Books: Best Books 2020: NYT Notable Books 2020

On a stormy summer day in the 1970s the Aosawas, owners of a prominent local hospital, host a large birthday party in their villa on the Sea of Japan. The occasion turns into tragedy when 17 people die from cyanide in their drinks. The only surviving links to what might have happened are a cryptic verse that could be the killer's, and the physician's bewitching blind daughter, Hisako, the only family member spared death.

The riveting story of a stranger’s arrival in the fledgling colony of Plymouth, Massachusetts—and a crime that shakes the divided community to its core.

Saving the life of a young boy, three siblings find their bond challenged by their parents' troubled marriage and their respective efforts to identify the boy's attacker, manage a new relationship and search for a birth parent.

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.

In a follow-up to What Belongs to You, set in Sofia, Bulgaria—a landlocked city in Southern Europe—an American teacher grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad as he prepares to leave the place he’s come to call home.

David has grown to be a tall ten-year-old. He is a natural at soccer, and loves kicking a ball around with his friends. His father Simon and Bolivar the dog usually watch. His mother Ines works in a fashion boutique. One day Julio Fabricante, the director of a nearby orphanage, invites David and his friends to form a proper soccer team. Before long David succumbs to a mysterious illness.

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.

This first novel by an Indian journalist probes the secrets of a big-city shantytown as a 9-year-old boy tries to solve the mystery of a classmate’s disappearance.

Two cousins agree that they're aliens, abandoned at birth among humans. After the traumas of childhood, in adulthood they seek to abandon society -- a.k.a. "the Baby Factory" -- altogether, in favor of a moral vacuum.

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.

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.

This rich, rewarding debut novel follows a Ghanaian seamstress — forced into an arranged marriage with a wealthy man she has never met — on her journey of self-discovery.

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.

A new Gilead novel that tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the beloved, erratic, and grieved-over prodigal son of a Presbyterian minister from Gilead, Iowa.

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.

A secret Muslim warrior from the height of England’s religious battles is sent to Scotland to uncover the true nature of James VI’s actual religious beliefs while an heirless Elizabeth I lies on her deathbed.

A metaphorical tale depicts a complex and relatable world where connections with people from all walks of life engage in internet encounters that lead to unexpected love, transformative adventure and unimaginable terror.

This first novel — about a 23-year-old New Yorker who becomes entangled with a white suburban couple and their Black daughter — feels like summer: sentences like ice that crackle or melt into a languorous drip; plot suddenly, wildly flying forward like a bike down a hill.

Sofer’s second novel traces a man’s path from “baffled revolutionary” in Iran to complicit actor in a ruthless regime sure he can undermine the system from inside. It is a master class in layering together a character who is essentially unforgivable but no less captivating.

A sense of estrangement pervades this assured debut novel, which opens as a man flies to Osaka to care for his terminally ill father, leaving his visiting mother and his Black boyfriend to keep each other company. One of the great themes of “Memorial” is the immense power parents wield over their children, even well into adulthood.

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.

Eagerly awaited and eight years in the making, The Mirror & the Light completes Cromwell's journey from self-made man to one of the most feared, influential figures of his time. Portrayed by Mantel with pathos and terrific energy, Cromwell is as complex as he is unforgettable.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

A young family escapes suburbia for a year-long sailing trip that upends all of their lives.

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.

Young Shuggie grows up in 1980s Glasgow with a calamitous, alcoholic mother and punishing reminders that his effeminate manner sets him apart from his peers. Pain — physical and emotional — is everywhere in this potent, sure-footed debut, which makes as strong a case as any for love’s redemptive power.

Secluded in a dilapidated country house, their depressed mother in a room upstairs, the teenage siblings at the center of this hypnotically macabre novel mull a sinister deed from their past.

Yu’s glorious modernist novel is narrated by a voice from the dead: a construction worker doomed to haunt various landmarks near Tokyo’s Ueno Park.

In this novel, Zvi Luria, a retired engineer in Tel Aviv, is in the early stages of dementia and takes a job in the desert to keep his mind sharp. The project involves building a road through an area where a Palestinian family lives, hiding out amid ancient ruins. Yehoshua masterfully entwines social commentary with a portrait of a mind in decline.

The stories in this collection, Minot’s first since 1989, are concerned with love, death, estrangement, loss and memory, which means that they are concerned with time itself.

A former golf prodigy turned waiter and writer is lonely, broke, directionless — and grieving for her mother, who has died suddenly. King’s hopeful novel follows this young woman’s hardscrabble quest for solvency, peace and passion.