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The Best Books We Read in 2020

By The New Yorker

“ Cleanness ,” by Garth Greenwell

An abstract watercolor shape on a book cover.

The casual grandeur of Garth Greenwell’s prose, unfurling in page-long paragraphs and elegantly garrulous sentences, tempts the vulnerable reader into danger zones: traumatic memories, extreme sexual scenarios, states of paralyzing heartbreak and loss. In the case of “Cleanness,” Greenwell’s third work of fiction, I initially curled up with the book, savoring the sensuous richness of the writing, and then I found myself sweating a little, uncomfortably invested in the rawness of the scene. The cause was a story titled “Gospodar,” in which the narrator, an American teacher living in Bulgaria, hooks up with a man who begins by play-acting violence and then veers toward the real thing. The transition from fantasy to horror is accomplished with the deftness of a literary magician, and Greenwell repeats the feat even more unnervingly in a later story, “The Little Saint,” in which his likable narrator takes the role of the aggressor rather than the victim. These stories are masterpieces of radical eroticism, but they wouldn’t have the same impact if they didn’t appear in a gorgeously varied narrative fabric, amid scenes of more wholesome love, finely sketched vistas of political unrest, haunting evocations of a damaged childhood, and moments of mundane rapture. Tenderness, violence, animosity, and compassion are the outer edges of what feels like a total map of the human condition. —Alex Ross

“ Stranger Faces ,” by Namwali Serpell

A line drawing of a face on a book cover.

In an age of totalizing theories, it’s nice to watch someone expertly pull a single idea through a needle’s eye. “Stranger Faces,” by Namwali Serpell, is one such exercise. The book’s catalytic inquiry—“what counts as a face and why?”—means to undermine the face, the way its expressive capabilities give it the cast of truth. We seek meaning in a shallow arrangement of eyes, nose, cheeks, and mouth, despite how often faces lie, or how often they cloak the world-ordering phenomena of race, gender, and class. Rather than depress or shame readers with these facts, Serpell delights in them. Unencumbered by truth, the face becomes interesting, motile—a work of art. (“Unruly faces” are especially intriguing, according to Serpell, because they invite viewers to sever ties with the placidity of an ideal.) Serpell, a Harvard professor and critic capable of close-reading people just as well as novels or films, includes a dancing range of examples. Her first essay considers the moniker given to Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, whose features aren’t, in fact, so elephantine; another essay, on Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man,” becomes a study of Keanu Reeves’s himbo appeal. Serpell can reanimate any subject, be it Hitchcock or emojis, and her bright, brainy collection is a model for how to surface the fun in a critical question. —Lauren Michele Jackson

“ Want ,” by Lynn Steger Strong

A colorful abstract painting on a book cover.

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

New York novels are as various as the city they describe. But “Want,” a subtly glorious new entry in the genre by Lynn Steger Strong, is set in a town whose qualities—unaffordable, unrelenting, unquittable—many readers will recognize. The book’s narrator is a writer who lives with her husband and two young daughters in a cramped Brooklyn apartment; to keep them in it, she teaches at a charter school by day and in an M.F.A. writing program by evening, though her half-hearted hustling doesn’t stop the family from capsizing into bankruptcy. (The husband quit a job in finance to become an artisanal carpenter, a phrase that would fit nicely on a Green-Wood Cemetery tombstone.) The virtue of this life is its being defiantly chosen. To counteract the claustrophobic privacy of subway commutes, and the slights of rubbing up against the city’s rich and oblivious, we get sticky memories of Florida, where the narrator grew up in a repressive, bourgeois household. There, her closest friend was Sasha, a beautiful, daring girl a year older, whose fate has been uncomfortably linked with hers ever since. Strong uses the friendship as a tether, returning to it to mark time’s passing; her technique is so sophisticated that the murk of the present and the sharply remembered past hold seamlessly together. Her biggest triumph is the transmission of consciousness. I loved the tense pleasure of staying pressed close to her narrator’s mind, with its beguiling lucidity of thought and rawness of feeling. There is much anxiety and ache to be found here—but also, when it is most needed, radiance, humor, love, and joy. —Alexandra Schwartz

“ On Anger ,” edited by Agnes Callard

A scribble under the word anger on the cover of On Anger.

Unless you’re dealing with a hard-line Stoic, most philosophers tend to consider anger a morally justifiable response to being wronged—though too much anger, for too long , they might say, could start to hurt you or your community. In the explosive essay that kicks off this anthology, the philosopher Agnes Callard writes that such caveats defang the very point of anger. If anger is a valid response to being wronged, she argues, and if none of the ways we hold people accountable for wronging us—apologies, restitution, etc.—actually erase the original act, doesn’t it follow that “once you have a reason to be angry, you have a reason to be angry forever”? Cue the clamor of a dozen-plus philosophers debating the cause, function, and value of our most jagged emotion. There’s Myisha Cherry, whose work is always so marvelously elegant, on the irrelevance of virtue to the anger that fuels the anti-racist struggle—an anger she describes as “Lordean rage,” after the poet and writer Audre Lorde. Elsewhere, we get Judith Butler on anger as a medium: “[W]e view rage as an uncontrollable impulse that needs to come out in unmediated forms. But people craft rage, they cultivate rage, and not just as individuals. Communities craft their rage. Artists craft rage all the time.” I’m resistant to the idea that moral philosophy is just self-help dressed in tweed, but as this year lurched from one outrage to the next, and as I found myself becoming hoarse (metaphorically, but often literally) from what felt like shouting into a void, this collection became something of a workbook: a tool for parsing the more unwieldy parts of myself, and my loved ones, and the world. —Helen Rosner

“ Mexican Gothic ,” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

A woman wearing a red dress and holding flowers on a book cover.

In the fall, I cracked open Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Mexican Gothic” in the bath and found myself reading until the water turned cold. “Mexican Gothic” is Moreno-Garcia’s sixth novel but the first to break through as a major hit. (It has already been optioned for television.) This is a function both of its timing and of its addictive prose, which is as easy to slurp down as a poisoned cordial. The book follows a glamorous young socialite with champagne taste named Noemí Taboada, who lives in Mexico City, in the nineteen-fifties, when women were not yet able to vote. Noemí intends to study at university, but her father has other plans: he wants her to check up on a distant cousin, Catalina, who’s living in a crumbling manse with a British man, in a small village, called El Triunfo, where the family operates a silver mine. Catalina has written a distressing note claiming that the house is suffocating her; the family assumes that she’s hysterical, but Noemí is meant to investigate the situation. What she finds is more shocking than she ever expected—the house is an entropic catastrophe, where something sinister (that I won’t spoil here) is literally growing under the baseboards. What makes “Mexican Gothic” so fresh is not only its cramped, crawly ambience—comparisons to “ Jane Eyre ” are not too generous—but also the fact that it’s steeped in a deep colonial history that haunts the narrative. Is the house in El Triunfo really sick? Or is it just tainted by colonizers who want to strip the land down to its bones? Moreno-Garcia deftly raises these questions and then brings them all together in a gory, monstrous, and utterly satisfying twist. —Rachel Syme

“ Blindness ,” by José Saramago

The word blindness written hundreds of times on a book cover.

José Saramago’s “Blindness” came by mail, last winter, one month after COVID came to the U.S. It arrived in a box, with a half-dozen other books, including Camus’s “ The Plague ” and Defoe’s “ Journal of a Plague Year ,” about the literature of infection, for an assignment . I read the Saramago in a cabin in the woods, a sugarhouse, while tending a fire, boiling sap. I’d get lost in the story of a plague of blindness and then put the book down to throw another log in the fire. The pages of the paperback got hot in my hands. I started to sweat, reading about the blindness that fell upon everyone, so that they could see only white, and then I’d stare into the flames and at the sap, bubbling, and the steam, rising, a cloud of white. I took one last trip after that, to Rutgers, the first week of March. I remember being worried about the virus on the train, wearing winter gloves and a scarf, thinking I should have cancelled. I gave a lecture and went out to dinner with a dozen people, professors of English and history. We sat at a long table by a fire, a last supper, and I happened to ask if anyone had ever read “Blindness,” and, weirdly, everyone had. So we went around the table, sacramentally, talking about our favorite lines, characters, moments: the doctor’s wife, the story of the dog, how the infected escape, blindly, from the lunatic asylum where they’ve been quarantined, and the part where they find soap and, finally, wash themselves, naked, on a balcony, with buckets of rainwater. And then, it was all over. —Jill Lepore

“ Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings ,” by Neil Price

The dramatic front of a viking ship as seen from below on a book cover.

