IIG Bookstack: Top 10 books of 2020 you just shouldn't miss

IIG Bookstack: Top 10 books of 2020 you just shouldn't miss

Books also became quite the newsmakers in 2020 — from Barack Obama’s memoir to Isabel Wilkerson’s book on caste — stirring debate and churning news.


The coronavirus may have hit a momentary pause on the book publishing industry in the first few months of 2020, but books are what got us through the lockdown and an uncertain year. For many, it was a habit lost and re-found, and for others, it was a chance to finally read the books piling up on their bookshelves and desktops.

Books also became quite the newsmakers in 2020 — from Barack Obama’s memoir to Isabel Wilkerson’s book on caste — stirring debate and churning news.

Check out our first list of 10 books!

A Promised Land by Barack Obama


The highly anticipated first volume of the former U.S President’s memoirs charts his rise from a young man in search of himself, to a world leader on a global stage Much like in his previous memoirs, Obama approaches the events of his first term of presidency with thoughtfulness and candor as he reflects on the job itself, as well as the power and responsibility it entails.

He doesn’t shy away from sharing his disappointments, and how being president might have impacted him and his family over his eight years in office.

It’s a personal look at a man who’s spent most of his political career in the headlines, being examined from every angle possible but one: his own.


Buy promised land from here

The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel is the great disaster artist of our time. Station Eleven, her (freshly relevant) world-ending pandemic novel, has sold over a million copies and developed a cult of zealous proselytizers, including me. In The Glass Hotel, a financial-apocalypse tale, she tells the story of a Bernie Madoff–like white-collar criminal named Jonathan Alkaitis who bilks investors out of billions and is caught when the 2008 downturn begins; she buttresses his story with a cast of characters including his Wall Street accomplices and the victims whose futures are completely upended.

The novel’s centrifugal force, however, is Vincent, Alkaitis’s thoughtful, unlikely trophy wife who disappears in and out of what she calls “the kingdom of money” as seamlessly as if she’s made of vapor — and goes over the side of a ship on the first page. Like all of Mandel’s work, The Glass Hotel links together far-flung stories and dips in and out of multiple timelines.

The term “transportive” is used far too frequently to describe literature that takes us, well, anywhere, but in this case, it’s the perfect descriptor for an exquisitely structured adventure across oceans and into unseen worlds.

Buy Glass Hotel from here

Where the Wild Ladies Are, Aoko Matsuda

In Where the Wild Ladies Are, Japanese author Aoko Matsuda guides readers through supernatural events and introduces them to otherworldly characters as if they were completely ordinary. That understated and witty touch is what makes this short story collection, translated to English by Polly Barton, so special.

Matsuda updates traditional Japanese ghost stories for the contemporary era, giving agency to previously voiceless female characters and playfully breaking down gender roles and stereotypes still so pervasive in Japanese culture today.

A translator herself, Matsuda knows how to play with language, infusing her narrators with memorable idiosyncrasies. While each chapter is its own contained short story, some interlink. The result is a reimagining of traditional tales as part of a broader narrative about women and power.

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Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

One of the smash hits of the year pulling in record sales within the week of its release, TV presenter Osman’s first foray into fiction writing is a riotous page-turning whodunnit in the vein of Agatha Christie’s Ms. Marple.

At the heart of the story are four septuagenarians in a retirement village in the English countryside who spend their time solving cold cases the local police haven’t gotten around to. But when murder strikes within the grounds of their own home, it’s up to them to solve the case and stop the growing body count.

Osman’s knack for memorable characters and deft plotting allows his tale to breeze by effortlessly, with each new twist proving as gripping as the next in this soon-to-be-adapted bestseller that will have readers already wanting to visit the club’s next meeting long before the final word.

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Moustache by S Hareesh

Legends are created by a facial appendage in S. Hareesh’s breakout novel, which won him the JCB Prize 2020. When a Dalit youth, Vavachan, dons a moustache for a policeman’s part in a play, it stays with him, transforming him into a larger-than-life figure.

Power dynamics of caste are reversed as the man with the tash becomes a byword for terror. It’s a grand novel of history, caste and Dalit assertion in early-mid 20th-century Kerala, combining realism with fantasy. Hareesh’s stunning descriptions make Kuttanad, with its snaking waterways and colourful characters, come to life.

