These famous books of 2020 somebody must be siting at a corner somewhere, and turning the pages. These in-demand, the finest books are proved famous by book nerds, accepted critics and other admired writers and swam through the eyes of editors around the world.
However, these chronicles are a mix of humour, philosophy, fiction, Non-fiction, poetry and essays. And are well-liked by readers as well, but female writers and authors have won the trophy of the age. On the other hand, The most of the female authors and writers are published this year successfully... who's names are in the list of the greatest books and writers of the pandemic year 2020.
Below are the list of famous books of 2020
“A Promised Land” by Barack Obama
The man of aspirations and many emotive inspirations, Barack Obama (4 Aug 1961) whose interest of becoming a political leader from his young age starred in the book. The book “A Promised Land” has now in the list of must-read recommendations from the New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian.
Learn how Barack’s early political journey was led into action bothers and tackles of rather-ripe man that proved the balancing act in front of the USA citizens. The day of the joyful night when the US elected their 44th President and his first few encounters facing the new system of democrats. And transforming into a new world with leading ahead, unstoppable, full of turmoil. The book also covered the Deepwater Horizon to most dangerous operation of Osama bin Laden.
“Homeland Elegies” by Ayad Akhtar
Pulitzer Award winner (2013) Ayad Akhtar (b. 28 Oct 1970) is an American Playwright. The book “Homeland Elegies” released on September 2020. Akhtar is a Literature award winner from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The book is solely based on 9/11 attack. Tagged Best book of the year by Washington Post, O Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Economist, Library Journal and Slate. It became the celebrated book of 2020
How new rulings of life soon had to start adapting post the attack. Ayad narrates a story of a family with unpredictable bump of the 9/11 (It was a series of four coordinated terrorist attack by the Wahhabi terrorist group Al-Qaeda against the United States) on millions of lives recounted.
Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable
Salman Rushdie
“Death in Mud Lick” by Eric Eyre
Another Pulitzer award winner, Eric Eyre (b. 1965, American journalist and investigative reporter) in investigative reporting for exposing the opioid crisis in West Virginia. Statehouse reporter for the Charleston Gazette-Mail resigned in April 2020. The title “Death in Mud Lick — A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies” That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic self-explanatory in win-win situation of business but of course local lives matters.
Eric narrated desperation of a woman for justice out of 382 people of a town. The story of hooking thousands of Appalachian over the drug prescription. The Gazette-Mail, the smallest newspaper ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.
“Cleanness” by Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell (b. 19 March 1978) is author of three books. The American poet also does literary critic whose first novella “Mitko” was published in 2011, “What Belongs to You” (2016), his third attempt “Cleanness” in 2020. The book “Cleanness” An American teacher (loss of his love) enters into a panic atmosphere, seek another luck of love with a foreigner. The romance that heals his old wounds.
“Instant classic”
The New York Book Review
“The Power of Adrienne Rich (a biography)” by Hilary Holladay
National book award winner (poet), Hilary Holladay (3 July 1961), A biographer, novelist and modern and contemporary American literature Scholar. Her novel “Tipton” was nominated for the 2015 Virginia Literary Prize in fiction.
The book, “The Power of Adrienne Rich” is a story of Adrienne Rich who was a poet but behind the career stream she had impressive personal life. Rich transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of prose as well as poetry. It became the famous book of 2020
“Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo” by Philippe Lancon
French newspaper, Charlie Hebdo's Journalist, Philippe Lancon (1963) is survival of terrorist attack occurred on 7 Jan 2015
The book, “Disturbance” is not an excellent narration by Lancon, not an essay on terrorism nor is it a witness’s minutes of Charlie Hebdo. The attack and what followed are part of Lancon’s narrative, which, instead, touches upon the universal. It is an honest, intimate portrayal of a man who seek and find his life back together post attack.
“Fiebre Tropical” by Juliana Delgado Lopera
Award-winning Columbian writer and historian, Juli Lopera (b. June 4, 1988) is author of “Quiereme” published by Nomadic Press in 2017, the bilingual literature (Spanish and English). Juli well done expressing longing for love through collection of essays. Fiebre Tropical (A Novel) is her second book. Her first book was “Immigrant of the USA” (2003)
The book “Fiebre Tropical” is based on Friendless Francisca, 15, falls in love with magnetic Carmen (head of youth group and the Pastor's daughter). The chemistry turns to Jesus to be saved.
Ebullient and assertive. Francisca’s soul stinks up the place beautifully in Fiebre Tropical.
The New York Times
“What are You Going Through” by Sigrid Nunez
As good as The Friend, if not better.