Reading the archeologist Neil Price’s beguiling book feels a little like time travel—and who, in 2020, didn’t feel tempted to drop into another epoch? Price achieves this feat with an accumulation of sensory detail, along with a grounded but game approach to conjuring the inner worlds of people whose cosmology, for starters, is utterly different from our own. (As he writes, we’ll never really know what it might have felt like “if you truly believed—in fact, knew —that the man living up the valley could turn into a wolf under certain circumstances.”) Not the least of Price’s achievement is to rescue Viking history from the grasp of white supremacists who claim a specious lineage with it. He does so not by asserting any sort of moral superiority for the Vikings—theirs was a brutal society that practiced human sacrifice and slavery, as Price makes abundantly clear—but by restoring their rich and strange particularity. As seafarers who travelled and traded widely, Vikings were, almost by definition, multiethnic. “There was never any such thing as a ‘pure Nordic’ bloodline, and the people of the time would have been baffled by the very notion,” Price writes. The book is full of such insights, but what has stuck with me are Price’s descriptions of a world enamored with beauty. Surfaces, including those of the body, were intricately decorated, tendrilled over with runic inscriptions and tiny pictures. (Vikings do not seem to have been the unkempt beasts of pop culture legend—the archeological record is heavy on, of all things, combs.) I’ll long remember Price’s evocation of the wafer-thin squares of gold, stamped with images of otherworldly beings, that adorned the great halls where visitors drank and fought and recited poetry. Firelight would have animated those static images. Price has done something similar here. —Margaret Talbot

“ Rodham ,” by Curtis Sittenfeld

A photo of a young Hillary Rodham Clinton on a book cover.

I have always been amazed by the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld’s talent for selecting people who we think we already know and convincing us that they are far more complicated and interesting than we ever dreamed. Before I read “ American Wife ,” I had a basic smug liberal contempt for Laura Bush, who I perceived as her husband’s mute appendage. But in Sittenfeld’s telling, the former first lady—or someone quite like her—was a shy but sharp bibliophile with seething guilt and compelling self-doubt. Now I kind of love her. Similarly, a Republican friend told me that reading Sittenfeld’s latest, “Rodham,” caused her to question everything she’d believed about Hillary Rodham Clinton. We were both riveted by Sittenfeld’s brave, passionate, and diligent heroine navigating lust, ambition, Arkansas, the Ivy League, and, of course, Washington. Sittenfeld’s writing is so fine, her characters so vivid, her empathy so profound that she manages to absorb the reader on a level that transcends partisanship. In 2020, that was a remarkable achievement and an enormous gift to her readers. —Ariel Levy

“ The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn ,” by Richard Hamming

A scientificlooking meandering line on a book cover.

Richard W. Hamming was a mathematician by training, but he cut his teeth as a researcher working at Los Alamos, programming the I.B.M. computers that physicists used to solve equations as they worked on the atomic bomb. After the war, he joined Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he remained for thirty years. This was when big corporations such as I.B.M. and Bell led the charge of technological innovation, and Hamming’s fingerprints were all over the period’s advances. He invented so-called Hamming codes, now basic to digital processing, and co-created an early programming language, L2. After retiring, he taught at the Naval Postgraduate School, in California, giving courses in not just how to do things but how to think like a scientist and conduct a fruitful creative career. (He called it “style.”) In the mid-nineties, a few years before his death, Hamming turned his lecture notes into a book, “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn,” which has been republished by Stripe Press—a young publishing house, created by the eponymous payment-software company, that brings out interesting left-brained books in beautiful, right-brain-friendly editions. Parts of “The Art” get technical enough to include equations, but Hamming is interested mostly in the big picture, and his subjects range from the limits of mathematics (and of language) to the slipperiness of data (“You cannot gather a really large amount of data accurately. It is a known fact which is constantly ignored”). “The Art” would be a great gift for a young scientist-to-be, yet I also loved it as someone on the fuzzy side of things, who always enjoyed science but lost daily touch with it when I left school. His chapter on “creativity,” which draws not just from his field but from history and art, is both stirring and humane. “My duty as a professor is to increase the probability that you will be a significant contributor to our society,” he writes. He was one of the last geniuses who believed in innovation as a shared public project, and, when he imagined the future for which he was preparing students, he looked to the year 2020. He’d be pleased to find his lessons are still urgent here today. —Nathan Heller

“ Balzac’s Lives ,” by Peter Brooks

A statue in a dark room on a book cover.

Honoré de Balzac’s “ La Comédie Humaine ,” grand in both ambition and scope, comprises approximately ninety titles, over whose course the occasionally intersecting stories of nearly two thousand five hundred characters form a portrait of France in the first half of the nineteenth century. In “Balzac’s Lives,” Peter Brooks—a professor emeritus of comparative literature at Yale—turns to nine of these characters to explore the author’s writerly obsessions with money and power, love and desire. To treat fictional characters as so-called real people, with their own lives and behavioral patterns, Brooks notes, has been considered a naïve, even gauche critical approach—at least since the time of the Russian Formalists, who encouraged us to analyze characters for their function as literary devices, rather than for their adherence to the rules that might govern flesh-and-blood individuals. But for Brooks, Balzac’s energetic, almost fevered attitude toward his characters—evident in their emergence and reëmergence over the course of many books, and in their dizzyingly varied social backgrounds, from courtesan to banker, baron to pauper—demands a closer critical look. As I read the book, I enjoyed Brooks’s sharp insights, which suggest the ways in which Balzac’s proto-modern world is not so different from our own. But I also felt a more basic, visceral pleasure. Though I consider myself a Balzac fan, I’ve read only a fraction of the author’s works, and so to be able to discover—or, in some cases, recall—what fates befall certain characters reminded me of the not unprimitive joy of tearing into a juicy morsel of gossip. In this case, it’s the kind that sends you on a mission to find out more—which means picking up a Balzac novel. —Naomi Fry

“ The Year of the French ,” by Thomas Flanagan

A feather is featured on a book cover.

I’m not a recreational reader. I need a reason—usually, it’s something I’m writing—to read a book. But the semi-lockdown last spring seemed to me, as it did to many people, a reason to read a book for no reason, other than pleasure or distraction. So I pulled one off the shelf: “The Year of the French,” by Thomas Flanagan. The novel, published in 1979, is about the invasion of Ireland by the French in 1798. France was revolutionary France, and Ireland was effectively a colony of Britain. The French were hoping to combine forces with an Irish insurrection and liberate the island in the name of liberté, fraternité, and égalité. It didn’t quite work out. I was lucky that I knew nothing about this invasion, not even that it had happened, because Flanagan’s method is to plunge the reader into a strange, wild, poetic, cruel, and finally hopeless world of Irish peasants, absentee British landlords, revolutionary terrorists, and men and women trying to hold on to what they have in a universe threatening to turn upside down. You have to make your own way through this landscape, so the stranger everything is for you, the more adventurous the experience. The story Flanagan tells makes our own dark times seem eminently manageable. I wanted to be taken somewhere else by a book, and I was. And there: I’ve written about it, too! —Louis Menand

“ So Long, See You Tomorrow ,” by William Maxwell

A prairie scene with houses and big clouds on a book cover.

During these long months of hiding out at home—of being thrown back upon recollections of the past, in place of new experience—I’ve been thinking about how to make literary use of memory. How might one capture the way that images or encounters lodge in the imagination and become, over time, layered with meaning? The title of William Maxwell’s short, stunning novel, “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” is a phrase that is said lightly but that comes to be freighted with tragedy; the book itself, which was published in 1980 after being serialized in The New Yorker , is a virtuosic blend of memoir and fiction. Maxwell, who was a fiction editor at this magazine for some four decades, and who died in 2000 at the age of ninety-one, drew in this book, as in a number of others, upon recollections of his hometown of Lincoln, Illinois. In part, it is a true-crime narrative: a jealous husband murders his wife’s lover, who is also his best friend. But the book is also about how that crime stays alive in the narrator’s memory, and how it becomes a means for him to explore his own experience of loss and of guilt. This is a book filled with passages that I wanted to transcribe in a hedge against the failings of my own memory, among them this pronouncement, about midway through: “If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it. I would be content to stick to the facts if there were any.” As well as encountering Maxwell on the page, I recommend listening to the audiobook, which was recorded in 1995. It’s beautifully read by the author, whose voice a listener can hear cracking with emotion upon reaching the novel’s final, breathtaking sentence. —Rebecca Mead

“ Corregidora ,” by Gayl Jones

A book purple cover with various spots of yellow and pink paint.

When Toni Morrison first read the manuscript for what would become Gayl Jones’s début novel, “Corregidora,” she immediately heralded it as a turning point for fiction. “No novel about any black woman could ever be the same after this,” Morrison, then an editor at Random House, wrote. “Corregidora” was published in 1975. Set primarily in the late nineteen-forties, the novel follows Ursa Corregidora, a twenty-five-year-old Black blues singer from Bracktown, Kentucky. Ursa navigates tumultuous, occasionally violent relationships and works to carve out a place for herself as an artist. Following an unwanted hysterectomy, she also confronts her ancestors’ entreaty to “make generations,” which is key to continuing an oral tradition that can preserve, undiluted, the realities of slavery. (Her family carries the name of the Portuguese slave owner who fathered both Ursa’s mother and grandmother.) Storytelling, in this mode, becomes an intergenerational act—a way of maintaining evidence of violence, incest, and erasure. Jones’s writing resists self-conscious ornamentation in favor of casual, knowing vernacular, and her structure is unconventional but tightly controlled. Dialogue is often interrupted by memory or fantasy, and time turns in on itself. On a visit to Bracktown, Ursa’s mother offers an elliptical, bracing account of her own mother’s sexual abuse by Corregidora; later in the novel, which closes in the late nineteen-sixties, Ursa moves closer to reconciling with what has gone unsaid. And yet, despite this panorama, the novel’s actual spaces are intimate—relationships play out in bedrooms, kitchens, bars. Jones’s great achievement is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them. —Anna Wiener

“ Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World ,” by J. R. McNeill

A landscape filled with wind turbines on a book cover.

