The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe Best Books of the Year 2012
The Boston Globe Best Books of the Year 2012 names 20 books across 2 categories. 15 of them also won or were shortlisted for an award.
Fiction
- A Hologram for the Kingsource (opens in a new tab)
- Battleborn: Storiessource (opens in a new tab)
- Bring Up the Bodiessource (opens in a new tab)
- Building Storiessource (opens in a new tab)
- The Hunger Angelsource (opens in a new tab)
- The Orphan Master's Sonsource (opens in a new tab)
- The Round Housesource (opens in a new tab)
- The Twelve Tribes of Hattiesource (opens in a new tab)
- This Is How You Lose Hersource (opens in a new tab)
Nonfiction
- A Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles through Islamic Africasource (opens in a new tab)
- All We Know: Three Livessource (opens in a new tab)
- Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercitysource (opens in a new tab)
- Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identitysource (opens in a new tab)
- Haiti: The Aftershocks of Historysource (opens in a new tab)
- House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle Eastsource (opens in a new tab)
- Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhoodsource (opens in a new tab)
- The Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New Americasource (opens in a new tab)
- The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Powersource (opens in a new tab)
- Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolutionsource (opens in a new tab)
- Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trailsource (opens in a new tab)
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)