Although a difficult year for many, 2020 turned out to be a great year for excellent books. If you don't already have a stack of unread books on your nightstand waiting for your attention (or even if you do), you'll definitely want to pick up a few of these titles from our Best of Year lineup - the highest rated books of 2020, as voted on by BookBrowse subscribers in our annual Best of Year survey (over 9,400 votes were cast). The books are listed in ratings order lower down this page; but first, the four 2020 Award Winners!

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It's been a challenging year on a number of levels and we hope you've managed to keep your book club going strong as we all rethink and rework the way we live our daily lives. The end of the year is a great time to take stock of your book group and make plans for the future. In this roundup, we recommend a dozen books for your book group in 2021, all of which are newly released in paperback or will be available in paperback soon.

The list features books by award-winning and tremendously popular authors like Elizabeth Strout's Olive, Again and Ann Patchett's The Dutch House, along with some debut novels such as The Yellow Bird Sings by Jennifer Rosner. We also have two young adult recommendations, two mysteries and a good splash of historical fiction; and for nonfiction fans we suggest Richard Askwith's captivating biography of World War II-era horse racing phenom Lata Brandisová, and Anne Gardiner Perkin's biography of the ground-breaking first cohort of women to join Yale in 1969.

All 12 books earned five stars from BookBrowse reviewers, so you can't go wrong whatever you choose. Also, we invite you to check out the selections from our Anti-Racist Reading List which includes books from the past two years that should foster dialogue on current events.

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This is the first in a series of four posts. See also nonfiction, mysteries & thrillers, and most popular books of 2019.


What are your top three all-time favorite book club books?

This is the question we posed to the 1,901 book club members who took part in our January 2020 survey.

Those who responded were well-qualified to answer this question. Over 90% have been in a book club for at least three years, 55% have more than ten years of book club experience under their belts, and almost half belong to more than one group. In other words, they've discussed a lot of books, so the titles that made it into the overall Top 10 had to triumph over a lot of competition.

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This is the second in a series of four posts. See also overall favorites, mysteries & thrillers, and most popular books of 2019.


In the previous post we shared the results of our 2020 survey of book club members to find out their all-time favorite book club books. Most of the overall top 10 fall into the broad bucket of "literary fiction," but we know that most book clubs read a variety of genres, and rightly so because the qualities that make a book ripe for discussion are certainly not exclusive to "literary fiction," let alone "women's fiction."

So, we probed a little deeper to ask specifically about the respondents' favorite nonfiction books, giving them the opportunity to nominate up to three books and reminding them that we were interested only in titles they had discussed in a book club setting, because not every excellent book makes for great discussion; 1,172 responded to this question.

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This is the third in a series of four posts. See also overall favorites, nonfiction, and most popular books of 2019.


In the previous two posts we shared the results of our survey of book club members to find out their all-time favorite book club books, and their favorite nonfiction books. Here we look at mysteries and thrillers. Once again, respondents were given the opportunity to nominate up to three books and reminded that they should only name books that they had discussed in a book club setting, because there are many excellent mysteries and thrillers but not all have the substance to make for great discussion; 920 responded to this question.

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This is the fourth in a series of four posts. See also overall favorites, nonfiction and mysteries and thrillers.


In the previous three posts in this sequence, we shared the results of our 2020 survey of book club members to find out their favorite book club books of all-time. In three separate questions, we asked them to name their overall favorites, their nonfiction favorites and their mystery/thriller favorites, always reminding them to only name books that they had discussed in a book club setting, because the qualities that make for great books to read don't always translate into great discussions.

In the final question, we asked them to think back over just those books they discussed in a book club during 2019, and to name their one overall favorite; 1,354 responded to this question:

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