The New York Times
The national award winner, Sigrid Nunez (1951) is popular for her novels, working with the Creative Writing Program at University of Boston. Her novel “The Friend” was in the shelves of many readers over the night. It became the famed book of 2020
Impossible to put down…leavened with wit and tenderness.
People Magazine
The book “What Are You Going Through” the novel of a woman who go through a series of encounters with many ordinary lives of her life. The novel of wisdom, humour and connections of humans. It is Unusual hardship between two.
I was dazed by the novel’s grace.
The New Yorker
“Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir” by Natasha Trethewey
The former poet Natasha Trethewey (26 April 1966) of Mississippi twice Poet Laureate (once in 2012 and again in 2013) and Pulitzer winner of 2007 in poetry for “Native Guard”. The Book, “Memorial Drive” is the story of her world when life undergoes upside down. Her stepfather shot and killed her mother when Natasha was just nine. Searing voices in the novel explores inches of her past in deep insides. It became the famous book of 2020
“Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson
The First lady Isabel Wilkerson (1961, African-American) who won the Pulitzer Prize of 1994 in Journalism and seven others. The author of “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration” and “Caste (Oprah's Book Club): The Origins of Our Discontents”.
Isabel is an adept writer and author which is ultimate proof that how she twisted the history and brought in front of people with strings of realistic situation of caste system of America in her previous book.
Most of the time, undeveloped countries are exposed under caste system but well-developed country like the USA has also rigid hierarchy where you would see human ranking. Isabel narrated the real faces of Americans in her book.
An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote non-fiction book of the American century thus far.
Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behaviour and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day.”
“Eat The Buddha: Life and Death in A Tibetan Town” by Barbara Demick
Economic History graduate and Former chief of the Los Angeles Times, Barbara Demick is also author of “Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighbourhood,” published in 1996. And second book, “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea”. It became the celebrated book of 2020
You simply cannot understand China without reading Barbara Demick on Tibet.
Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition
Researched Tibetan, travelled 11 thousands above the sea level which is difficult to visit for everyone. Barbara has only explored and uncovered everyone out there. It is a hidden story of one of the world's most famous countries, China. And how Tibetan and China communist are killing each others are perfectly narrated with all awaken senses by Demick.
“The Lying Life of Adults” by Elena Ferrante
One of the 100 most influential people (by Times Magazine 2016), Italian novelist, Elena Ferrante is famous for her four-book series of “Neapolitan Novels”. Two of her books, “Troubling Love” and “The Days of Abandonment” have been turned into films.
Another spellbinding coming-of-age tale from a master.
People Magazine
The Book, “The Lying Life of Adults” Protagonist, Giovanna searching for her identity, sometimes in her mirror or with different people, that who is her real mother. She faces many hurdles seeking the truth in the city, the place of vulgarity never let her escape or find her answer.
There’s no doubt [the publication of The Lying Life of Adults] will be the literary event of the year.
ELLE Magazine
... Once I knew that the completed book would make its way in the world without me, once I knew that nothing of the concrete, physical me would ever appear beside the volume—as if the book were a little dog and I were its master—it made me see something new about writing. I felt as though I had released the words from myself [...] It became the famous book of 2020
“To the Friend Who did not Save My Life” by Harve Guibert
French writer, Harve Guibert (b. 14 Dec 1955 — d. 27 Dec 1991) is famous for his autobiographical studies and author of many novels. He was the one who changed the attitude of French toward the AIDS. The book, “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life” was published for the first time in 1990 by Gallimard.
With devastating, darkly comic clarity, its narrator's experience of being diagnosed with AIDS. Guibert chronicles three months in the penultimate year of the narrator's life as, in the wake of his friend Muzil's death, he goes from one quack doctor to another, describing the progression of the disease and recording the reactions of his many friends. The novel scandalized the French media, which quickly identified Muzil as Guibert's close friend Michel Foucault. To the Friend became a bestseller, and Guibert a celebrity.
[...] Guibert continued to document the daily experiences of his body in a series of novels and diaries, mostly published posthumously. To the Friend has since attained a cult following for its intimate and candid tone, its fragmented and slippery form. As Edmund White observed, “[Guibert's] very taste for the grotesque, this compulsion to offend, finally affords him the necessary rhetorical panache to convey the full, exhilarating horror of his predicament.” In his struggle to piece together a language suited to his suffering, Hervé Guibert catapulted himself into notoriety and sealed his reputation for uncompromising, transgressive prose.
“Wow No Thank You” by Samantha Irby
Fun-loving Samantha Irby (b. 13 Feb 1980) Comedian, blogger (Bitches Gotta Eat) and author from Illinois, United Sates. She has published the early five books. "We Never Ever Meeting in Real Life”(2017), “Meaty” (2013), “New Year Same Trash” (2017), and Finally The book, “Wow No Thank You” in 2020. It became the renowned book of 2020
“Stay-up-all-night, miss-your-subway-stop, spit-out-your-beverage funny.... irresistible as a snack tray, as intimately pleasurable as an Irish goodbye.”