J. R. McNeill’s “Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World” came out in 2000, but it’s just as relevant now as it was when it first appeared. It’s one of those rare books that’s both sweeping and specific, scholarly and readable. McNeill looks at how humans have, over the past hundred years, altered the atmosphere, the biosphere, and what he calls the “hydrosphere.” What makes the book stand out is its wealth of historical detail. The changes we have wrought, McNeill argues, have mostly been the unintentional side effects of economic growth. They’ve ushered in “a regime of perpetual ecological disturbance,” which will strain many species’ ability to adapt. How people will deal with this new “regime” will determine what the world looks like not just a century from now but for millennia. —Elizabeth Kolbert

“ The Known World ,” by Edward P. Jones

A family rides a carriage down a road on a book cover.

My reading life in 2020 was mostly distinguished by how hard it was for me to read. But my skittering stopped sometime this spring, when I opened “The Known World,” Edward P. Jones’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, from 2003. Reading it was like dropping anchor. My brain stabilized, and it felt like the only thing I could do, for a change, was focus in. This was the work of a genius. The clarity of Jones’s lines, the beauty of his descriptions, the mesmerizing character sketches: all of them were a function of the extreme specificity and intricacy of the world he had created. In a way, he’s a kind of cartographer. The book’s title is a reference to a map: “a browned and yellowed woodcut of some eight feet by six feet” that hangs behind the desk of a sheriff in antebellum Virginia. The seller of the woodcut—a Russian “with a white beard down to his stomach”—claimed it was the first time the word “America” had appeared on a map. The novel, which tells the story of a Black slave owner and his family, is also an account of territory—that marked out by the institution of slavery, which extends into the brains, bones, and souls of everyone it touches. After reading, I immediately picked up Jones’s other two books, both story collections, and raced through the more recent one, “ All Aunt Hagar’s Children .” I didn’t think it was possible for me to like a book as much as “The Known World,” but I began to think that I liked these stories even more. Now, the other collection, “ Lost in the City ,” is on my bedside table—a down payment on my next escape. —Jonathan Blitzer

2020 in Review

  • The funniest cartoons , as chosen by our Instagram followers.
  • Helen Rosner on the best cookbooks .
  • Doreen St. Félix selects the year’s best TV shows .
  • Richard Brody lists his top thirty-six movies .
  • Ian Crouch recounts the best jokes of the year .
  • Sheldon Pearce on the albums that helped him navigate a lost plague year.
  • Sarah Larson picks the best podcasts .
  • Amanda Petrusich counts down the best music .
  • Michael Schulman on ten great performances .

ny times best books 2020

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By Amanda Petrusich

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The New York Times Names Their 10 Best of 2020

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Kelly Jensen

Kelly is a former librarian and a long-time blogger at STACKED. She's the editor/author of (DON'T) CALL ME CRAZY: 33 VOICES START THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and the editor/author of HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD. Her next book, BODY TALK, will publish in Fall 2020. Follow her on Instagram @heykellyjensen .

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The editors of The New York Times Book Review have named their top ten books of 2020.

  • A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet
  • Deacon King Kong by James McBride
  • Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
  • Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
  • The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
  • Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker
  • A Promised Land by Barack Obama
  • Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro
  • Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
  • War by Margaret MacMillan

The first five titles on the list showcase the best in fiction — all which might be categorized under the broad label “literary” (though arguably, Deacon King Kong lies closely within mystery and crime fiction) — while the second five titles are all nonfiction, including a memoir, an Oprah’s Book Club selection, an insider’s story of life inside Silicon Valley, and two histories.

Forty percent of the choices are by authors of color.

Amazon released their best books of 2020 last week, and among their top 20 are three on the New York Times list: The Vanishing Half , Hidden Valley Road , and Deacon King Kong .

To read more about why these were the New York Times selections for 2020, dig into the editors’ commentary on their site. Readers who have access can also enjoy the New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2020 .

ny times best books 2020

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New York Times Fiction Best Sellers 2020

The New York Times Fiction Bestseller List 2020

Go beyond just the current list of New York Times Fiction Best Sellers to discover every bestselling book listed on the NYT Bestseller List in 2020.

Since 1931, The New York Times has been publishing a weekly list of bestselling books. Since then, becoming a New York Times bestseller has become a dream for virtually every writer.

When I first started reading adult fiction, one of the first places I went for book recommendations was the New York Times Fiction Best Sellers. I wanted to know what books were the most widely read, and start with those.

However, scrolling through the list week by week on The New York Times website is rather annoying. I just wanted all the bestselling fiction books gathered together in one place.

When I couldn’t find it, I decided to create it.

Here are all the New York Times fiction bestsellers from 2020. Instead of just the current best seller list , which you can find all over the place, I’ve compiled a list of every book that has appeared on the New York Times Fiction Best Sellers list in 2020 for Hardcover Fiction. 

Note: The week count in this list stops on the last week of 2020. Visit the 2021 Bestseller List if you want to find out which books kept ranking into the next year.

Since this is a bit of a sprawling post, feel free to jump to the section that most interests you or take your time scrolling through the complete list of New York Times fiction best sellers.

Quick Links

  • #1 Fiction Best Sellers of 2020
  • Heavyweights (10+ Weeks)
  • Fan Favorites (5+ Weeks)
  • Honorable Mention (2+ Weeks)
  • One Hit Wonders

#1 New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 2020

book cover Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

For years, Kya Clark has survived alone in the marshes of the North Carolina coast. Dubbed “The Marsh Girl” by the locals, she was abandoned by her family and has been raised by nature itself. Now, as she comes of age, she begins to yearn for something more than her loneliness – maybe even a connection with the locals. ( 119 Weeks ) Read more →

book cover American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

In Mexico, bookstore owner Lydia is charmed to meet Javier, a man who shares her taste in books, only to find he is the local drug lord. When her husband exposes Javier’s secrets, the wrath of the cartel falls upon her family. Lydia and her son Luca must flee from his wrath – all the way to American soil. ( 34 Weeks ) Read more →

book cover The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Growing up in a small black community in the Deep South, the Vignes sisters run away at age sixteen. Though identical twins, their lives end in completely different paths. One returns to live in their hometown while the other secretly passes as white. Bennett explores more than race, as she contemplates how the past affects future generations when their daughters’ lives intersect. ( 28 Weeks ) Read more →

book cover If It Bleeds by Stephen King

If It Bleeds by Stephen King

A collection of four novellas. In “If It Bleeds,” a standalone sequel to The Outsider , a bomb at a middle school prompts an investigation into the lead reporter by Holly Gibney. Other stories include “Mr. Harriagan’s Phone,” “The Life of Chuck,” and “Rat.” ( 18 Weeks ) Read More →

book cover Camino Winds by John Grisham

Camino Winds by John Grisham

With Hurricane Leo approaching, bookstore owner Bruce Cable decides to ride out the storm. In the aftermath, his author friend Nelson Kerr is found dead. Did Nelson die in the storm? Or did someone use the hurricane to cover a murder? ( 17 Weeks ) Read More →

book cover Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

After a failed bank robbery, a banker robber on the run accidentally ends up with a room full of hostages at an open house. After letting all of the hostages go, the police storm the apartment, only to find it empty. Now the police must interview the dysfunctional group to figure out what exactly happened. Backman purposely plays on your assumptions and uses an unusual narration style that gives the story an allegorical feel. ( 14 Weeks ) Read more →

book cover The Return by Nicholas Sparks

The Return by Nicholas Sparks

After being injured in a bombing in Afghanistan, a Navy doctor settles at his late grandfather’s cabin in North Carolina. While recuperating from his wounds, Trevor Benson never expects to find love, but he can’t fight the attraction he feels to deputy sheriff Natalie Masterson. However, Natalie remains distant, and a sullen teenage girl might be more connected to Trevor’s grandfather’s death than any suspected. (11 Weeks) Read more →

book cover 28 Summers by Elin Hilderbrand

28 Summers by Elin Hilderbrand

At her brother’s bachelor party, Mallory meets Jake McCloud. Thus begins a love affair that lasts for decades, but only for one weekend a year. When Mallory his dying, she leaves instructions for her son to call Jake, who is now the husband of the leading presidential candidate. ( 11 Weeks ) Read more →

book cover The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett

The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett

Thirty years after publishing The Pillars of the Earth , Ken Follett has written a prequel revealing the events that led up to his epic work. At the end of the Dark Ages in England, one man’s determination to make his abbey the center of learning changes the lives of a boatbuilder, a noblewoman, and the monk in unexpected ways. ( 10 Weeks ) Read more →

