Year-End Lists

Christopher Borrelli: The 10 Best Books of 2019, as published by The Chicago Tribune

[see also 2024 • 2023 • 2022 • 2021 • 2020 • 2018]

Fiction

• Ducks, Newburyport
  Lucy Ellmann
• Lost Children Archive
  Valeria Luiselli
• The Memory Police
  Yoko Ogawa
• Growing Things
  Paul Tremblay
• American Spy
  Lauren Wilkinson

Nonfiction

• Go Ahead in the Rain

  Notes to A Tribe Called Quest
  Hanif Abdurraqib
• The Yellow House
  Sarah M. Broom
• How to Hide an Empire

  A History of the Greater United States
  Daniel Immerwahr
• Good Talk

  A Memoir in Conversations
  Mira Jacob
• Say Nothing

  A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
  Patrick Radden Keefe

And 15 almost top-10s, well worth your time

• The Peanuts Papers

  Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & the Gang, and the Meaning of Life
  Andrew Blauner (editor)
• Exhalation
  Ted Chiang
• Trust Exercise
  Susan Choi
• Thick

  And Other Essays
  Tressie McMillan Cottom
• Me
  Elton John
• The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan
  Caitlín R. Kiernan
• The Institute
  Stephen King
• The Topeka School
  Ben Lerner
• Underland

  A Deep Time Journey
  Robert Macfarlane
• Savage Appetites

  Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession
  Rachel Monroe
• I Like to Watch

  Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution
  Emily Nussbaum
• Disappearing Earth
  Julia Phillips
• Audience of One

  Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America
  James Poniewozik
• Trick Mirror

  Reflections on Self-Delusion
  Jia Tolentino
• One Day

  The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America
  Gene Weingarten