Year-End Lists

Vanity Fair: 39 Best Books of 2022

[see also 2025 • 2024 • 2023 • 2020]

• The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man

  A Memoir
  Paul Newman
• The Man Who Could Move Clouds
  Ingrid Rojas Contreras
• Aesthetica
  Allie Rowbottom
• Less Is Lost
  Andrew Sean Greer
• Stay True

  A Memoir
  Hua Hsu
• Heartbreak

  A Personal and Scientific Journey
  Florence Williams
• Incredible Doom

  Volume 2
  Matthew Bogart and Jesse Holden
• The Nineties
  Chuck Klosterman
• How Far the Light Reaches

  A Life in Ten Sea Creatures
  Sabrina Imbler
• Lincoln and the Fight for Peace
  John P. Avlon
• Mr. B

  George Balanchine's 20th Century
  Jennifer Homans
• You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty
  Akwaeke Emezi
• In the Mouth of the Wolf

  A Murder, a Cover-Up, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press
  Katherine Corcoran
• The Old Place
  Bobby Finger
• The Candy House
  Jennifer Egan
• Trust
  Hernan Diaz
• Constructing a Nervous System

  A Memoir
  Margo Jefferson
• Honey & Spice
  Bolu Babalola
• I'm Glad My Mom Died
  Jennette McCurdy
• Corporate Rock Sucks

  The Rise and Fall of SST Records
  Jim Ruland
• Young Mungo
  Douglas Stuart
• Everything I Need I Get from You

  How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It
  Kaitlyn Tiffany
• Who by Fire

  Leonard Cohen in the Sinai
  Matti Friedman
• Picasso's War

  How Modern Art Came to America
  Hugh Eakin
• Secret City

  The Hidden History of Gay Washington
  James Kirchick
• Portrait of an Unknown Woman
  Daniel Silva
• Temples of Books

  Magnificent Libraries Around the World
  Marianne Julia Strauss
• All This Could Be Different
  Sarah Thankam Mathews
• Just Passing Through: A Seven-Decade Roman Holiday: The Diaries and Photographs of Milton Gendel
  Milton Gendel
• The Ruin of All Witches

  Life and Death in the New World
  Malcolm Gaskill
• Agent Josephine

  American Beauty, French Hero, British Spy
  Damien Lewis
• Last Call at the Hotel Imperial

  The Reporters Who Took on a World at War
  Deborah Cohen
• Dele Weds Destiny
  Tomi Obaro
• Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head
  Warsan Shire
• Time Is a Mother
  Ocean Vuong
• I'll Show Myself Out

  Essays On Midlife And Motherhood
  Jessi Klein
• The Song of the Cell

  An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
  Siddhartha Mukherjee
• Lungfish
  Meghan Gilliss
• The Method

  How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act
  Isaac Butler