family, juxtaposing gorgeous scenery with complex ethical questions.
Why It's on Our List: National Book Award finalist

What It's All About: The Queen of the Night follows the career of Lilliet Berne, an orphan-turned-opera-phenom who harbors a dark secret.
Why It's on Our List: New York Times editors' choice, national bestseller

What It's All About: LaRose tracks the fallout of an accidental shooting in a close-knit Native American community, calling to mind the themes of violence, family, and tradition that Erdrich's previous novel, The Round House, so expertly mined.
Why It's on Our List: National Book Award-winning author

What It's All About: Thanks to one rash decision from their older brother, the Plumb siblings see their futures — and the family's large inheritance — unravel before their very eyes in The Nest. Backstabbing, scheming, and bargaining aside, seeing how the Plumbs struggle to regain their footing in the world, and among each other, afterward is half the fun of Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's mesmerizing novel.
Why It's on Our List: New York Times bestseller, POPSUGAR editors' pick

What It's All About: Two black girls, both with big dreams, grow up together but watch their paths diverge as life takes them to radically different places in Zadie Smith's latest: Swing Time.
Why It's on Our List: Amazon bestseller, POPSUGAR editors' pick

What It's All About: When a bomb goes off in a Delhi neighborhood, a family is forever changed. The Association of Small Bombs is a timely tale of terrorism, loss, and survival.
Why It's on Our List: National Book Award finalist, New York Times editors' choice

What It's All About: More than 100 million American women are unmarried, including Spinster author Kate Bolick. The writer's intelligent examination of the single life conjures up accomplished spinsters in history while exploring the power of purposeful singledom through the writer's own modern experiences in love and loneliness.
Why It's on Our List: POPSUGAR editors' pick

What It's All About: Siddhartha Mukherjee's talent for making scientific writing literary and immediate made his history of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, unforgettable. Now, he's back with The Gene, in which he applies his one-of-a-kind skill to this biography of the gene.
Why It's on Our List: Pulitzer Prize-winning author, New York Times bestseller

What It's All About: Seinfeldia chronicles the fascinating backstory behind how one of TV's most unlikely sitcoms became a pop cultural touchstone.
Why It's on Our List: New York Times bestseller

What It's All About: The Wangs vs. the World is a raucous, well-spun story about a Chinese-American family's unraveling that captures the frequent disconnect — but deep love — between generations.
Why It's on Our List: POPSUGAR editors' pick

What It's All About: Courtney E. Martin explores how younger generations are reevaluating institutions like career, marriage, and religion and forging their own sets of values in an uncertain time in The New Better Off. An excellent read woven from equal parts statistics and data and compelling, real-life stories.
Why It's on Our List: POPSUGAR editors' pick

What It's All About: Gloria Steinem looks back on a lifetime mostly spent in transit in My Life on the Road. The activist and writer's reflections on the early days of the feminist movement and the women who have impacted her life and thinking is packed with incredible anecdotes, and small but moving stories, from her singular life and travels.
Why It's on Our List: New York Times bestseller, POPSUGAR editors' pick

What It's All About: The Girls is a spellbinding, sun-drenched take on a fictional, Charles Manson-esque cult in 1960s California, seen through the eyes of lonely teenager Evie Boyd. Desperate to make a human connection, she falls quick and hard into the arms of a dangerous group of drifters.
Why It's on Our List: New York Times bestseller, POPSUGAR editors' pick

What It's All About: Sure, You Will Know Me — an unnerving novel set in the cutthroat world of competitive gymnastics — jumped on 2016's Olympic zeitgeist. But Abbott's talent for haunting readers and zeroing in on human obsession makes this book transcend the pop culture moment.
Why It's on Our List: Pushcart Prize-nominated author

What It's All About: A tense coming-of-age story set in the intimate universe of NYC's restaurant scene, Sweetbitter is incisive and poetic, and it feels just dangerous enough to be true.
Why It's on Our List: New York Times bestseller, POPSUGAR editors' pick