The Wall Street Journal Best Books of the Year

About the The Wall Street Journal Best Books of the Year

WSJ books editors' year-end picks. 2012-2016: the Best Fiction and Best Nonfiction lists, ten books each. 2018-2025: the 10 Best Books, one list across fiction and nonfiction. Left out: the Review section's Books of the Year picks by outside contributors, the genre lists (mysteries, science fiction, children's, politics, business, aging) and gift guides. No list is ranked. wsj.com's robots.txt bars Claude crawlers and forbids automated collection, so WSJ pages were read only through the Wayback Machine. wsj.com is also paywalled and its Wayback copies after 2012 show only the first item, so most years come from secondary copies: 2012 fiction from the free 2012 WSJ page; 2012-2015 nonfiction, 2013-2015 fiction and 2023 from Barnes & Noble's WSJ collections (read through Wayback); 2016 from a Lower Providence Community Library reprint; 2018-2021, 2024 and 2025 from yearendlists.com; 2022 from Booklisti. 2016 spellings of de Kerangal, Jonathan Lee and C. E. Morgan were corrected against Wikipedia. Missing: 2013 nonfiction and 2017 (no readable copy; the 2017 WSJ page names the books only in cover images); 2006-2011 (no clean editors' list found).

Organization: The Wall Street Journal. Official site (opens in a new tab)