Barnes & Noble unveiled its list of the best books of 2022, with titles by Celeste Ng, Michelle Obama, and Jennette McCurdy making the cut.
The books were “hand-selected” by the retailer, and “championed by bookseller enthusiasm,” Barnes & Noble said in a news release. All will compete for Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year honor.
Ng’s Our Missing Hearts, recently selected by Reese Witherspoon as her latest book club pick, made the list, with the bookstore chain praising it as “timely and stunning.” Also honored was Tess Gunty’s “dazzling” The Rabbit Hutch, a finalist for this year’s National Book Award for fiction.
Other adult fiction titles making the list were Louise Penny’s thriller A World of Curiosities, Bonnie Garmus’ debut novel, Lessons in Chemistry, and R.F. Kuang’s dark academia novel Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution.
Obama’s forthcoming The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times was one of four nonfiction books to make the list, along with McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died. The others were Ben Macintyre’s Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis' Fortress Prison and Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human.
The sole children’s book to make the list was A.F. Steadman’s fantasy novel, Skandar and the Unicorn Thief.
“There has been no shortage of absolutely extraordinary books published this year, with so many amazing new voices putting pen to paper and bookseller favorites returning to the page,” Shannon DeVito, Barnes & Noble’s director of books, said in a statement. “These are stories that have truly captivated the attention and love of our booksellers and I’m confident they will make for great gifts this holiday season, resonating with readers nationwide.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