Jia Tolentino
This book is a collection of essays of her new life of Los Angeles. Read the excellent combination of her mind trip of boring, happy and funny with sarcasm, every day and night. If you are satire lover, pick this one right now.
“A Woman Like Her: The Story Behind the Honor Killing of a Social Media Star” by Sanam Maher
Pakistani journalist Sanam Maher is well known for her first book “The sensational life of Qandeel Baloch” based on social media sensation of Qandeel Baloch.
An exemplary work of investigative journalism.
Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
This is recounted story of Baloch in her second book “A Woman Like Her” It became the far-famed book of 2020
“In 2016, Pakistan’s first social media celebrity, Qandeel Baloch, was murdered in a suspected honor killing. Her death quickly became a media sensation. It was both devastatingly routine and breathtakingly brutal, and in a new media landscape, it couldn’t be ignored. Qandeel had courted attention and outrage with a talent for self-promotion that earned her comparisons to Kim Kardashian—and made her the constant victim of harassment and death threats. Social media and reality television exist uneasily alongside honor killings and forced marriages in a rapidly, if unevenly, modernizing Pakistan, and Qandeel Baloch’s story became emblematic of the cultural divide.”
“The Story of A Goat” by Perumal Murugan
Indian scholar Perumal Murugan (1966) is literary chronicler and author of more than nine novels, wrote five short stories and some anthologies of poetry. His excruciatingly clear focus on rural life of farmers (community) of India.
“As the novel opens, a farmer in Tamil Nadu is watching the sunset over his village one quiet evening when a mysterious stranger, a giant man who seems more than human, appears on the horizon. He offers the farmer a black goat kid who is the runt of the litter, surely too frail to survive. The farmer and his wife take care of the young she-goat, whom they name Poonachi, and soon the little goat is bounding with joy and growing at a rate they think miraculous for such a small animal.
[...] Intoxicating passages from the goat’s perspective offer a bawdy and earthy view of what it means to be an animal and a refreshing portrayal of the natural world. But Poonachi’s life is not destined to be a rural idyll―dangers can lurk around every corner, and may sometimes come from surprising places, including a government that is supposed to protect the weak and needy. Is this little goat too humble a creature to survive such a hostile world?”
“Putin's People” by Catherine Belton
[Putin's People] will surely now become the definitive account of the rise of Putin and Putinism.
Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic
Correspondent for the Financial Times and Journalist Catherine Belton won the hearts of many after the book, “Putin's People” was out. It has got nearly a thousand reviews on Amazon. It became the notable book of 2020
This riveting, immaculately researched book is arguably the best single volume written about Putin, the people around him and perhaps even about contemporary Russia itself in the past three decades.
Peter Frankopan, Financial Times
“In Putin’s People, the investigative journalist and former Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him rose to power and looted their country. Delving deep into the workings of Putin’s Kremlin, Belton accesses key inside players to reveal how Putin replaced the freewheeling tycoons of the Yeltsin era with a new generation of loyal oligarchs, who in turn subverted Russia’s economy and legal system and extended the Kremlin's reach into the United States and Europe.
[...] The result is a chilling and revelatory exposé of the KGB’s revanche―a story that begins in the murk of the Soviet collapse, when networks of operatives were able to siphon billions of dollars out of state enterprises and move their spoils into the West. Putin and his allies subsequently completed the agenda, reasserting Russian power while taking control of the economy for themselves, suppressing independent voices, and launching covert influence operations abroad.”
“The Price of Peace” by Zachary D Carter
HuffPost senior reporter, Zachary Carter is an expert in covering Congress, the White House and Economics. His works mostly appears in The New Republic, The Nation and The American Prospect.
A timely, lucid and compelling portrait of a man whose enduring relevance is always heightened when crisis strikes.
The Wall Street Journal
“At the dawn of World War I, a young academic named John Maynard Keynes hastily folded his long legs into the sidecar of his brother-in-law’s motorcycle for an odd, frantic journey that would change the course of history. Swept away from his placid home at Cambridge University by the currents of the conflict, Keynes found himself thrust into the halls of European treasuries to arrange emergency loans and packed off to America to negotiate the terms of economic combat. The terror and anxiety unleashed by the war would transform him from a comfortable obscurity into the most influential and controversial intellectual of his day—a man whose ideas still retain the power to shock in our own time.” It became the famed book of 2020
“Keynes was not only an economist but the preeminent anti-authoritarian thinker of the twentieth century, one who devoted his life to the belief that art and ideas could conquer war and deprivation. As a moral philosopher, political theorist, and statesman, Keynes led an extraordinary life that took him from intimate turn-of-the-century parties in London’s riotous Bloomsbury art scene to the fevered negotiations in Paris that shaped the Treaty of Versailles, from stock market crashes on two continents to diplomatic breakthroughs in the mountains of New Hampshire to wartime ballet openings at London’s extravagant Covent Garden.”
“Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America” by Marcia Chatelain
The professor of Georgetown, Marcia Chatelain swiftly made her presence in 2020 after her first book, “South Side Girl” in 2015
Marcia's profession as a historian, she examined and studied the effects of growing disease among the Black Americans. She found the villains in her book that who is paying contributing roles in Obesity and Diabetes.
“Often blamed for the rising rates of obesity and diabetes among black Americans, fast food restaurants like McDonald's have long symbolized capitalism's villainous effects on our nation's most vulnerable communities. But how did fast food restaurants so thoroughly saturate black neighbourhoods in the first place? In Franchise, acclaimed historian Marcia Chatelain uncovers a surprising history of cooperation among fast food companies, black capitalists, and civil rights leaders, who ― in the troubled years after King's assassination ― believed they found an economic answer to the problem of racial inequality. It became the celebrated book of 2020
[...] With the discourse of social welfare all but evaporated, federal programs under presidents Johnson and Nixon promoted a new vision for racial justice: that the franchising of fast food restaurants, by black citizens in their neighbourhoods, could finally improve the quality of black life. Synthesizing years of research, Franchise tells a troubling success story of an industry that blossomed the very moment a freedom movement began to wither.”
“Time Of The Magicians” by Wolfram Eilenberger
International bestselling author and philosopher, Wolfram Eilenberger (7 Aug 1972) received 4.5 stars on his book, “Time Of The Magicians”. It is the book of the great four legendary philosophers (Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger). It is the book of Eilenberger's narrative view on how they shaped the twentieth century.
“The year is 1919. The horror of the First World War is still fresh for the protagonists of Time of the Magicians, each of whom finds himself at a crucial juncture. Walter Benjamin, having survived the flu during the 1918 pandemic, is trying to flee his overbearing father and floundering in his academic career. Ludwig Wittgenstein, by contrast, has dramatically decided to divest himself of the monumental fortune he stands to inherit as a scion of one of the wealthiest industrial families in Europe, searching for absolute spiritual clarity.
[...] Meanwhile, Martin Heidegger, having managed to avoid combat in war by serving instead as a meteorologist, is carefully cultivating his career. Finally, Ernst Cassirer is working furiously in academia, applying himself intensely to his writing and the possibility of a career at Hamburg University. The stage is set for a great intellectual drama, which will unfold across the next decade. The lives and ideas of this extraordinary philosophical quartet will converge as they become world historical figures. But with the Second World War looming on the horizon, their fates will be very different.”
“Young Heroes Of The Soviet Union” by Alex Halberstadt
Journalist and non-fiction writer, Alex Halberstadt (1950) from the United States and did his graduation from Columbia University. The book is a Memoir of revisits of his childhood, birthplace and house of his maternal and maternal homes. The book revealed how the old generation went through trauma, fear, suffering, and rage.
“Alex Halberstadt’s quest takes him across the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth, where decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family. In Ukraine, he tracks down his paternal grandfather—most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin.
...he revisits Lithuania, his Jewish mother’s home, to examine the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for. And he returns to his birthplace, Moscow, where his grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers’ wives, his mother consoled dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a dangerous living by selling black-market American records. Halberstadt also explores his story: that of an immigrant growing up in New York, another in a line of sons separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history.“
“Minor Feelings” by Cathy Park Hong
Korean-American poet, Cathy Park Hong (7 Aug 1976) who has published three books on poetry. This year (2020) brought her luck through her literary skill presenting dark humour. It is her collection of essays she received recognition in the book, “Minor Feelings”. It became the famous book of 2020
Brilliant. . . To read this book is to become more human.
Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen
Cathy exposed the real racial Americans. The book, “Minor Feelings” is brilliant collections because of humours, vulnerable and provocative.
Hong begins her new book of essays with a bang. . . . The essays wander a variegated terrain of memoir, criticism and polemic, oscillating between smooth proclamations of certainty and twitches of self-doubt. . . . Minor Feelings is studded with moments [of] candor and dark humor shot through with glittering self-awareness.
The New York Times
Note: These top books have also appeared and recommended by (2020) “The New York Review of Books”, “The Guardian Review”, “Times Magazine” and many others...
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