Oprah Magazine's Top Books of 2010

Illustration: Silja Götz
Book photo: Philip Friedman/Studio D

A Visit from the Goon Squad

By Jennifer Egan
288 pages; Knopf

Wildly inventive and lovable: We're talking about the characters in this extraordinary novel as well as the transformative sweep of the story itself.

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Illustration: Silja Götz
Book photo: Philip Friedman/Studio D

Super Sad True Love Story

By Gary Shteyngart
352 pages; Random House

A darkly hilarious futuristic novel that looks at love in the time of apocalypse and data overload. Lots of schtick mixed with just enough heart.

Read the complete book review from O

Illustration: Silja Götz
Book photo: Philip Friedman/Studio D

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

By Helen Simonson
368 pages; Random House

A delightful comedy of manners about the late-life love affair between a snooty British major and his far classier Pakistani shopkeeper/neighbor.

Read the complete book review from O

Illustration: Silja Götz
Book photo: Philip Friedman/Studio D

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

By Danielle Evans
240 pages; Penguin Group

An impressive collection of stories centered on the achingly believable problems of African-American teenage girls and young women.

Read the complete book review from O

Illustration: Silja Götz
Book photo: Philip Friedman/Studio D

Freedom

By Jonathan Franzen
576 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A great American novel about Big Issues (war, the environment) that's also insightful about the details of everyday life. A family saga by an author so good, you'll savor every page.

Freedom became the 64th Oprah's Book Club selection on September 17, 2010. Get the complete reader's guide

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Illustration: Silja Götz
Book photo: Philip Friedman/Studio D

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

By Siddhartha Mukherjee
592 pages; Scribner

Hard to believe, but this serious scientific history of the dread disease, its researchers, doctors, and patients, is a page-turner—by a physician who can also write.

Read the complete book review from O

Illustration: Silja Götz
Book photo: Philip Friedman/Studio D

Hellhound on His Trail

By Hampton Sides
480 pages; Random House

Knowing how the era-defining story ends doesn't make these parallel portraits of Martin Luther King Jr. and the man who killed him any less riveting.

Read the complete book review from O

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Illustration: Silja Götz
Book photo: Philip Friedman/Studio D

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

By Isabel Wilkerson
640 pages; Random House

The dramatic stories of three African-Americans who fled the brutal Jim Crow South to make their way north. Nonfiction that reads like great fiction.

Read the complete book review from O

Illustration: Silja Götz
Book photo: Philip Friedman/Studio D

Let's Take the Long Way Home

By Gail Caldwell
208 pages; Random House

They "coaxed each other into the light," says journalist Caldwell in this moving tribute to her best friend, the late Caroline Knapp, author of Drinking: A Love Story and Pack of Two.

Read the complete book review from O

Illustration: Silja Götz
Book photo: Philip Friedman/Studio D

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By Rebecca Skloot
369 pages; Random House

An uneducated black woman dies young and poor, but her cells live on, leading to countless medical breakthroughs—and to this multilayered narrative of race, class, and family.

Read an excerpt

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O's Top 10 Books of 2010