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The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

A tale of black twin sisters born in the deep American South, who choose to run away at age 16, only to end up separated. Years pass. While Desiree goes on to leave her abusive marriage with her young daughter and move back to that same small town they grew up in, Stella ends up adopting a different racial identity, allowing herself to pass as a white woman and keeping her past a secret from both her husband and her daughter.


Bennett weaves a multigenerational tale that loops from the 1950s down to the 1990s in nonlinear fashion as she explores both sisters’ lives and the circumstances they find themselves in. Emotionally-packed and written with literary flair that equally serves up brilliant plot twists as well as well-excavated psychological insights and meditations on racial identity.


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 IIG Bookstack: Top 10 books of 2020 you just shouldn't miss
Classical turns magical! You got to burn this book if you want to read

A Children’s Bible, Lydia Millet

On a vacation like no other, a group of families share a lakeside summer home, where the parents care little about what their children are up to. When a catastrophic storm tears through the house, the adults choose to ignore the chaos and turn to the liquor cabinet instead, leaving the kids to seek safety on their own. In the slim and propulsive novel, teenager Evie narrates the group’s struggles in the midst of apocalyptic levels of devastation.

Her thoughts on the burgeoning natural disaster capture the dual personalities of a sulking teen, sick of her parents, and a young person forced to grow up too fast. Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet’s novel, which was a National Book Award finalist, is both an adventure story reminiscent of the classics and a warning tale of a grim future told through the eyes of a generation far too comfortable with catastrophe.

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 IIG Bookstack: Top 10 books of 2020 you just shouldn't miss
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A Burning, Megha Majumdar

After witnessing a terrorist attack, Jivan, a poor Muslim woman living in the slums of Kolkata, makes a comment on Facebook criticizing her government’s response to the tragic event. It’s an action with terrible consequences, as she’s taken into custody and accused of aiding the attackers. In her exquisitely plotted debut novel, Megha Majumdar writes with absorbing urgency as she details Jivan’s plight.

Beyond Jivan, Majumdar introduces two key perspectives: the protagonist’s former gym teacher, PT Sir, who has ties to the right-wing political party that seeks to seal her fate, and Lovely, an outcast with dreams of being an actor and the only person who can prove Jivan’s innocence. In moving between their three voices, Majumdar reveals the intersections of their ambitions and fears, coalescing into an unnerving investigation of corruption, class and tragedy.

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Red Pill by Hari Kunzru

A Brooklyn author with a writer’s block goes to a literary retreat in Berlin hoping to unblock his creative mind. He spirals downwards instead. The centre’s policy of ultra-transparency and the incitement of a fellow resident leave him disconcerted.

In this shattered mental state, he turns to an alt-right media propagandist and comes to believe that the only way out of the confusion is the “red pill” — the revelatory dose of reality which will get him out of the swamp of moral darkness.

Hari Kunzru’s novel, with its forensic analysis of the post-truth netherworld, has been called the “prototype for Trump-era novels to come” and “the Gen X Midlife-Crisis Novel in its purest form.” His pointed prose is as chilling as it is thrilling.

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 IIG Bookstack: Top 10 books of 2020 you just shouldn't miss
UAE | 11-day Sharjah Book Fair received 382,000 visitors

Homeland Elegies, Ayad Akhtar

Every so often we are gifted a novel that combines deep intelligence, meticulous prose and something profound to say about the state of our world. In Homeland Elegies, Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar gives readers just that in the story of a man very much like himself, who shares his name and was born to Pakistani immigrants in the American Midwest as Akhtar was.

From the opening chapters when the fictional Ayad’s father treats Donald Trump for a heart condition in the 1990s, it’s clear we are in a world that is recognizable but not necessarily real.

That’s all part of Akhtar’s point: his project uses fiction as a filter through which to tell an essential story about a man facing the turmoil of American life after 9/11 and his family’s attendant struggle to define itself. It’s a delicate balancing act between what’s real and what may not be, yet in Akhtar’s brilliant book the complexities of the American Dream have never been so naked.

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 IIG Bookstack: Top 10 books of 2020 you just shouldn't miss
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