The Boston Globe Best Books of the Year

About the The Boston Globe Best Books of the Year

The Globe's year-end Fiction and Nonfiction critics' picks. Picks from the same year-end package for mystery, poetry, sports, graphic novels, science, New England, children's, middle grade, and young adult books are left out. 2006-2009 lists are the boxed title lists that ran with the year-end fiction and nonfiction essays on boston.com. In 2011 and 2014 each section was the combined picks of two or three critics; books picked by more than one critic appear once. Missing years: no 2010 adult list could be found in the Wayback Machine (only a children's list was archived). No list is ranked. bostonglobe.com robots.txt blocks AI crawlers, so no Globe page was fetched directly: Globe pages were read through Wayback Machine captures, and the 2022-2024 lists were read from the Flourish card embeds the Globe pages load. Secondary sources: yearendlists.com copies of the 2020-2025 lists were used to cross-check counts and to correct three page typos (Walter Mosley, Natasha Trethewey, and the title Loved and Missed). Other page typos were corrected against existing catalog entries (Tenth of December, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jodi Kantor) and against the publisher listing for Helon Habila's Travelers. The 2016 list files Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time under Fiction, as the Globe did.

Organization: The Boston Globe. Official site (opens in a new tab)