Wrap, read, rejoice.
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A book can often be the perfect gift, whether it’s specifically tailored to a friend’s tastes or something you personally loved and want to share. They are easy to find, travel well, and can prompt both fun and frustrating conversations. If you need holiday gift ideas for the book lovers in your life this year, you’re in luck—because some absolutely incredible reads came out in 2019, from debut authors and established names alike. So many, in fact, that curating a list of the definitive best feels like an impossible task.
To pull together this book list, we scoured a year’s worth of reviews and best-of lists, polled our staff, and reached out to voracious readers and writers for their top picks. Spanning a variety of genres, from fiction to nonfiction to short stories and essays, these books look at life through a kaleidoscope of experience—and are so groundbreaking, or paradigm shifting, or exceptionally written that everyone is talking about them. We even added suggestions for what type of reader might enjoy each one, to give you some ideas.
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Tolentino’s first book is a collection of essays about…everything. Internet culture, kale, marriage, barre class, reality TV, drugs, the list goes on. Her pieces for the New Yorker regularly go viral, and the book captures some of her most incisive, funny writing. “Tolentino’s book is about what it’s like to live right now, and its commentary is so up to date, and so close to our current moment, that it feels like a cheat code,” Callie Hitchcock wrote for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Recommended for: Your friend who keeps sending you Jia’s essays in the group chat.
Buy it: $19, amazon.com
In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir about domestic abuse released late this year, has already received widespread praise from critics and readers alike. It’s an attempt at filling gaps in our historical and cultural narratives about love and abuse, and a beautiful and harrowing project. The book, which was long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence, was described by Rosa Boshier in the Los Angeles Review of Books as “a series of vignettes that range from the idyllic to the erotic to the steadily chilling.’ ”
Recommended for: The Shirley Jackson fan in your life.
Buy it: $19, amazon.com
This much-anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, which was released in 1985, is something readers have been clamoring for for decades. Atwood finally delivered, and the events that take place in Gilead 15 years after the first novel’s ending tie in well with the plot of the Hulu adaptation. Without revealing any spoilers, we can tell you that the book ends up diverging from the TV adaption in ways that make this an absolute must-read for fans of the show or the original book. The Testaments won the Booker Prize and was a number one New York Times best seller.
Recommended for: Anyone who hasn’t read it yet.
Buy it: $16; amazon.com
This literary thriller follows what happens after an accident at a controversial medical treatment center rips apart an immigrant family—and their local community. Kim is a former lawyer, and her legal experience shines through in this taut, fast-paced book. Her book largely draws on her own family experiences with medical scares, according to an interview with The Rumpus, where she notes the extensive issues her children have faced, from hearing loss to celiac disease, requiring a nightmarish cycle of testing, insurance filings, and routine appeals.
Recommended for: The friend who binge-watched Sharp Objects.
Buy it: $15, amazon.com
This epistolary novel (a letter from a son to his mother, who can’t read) is a coming-of-age story about a lot of things: Trauma, family history, an immigrant experience, sexual exploration, and more. The writing style will leave you breathless. It’s one that has garnered a lot of buzz and praise this year, with fellow writer Ben Lerner calling it “a courageous, embodied inquiry into the tangle of colonial and personal histories.” The book was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
Recommended for: Your friend who loved Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Buy it: $15; amazon.com
Broom’s memoir, which won the 2019 National Book Award in Nonfiction and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence, is centered around the home her mother purchased in New Orleans East in 1961. It’s a memoir of the city as much as a family, and a different kind of story about the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, one that Lauren LeBlanc said, in a review for the Atlantic, “expanded the collective understanding of American history.”
Recommended for: Your friend obsessed with family sagas.
Buy it: $20, amazon.com
Gray’s novel follows the complex family dynamics of three sisters, charting what happens when the oldest one is arrested for a crime none of them can understand. “Gray uses imprisonment as the backdrop for a disarmingly compelling story that skirts easy answers and sentimentality,” Chloe Schama wrote for a Vogue review. “Conversational in tone and difficult in subject, Care and Feeding tells not just an American story but several important ones.”
Recommended for: Your friend who loved An American Marriage by Tayari Jones.
Buy it: $18, amazon.com
For years, Chanel Miller was known as Emily Doe, the survivor from the Brock Turner case, until she made the extremely personal choice to publicly come forward, attaching her real name to this astonishing memoir. Since the book’s release, Miller is finally being recognized for the role that she’s played in shaping the wider cultural conversation around sexual assault. She was named a Glamour 2019 Woman of the Year and listed in the Time 100 this year. NPR’s Annalisa Quinn described Know My Name as “devastating" and “immersive,” and added, “at points, it is hard to read it and breathe at the same time.”