book cover A Time for Mercy by John Grisham

A Time For Mercy by John Grisham

John Grisham returns you to Clanton, Mississipi, the setting of his debut novel A Time to Kill . After appearing in the novel Sycamore Row , lawyer Jake Brigance is back, this time defending a teenager accused of killing a local deputy. With demand rising for a swift guilty verdict and the death penalty, Brigance realizes the town is against him as he pleads for mercy along with justice. ( 9 Weeks ) Read more →

book cover The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult

The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult

When Dawn Edelstein is in a plane crash, her last thoughts are not of her husband, but of a man she hasn’t seen in fifteen years. When she miraculously survives, Dawn has a choice to make. Should she return to her husband and try to work out their marriage? Or should she run away to Egypt to pursue a man and a degree that she left behind? ( 8 Weeks ) Read more →

book cover The Sentinel by Lee Child and Andrew Child

The Sentinel by Lee Child and Andrew Child

In the 25th Jack Reacher novel, Lee Child teams up with his younger brother Andrew. When Jack Reacher intervenes in an ambush in Tennessee, he meets an unassuming IT manager. Recently fired from his job after a cyberattack, Rusty Rutherford just wants to clear his name. Instead, they stumble upon a much larger conspiracy. (7 Weeks) Read more →

book cover The Order by Daniel Silva

The Order by Daniel Silva

While holidaying in Rome, Gabriel Allon is shocked by the death of his friend Pope Paul VII. When the pope’s secretary insists he was murdered, Gabriel stumbles upon a long-hidden secret – a book containing a lost New Testament story that The Order of St. Helena will do anything to keep hidden. ( 7 Weeks ) Read more →

book cover The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel

The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel’s third and final book of her Thomas Cromwell series. With Anne Boleyn dead, Thomas Cromwell continues to support King Henry VIII. However, when the Spanish ambassador points out that the King always turns on those closest to him, Cromwell starts to wonder if his turn is next. ( 7 Weeks ) Read more →

book cover Fortune and Glory by Janet Evanovich

Fortune and Glory by Janet Evanovich

The 27th Stephanie Plum novel. After Grandma Mazur’s new husband dies, he leaves her the key to his massive fortune. As Stephanie and her grandma search for the treasure, they realize they aren’t the only ones looking. Stephanie’s old nemesis from Little Havana is hot on the trail. Can Stephanie outwit her? And will she finally decide between Joe Morelli and Ranger? ( 6 Weeks ) Read more →

book cover Blindside by James Patterson and James O. Born

Blindside by James Patterson and James O. Born

When the Mayor of New York’s daughter goes missing, he strikes a deal with Detective Michael Bennett, whose son is in prison. Bennett’s investigation leads him to a murder connected to a hacking operation, with national security implications. ( 6 weeks ) Read More →

book cover The Law of Innocence by Michael Connelly

The Law of Innocence by Michael Connelly

After a big courtroom win, Lincoln Lawyer Mickey Haller is pulled over by the police who find the body of a former client in his trunk. Unable to post bail, Haller must defend himself against murder charges from his jail cell while fending off enemies from the inside and out. Haller knows that it’s not enough to get a not guilty verdict. To be free of the charges, he must find out who really did it. ( 5 Weeks )

book cover All the Devils Are Here by Louise Penny

All the Devils are Here by Louise Penny

The 16th book in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series. While in Paris, Gamache investigates the attempted murder of his godfather, billionaire Stephen Horowitz. Now Gamache and his wife use the help of his former second-in-command to uncover secrets buried in the City of Lights. (4  Weeks ) Read more →

book cover Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson

Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson

After forming a coalition against the enemy invaders, Dalinar Kholin and his Knights Radiant face a stalemate in the war. Until a technological advance creates an arms race with terrible consequences. The much-awaited fourth book in the Stormlight Archive is publishing in November. ( 3 Weeks ) Read more →

book cover House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas

House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas

Sarah J. Maas kicks off her new Crescent City adult fantasy series with the story of half-Fae half-human Bryce Quinlan intent on avenging the death of her friends. She teams up with Fallen Angel Hunt Athalar for a tale of danger, romance, and magic. ( 3 weeks )  Read more →

book cover Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline

Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline

Ernest Cline returns with a sequel to his science fiction bestseller, Ready Player One . After winning James Halliday’s contest, Wade Watts finds another easter egg hidden in Halliday’s vaults – a technological advance leagues ahead of the OASIS. Wade and his friends must solve this new riddle in a plot eerily reminiscent of the first book. And, yes, Wil Wheaton is narrating the audiobook. ( 3 Weeks ) Read more →

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New York Times Fiction Best Sellers 2020

Heavyweights (10+ Weeks on the NYT Bestseller List)

book cover The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

One night, famous painter Alicia Berenson shoots her husband in the face 5 times, and then never utters another word again. Now criminal psychotherapist Theo Faber is determined to get the truth from this silent patient while his own life is falling apart. ( 56 Weeks )  Read more →

book cover The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes

The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes

Set during the Great Depression, Englishwoman Alice Wright marries a handsome American and finds herself transplanted to rural Kentucky. To escape her unhappy home life with her withdrawn husband and overbearing father-in-law, Alice agrees to become a traveling librarian, riding around the countryside bringing books to local residents. In her new job, she meets other fierce women and gains lasting friendships. ( 33 Weeks ) Read more →

book cover The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Shortly after World War II, a real estate mogul buys The Dutch House, a lavish estate outside of Philadelphia. This purchase changes everything for his children, Danny and Maeve – driving out their mother, and leading to Cyril’s remarriage and their exile from the house by their stepmother. A story of the bond between siblings, The Dutch House warns of the dangers of obsessive nostalgia. ( 32 Weeks ) Read More →

book cover The Institute by Stephen King

The Institute by Stephen King

In the middle of the night, Luke Ellis’s parents are murdered, and he is kidnapped only to awaken in The Institute. Here live children with the special abilities of telekinesis and telepathy who are tested and used at the hands of the ruthless director Mrs. Sigsby. Children who cooperate are given tokens for the vending machines. Those that don’t are brutally punished. As other children start to disappear to never be seen, Luke realizes his only hope is to escape. ( 22 Weeks )  Read more →

book cover The Guardians by John Grisham

The Guardians by John Grisham

Over two decades ago, a jury convicted Quincy Miller for the murder of his lawyer Keith Russo. However, someone framed Miller, and Cullen Post, the founder of innocence group Guardian Ministries, takes up his case. As Post works to overturn Miller’s conviction, he realizes much more is going on. Powerful people do not want the truth of Russo’s murderer revealed, and they are willing to do anything to keep their secrets. ( 20 Weeks ) Read More →

book cover The Guest List by Lucy Foley

The Guest List by Lucy Foley

On a remote Irish island, the perfect wedding turns deadly in this thrilling mystery. The high profile wedding between a television star and a magazine publisher is supposed to be the perfect event. Yet once the guests arrive, past conflicts come into play and someone turns up dead. Was it the bride? The best man? The wedding planner? ( 20 Weeks ) Read more →

book cover The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Sequel to Atwood’s classic The Handmaid’s Tale , set fifteen years after the events of the first book. Although the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead still rules, it’s power is beginning to slip. Following three women from inside and outside the system, the novel feels much more like the Hulu tv show than the original book. ( 16 Weeks )  Read more → 

book cover Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

Sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Olive Kitteridge . Continuing in the same vein as the first book, Olive, Again , shows Olive struggling to understand the various people in her hometown of Crosby, Maine. She interacts with a teenager dealing with the death of a parent, a pregnant young woman, a nurse with a secret crush, and a lawyer struggling with an inheritance. (14 weeks) Read More →

book cover The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s first novel follows Hiram, the black son of a white plantation owner. With no memory of his mother after she is sold away, Hiram tries to win the love of his father. After escaping death, Hiram realizes his father will never love him as a son. After a failed attempt to escape, Hiram eventually joins the Underground – where he aims to rescue others with a mysterious power he has developed. (14 weeks) Read More →

book cover Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

Blogger Alix Chamberlain has built herself a brand empowering women. When she moves to Philadephia, she feels overwhelmed by her two young daughters and comes to rely on her babysitter, Emira Tucker. While watching Alix’s two-year-old, Emira is shocked one day to be stopped by a grocery store clerk, only because she is black. (13 weeks)   Read More →

book cover Blue Moon by Lee Child

Blue Moon by Lee Child

Jack Reacher is just minding his business on a Greyhound bus when he makes the mistake of helping an old man. Now he’s caught in the between warring gangs, dodging loan sharks and assassins with the help of a fed-up waitress. (12 weeks) Read More →

book cover A Minute to Midnight by David Baldacci

A Minute to Midnight by David Baldacci

FBI Agent Atlee Pine and her assistant Carol Blum head back to Atlee’s hometown to investigate Atlee’s twin sister’s long-ago kidnapping Instead, they find bizarre ritualistic murders of a serial killer just getting started. (11 weeks) Read More →

book cover Big Summer by Jennifer Weiner

Big Summer by Jennifer Weiner

Six years after a fight ended their friendship, Daphne Berg is shocked when her ex-best friend Drue Cavanaugh begs Daphne to be her maid-of-honor. No longer a shy side-kick, Daphne is now a confident plus-size influencer and a weekend in Cape Cod is too tempting to pass up. ( 11 Weeks ) Read more →

Fan Favorites (5+ Weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List)

The starless sea by erin morgenstern.

