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New York Times Notable Fiction of 2020
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The Aosawa Murders
by Riku Onda
In the 1960s 17 people die of cyanide poisoning at a large party at the Aosawas, owners of a prominent clinic in an ancient castle city on the coast of the Sea of Japan. The only survivor is their teenage daughter Hisako, blind, beautiful, admired by all, but soon suspected of masterminding the crime.
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The Beauty of Your Face : a novel
by Sahar Mustafah
Enduring the harrowing minutes of a shooting attack on her school by a radicalized assailant, a school principal and daughter of Palestinian immigrants experiences flashbacks about the bigotry she faced as a child and the disappearance of an older sister.
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Beheld : a novel
by TaraShea Nesbit
Ten years after the Mayflower pilgrims arrived on rocky, unfamiliar soil, Plymouth is not the land its residents had imagined. Seemingly established on a dream of religious freedom, in reality the town is led by fervent puritans who prohibit the residents from living, trading, and worshipping as they choose. By the time an unfamiliar ship, bearing new colonists, appears on the horizon one summer morning, Anglican outsiders have had enough.
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Blacktop Wasteland
by S. A. Cosby
Compelled by poverty to agree to a lucrative final heist that will allow him to go straight, a skilled getaway driver finds his efforts complicated by racial dynamics and the ghosts of his past. 50,000 first printing.
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The Boy in the Field : a novel
by Margot Livesey
Three siblings on their way home from school find a boy who has been attacked and left for dead in a field. This discovery leads to a mystery that will change the lives of all involved.
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A Burning
by Megha Majumdar
An opportunistic gym teacher and a starry-eyed misfit find the realization of their ambitions tied to the downfall of an innocent Muslim girl who has been wrongly implicated in a terrorist attack.
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A Children's Bible : a novel
by Lydia Millet
Contemptuous of the equally neglectful and suffocating parents who would pass the summer in a stupor of drugs and sex, one dozen eerily mature children run away as a dangerous storm descends and subjects them to apocalyptic chaos.
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Cleanness
by Garth Greenwell
Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval ... In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place he's come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of his past.
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Deacon King Kong : A Novel
by James McBride
In the aftermath of a 1969 Brooklyn church deacon’s public shooting of a local drug dealer, the community’s African-American and Latinx witnesses find unexpected support from each other when they are targeted by violent mobsters.
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The Death of Vivek Oji
by Akwaeke Emezi
In the wake of a southeastern Nigerian mother's discovery of her son's body on her doorstep, a family struggles to understand the enigmatic nature of a youth shaped by disorienting blackouts, diverse friendships and a cousin's worldly influence.
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Djinn patrol on the purple line : a novel
by Deepa Anappara
In an award-winning debut based on true events, a 9-year-old reality-television enthusiast in India uses crime-show approaches to investigate the disappearance of a classmate, before additional abductions shatter life in his sprawling city home.
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Earthlings : a novel
by Sayaka Murata
Pursued by childhood traumas and the feeling of not fitting in with her family, Natsuki decides to flee the "baby factory" of society for good in search of answers about the universe
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Everywhere You Don't Belong
by Gabriel Bump
Raised by a civil-rights activist grandmother on the South Side of Chicago, Claude McKay Love searches for a sense of belonging before a riot compels his departure for college, where he discovers he cannot escape his past.
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The Glass Kingdom : a novel
by Lawrence Osborne
Fleeing to Bangkok with a suitcase of money to hide in plain sight in a luxury high-rise, Sarah bonds with a circle of ex-pat women before political chaos and military coup attempts turn the apartment's residents against each other.
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Hamnet : a novel
by Maggie O'Farrell
The award-winning author of I Am, I Am, I Am presents the evocative story of a young Shakespeare’s marriage to a talented herbalist before the ravaging death of their 11-year-old son shapes the production of his greatest play.
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His only wife : a novel
by Peace A. Medie
Enduring a life of minimal prospects among her uncles many wives, a young seamstress relocates to Accra when she is married in absentia to a wealthy man whose family would separate him from the woman he loves.
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Homeland Elegies : a novel
by Ayad Akhtar
A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.
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How Much of These Hills is Gold
by C Pam Zhang
Two orphaned Chinese immigrant siblings flee the threats of their gold rush mining town across an unforgiving landscape where their survival is tested by family secrets, sibling rivalry and disparate goals.
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Hurricane Season
by Fernanda Melchor
The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse-by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals-propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portraitof a damned Mexican village.
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Jack
by Marilynne Robinson
A conclusion to the story that began with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead traces the story of prodigal son John Ames Boughton, who pursues a star-crossed, interracial romance with a high school teacher who is also the son of a preacher.