Recommended for: The person who read and shared Emily Doe’s victim impact statement when it was released in 2016.
Buy it: $19, amazon.com
Lalami’s novel, a finalist for the National Book Award, follows the suspicious death of an immigrant from Morocco and the resulting fallout. The story is told through a chorus of nine characters, many of whom have only their geographic location in common. Rayyan Al-Shawaf praised it in a Washington Post review as a story that transcends the traditional crime narrative: “Instead, Lalami gives us a searching exploration of the lives of several individuals with whom mainstream American society has a vexed relationship.”
Recommended for: Your friend who listens to slow-burn crime podcasts.
Buy it: $18, amazon.com
This novel, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence, explores the relationships between members of two different families in Brooklyn brought together by a young woman’s pregnancy. The book opens in 2001 and hops around in time, touching on the Tulsa massacre of 1921 and the experiences of the protagonist’s parents, grandparents, and ancestors. It’s a short but complex book, which Heller McAlpin sums up in a review for NPR as one that “[encompasses] issues of class, education, ambition, racial prejudice, sexual desire and orientation, identity, mother-daughter relationships, parenthood, and loss—yet never feels like a checklist of Important Issues.”
Recommended for: Your friend who loves Toni Morrison.
Buy it: $16, amazon.com
“Me Too” was the hashtag, and the movement, heard around the world in 2017. But a large catalyst for the unraveling of so many stories on sexual harassment and assault that year began with the work of two journalists from the New York Times who first broke the story on Harvey Weinstein. This book follows how investigative journalists Kantor and Twohey investigated Weinstein and the network of enablers that helped him lure and intimidate women—plus what happened after they hit “publish” on that first article.
Recommended for: Your friend who loves All The President’s Men.
Buy it: $22, amazon.com
This historical novel, long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, follows two separate narratives in the late 1800s: The happenings on an Arizona homestead during a drought, and an immigrant’s experience traveling the U.S. with a team of camels. In a review for the New York Times, author Chanelle Benz described the novel as a reinvention of the Western novel and a new look at the history of the American West.
Recommended for: Your friend who’s read every Cormac McCarthy novel.
Buy it: $14, amazon.com
In Arnett’s debut novel, a woman named Jessa-Lynn Morton attempts to deal with her father’s suicide while managing the family business—a taxidermy shop. In a review for the Washington Post, Jake Cline wrote that Arnett perfectly captures “the feeling of being trapped and vulnerable within one’s own family” and “the agony and confusion of surviving a loved one’s suicide.”
Recommended for: Your friend who enjoyed Swamplandia! by Karen Russell.
Buy it: $12, amazon.com
In a year when class struggles took center stage in blockbusters like Parasite and Us, Land’s new memoir, which covers her job cleaning other people’s homes for nine dollars an hour, hits especially hard. The book contextualizes the cycle of poverty that keeps many living paycheck to paycheck, but is ultimately a story of redemption and staying afloat. Land sketches her own struggles as a single mother living below the poverty line, just an arm’s length away from the affluent upper-middle-class families she picked up after.
Recommended for: Your friend who raved about Educated by Tara Westover
Buy it: $15, amazon.com
This novel, set in 1930s colonial Malaysia, is kind of a mystery novel. But it’s also a coming-of-age story, an exploration of folklore, and an absolutely beautiful read. Choo herself described the novel in an interview with the Los Angeles Public Library as something akin to a “driveway story,” the kind of NPR-esque narrative that makes you want to stay in the car because you’re so gripped by the story, and we agree.
Recommended for: The Isabel Allende fan on your list.
Buy it: $13, amazon.com
This collection of 27 “form-bending” essays is expertly crafted, with a focus on experimental form. It contains pieces of memoir and poetry alongside essays from writers like Stephen Graham Jones and Terese Marie Mailhot, who wrote a heavy memoir of addiction and poverty in 2018 called Heart Berries. Amber Cortes called this anthology “a powerful read, and an absolutely necessary one,” in a review for High Country News, one that “introduces the reader to a unique collection of voices” shifting from past to present.
Recommended for: Your friend who loves learning about the craft of writing and storytelling.
