Notable Books ListNonfiction

Given by CODES: Notable Books Council

Other Names: ALA Notable Books for Adults, RUSA Notable Books List
206 Works 345,149 Books 13,650 Reviews 4.1
"Since 1944, the goal of the Notable Books Council has been to make available to the nation’s readers a list of 25 very good, very readable, and at times very important fiction, nonfiction, and show more poetry books for the adult reader." show less
Categories:
All, Fiction (222), Nonfiction (206), Poetry (41), No Category (2,365)
Years:
All, 2024 (12), 2023 (11), 2022 (11), 2021 (11), 2020 (11), 2019 (12), 2018 (12), 2017 (12), 2016 (12), 2015 (12), 2014 (1), 2013 (12), 2012 (12), 2011 (12), 2010 (12), 2009 (12), 2008 (10), 2007 (11), 1997 (1), 1996 (2), 1995 (1), 1994 (1), 1993 (1), 1990 (2)
WorkYear
The Talk by Darrin Bell
2024
The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle
2024
Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming by Ava Chin
2024
Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond
2024
A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan
2024
King: A Life by Jonathan Eig
2024
Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation by Camonghne Felix
2024
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann
2024
How to Say Babylon: A Memoir by Safiya Sinclair
2024
Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” by Héctor Tobar
2024
Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo
2024
The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science by Kate Zernike
2024
Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me by Ada Calhoun
2023
The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation by Scott Carney
2023
Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution, and the Female Animal by Lucy Cooke
2023
Easy Beauty: A Memoir by Chloé Cooper Jones
2023
The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland
2023
This Body I Wore: A Memoir by Diana Goetsch
2023
We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth by Dahr Jamail
2023
The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee
2023
His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice by Robert Samuels
2023
Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation by Linda Villarosa
2023
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong
2023
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib
2022
The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town by Brian Alexander
2022
Poet Warrior: A Memoir by Joy Harjo
2022
People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn
2022
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
2022
Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 by Ibram X. Kendi
2022
English Pastoral: An Inheritance by James Rebanks
2022
Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert
2022
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America by Clint Smith
2022
Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space by Stephen Walker
2022
A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds by Scott Weidensaul
2022
A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom by Brittany K. Barnett
2021
Carville's Cure: Leprosy, Stigma, and the Fight for Justice by Pam Fessler
2021
Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
2021
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker
2021
Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine
2021
Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West by Lauren Redniss
2021
Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace by Carl Safina
2021
We Have Been Harmonised: Life in China's Surveillance State by Kai Strittmatter
2021
Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir by Natasha Trethewey
2021
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
2021
Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino
2021
Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life by Louise Aronson
2020
The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom
2020
Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom
2020
A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century by Jason DeParle
2020
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham
2020
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
2020
Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane
2020
Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl
2020
Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves by Frans de Waal
2020
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells
2020
The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation by Brenda Wineapple
2020
High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing by Ben Austen
2019
American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment by Shane Bauer
2019
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight
2019
Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father by Stephen Fried
2019
Call Me American: A Memoir by Abdi Nor Iftin
2019
The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson
2019
Beneath a Ruthless Sun: A True Story of Violence, Race, and Justice Lost and Found by Gilbert King
2019
Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon
2019
Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy
2019
The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen
2019
Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush
2019
Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover
2019
You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir by Sherman Alexie
2018
Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden
2018
The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui
2018
Grant by Ron Chernow
2018
The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone
2018
The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine by Lindsey Fitzharris
2018
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay
2018
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
2018
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character by Kay Redfield Jamison
2018
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
2018
Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital by David Oshinsky
2018
The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B. Tyson
2018
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell
2017
The Boys in the Bunkhouse: Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland by Dan Barry
2017
The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice by Patricia Bell-Scott
2017
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
2017
In the Darkroom by Susan Faludi
2017
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin
2017
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee
2017
Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick
2017
Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America by Patrick Phillips
2017
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly
2017
Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams by Louisa Thomas
2017
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal
2017
The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission by Jim Bell
2016
Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman
2016
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
2016
The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle by Lillian Faderman
2016
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon
2016
The End of Plenty: The Race to Feed a Crowded World by Joel K. Bourne Jr
2016
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson
2016
The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
2016
The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery
2016
M Train by Patti Smith
2016
Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War by Susan Southard
2016
Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva by Rosemary Sullivan
2016
The most dangerous book: the battle for James Joyce's Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham
2015
Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America by Howard Blum
2015
Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story by Rick Bragg
2015
The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution by Jonathan Eig
2015
No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald
2015
Blood Royal: A True Tale of Crime and Detection in Medieval Paris by Eric Jager
2015
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
2015
The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore
2015
Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town by Beth Macy
2015
In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides
2015
Pandora's DNA: Tracing the Breast Cancer Genes Through History, Science, and One Family Tree by Lizzie Stark
2015
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
2015
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink
2014
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
2013
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain
2013
Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America by Tanner Colby
2013
Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson
2013
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan
2013
Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt
2013
Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars by Paul Ingrassia
2013
Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats by Kristen Iversen
2013
Leonardo and the Last Supper by Ross King
2013
Shooting Victoria: Madness, Mayhem, and the Rebirth of the British Monarchy by Paul Thomas Murphy
2013
The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea by Callum Roberts
2013
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
2013
Turn right at Machu Picchu by Mark Adams
2012
The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók
2012
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
2012
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
2012
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand
2012
Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens by Christopher Hitchens
2012
Apollo's Angels : A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans
2012
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
2012
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
2012
Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard
2012
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
2012
Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion by Janet Reitman
2012
Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow
2011
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
2011
The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund De Waal
2011
Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier
2011
The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness by Oren Harman
2011
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent
2011
Citizens of London : the Americans who stood with Britain in its darkest, finest hour by Lynne Olson
2011
The Last Stand : Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick
2011
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
2011
Just Kids by Patti Smith
2011
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant
2011
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
2011
Columbine by Dave Cullen
2010
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
2010
The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
2010
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
2010
The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders by Emmanuel Guibert
2010
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
2010
The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe
2010
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall
2010
Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath by Michael Norman
2010
Provenance: how a con man and a forger rewrote the history of modern art by Laney Salisbury
2010
Stitches: A Memoir by David Small
2010
The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War by Nicholas Thompson
2010
The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll
2009
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library) by Drew Gilpin Faust
2009
The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
2009
Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore
2009
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed
2009
Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris
2009
A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Tony Horwitz
2009
The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer
2009
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan
2009
American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work by Nick Taylor
2009
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt
2009
The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order by Joan Wickersham
2009
The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackermann
2008
The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier
2008
Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres
2008
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin
2008
How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman
2008
Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations by Georgina Howell
2008
Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson
2008
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver
2008
Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline by Lisa Margonelli
2008
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
2008
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
2007
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan
2007
The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery
2007
There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Rescue Her Country's Children by Melissa Fay Greene
2007
Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China by Peter Hessler
2007
Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City by Jed Horne
2007
The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism by Ross King
2007
Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert
2007
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick
2007
James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips
2007
The Heartless Stone: A Journey through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire by Tom Zoellner
2007
Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood by Michael D'Orso
1997
Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s by Ann Douglas
1996
The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School by Neil Postman
1996
9 Highland Road: Sane Living for the Mentally Ill by Michael Winerip
1995
United States: Essays 1952-1992 by Gore Vidal
1994
Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean
1993
From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas L. Friedman
1990
Songs from the Alley by Kathleen Hirsch
1990

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