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Where do you find your latest books these days? I’ve been discovering and ordering ones that cross my Instagram feed from book reviewers. I enjoy their breakdowns and honest opinions of what’s on their To Be Read (TBR) lists. It’s been my main source since the continuing state of the world has drastically cut down on my trips to bookstores. I dart into Barnes and Noble and used stores if not crowded. In and out. I decided I’d Google top books of 2020 to see what’s new. After scrolling through title lists, I’ve picked 5 out to tell you about today from some key categories.
The source I used was FiveBooks.com which is a site where experts and authors make recommendations on what they consider the top 5 books in their field. All content below is from the FiveBooks.com site.
The Best History Books: the 2020 Wolfson Prize shortlist, recommended by Richard Evans
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
By Hallie Rubenhold
Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
Five devastating human stories and a dark and moving portrait of Victorian London—the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper.
Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses, and escaped people-traffickers.
What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women.
For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that “the Ripper” preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not just of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness, and rampant misogyny. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time—but their greatest misfortune was to be born a woman.
The Best Thrillers of 2020, recommended by Anthony Franze
Conviction
By Denise Mina
A true crime podcast sets a trophy wife's present life on a collision course with her secret past in this “blazingly intense” Reese Witherspoon book club pick and New York Times Best Crime Novel of the Year (A. J. Finn).
The day Anna McDonald's quiet, respectable life exploded started off like all the days before: Packing up the kids for school, making breakfast, listening to yet another true crime podcast. Then her husband comes downstairs with an announcement, and Anna is suddenly, shockingly alone.
Reeling, desperate for distraction, Anna returns to the podcast. Other people's problems are much better than one's own — a sunken yacht, a murdered family, a hint of an international conspiracy. But this case actually is Anna's problem. She knows one of the victims from an earlier life, a life she's taken great pains to leave behind. And she is convinced that she knows what really happened. Read more about Conviction here.
Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Fall 2020, recommended by Cal Flyn
Sisters
By Daisy Johnson
Daisy Johnson is the demon offspring of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King.” —The Observer
“Builds a gothic plot to an artful and shocking climax.”—The New York Times
“Ends with a magnificent twist.” —The Boston Globe
From a Booker Prize finalist and international literary star: a blazing portrait of one darkly riveting sibling relationship, from the inside out.
“One of her generation's most intriguing authors” (Entertainment Weekly), Daisy Johnson is the youngest writer to have been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Now she returns with Sisters, a haunting story about two sisters caught in a powerful emotional web and wrestling to understand where one ends and the other begins.
Born just ten months apart, July and September are thick as thieves, never needing anyone but each other. Now, following a case of school bullying, the teens have moved away with their single mother to a long-abandoned family home near the shore. In their new, isolated life, July finds that the deep bond she has always shared with September is shifting in ways she cannot entirely understand. A creeping sense of dread and unease descends inside the house. Meanwhile, outside, the sisters push boundaries of behavior—until a series of shocking encounters tests the limits of their shared experience, and forces shocking revelations about the girls’ past and future.
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist, recommended by Katharine Grant
Shadow Play
By Joseph O’Connor
WINNER: NOVEL OF THE YEAR, An Irish Post Book Awards
Shadowplay by New York Times best-selling author, Joseph O’Connor, is set during the golden age of West End theater in a London shaken by the crimes of Jack the Ripper.
Henry Irving is Victorian London’s most celebrated actor and theater impresario. He has introduced groundbreaking ideas to the theater, bringing to the stage performances that are spectacular, shocking, and always entertaining. When Irving decides to open his own London theater with the goal of making it the greatest playhouse on earth, he hires a young Dublin clerk harboring literary ambitions by the name of Bram Stoker to manage it. As Irving’s theater grows in reputation and financial solvency, he lures to his company of mummers the century’s most beloved actress, the dazzlingly talented leading lady Ellen Terry, who nightly casts a spell not only on her audiences but also on Stoker and Irving both.
Bram Stoker’s extraordinary experiences at the Lyceum Theatre, his early morning walks on the streets of a London terrorized by a serial killer, his long, tempestuous relationship with Irving, and the closeness he finds with Ellen Terry, inspire him to write DRACULA, the most iconic and best-selling supernatural tale ever published.
A magnificent portrait both of lamp-lit London and of lives and loves enacted on the stage, Shadowplay’s rich prose, incomparable storytelling, and vivid characters will linger in readers’ hearts and minds for many years.
The Best of Biography: the 2020 NBCC Shortlist, recommended by Elizabeth Taylor
L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron”
By Lucasta Miller
FiveBooks.com is a pretty good website to reference for books in various categories. Happy hunting for more titles and the joy of reading.
