The Irish Times Best Books of the Year 2020

About the The Irish Times Best Books of the Year

The Irish Times has no single critics' best-books list most years. Its main year-end books feature is a panel of writers and critics who each name their books of the year, so that panel is the list here (category "Books of the Year"), one row per book named as a pick, deduped within the year. Books a contributor mentions only for comparison, plans to read, or dislikes are left out, as are contributors' own books in their bio lines. 2017 is the exception: that year the paper ran the Ticket Awards "Irish Times critics' selection", a top-10 list by section, so 2017 uses those eight sections and leaves out that year's writers' panel. 2013 and 2014 ran as one page per contributor; rows link to each writer's page, the expected count covers all pages found (2013 via the pages' next/previous links, 2014 via a Wayback Machine URL listing, so 2014 may miss a page), and the citation is the books-of-the-year section. No 2007-2009 feature could be found on irishtimes.com or in search results. Single-critic lists (Eileen Battersby's books of the year), genre roundups (crime, poetry, translation, children's, Irish-language, sport), readers' picks, mid-year and summer lists are left out. Picks were read from the prose of each page. Where a page names a book without its author, the author comes from a publisher or retailer listing for that title (17 rows; classical works use the usual author name, such as Homer or Anonymous); obvious misprints in author names are corrected. No list is ranked.

Organization: The Irish Times. Official site (opens in a new tab)