Our editors picked their favorite novels and non-fiction from the past year.
Written by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louis Erdrich,takes place in a little indie bookstore in Minneapolis that’s populated with a colorful cast of characters on both sides of the checkout counter. There’s just one problem: the events of this book begin at the tail end of 2019 and a whole lot of trouble is coming for everyone. A strange virus is about to descend and a Black man named George Floyd is about to be murdered by the police just miles away.
In the middle of all of this is Tookie: an Indigenous bookseller who spent much of her life in prison for a crime she can’t let go of, and a person who is struggling with all sorts of other ghosts of her own. I won’t lie: this is the best book I’ve read in a long time, and the only thing that I’ve read that’s captured 2020 in any sort of realistic fashion. I was swept away from the first chapter and fell completely in love with Tookie, an incredibly resilient, funny, smart woman who still struggles greatly just to get through each day. This book contains an enormous heart, a head swimming full of ideas, and one of my favorite love stories I’ve read to date .