Amazon | Goodreads

(9 weeks) Graduate student Zachary Rawlins stumbles upon a mysterious book full of fantastical tales, only to find himself in the narrative. From there, he follows hints to a secret library, preserved by guardians intent on protecting it.  Read More →

Walk the Wire by David Baldacci

(8 weeks) FBI consultant Amos Decker investigates a gruesome murder in a small North Dakota fracking town.

Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano

Amazon | Goodreads  

(8 weeks) The coming-of-age story of Edward, the sole survivor of an airplane crash. Now an orphan, Edward must cope with the fact that he survived when so many did not. Read More →

Criss Cross by James Patterson

(8 weeks) Hours after watching the execution of a killer, Alex Cross and John Sampson are called to a copycat murder. Was the wrong man just killed, or is something even more sinister going on?

The invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab

( 8 Weeks ) A Faustian bargain comes with a curse that affects the adventure Addie LaRue has across centuries, for she must live a life where no one can remember her. Read more →

Twisted Twenty-Six by Janet Evanovich

(8 weeks) Grandma Mazur is a widow again. When his business associates turn up demanding a set of Jimmy’s keys, bounty hunter Stephanie Plum rises to the task.

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

(8  Weeks ) In 1950s Mexico, a debutante travels to a distant mansion in the mountains where family secrets of a faded mining empire have been kept hidden. Read more →

The Boy From the Woods by Harlan Coben

(7 weeks) Found as a boy in the woods, Wilde has never really integrated into society. With two teenage disappearances in his town, Wilde must discover what happened to them, and to himself, all those years ago. Read More →

In Five Years by Rebecca Serle

(7 weeks) Lawyer Dannie Cohan knows exactly where she’ll be in five years – until she has a vision of herself in five years engaged to someone else. She doesn’t think much of it until she later meets the same man.  Read More →

Fair Warning by Michael Connelly

(7  Weeks ) The third book in the Jack McEvoy series. A veteran reporter tracks a killer who uses genetic data to pick his victims only to become a suspect in the case.

The Searcher by Tana French

( 7 Weeks ) After a divorce, a former Chicago police officer resettles in an Irish village where a boy begs for help when his older brother goes missing and no one seems to care. Read more →

The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd

(6 weeks) Acclaimed author Sue Monk Kidd imagines a narrative about a fierce, intellectual Jewish woman named Ana who becomes the wife of Jesus.  Read More →

The Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate

(6 weeks) After the Civil War, freed slaves posted “Lost Friends” advertisements, seeking loved ones who had been sold off. In 1987, searching for a way to connect to her students, teacher Benedetta comes across a book and a story of three women living in 1875.  Read More →

The Summer House by James Patterson and Brendan DuBois

(6 Weeks) Jeremiah Cook, a veteran and former N.Y.P.D. cop, investigates a mass murder near a lake in Georgia.

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

(6 weeks) Fleeing the Spanish Civil War, pregnant widow Roser marries her brother-in-law out of necessity. Starting over in Chile, Roser and Victor find a way to make work a marriage neither one wanted.  Read More →

Near Dark by Brad Thor

(6  Weeks ) The 19th book in the Scot Harvath series. With a bounty on his head, Harvath, America’s top spy, makes an alliance with a Norwegian intelligence operative.

All Adults Here by Emma Straub

(5 weeks) After an accident, Astrid Strick realizes that she wasn’t the best mother. Watching her children struggle to parent, she contemplates the long-term consequences of her failures and whether she can set things right.  Read More →

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

(5 weeks) With the collapse of a Ponzi scheme and the mysterious disappearance of a woman at sea, Mandel combines two seemly unconnected events into a narrative of crisis and survival.  Read More →

Lost by James Patterson and James O. Born

(5 weeks) Detective Tom Moon and his FBI task force investigate a Russian crime syndicate operating in Europe and Miami. But operating in his hometown is risky for Moon when someone close to him is targeted.  

Hideaway by Nora Roberts

( 5 weeks ) After escaping her abductors, child star Caitlyn Sullivan gathers herself in western Ireland and returns to Hollywood hoping to act again only to find love and betrayal.

Sex and Vanity by Kevin Kwan

( 5 Weeks ) A nod to “A Room With a View” in which Lucie Tang Churchill is torn between her WASPy billionaire fiancé and a privileged hunk born in Hong Kong. Read more →

The Harbigner II by Jonathan Cahn

(5  Weeks ) Nouriel, Ana Goren and a figure known as “the prophet” return as revelations are unlocked in the sequel to The Harbinger .

1st Case by James Patterson and Chris Tebbetts

(5  Weeks ) After getting kicked out of M.I.T., Angela Hoot interns with the F.B.I. and tracks the murderous siblings known as the Poet and the Engineer.

One by One by Ruth ware

(5  Weeks ) An avalanche tests the bonds of coworkers from a London-based tech startup on a corporate retreat in the French Alps. Could one of them be willing to resort to murder to get their way? Read more →

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

(5  Weeks ) A family vacation in an isolated part of Long Island is thrown into confusion when the home’s owners return claiming New York City is having a blackout. Read more →

The New York Times Fiction Best Sellers

Honorable Mention (2-4 Weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List)

book cover The 20th Victim by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro

One Hit Wonders (1 Week on the New York Times Best Seller List)

book cover Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

  • Read This Not That 2020
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ny times best books 2020

New York Times 10 Best Books of 2020

Hamnet By Maggie O'Farrell Cover Image

Hamnet (Hardcover)

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait delivers a luminous portrait of a marriage, a family ravaged by grief, and a boy whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time.

A Children's Bible: A Novel By Lydia Millet Cover Image

A Children's Bible: A Novel (Hardcover)

Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction One of the New York Times ' Ten Best Books of the Year Named one of the best novels of the year by Time , Washington Post , NPR, Chicago Tribune , Esquire , BBC, and many others National Bestseller

Homeland Elegies: A Novel By Ayad Akhtar Cover Image

Homeland Elegies: A Novel (Hardcover)

This "profound and provocative" work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and American Dervish follows an immigrant father and his son as they search for belonging—in post-Trump America, and with each other ( Kirkus Reviews ). "Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable." —Salman Rushdie ​ A deeply

Deacon King Kong (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel By James McBride Cover Image

Deacon King Kong (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel (Hardcover)

Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction   Winner of the Gotham Book Prize One of Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of the Year" Oprah's Book Club Pick Named one of the Top Ten Books of the Year by the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly and TIME Magazine A Washington Post Notable Novel

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family By Robert Kolker Cover Image

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family (Hardcover)

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • ONE OF GQ 's TOP 50 BOOKS OF LITERARY JOURNALISM IN THE 21st CENTURY • The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir By Anna Wiener Cover Image

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir (Hardcover)

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2020.

Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future By James Shapiro Cover Image

Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future (Hardcover)

One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • A New York Times Notable Book A timely exploration of what Shakespeare’s plays reveal about our divided land.

War: How Conflict Shaped Us By Margaret MacMillan Cover Image

War: How Conflict Shaped Us (Hardcover)

Is peace an aberration? The New York Times bestselling author of Paris 1919 offers a provocative view of war as an essential component of humanity. NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

The Vanishing Half: A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel) By Brit Bennett Cover Image

The Vanishing Half: A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel) (Hardcover)

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST *  NPR *  PEOPLE * TIME MAGAZINE* VANITY FAIR * GLAMOUR  2021 WOMEN'S PRIZE FINALIST

A Promised Land By Barack Obama Cover Image

A Promised Land (Hardcover)

A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making—from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINEE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

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Anti-Trump Burnout: The Resistance Says It’s Exhausted

Bracing for yet another election against Donald Trump, America’s liberals are feeling the fatigue. “We’re kind of, like, crises-ed out,” one Democrat said.

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A portrait of Shannon Caseber, a Democratic voter in Pittsburgh. She is leaning against a utility pole on a city street corner.

By Katie Glueck

In 2017 they donned pink hats to march on Washington, registering their fury with Donald J. Trump by the hundreds of thousands .

Then they flipped the House from Republican control, won the presidency and secured a surprisingly strong showing in the 2022 midterm elections, galvanized by their conviction that Mr. Trump and his allies constituted a national emergency.

This year, anti-Trump voters are grappling with another powerful sentiment: exhaustion.

“Some folks are burned out on outrage,” said Rebecca Lee Funk, the Washington-based founder of the Outrage, a progressive activism group and a purveyor of resistance-era apparel. “People are tired. I think last election we were desperate to get Trump out of office, and folks were willing to rally around that singular call to action. And this election feels different.”

