The Books

Here’s a spreadsheet of the shortlist titles, if you’re into that kind of thing. We may get a cut from any purchases made through the list links. Book descriptions are excerpted from publishers’ summaries and edited for length.

All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg

Now that her father is on his deathbed, Alex feels she can finally unearth the secrets of who Victor is and what he did over the course of his life and career. She travels to New Orleans to be with her family, but mostly to interrogate her tightlipped mother, Barbra. Meanwhile Gary, Alex’s brother, is incommunicado. And Gary’s wife, Twyla, is having a nervous breakdown. As each family member grapples with Victor’s history, they must figure out a way to move forward—with one another, for themselves, and for the sake of their children. (Amazon / Apple Books / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Google / IndieBound / Powell’s)

Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Dr. Toby Fleishman thought he knew what to expect when he moved out: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, tense co-parenting negotiations. He never thought that one day Rachel would just drop their children off at his place and never come back. As Toby tries to figure out what happened and what it means, his tidy narrative of a spurned husband is his sole consolation. But if Toby ever wants to really understand where Rachel went and what really happened to his marriage, he is going to have to consider that he might not have seen it all that clearly in the first place. (Amazon / Apple Books / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Google / IndieBound / Powell’s)

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her Black lesbian identity. Her old friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades of work in London’s funding-deprived schools. Carole, one of Shirley’s former students, is a successful investment banker. Carole’s mother Bummi works as a cleaner and worries about her daughter’s lack of rootedness despite her obvious achievements. From a nonbinary social media influencer to a 93-year-old woman living on a farm in Northern England, these 12 characters intersect in shared aspects of their identities, from age to race to sexuality to class. (Amazon / Apple Books / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Google / IndieBound / Powell’s)

Golden State by Ben H. Winters

Play-in competitor: In a strange alternate society that values law and truth above all else, Laszlo Ratesic is a 19-year veteran of the Speculative Service. He lives in the Golden State, a nation standing where California once did, a place where like-minded Americans retreated after the erosion of truth and the spread of lies made public life and governance impossible. In the Golden State, knowingly contradicting the truth is the greatest crime—and stopping those crimes is Laz’s job. In its service, he is one of the few individuals permitted to harbor untruths, to “speculate” on what might have happened. But the Golden State is less a paradise than its name might suggest. (Amazon / Apple Books / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Google / IndieBound / Powell’s)

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

A mother and father set out with their two children, driving from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. On the radio, there is news about an “immigration crisis”: thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States, but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way. As the family drives, we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. They are led, inexorably, to a grand, harrowing adventure—both in the desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations. (Amazon / Apple Books / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Google / IndieBound / Powell’s)

Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen by Dexter Palmer

Surgeon’s apprentice Zachary Walsh knows that his master, John Howard, prides himself on his rationality. But John cannot explain how or why Mary Toft, the wife of a local journeyman, has managed to give birth to a dead rabbit. When this singular event becomes a regular occurrence, John and Zachary realize that nothing in their experience as rural physicians has prepared them to deal with a situation like this. When King George I learns of Mary’s plight, she and her doctors are summoned to London, where Zachary is exposed to some of the darkest corners of the human soul. (Amazon / Apple Books / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Google / IndieBound / Powell’s)

Normal People by Sally Rooney

At school, Connell is popular and well-adjusted, while Marianne is intensely private. But later, when they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin, Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other. (Amazon / Apple Books / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Google / IndieBound / Powell’s)

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson

Lillian and Madison were the unlikeliest of roommates at their elite boarding school: Madison, the daughter of a prominent Atlanta family, being groomed for greatness; Lillian, a scholarship student, plucked out of nowhere based solely on her intellect and athletic prowess. Yet the two were as tight as could be. Years later, the two have lost touch, but Madison writes and begs Lillian for help. Her husband’s twin stepkids are moving in with them and she wants Lillian to be their caretaker. There’s a catch: The twins can spontaneously combust when they get agitated. (Amazon / Apple Books / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Google / IndieBound / Powell’s)

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

In a letter to his mother who cannot read, Little Dog, who is in his late twenties, unearths a family’s history that began before he was born—a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam—and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation that along the way explores race, class, masculinity, and our American moment—immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness. (Amazon / Apple Books / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Google / IndieBound / Powell’s)

A message from our sponsor

As always, Field Notes® has made a small batch of Memo Books for 2020, with the Tournament mascot on the cover and a list of competing books inside.

