Year-End Lists

The San Francisco Chronicle: 100 Recommended Books of 2016

[see also Best Books of 2024 • Favorite Books of 2022 • 100 Recommended Books of 2018 • Top 10 Books of 2018 • Top 10 Books of 2016 • Top 10 Books of 2015]

Fiction and Poetry

• Alice & Oliver
  Charles Bock
• All That Man Is
  David Szalay
• Another Brooklyn
  Jacqueline Woodson
• Behold the Dreamers
  Imbolo Mbue
• Carousel Court
  Joe McGinniss Jr.
• Commonwealth
  Ann Patchett
• Daredevils
  Shawn Vestal
• Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine
  Diane Williams
• For a Little While

  New and Selected Stories
  Rick Bass
• The Fortunes
  Peter Ho Davies
• A Gambler’s Anatomy
  Jonathan Lethem
• A Gentleman in Moscow
  Amor Towles
• Gesell Dome
  Guillermo Saccomanno
• The Girls
  Emma Cline
• Here Comes the Sun
  Nicole Dennis-Benn
• Here I Am
  Jonathan Safran Foer
• High Dive
  Jonathan Lee
• Homegoing
  Yaa Gyasi
• Hystopia
  David Means
• Innocents and Others
  Dana Spiotta
• The Jungle Around Us
  Anne Raeff
• The Kindness of Enemies
  Leila Aboulela
• LaRose
  Louise Erdrich
• The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
  Dominic Smith
• The Last Shift

  Poems
  Philip Levine
• The Little Red Chairs
  Edna O’Brien
• Look
  Solmaz Sharif
• Losing It
  Emma Rathbone
• Mister Monkey
  Francine Prose
• Monterey Bay
  Lindsay Hatton
• Moonglow
  Michael Chabon
• Mortal Trash
  Kim Addonizio
• My Name Is Lucy Barton
  Elizabeth Strout
• My Struggle

  Book Five
  Karl Ove Knausgaard
• The Nest
  Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
• Night Sky With Exit Wounds
  Ocean Vuong
• Ninety-Nine Stories of God
  Joy Williams
• The Noise of Time
  Julian Barnes
• Nutshell
  Ian McEwan
• Pond
  Claire-Louise Bennett
• The Portable Veblen
  Elizabeth Mckenzie
• The Queen of the Night
  Alexander Chee
• The Red Car
  Marcy Dermansky
• Reputations
  Juan Gabriel Vásquez
• The Revolutionaries Try Again
  Mauro Javier Cardenas
• Serious Sweet
  A.L. Kennedy
• Shelter in Place
  Alexander Maksik
• Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty
  Ramona Ausubel
• Sudden Death
  Álvaro Enrigue. Translated by Natasha Wimmer
• Sweet Lamb of Heaven
  Lydia Millet
• Sweetbitter
  Stephanie Danler
• Swing Time
  Zadie Smith
• The Terranauts
  T.C. Boyle
• The Vegetarian
  Han Kang. Translated by Deborah Smith
• The Veins of the Ocean
  Patricia Engel
• Version Control
  Dexter Palmer
• What Belongs to You
  Garth Greenwell
• What Lies Between Us
  Nayomi Munaweera
• You Should Pity Us Instead
  Amy Gustine
• Zero K
  Don DeLillo

Nonfiction

• Against Everything

  Essays
  Mark Greif
• America’s Social Arsonist

  Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century
  Gabriel Thompson
• Am I Alone Here?

  Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live
  Peter Orner
• At the Existentialist Café

  Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
  Sarah Bakewell
• The Attention Merchants

  The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
  Tim Wu
• Born To Run
  Bruce Springsteen
• Children of Paradise

  The Struggle for the Soul of Iran
  Laura Secor
• Citizen Scientist

  Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction
  Mary Ellen Hannibal
• The Earth Is Weeping

  The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West
  Peter Cozzens
• Eleanor Roosevelt

  The War Years And After, 1939-1962
  Blanche Wiesen Cook
• The Fire This Time

  A New Generation Speaks about Race
  Jesmyn Ward
• The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice
  Patricia Bell-Scott
• The Gene

  An Intimate History
  Siddhartha Mukherjee
• Girls & Sex

  Navigating the Complicated New Landscape
  Peggy Orenstein
• The Gunning of America

  Business and the Making of American Gun Culture
  Pamela Haag
• Hillbilly Elegy

  A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
  J.D. Vance
• How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything

  Tales from the Pentagon
  Rosa Brooks
• Joe Gould’s Teeth
  Jill Lepore
• Kill ‘Em and Leave

  Searching for James Brown and the American Soul
  James McBride
• Known and Strange Things

  Essays
  Teju Cole
• The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict
  Austin Reed
• Louisa

  The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams
  Louisa Thomas
• “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”

  Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination
  Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf
• Nonstop Metropolis

  A New York City Atlas
  Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
• The Other Slavery

  The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
  Andrés Reséndez
• Pit Bull

  The Battle over an American Icon
  Bronwen Dickey
• The Red Parts

  Autobiography of a Trial
  Maggie Nelson
• Shame and Wonder

  Essays
  David Searcy
• Shirley Jackson

  A Rather Haunted Life
  Ruth Franklin
• Soul at the White Heat

  Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life
  Joyce Carol Oates
• Spain in Our Hearts

  Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939
  Adam Hochschild
• Spiral

  Trapped in the Forever War
  Mark Danner
• Strangers in Their Own Land

  Anger and Mourning on the American Right
  Arlie Russell Hochschild
• Time Travel

  A History
  James Gleick
• The Way to the Spring

  Life and Death in Palestine
  Ben Ehrenreich
• We Have the Technology

  How Biohackers, Foodies, Physicians, and Scientists Are Transforming Human Perception, One Sense at a Time
  Kara Platoni
• When We Are No More

  How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future
  Abby Smith Rumsey
• White Sands

  Experiences from the Outside World
  Geoff Dyer
• White Trash

  The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
  Nancy Isenberg
• Writing to Save a Life

  The Louis Till File
  John Edgar Wideman