But for Democrats, the mission is similar: Now defending the White House, President Biden is trying to reassemble that sprawling anti-Trump coalition, casting the 2024 contest as another battle to save American democracy as Mr. Trump moves toward the Republican nomination.

Mr. Biden, however, has a lot of work to do. Interviews with nearly two dozen Democratic voters, activists and officials make clear his challenge in energizing Americans who are unenthusiastic about a likely 2020 rematch, are worried about his age , and, in some cases, are struggling to sustain the searing anger toward Mr. Trump that Democrats have relied on for nearly a decade.

“We’re kind of, like, crises-ed out,” said Shannon Caseber, 36, a security guard in Pittsburgh who called the prospect of a Trump-Biden rematch a “dumpster fire.” She added, “It’s crisis fatigue, for sure.”

Ms. Caseber, a Democrat who would back Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump, added, “Any sense of urgency that we had with the 2020 election — I think it’s still there in the sense that no one wants Trump to be president, at least for Democrats, but it’s exhausting.”

Democrats are hardly alone in their political fatigue: A Pew Research Center survey last year found that 65 percent of Americans said they always or often felt exhausted when they thought about politics.

“Exhaustion is underlying the entire attitude toward our presidential election,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. “When you’ve got two people that are opposed by 70 percent of Americans who want a different choice, it creates frustration, anxiety and discouragement.”

Democratic pollsters and strategists say that no one is more motivating or terrifying to their voters than Mr. Trump.

Buoyed by strong showings in special elections last week, and other recent contests including a successful write-in campaign for Mr. Biden in New Hampshire’s primary, many believe their voters will grow increasingly engaged as the general election nears and Mr. Trump’s legal problems unfold.

He confronts 91 felony charges across four cases , is poised to be the first former president to face a criminal trial and now has staggering financial problems . He has also privately expressed support for a 16-week national abortion ban, with some exceptions, The New York Times reported on Friday, and Democrats see abortion rights as a powerful motivator for their base and for some swing voters.

But there are pronounced warning signs on the left, as well.

A CNN poll recently asked how motivated Americans were to vote in the election. Republicans, out of power and eager to regain it, were more likely to say “extremely motivated.” A Yahoo News/YouGov poll asked voters last fall about their attitudes toward the 2024 election. Thirty-nine percent of Democrats picked “exhaustion” from the list of sentiments offered (a close second to “dread”). Just 26 percent of Republicans chose “exhaustion.”

Broadly, surveys have shown erosion in the party’s standing with traditional Democratic constituencies. On the left, some groups have warned of funding challenges and voter apathy, and the most visible source of in-the-streets energy is progressive frustration with Mr. Biden over his support for Israel.

Lauren Hitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Biden, said there was tangible evidence of enthusiasm in recent weeks, including on the fund-raising front .

She also signaled that the campaign’s messaging would go beyond simply opposing Mr. Trump, drawing contrasts with Republicans on abortion rights and gun safety as she described the stakes of the election, and nodding to Mr. Biden’s policy accomplishments on issues like combating climate change and child poverty.

“This election determines whether we build on that progress or we lose so many of our fundamental freedoms,” she said in a statement.

Many Democrats have argued that the party must do more to press an affirmative case for Mr. Biden’s re-election, beyond just stopping Mr. Trump again. They also worry that some voters could vote third-party or sit out altogether this year.

“They hear it every cycle: This is the most important election ever,” said Leah D. Daughtry, a Democratic strategist.

While she considers Mr. Trump an “existential threat,” she said, “people want to vote for something and not necessarily against something.”

Max Dower, the founder of the clothing line Unfortunate Portrait, recently designed a $78 shirt that reflected his sense of feeling “uninspired” about the election. It featured an image of Mr. Biden, 81, using a walker to fend off a cane-wielding Mr. Trump, 77, with the message, “Vote 2024.” He said it had drawn more engagement on social media than any design he had posted in roughly eight years (it also inevitably set off political battles in his Instagram comments).

After years of feeling that the country was veering from one crisis to the next, Mr. Dower, who said he voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, suggested that he was burned out.

“We’ve dealt with so many emergencies these past few years: national emergencies, perceived emergencies, real emergencies — it’s just kind of like, that is not really a strong motivator for me anymore,” said Mr. Dower, who is based in Los Angeles. He declined to say how he would vote this year, but said he was unlikely to cast a ballot for Mr. Trump.

“A lot of us would like a more positive thing to motivate us,” he said. “Not just purely, Do this or else this bad thing is going to happen.”

Certainly, Mr. Trump is hardly a morning-in-America candidate. And while some have tuned him out since he left office, he will be unavoidable in an election year — reminding voters, Democrats hope, of everything they have long disliked about him.

The former president, whose supporters attacked the Capitol to try to overturn the 2020 election, has encouraged political violence , spread conspiracy theories and preached a darkly nativist vision . He has sought to undermine American institutions and threatened to upend the international order , recently suggesting that he would encourage Russian aggression against American allies.

“People are going to be more alert because Trump has become even more outrageous in his post-presidency,” Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, a Democrat, said in an interview last month. “It will be a challenge to make sure that people are aware of what he is doing, because I think that sometimes he is so outrageous, so consistently, that there’s a danger that it can be normalized. But I do believe that the stakes will be so high in this election that people will, at the end of the day, understand that our democracy truly is at stake.”

Democrats are also trying to put abortion rights on the ballot, literally and figuratively. The Biden campaign has already started advertising on the issue .

Leah Greenberg, the co-executive director of the Indivisible Project, a progressive grass-roots group, said her organization was supporting ballot measure efforts that would protect abortion rights in key states. She also argued that full Democratic control of Washington could lead to meaningful abortion protections nationally.

“Burnout tends to be a function of a sense of powerlessness,” she said. “People are activated around getting our rights back.”

That kind of message resonated with Dorothy Stevenson, 64, of Milwaukee. She did not vote for president in 2020, she said, alluding to Mr. Biden’s tough-on-crime record as a senator , saying she worried at the time that he was not “really for Black people.” Now, she said, she is unexcited by her choices, but intends to support Mr. Biden because she believes the stakes of the election are higher.

“It’s really, really, really, really because of the abortion issue — I think that they need to stay away from women’s bodies,” she said. The potential return of Mr. Trump, she said, is “a crisis.”

Many Americans have been in denial about the prospect of a Trump-Biden rematch . But as Mr. Trump moves closer to being renominated, some Democrats say their voters are beginning to grasp the significance of his return.

Representative Veronica Escobar, Democrat of Texas and a Biden campaign co-chair, said she “heard some fatigue and some concern” in the recent past.

But after Mr. Trump won the New Hampshire primary, she said, “there has been a palpable shift. And it’s what I had hoped for. I hope we can sustain it and grow it.”

In Washington, Ms. Funk of the Outrage suggested that to do so, some voters now “want to be reminded of what’s good about this country.”

“It’s been a long slog,” she added, “for those of us in the movement.”

Ruth Igielnik contributed reporting.

Katie Glueck is a national political reporter. Previously, she was chief Metro political correspondent, and a lead reporter for The Times covering the Biden campaign. She also covered politics for McClatchy’s Washington bureau and for Politico. More about Katie Glueck

Our Coverage of the 2024 Presidential Election

News and Analysis

At the influential Conservative Political Action Conference, which is currently underway in Washington, the question is not which Republican will face off against President Biden in November, but rather who will join former President Donald Trump atop the ticket as his running mate .

Speaking at a Christian media convention in Nashville, Trump claimed that a “radical left, corrupt political class” was persecuting Christians and framed the election as a battle against a “wicked” system .

Anger within the Democratic Party over Biden’s support for Israel in the war in Gaza has been building for months. Michigan’s upcoming primary will put that discontent on the ballot for the first time .

Nikki Haley’s struggles to gain traction ahead of South Carolina’s Republican primary stem in part from a demographic fact : Nearly 10% of the state’s voters were not there when she left the governor’s mansion in 2017, and many of the newcomers have an affection for Trump. How did the state become Trump country ?

Fact-Checking Biden: During campaign and public events in recent weeks, Biden has made some misleading statements  about taxes, industry, jobs and more.

A Right-Wing Nerve Center:  The Conservative Partnership Institute has become a breeding ground for the next generation of Trump loyalists and an incubator for policies he might pursue. Its fast growth is raising questions .

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Investigations

A hospital is suing to move a quadriplegic 18-year-old to a nursing home. she says no.

Joe Shapiro

Joseph Shapiro

ny times best books 2020

Alexis Ratcliff attends her 18th birthday party at the hospital in Winston-Salem, N.C. She is a quadriplegic who uses a ventilator and has lived at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist since she was 13. Susan Ratcliff hide caption

Alexis Ratcliff attends her 18th birthday party at the hospital in Winston-Salem, N.C. She is a quadriplegic who uses a ventilator and has lived at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist since she was 13.

From her hospital bed, Alexis Ratcliff asks a question: "What 18-year-old gets sued?"

