10 Best (And 5 Worst!) Books of 2015

Ta-Nehisi Coates made injustice visceral, Lucia Berlin and Carrie Brownstein gave us new manuals for cool, and Derf Backderf taught us the stinky, scary truth about the planet’s garbage problem. See who else made EW’s list of the top 10 books we couldn’t stop reading this year.

Publishers now love to dub any vaguely sociopathic take on a broken marriage “the next Gone Girl.” Swanson’s vicious little novel actually earns that comparison, but it has just as much in common with Patricia Highsmith, Raymond Chandler, and the classic characters of noir: the dame, the double-crosser, the patsy. What begins with a chance — or is it? — encounter in an airport bar soon blooms into a taut thriller with a mounting body count and a final twist so ruthlessly clever it’s criminal. — Leah Greenblatt

Think nothing sounds duller or more depressing than memoirs about caregiving? Think again: Both these funny, touching, quirky, heartbreaking, and — in Marshall’s case — occasionally profane books about nursing elderly parents are destined to become modern classics. You’ll root for both Hodgman, a book editor who jettisoned New York City life to care for his mother in small-town Missouri, and Marshall, who left L.A. and moved back in with his dad, who had ALS, and his mom, who was suffering from cancer. — Tina Jordan

Chicago, 1896: Shortly after debonair 17-year-old gangster Zebulon Finch is dispatched to the bottom of Lake Michigan with a bullet in the skull, he’s resurrected… sort of. Seeking redemption for the murders he committed, Finch is forced to wander through time, from the battlefields of World War I to the moonshine distilleries of Prohibition-era Georgia. His voice — turn-of-the-century murderer-turned-victim — is utterly riveting. — Megan Lewis

Postapocalyptic works are a dime a dozen, but Backderf’s graphic novel about our global trash epidemic feels almost pre-apocalyptic. Through a combination of fictional panels — inspired by his own stint as a trash collector — and facts about the current state of our swelling landfills, he delivers an urgent message about our need to stop throwing so much stuff away — or else. It’s enough to make an environmentalist out of the laziest consumer, but Backderf knows how to have fun, too, and this medicine doesn’t go down without hilarious heaps of sugar. — Isabella Biedenharn

When a made-up family feels as warmly real as the Turners — Francis, Viola, and their 13 children — your heart takes note. And when that perceptive, generation-spanning work turns out to be a debut, so does the National Book Award committee, which short-listed Flournoy’s beautifully written novel for its fiction prize. Whether you’re sitting in oldest son Cha-Cha’s therapy sessions, praying for Lelah to overcome her roulette addiction, or following the years young Francis and Viola spent apart, by the time you reach the book’s end, you’ll almost feel like a Turner yourself. — Isabella Biedenharn

In this slyly subversive feminist novel, 300-pound Plum plans to get her stomach stapled until a mysterious group of women convinces her otherwise — just as a militant, anonymous band of vigilantes called “Jennifer” begins wreaking havoc on bad men — dropping rapists from planes, blackmailing CEOs of exploitative newspapers — and inspiring regular ladies to do the same. Word of warning: While you may be inclined to try this at home, it’s probably better left in Walker’s competent hands and on her incendiary pages for now. — Isabella Biedenharn

Hunger — to transcend her troubled childhood and connect with something bigger and more beautiful via the power of music — made Brownstein not just a modern girl but a trailblazing rock heroine. In her shrewd, funny, touchingly honest memoir, the singer-guitarist in seminal riot-grrrl trio Sleater-Kinney and star of Portlandia traces her evolution from a needy, nerdy kid flailing in a house full of secrets (her mother’s anorexia, her father’s sexuality) to a young woman finding herself, at least for a while, inside the songs. — Leah Greenblatt

Like a David Simon TV show gone cosmic, this investigation into our country’s opiate epidemic cuts feverishly between national nightmares: the rise of Big Pharma, the decline of the Rust Belt, the drug-trade underworld along the America–Mexico border, the fear that health insurance does everything besides ensure health. Quinones builds every hyperprecise detail and desperately human story into a coherent portrait of American rot. — Darren Franich

Like a lot of brilliant but erratic artists, Lucia Berlin found her best work mislaid by history and largely forgotten after her death in 2004. To her credit, she might have been too busy living to care: A hard-drinking, easy-marrying ex-debutante whose compass led her everywhere from Alaska and El Paso to Chile’s cotillions and the ER wards of California, she put it all into these stories — a Manual as smart and nervy and unforgettable as the woman who wrote them. — Leah Greenblatt

“I would not have you descend into your own dream,” Coates urges in Between the World and Me, a tender, furious polemic addressed as a novella-length letter to his teenage son. “I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.” An established journalist and essayist, Coates has already won numerous prizes — not least among them a National Book Award and MacArthur genius grant — and been anointed a 21st-century torchbearer of black intellectual thought. He knows that mantle is no small thing. But he also has no desire to offer easy gestures or advance the audacity of hope. Instead, in raw, starkly personal prose, he presents racism not as a social construct but as a “visceral experience [that] dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones….” The inclusion of torn-from-the-headlines names like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown has led well-meaning readers (many of them white) to remark on the timeliness of World’s arrival. But Coates’ crosshairs are set on millennia of injustice, not just isolated moments, and his voice resonates long after the last page. — Leah Greenblatt

Basically Wild minus the self-awareness and two decades of life experience, plus a heap of millennial entitlement. – Isabella Biedenharn

Proof that musical prowess doesn’t always translate to fiction: “Lush houses of beddy-bye shut-eye snoozled in sleepland.” Snoozled? – Isabella Biedenharn

She may look different from her Jersey Shore days, but she’s still the same Snooki — and we still don’t want her advice. – Isabella Biedenharn

We know you’re a busy guy, Pharrell, but simply reprinting your lyrics in a picture book kinda feels like cheating. – Isabella Biedenharn

How do you make a robotic character even more unlikable? By giving us his creepy perspective on the events of Fifty Shades — which makes him seem like a sociopathic rapist. – Isabella Biedenharn