Every year, we have scores of books that are published and readers are clamouring for more because you can’t have too many bestsellers. We have sequels, we have new authors who are putting out their best work. For a reader, there can be no greater joy that getting your hands on new books. Here we have the 5 books that came out last year and the editors and publishing houses behind it.

  • The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

bestseller book

The Testaments is a novel set 15 years after ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. The book is narrated by Aunt Lydia, a character from the previous novel; Agnes, a young woman living in Gilead; and Daisy, a young woman living in Canada. The Testaments was a joint winner of the 2019 Man Booker Prize, along with ‘Girl, Woman, Other’. The novel alternates between the perspective of the three women, presented as portions of a manuscript by one, and testimonies by the two others.

McClelland and Stewart obtained the rights of the book from Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown and published it simultaneously, with Penguin Random House. It was published by Vintage Publications in India, South Africa, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Nan A Talese/Knopf Doubleday in the US.

  • The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

bestseller

The Nickel Boys is a 2019 novel by American novelist and writer Colson Whitehead. Based on the real story of the Dozier School, which was a reform school in Florida that operated for 111 years, it had its history exposed by a university’s investigation. It was one of TIME’s best books of the decade.

The author stumbled upon a story that ran in the Tampa Bay Times which was about a couple of archaeology students that were trying to dig up the remains of students who had been tortured, raped and mutilate. These remains were then buried in a secret graveyard, at the state-run Dozier School for Boys in the Panhandle town of Marianna.

Published by Doubleday, the “Nickel Boys” tells the true story of the hellish ordeal that two boys were subjected to in a school run in the Jim Crow-era.

  • On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

publishers

Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese author whose poetry has always been haunting, sublime and beyond extraordinary. He writes his book, “On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous”, in the form of a letter from a Vietnamese son to his illiterate mother. Here’s an excerpt from the novel:

“I wanted to disappear — so I opened the door to a stranger’s car. He was divorced. He was still alive. He was sobbing into his hands (hands that tasted like rust). The pink breast cancer ribbon on his keychain swayed in the ignition. Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck. I let the fog spill through the cracked window & cover my fangs. When I left, the Buick kept sitting there, a dumb bull in pasture, its eyes searing my shadow onto the side of suburban houses. At home, I threw myself on the bed like a torch & watched the flames gnaw through my mother’s house until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. How I wanted to be that sky — to hold every flying & falling at once.”

  • Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

book editors and bestsellers

Three Women, a bestseller in the US and the UK, tells us the true stories of Maggie, Lina and Sloane. Each of these women have a very complicated understanding of their own needs, needs which are dominated by very personal yet deeply profound reasons.

  • Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy-Brodesser Akner

bestseller

Akner’s debut novel, “Fleishman is in Trouble” tells the story of Toby Fleishman, whose wife Rachel has left him with their two kids and gone off to a Yoga retreat, paving a path for his foray into online dating.

  • Published by: Penguin Random House