October 2020 Highlights

NOVELS
1. Mr Cadmus (Canongate, 2020) / Peter Ackroyd

2. Leave the World Behind (Ecco, 2020) / Rumaan Alam
3. Inside Story (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020) / Martin Amis
4. Hidden in Plain Sight (Macmillan, 2020) / Jeffrey Archer
5. Snow (Faber & Faber/Hanover Square Press, 2020) / John Banville
6. Trio (Viking, 2020) / William Boyd
7. The Silence (Scribner, 2020) / Don DeLillo
8. Should We Fall Behind (Bluemoose, 2020) / Sharon Duggal

9. A Man’s Place (trans. from the French by Tanya Leslie) (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020) / Annie Ernaux
10. The Outlook for Earthlings (Regal House, 2020) / Joan Frank

11. The Searcher (Viking, 2020) / Tana French
12. A Time for Mercy (Doubleday/Hodder & Stoughton, 2020) / John Grisham
13. A Lover’s Discourse (Grove Press, 2020) / Xiaolu Guo 

14. Magic Lessons (Scribner UK, 2020) / Alice Hoffman

15. Infinite Splendours (Allen & Unwin, 2020) / Sofie Laguna

16. Shelter in Place (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020) / David Leavitt

17. The First Woman (Oneworld, 2020) / Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

18. The Land (Soho Press, 2020) / Thomas Maltman

19. Earthlings (trans. from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori) (Granta Books, 2020) / Sayaka Murata
20. The Hole (trans. from the Japanese by David Boyd) (New Directions, 2020) / Hiroko Oyamada

21. A Song for the Dark Times (Orion, 2020) / Ian Rankin

22. The Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2020) / Kim Stanley Robinson

23. The Devil and the Dark Water (Raven Books, 2020) / Stuart Turton

24. The Cold Millions (Harper, 2020) / Jess Walter
25. Cane Warriors (Andersen Press, 2020) / Alex Wheatle

FIRST NOVELS
1. Ghosts (Fig Tree, 2020) / Dolly Alderton
2. The Pear Field (trans. from the Georgian by Elizabeth Heighway) (Peirene Press, 2020) / Nana Ekvtimishvili

3. Missionaries (Penguin Press/Canongate, 2020) / Phil Klay

4. The Apparition Phase (William Heinemann, 2020) / Will Maclean

5. Toto Among the Murderers (JM Originals, 2020) / Sally J. Morgan

6. Three-Fifths (Pushkin Vertigo, 2020) / John Vercher

7. Memorial (Riverhead Books, 2020) / Bryan Washington

STORIES
1. That Old Country Music (Canongate, 2020) / Kevin Barry
2. The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) / Caroline Kim

3. Reality and Other Stories (Faber & Faber, 2020) / John Lanchester

4. Where the Wild Ladies Are (trans. from the Japanese by Polly Barton) (Soft Skull Press, 2020) / Aoko Matsuda
5. Cardiff, by the Sea: Four Novellas of Suspense (Mysterious Press, 2020) / Joyce Carol Oates

6. How to Walk on Water and Other Stories (New American Press, 2020) / Rachel Swearingen

7. Scattered Lights (Cornerpost Press, 2020) / Steve Wiegenstein

POETRY
1. The Historians (W.W. Norton/Carcanet, 2020) / Eavan Boland

2. Belongings (Bloodaxe Books, 2020) / David Constantine

3. What Girls Do in the Dark (Nine Arches Press, 2020) / Rosie Garland

4. When This Is Over: Pandemic Poems (Ice Cube Press, 2020) / Ralph James Savarese
5. The Marble Bed (Turtle Point Press, 2020) / Grace Schulman

6. Word Problems (Coach House Books, 2020) / Ian Williams

NONFICTION
1. The Godless Gospel: Was Jesus A Great Moral Teacher? (Granta, 2020) / Julian Baggini

2. Dirt: Adventures in French Cooking (Jonathan Cape, 2020) / Bill Buford

3. Conquistadores: A New History (Allen Lane, 2020) / Fernando Cervantes

4. Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment (trans. from the French by Malcolm DeBevoise) (The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2020) / Lucas Chancel

5. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020) / Heather Clark

6. The Last Libertines (trans. from the French by Aaron Kerner) (The New York Review of Books, 2020) / Benedetta Craveri 

7. The Border: A Journey Around Russia: Through North Korea, China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Norway and the Northeast Passage (trans. from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson) (MacLehose Press, 2020) / Erika Fatland

8. The Fragile Earth: Writing from The New Yorker on Climate Change (Ecco, 2020) / David Remnick & Henry Finder (eds)

9. Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession (Canongate, 2020) / Gavin Francis

10. Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (Allen Lane, 2020) / Tim Harper

11. Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths (Picador, 2020) / Natalie Haynes

12. The Fire of Joy: Roughly 80 Poems to Get by Heart and Say Aloud (Picador, 2020) / Clive James
13. The SS Officer’s Armchair: In Search of a Hidden Life (Jonathan Cape, 2020) / Daniel Lee
14. Tom Stoppard: A Life (Faber & Faber, 2020) / Hermione Lee
15. How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton University Press, 2020) / T.M. Luhrman

16. Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books (4th Estate, 2020) / Hilary Mantel
17. War: How Conflict Shaped Us (Profile Books/Random House, 2020) / Margaret MacMillan
18. Kant’s Little Russian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography in Essays (W.W. Norton, 2020) / Claire Messud
19. Eleanor (Simon & Schuster, 2020) / David Michaelis

20. Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker (Yale University Press, 2020) / David Mikics

21. Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) / Pankaj Mishra
22. The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020) / John Mullan
23. African Europeans: An Untold History (Hurst & Co., 2020) / Olivette Otele
24. The Dead Are Rising: The Life of Malcolm X (Liveright, 2020) / Les Payne & Tamara Payne
25. Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (trans. from the Spanish by Sarah Booker) (The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2020) / Cristina Rivera Garza

26. Cold Moon: On Life, Love and Responsibility (Turtle Point Press, 2020) / Roger Rosenblatt
27. An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida (Verso, 2020) / Peter Salmon
28. Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire (Allen Lane/The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2020) / Priya Satia
29. The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: God, Art, and Money in the English Quest for Japan, 1600-1625 (Oxford University Press, 2020) / Timon Screech

30. Stranger Faces (Transit Books, 2020) / Namwali Serpell

31. Loss (HarperCollins India, 2020) / Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

32. Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck (W.W. Norton, 2020) / William Souder

33. The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020) / Peter Stothard

34. The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story (Bloomsbury Circus, 2020) / Kate Summerscale

35. How to Make a Slave and Other Essays (Mad Creek Books, 2020) / Jerald Walker

36. A World Beneath the Sands: Adventurers and Archaeologists in the Golden Age of Egyptology (Picador, 2020) / Toby Wilkinson

37. The National Road: Dispatches from a Changing America (Counterpoint, 2020) / Tom Zoellner