The Books Briefing: All the Books We Loved This Year

Writing (and reading, for that matter) is often a way of taking stock—making sense of life’s tangled plotlines and inconclusive endings. And while many of the year’s best books blew apart storytelling conventions, they also pieced together a clearer picture of painful and confusing moments, both national and personal.

Carmen Maria Machado told the wrenching story of her experience in an abusive relationship, while Daša Drndić paid tribute to people whose histories were obliterated by the Nazi and Soviet regimes. Namwali Serpell wrote a novel that careened across time to show how Zambia’s colonial