Buy one or more of these for $5 and Field Notes will donate all the profits to 826 National, a nine-chapter network that provides under-resourced students, ages 6-18, with opportunities to explore their creativity and improve their writing skills.

Over the years we have raised tens of thousands of dollars for 826. C’mon readers, let’s keep it rolling.

Optic Nerve by María Gainza

El Greco visits the Sistine Chapel and is appalled by Michelangelo’s bodies. The mystery of Rothko’s refusal to finish murals for the Seagram Building in New York is blended with the story of a hospital in which a prostitute walks the halls while the narrator’s husband receives chemotherapy. Alfred de Dreux visits Géricault’s workshop; Gustave Courbet’s devilish seascapes incite viewers “to have sex, or to eat an apple”; Picasso organizes a cruel banquet in Rousseau’s honor. All of these fascinating episodes in art history interact with the narrator’s life in Buenos Aires—her family and work; her loves and losses; her infatuations and disappointments. (Amazon / Apple Books / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Google / IndieBound / Powell’s)

Oval by Elvia Wilk

Play-in competitor: In the near future, Berlin’s real estate is being flipped in the name of “sustainability,” only to make the city even more unaffordable; artists are employed by corporations as consultants, and the weather is acting strange. When Anja and Louis are offered a rent-free home on an artificial mountain, they seize the opportunity. After Louis’s mother dies, Anja is convinced he has changed. At work, Louis has become obsessed with a secret project: a pill called Oval that temporarily rewires the user’s brain to be more generous. While Anja is horrified, Louis believes he has found the solution to Berlin’s income inequality. (Amazon / Apple Books / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Google / IndieBound / Powell’s)

Overthrow by Caleb Crain

As Matthew is walking home from the subway, a handsome skateboarder catches his eye. Leif, mesmerizing and enigmatic, invites Matthew to meet his friends. It’s easier to know what’s in other people’s minds than most people realize, the friends claim. Do they believe in telepathy? Though Matthew should be writing his dissertation, he soon finds himself falling in love with Leif and entangled with Leif’s group. When the friends fall afoul of a security contractor, the repercussions damage the romances and alliances that hold them together, and complicate the faith the members of the group have in the powers they’ve been nurturing. (Amazon / Apple Books / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Google / IndieBound / Powell’s)

Saudade by Suneeta Peres da Costa

1960s Angola. A Goan immigrant family finds itself caught between their complicity in Portuguese rule and their own outsider status in the period leading up to independence. Looking back on her childhood, our narrator captures the difficult relationship between her and her mother, and the ways in which their intimate world is shaken by domestic violence, the legacies of slavery, and the end of empire. Her story unfolds into a growing awareness of the lies of colonialism and the political ruptures that ultimately lead to their exile. (Amazon / Apple Books / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Google / IndieBound / Powell’s)

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

More than 15 years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results. Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by a third: Aunt Lydia. Her complex past and uncertain future unfold in surprising and pivotal ways. (Amazon / Apple Books / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Google / IndieBound / Powell’s)

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble. When two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed—or untoyed with—by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls—until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. (Amazon / Apple Books / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Google / IndieBound / Powell’s)

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Born into bondage, young Hiram Walker almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn’t understand. So begins an unexpected journey into the covert war on slavery that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s plantations to guerrilla cells in the wilderness. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, all Hiram wants is to free the family he left behind—but first he must master his magical gift and reconstruct the story of his greatest loss. (Amazon / Apple Books / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Google / IndieBound / Powell’s)

We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Play-in competitor: “You can be beautiful, even more beautiful than before.” This is the seductive promise of Dr. Nzinga’s Clinic, where anyone can get their lips thinned, their skin bleached, and their noses narrowed. In this near-future Southern city, more and more residents are turning to this experimental medical procedure. Like any father, our narrator just wants the best for his son, whose black birthmark is getting bigger by the day. The darker Nigel becomes, the more frightened his father feels. (Amazon / Apple Books / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Google / IndieBound / Powell’s)

Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha

Los Angeles is tense in the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager. Living at home with her Korean-immigrant parents, Grace Park is trying to understand why her sister hasn’t spoken to their mother in years. Shawn Matthews’s sister was murdered as a teenager back in 1991, and this new shooting is bringing up painful memories. Plus, his cousin is just released from prison and needs to reconnect with their family. When another shocking crime hits LA, the families collide in unexpected ways. Tensions come to a head and force a reckoning that could clear the air or lead to more violence. (Amazon / Apple Books / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Google / IndieBound / Powell’s)