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Kim Jiyoung, born 1982
by Nam-ju Cho
A U.S. release of a feminist best-seller from Korea follows the experiences of a millennial from Seoul who suddenly manifests the bizarre symptom of being able to flawlessly impersonate and then become any woman, alive or dead.
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The king at the edge of the world : a novel
by Arthur Phillips
When Queen Elizabeth I is dying, her spymasters recruit Mahmoud Ezzedine, a Muslim physician, for the task of discovering if her possible successor, King James VI of Scotland, is truly a Protestant or secretly shares his family's Catholicism
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Luster
by Raven Leilani
A young black artist falls into an affair with a man in an open marriage before gradually befriending his wife and adopted daughter against a backdrop of dynamic racial politics.
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Man of My Time
by Dalia Sofer
Set in Iran and New York City, Man of My Time tells the story of Hamid Mozaffarian, who is as alienated from himself as he is from the world around him. Hamid travels on a diplomatic mission to New York, where he encounters his estranged family and retrieves the ashes of his father, whose dying wish was to be buried in Iran. Tucked in his pocket throughout the trip, the ashes propel him into a first-person excavation of a lifetime of betrayal, and prompt him to trace his own evolution from a perceptive boy in love with marbles to a man who, on seeing his own reflection, is startled to encounter someone he no longer recognizes
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Memorial : a novel
by Bryan Washington
A Japanese-American chef and a Black daycare teacher begin reevaluating their stale relationship in the wake of a father’s death and the arrival of an acerbic mother-in-law who becomes an unconventional roommate.
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The Mercies : a novel
by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
In Finnmark, Norway, 1617, after 40 fishermen are drowned in the sea, the women of the tiny Arctic town of Vardo must fend for themselves especially when a sinister figure arrives, bringing with him a mighty evil that threatens their very existence.
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The Mirror & the Light
by Hilary Mantel
A tale inspired by the final years of Thomas Cromwell describes how after the execution of Anne Boleyn and childbed death of Queen Jane, the former blacksmith’s son orchestrates a desperate plot to fortify England and save his own life.
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Missionaries
by Phil Klay
Examines the globalization of violence through the interconnected stories of a U.S. Army Special Forces medic, a foreign correspondent, a Colombian officer and a militia lieutenant who navigate the realities of modern warfare.
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Monogamy : a novel
by Sue Miller
Derailed by the sudden passing of her husband of 30 years, an artist on the brink of a gallery opening struggles to pick up the pieces of her life before discovering harrowing evidence of her husband’s affair.
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Real Life
by Brandon Taylor
Keeping his head down at a lakeside Midwestern university where the culture is in sharp contrast to his Alabama upbringing, an introverted African-American biochem student endures unexpected encounters that bring his orientation and defenses into question.
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Red Pill : a novel
by Hari Kunzru
Navigating an existential crisis in a haunted Berlin suburb after accepting a prestigious writing fellowship, an aspiring author becomes locked in a cosmic, Darwinian rivalry against the creator of a popular television series.
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Saint X
by Alexis Schaitkin
When a brief but fateful encounter brings her together with one of the men originally suspected of killing her sister, Claire, hoping to gain his trust and learn the truth, forms an unlikely attachment with this man whose life is forever marked by the same tragedy.
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Sea Wife
by Amity Gaige
A husband and wife try to escape their problems by packing up their small children and taking to the open sea on a boat they barely know how to sail. Trouble follows, but not necessarily the kind you’re expecting.
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Sharks in the Time of Saviors
by Kawai Strong Washburn
When a child falls overboard and is returned safely to his mother by a shark, his miraculous rescue is hailed as a sign from ancient Hawaiian gods, complicating his family’s troubles amid a collapsing sugarcane industry.
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Shuggie Bain : a novel
by Douglas Stuart
A young boy growing up in a rundown 1980s Glasgow public housing facility pursues some semblance of a normal life as his older siblings move on and his mother increasingly succumbs to alcoholism.
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Sisters
by Daisy Johnson
Moving in the aftermath of a school bullying incident to an abandoned family home near the shore, two fiercely loyal siblings find the nature of their bond changing in the wake of a series of revelatory encounters.
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The vanishing half
by Brit Bennett
Separated by their embrace of different racial identities, two mixed-race identical twins reevaluate their choices as one raises a black daughter in their southern hometown while the other passes for white with a husband who is unaware of her heritage.
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Writers & lovers : a novel
by Lily King
Follows the story of a former child golf prodigy-turned-unemployed writer whose determination to live a creative life is complicated by her relationships with two very different men.
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