Ratcliff is that 18-year-old, sued by the hospital in Winston-Salem, N.C., that wants her to leave.

Ratcliff, a quadriplegic who uses a ventilator, has lived at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist since she was 13. She wants to leave, too. But not to the nursing home the hospital found for her in another state.

She wants to live in a home nearby, close to her family and school.

When she refused to move to the distant nursing home, the hospital sued her for trespass.

The standoff in North Carolina shows the failure of states across the country to adequately address the long-term-care needs of younger people with complex disabilities. This year marks the 25th anniversary of a U.S. Supreme Court opinion that found states have an obligation to help people with disabilities — young and old — live, whenever possible, in their own homes and not in institutions like hospitals and nursing homes.

As Hospitals Fear Being Overwhelmed By COVID-19, Do The Disabled Get The Same Access?

As Hospitals Fear Being Overwhelmed By COVID-19, Do The Disabled Get The Same Access?

A 2010 NPR investigation found that states and the federal government failed to live up to the new requirement to help people live at home. Ratcliff's case, and new analysis by NPR, shows that progress in the states remains spotty, especially for people with the most complex disabilities.

In her hospital room decorated with cards, posters and Disney memorabilia, Ratcliff speaks softly under the persistent whoosh of the ventilator, a machine that pushes oxygen into her lungs. "I didn't ask to be here," Ratcliff says. "It wasn't my choice. It wasn't my decision. I didn't want to be here. But unfortunately, I'm the one who got sued."

ny times best books 2020

Ratcliff's hospital room is decorated with Disney memorabilia, cards and posters. Susan Ratcliff hide caption

Ratcliff's hospital room is decorated with Disney memorabilia, cards and posters.

She wants the state of North Carolina, where she has lived her entire life, to find a house or apartment for her, with aides and nurses. It's something the state has done for other people with disabilities similar to hers.

"Yes, I am a quad," she says. "But I'm still a normal human being, just like everyone else. And I should be able to live ... life to the fullest of my abilities."

Ratcliff says to do that, she needs to stay near her family and the neighboring college that gave her a full academic scholarship. She recently began online classes, but dreams of attending on campus one day.

Lois Curtis, who won a landmark civil rights case for people with disabilities, died

Lois Curtis, who won a landmark civil rights case for people with disabilities, died

In February 2008, when Ratcliff was 18 months old, she was injured — her neck crushed — in a car crash. Her mother was driving and her father was holding her in his lap in the front seat. Ratcliff's mother was high on drugs and was later convicted of multiple charges related to the accident and sentenced to prison.

Doctors at Wake Forest Baptist saved Ratcliff's life.

She was sent home to live with family. North Carolina's Medicaid agency sent nurses and aides to the house to help care for the young child, who needed a ventilator to breathe and a wheelchair to get around.

That arrangement ended when her grandfather developed serious health problems and gave up his house to move to an assisted living facility. In January 2019, when Ratcliff was 13, she returned to the hospital. Except for one six-month period when she stayed with a foster parent, she's lived there ever since.

Dr. Kevin High, the hospital's vice chief academic officer, says this isn't about money. Medicaid pays for Ratcliff's care.

ny times best books 2020

Alexis Ratcliff wants to stay near home so she can see her family — including Randy Ratcliff, her biological grandfather and adoptive father, who came to see her at the hospital last spring for her graduation party. Susan Ratcliff hide caption

Alexis Ratcliff wants to stay near home so she can see her family — including Randy Ratcliff, her biological grandfather and adoptive father, who came to see her at the hospital last spring for her graduation party.

High says a hospital isn't a place for people to live long term. Except for a short time after Ratcliff returned from her brief foster care placement, her health has been stable, according to the hospital's lawsuit, and she doesn't require the level of care she's getting in the hospital.

"We always have people waiting for beds. And especially ICU beds," says High, who until September served as the hospital's president. Some people get turned away or wait for prolonged periods, he says, "when you have people who stay in the hospital for a very long period of time like this."

Ratcliff says she still needs the bed — until care can be set up in a home or apartment.

Since Ratcliff came back to the hospital in 2019, the level of care has been attentive and skillful. She's had no bed sores, no respiratory infections. Those can be common — and deadly — for a quadriplegic on a ventilator.

The nurses, doctors and staff have been some of Ratcliff's biggest supporters, and her best friends.

Last spring, when Ratcliff graduated from high school, staff on the pediatric side, Brenner Children's Hospital, threw a big party. In August, when she turned 18, they threw her an even-bigger birthday celebration.

The next day, officials at the health center ordered her moved to the adult side of the hospital and increased the pressure on her to leave. With no nursing home in North Carolina willing to take her, the hospital found a nursing home a few hours away in Virginia.

How to talk about disability sensitively and avoid ableist tropes

On Disabilities

How to talk about disability sensitively and avoid ableist tropes.

High notes that Ratcliff initially said OK. But Ratcliff, who became her own guardian when she turned 18, says she felt pressured by hospital staff who said if she didn't go to the nursing home in Virginia she'd be sent instead to one even farther away, possibly in Ohio. Ratcliff and her lawyers say she was pressed to make a decision without family or another representative present.

Ratcliff's lawyers claim the hospital retaliated against the young woman. It removed the respiration equipment she needs to go outside the hospital and ended a contract with a nurse who occasionally took her out, the lawyers allege.

ny times best books 2020

Alexis Ratcliff, in cap and gown for the invitations she sent for her high school graduation. It took a judge's order to tell the hospital to help her leave the hospital and attend her graduation ceremony. Amber Flippen hide caption

Alexis Ratcliff, in cap and gown for the invitations she sent for her high school graduation. It took a judge's order to tell the hospital to help her leave the hospital and attend her graduation ceremony.

They claim Ratcliff has been warned that if she goes outside the hospital, she won't be allowed back in. She hasn't been outside since August.

The hospital had tried before to discharge Ratcliff — a family member says it found nursing homes for her in California and New Jersey — but it sparred with a judge from Ratcliff's home county, who halted the transfer. That order, from a Surry County District Court, held until Ratcliff turned 18.

The hospital's lawsuit charging Ratcliff with trespass was filed in September, the month after she turned 18. It said her continued refusal to move to a nursing home out of state "constitutes a trespass" and asked a different court to require Ratcliff to accept the placement.

In November, Ratcliff's lawyers won an order from the new court that stopped the hospital from immediately moving her out of state.

Moving to another state would make it difficult to get back to North Carolina, says Lisa Nesbitt of Disability Rights North Carolina, which is representing Ratcliff. If Ratcliff moves to a nursing home in another state, Nesbitt says, she becomes a citizen of that state and gives up her North Carolina Medicaid. That would make it unlikely she could return to North Carolina, according to the response to the hospital's lawsuit.

"Right now, there is no known path back for her if she leaves the state," says Nesbitt.

There's another key player here: the state Medicaid agency. It's responsible for making an effort to help people like Ratcliff who are eligible for Medicaid get long-term care — in their own homes, not in a hospital or a nursing home.

Home Or Nursing Home

Home Or Nursing Home

NPR asked to speak to someone at North Carolina's Medicaid agency about what they're doing to help Ratcliff get out of the hospital.

The answer: "No comment."

In 2010, an NPR investigation found that all states and the federal government had failed to follow up on a new right of people who need long-term care to receive it in the " most integrated" and appropriate setting. That obligation was established by a 1999 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Olmstead v. L.C. Two Georgia women with developmental disabilities and mental illness, Lois Curtis and Elaine Wilson , argued that under the Americans with Disabilities Act, they had a right to get care in their community, not in state hospitals.

ny times best books 2020

Elaine Wilson (left) and Lois Curtis, two Georgia women with developmental disabilities and mental illness, are seen in 1999. At the Supreme Court, lawyers argued that under the Americans with Disabilities Act, they had a right to get care in their community, not in state hospitals. John Bazemore/AP hide caption

Elaine Wilson (left) and Lois Curtis, two Georgia women with developmental disabilities and mental illness, are seen in 1999. At the Supreme Court, lawyers argued that under the Americans with Disabilities Act, they had a right to get care in their community, not in state hospitals.

The NPR investigation found that although nursing homes mainly serve elderly people, there were more than 6,000 children and youth up to age 21 living in them and thousands more in their early 20s — many of whom could live in their communities with proper medical support.

A new NPR analysis found that although there are fewer young people in nursing homes today, thousands still live in one. NPR looked at federal data that, as of September 2023, showed 6,594 people age 30 and under living in American nursing homes.

The pandemic pummeled long-term care – it may not recover quickly, experts warn

Shots - Health News

The pandemic pummeled long-term care – it may not recover quickly, experts warn.

One issue, policymakers say, is that younger disabled people in nursing homes often have some of the most complex medical needs, and those who are easier to set up at home — more often older people — get services first. Researchers writing in the journal Health Affairs faulted state agencies for allowing a "stagnation in nursing home use for younger people with disabilities."

"The cost is stolen lives," says co-author Ari Ne'eman, a Ph.D. candidate in health policy at Harvard. "People end up living out years, decades, sometimes their entire lives in institutional settings where they don't want to be and don't need to be."