Buy it: $27, amazon.com
This quasi-dystopian novel—longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize—follows women on “The Farm,” a place where they live for nine months as paid surrogates, making a life-changing amount of money upon delivering a healthy baby. “What’s so striking about The Farm isn’t that it imagines a frightening dystopia,” Barbara VanDenburgh wrote for USA Today. “This isn’t a hundred years in the future, it’s next week. Its very plausibility is a warning shot.”
Recommended for: Your friend who couldn’t put down The Handmaid’s Tale
Buy it: $16, amazon.com
In this debut novel from Julia Phillips, a Fulbright fellow, two young sisters go missing in a remote region of northeastern Russia. The crime story follows their community over the course of the following year, from a variety of viewpoints and entanglements. The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence.
Recommended for: Your friend who loves Tana French novels.
Buy it: $20, amazon.com
This book from investigative reporter Ronan Farrow takes a panoramic view of his reporting on Harvey Weinstein, recounting all the challenges he faced interviewing sources and piecing together the story, and even explores how news networks like NBC worked to bury the piece. It was one of SELF editor-in-chief Carolyn Kylstra’s favorite reads of the year; she describes it as “astonishing and enraging and fascinating and horrifying all at once.” She likens it to Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, “because it’s a similar formula of absolutely despicable corporate malfeasance, powerful people behaving reprehensibly, and inside-baseball details about what it takes to do good journalism.”
Recommended for: Your friend who can’t get enough content about Elizabeth Holmes.
Buy it: $21, amazon.com
We hear the term self-care thrown around so much that by now it’s become kind of a confusing umbrella term. Borges, who is (full disclosure) a SELF editor, helps to put the term in perspective with this guide on exactly how to “do” self-care, offering actionable tips for everything from physical self-care (like getting enough sleep and moving your body) to social self-care (e.g. making time for your loved ones), alongside research and reporting.
Buy this for: Your friend who needs a little push to put themself first.
Buy it: $17, amazon.com
Celestial Bodies, translated from the original Arabic text, follows the lives of three sisters living in Oman—and the multiple generations of women that came before them. Alharthi and her translator, Marilyn Booth, received this year’s Man Booker International Prize for the novel. Naina Bajekal wrote in a review for Time that Alharthi’s book defies stereotypes of Muslim women challenging the patriarchy, “instead illustrating the difficulties of balancing tradition and newfound freedoms.”
Recommended for: Your friend fascinated by family dramas.
Buy it: $15, amazon.com
Ariana Reines, a playwright, translator, and artist in addition to a poet, released this new collection of poems—touching on subjects like climate change and sexual trauma as well as more millennial concerns like ghosting—that was long-listed for the National Book Awards this year. Kristen Iversen described A Sand Book in a Nylon review as “the kinds of poems that reorient you in the world, [and] make you understand how little you know, but how much is inside you.”
Buy this for: Your friend who loves going to live poetry readings.
Buy it: $14, amazon.com
By all accounts, Tressie McMillan Cotton’s new essay collection—a finalist for the National Book Award—expands on the humor and sharp insights her Twitter followers love. “I have an understanding that black women, like any other group of people, any other subculture, has a political philosophy and a [history of thought],” McMillan Cottom told WBUR. “To me that was just another way to think about Thick. I wanted to write essays that would expose these different ways of thinking about the world to people who may not experience them themselves.”
Recommended for: Your friend who loves sociology and pop culture.
Buy it: $11, amazon.com
The Collected Schizophrenias is a deeply humanizing book of essays about one woman’s experiences living with schizoaffective disorder, spanning the process of being diagnosed, her experiences being institutionalized, and how her condition has affected her relationships. It was a favorite of SELF editor-in-chief Carolyn Kylstra, who said, “I read it months ago, but I find myself thinking about it again and again.”
Recommended for: Your friend who loves memoirs about health.
Buy it: $9, amazon.com
The protagonist of this short book is 17-year-old Silvie, who spends a summer living like Britons from the Iron Age, along with her parents and some students of archaeology and anthropology, until her controlling father’s obsession with ancient practices steers the project toward disaster. NPR’s Maureen Corrigan says it’s one of those reads that almost defies genre. “It could be labeled a supernatural tale, a coming-of-age chronicle, [or] even a timely meditation on the various meanings of walls themselves. All this, packed into 130 beautifully written pages. No wonder I read it twice within one week.”
Recommended for: Your friend obsessed with bog bodies and ancient societies.
Buy it: $13, amazon.com
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