Complex medical needs require support

If she were to live in her own home, Ratcliff would need a lot of caregiving support, probably 24 hours a day. She'll need aides, and likely a nurse, to watch that her ventilator works, that her tracheostomy tube — which directs the air from the ventilator to her lungs — doesn't get clogged or dislodged. She'll need someone to move her in bed and in her wheelchair so she doesn't get painful pressure sores.

"She absolutely can get that care at home," says Joonu Coste, a lawyer at Disability Rights North Carolina. Coste says the task now is for the state Medicaid agency "to put a package together that will support her so she can be in the community and do all the things that the rest of us want to do in the community: attend school, have friends, go out with friends. It's all possible, but Medicaid has to step in and help put this package together for her."

ny times best books 2020

Alexis Ratcliff is surrounded by her Aunt Susan Ratcliff, Uncle Rondale Ratcliff and cousins Halee and Caden Ratcliff in her hospital room. Ratcliff family hide caption

Alexis Ratcliff is surrounded by her Aunt Susan Ratcliff, Uncle Rondale Ratcliff and cousins Halee and Caden Ratcliff in her hospital room.

It takes time to put together the staff of nurses and aides needed to care for someone with complex medical needs, and there's a shortage nationwide of home-care aides, called direct service professionals. At one point last year, a nurse who had worked with Ratcliff considered caring for her in her own home, but that fell through.

Care at home is usually cheaper than what it costs for a disabled person like Ratcliff to live in a hospital and even in a nursing home. Holly Stiles, an attorney with Disability Rights North Carolina, notes that the state's Medicaid program has said Ratcliff is eligible for at-home service programs that, by law, are required to be cost neutral to the state overall.

Alexis Ratcliff says she needs to leave the hospital and have her own home in order to live a full life.

"You can't put a social butterfly in a bubble and think that it's going to be OK. And it's just not," she says.

From her hospital bed, she attended classes online at her high school in rural Surry County, northwest of Winston-Salem. She graduated last spring and was selected to the National Honor Society.

But it took a court order for Ratcliff to attend her high school graduation. A Surry County judge ordered the hospital to let her attend and to provide transportation and a nurse to accompany her.

Ratcliff won a full academic scholarship to nearby Salem College, a small women's school.

Ratcliff takes classes there online, for now. But her wish is to one day have a more normalized college experience and attend classes on campus.

"She loves people," Ratcliff's aunt, Susan Ratcliff, says. "And she would love to be here with her peers. She has missed out on so much of that."

Susan Ratcliff notes that before Alexis had to live in the hospital she took a school bus every day, in her wheelchair, to middle school, where she made good friends.

ny times best books 2020

Susan Ratcliff says her niece wants to attend classes at Salem College on campus with her peers. "She has missed out on so much of that." Joseph Shapiro/NPR hide caption

Susan Ratcliff says her niece wants to attend classes at Salem College on campus with her peers. "She has missed out on so much of that."

At Salem, school officials are working to help Ratcliff succeed. They've already thought out how to move classes to wheelchair-accessible rooms if Ratcliff one day comes to the campus of brick sidewalks and old brick Colonial-era buildings, some built in the 1700s and 1800s.

When Ratcliff was unable to leave the hospital to attend office hours, her faculty adviser, Diane Lipsett, took office hours directly to Ratcliff, making periodic visits to the hospital.

"We talk a lot here — all of my colleagues talk — about meeting students where they are," says Lipsett, an associate professor of religion. "Sometimes that's metaphorical. With Alexis, it means a different space, too."

Ratcliff can't use her hands. But from her hospital bed, she uses her voice to control her iPad and iPhone, calling friends and family, sending emails and doing her schoolwork. Every day, she calls her younger sister, Apple.

In addition to the chance to attend college, Ratcliff says it's important to stay nearby so she can be close to family. Established in a home of her own, she could see her sister more, along with other friends and family, including her aunt and her grandfather.

Living in their own homes

Around the country, many people with Ratcliff's high level of disability do live in their own homes. Tracy Chen, born with a rare muscular disorder, lives in Pennsylvania, where the state set up a program to provide in-home care to people with complex medical needs. Chen says, "Don't let people tell you you're not able to do something."

The 21-year-old, who uses a ventilator and electric wheelchair, has lived in her parents' home, in group homes and in a hospital for a brief period in 2022, before she moved into her own apartment in Philadelphia with a full-time nurse and aides. She appreciates the freedom to invite family over to play board games or to take an Uber to the Cheesecake Factory for lunch with friends.

ny times best books 2020

When Hogan VanSickle got out of a nursing home and into her own home in Charlotte, N.C., she went back to school — law school. Travis Dove for NPR hide caption

When Hogan VanSickle got out of a nursing home and into her own home in Charlotte, N.C., she went back to school — law school.

In Charlotte, N.C., technology helps Hogan VanSickle live in a low-slung brick ranch home with her mother. VanSickle, a quadriplegic, shows how she uses voice commands to set her bed to shift every 45 minutes through the night to help her avoid pressure sores.

After an auto accident in 2014, VanSickle spent 2 1/2 years in a nursing home. "I was miserable," she says.

VanSickle says overworked aides there failed to do basic care, like moving her body so she wouldn't get bedsores. She had lots of them; two got infected down to the bone.

ny times best books 2020

In her home office, VanSickle keeps an image of herself in the hospital after her 2014 car accident. With her law degree, VanSickle wants to become a disability rights lawyer. Travis Dove for NPR hide caption

In her home office, VanSickle keeps an image of herself in the hospital after her 2014 car accident. With her law degree, VanSickle wants to become a disability rights lawyer.

"It was probably the most painful experience of my life, easily," she says. "I would have taken 10 spinal cord injuries over that bone infection. I mean, it was just so ungodly painful."

During the time in the nursing home, she had to be hospitalized for months after developing dangerous sepsis. She said she'd go weeks — 21 days at one point — without a shower.

Things got better for her when North Carolina's Medicaid program moved her into a house with her parents and arranged for aides to come in seven hours a day to help her with things like getting out of bed, getting dressed and eating.

ny times best books 2020

Hogan VanSickle gets help from her sister, Heather Hanson (right), and mother, Clara Brown, as they try to obtain fingerprints for her bar exam application, which is made challenging by the format and the limited mobility in her fingers. Travis Dove for NPR hide caption

Hogan VanSickle gets help from her sister, Heather Hanson (right), and mother, Clara Brown, as they try to obtain fingerprints for her bar exam application, which is made challenging by the format and the limited mobility in her fingers.

VanSickle, who is 41 now, went back to school — where she studies law. She attends a hybrid online and on-campus program at the University of Dayton Law School. She'll take the bar exam in July.

VanSickle wants to become a disability rights lawyer and help people like Alexis Ratcliff. Recently, she spoke to Ratcliff. "At 18, to be able to stand up against a hospital and say, 'This is not OK, you're not going to do this to me,' is so impressive," VanSickle says.

ny times best books 2020

VanSickle has outfitted her home with assistive technology such as cameras that allow her to navigate a computer with facial movements and expressions. Travis Dove for NPR hide caption

VanSickle has outfitted her home with assistive technology such as cameras that allow her to navigate a computer with facial movements and expressions.

Living in the hospital, Alexis Ratcliff was forced to grow up fast.

She says her parents' lives were marred by drug use. Her father died a few years after the auto accident.

And last month, Ratcliff's mother died, too.

Anna Marie Crim spent years in prison for the accident that injured her daughter so badly. When she came out, in 2020, it was Ratcliff who reached out.

"When she first got out, she was doing fantastic," Ratcliff says of the mother she barely knew. "She was sober. She was working at Goodwill."

They talked on FaceTime frequently.

"We were really close at that moment," Ratcliff says.

ny times best books 2020

The Ratcliff family, including Alexis' sister Apple (right), celebrates with Alexis at her high school graduation. Ratcliff family hide caption

The Ratcliff family, including Alexis' sister Apple (right), celebrates with Alexis at her high school graduation.

But then, Ratcliff could tell from their conversations that her mother was hanging out again with old friends who abused drugs.

Ratcliff — then just 15 — warned her mother to stay away from them.

Her mother's calls became less and less frequent.

When she died in January, she was 37.

"I love her. I do," she says. "We never had a perfect relationship. Never the perfect mother-daughter relationship that I would love. And I am sad that she's gone."

Still, the relationship was stressful. "The stress of worrying about her," Ratcliff says. "The stress of knowing whether she's alive or not. And the stress of calling and seeing if she's high. And just the stress of the drama, the pain and the heartache."

Now Alexis Ratcliff is dealing with a different stress. She says she intends to finish her fight to get out of the hospital, avoid the nursing home and get the life she dreams of — to finish college and move to a place she can call home.

Robert Benincasa contributed reporting to this story. The radio story was produced by Graham Smith.

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  1. The New York Times Fiction Bestseller List 2020

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  2. The Complete List of New York Times Fiction Best Sellers in 2020

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