Amazon’s Best Books of 2018

Amazon.com announced its selections for the Best Books of 2018, naming Tara Westover’s Educated: A Memoir the Best Book of the Year.

Just in time for the holidays, the annual list features the Top 100 books of the year plus Top 20 lists across various categories ranging from biography, literary fiction, and mystery to children’s and young adult. All lists are hand-selected by Amazon’s team of editors—first by choosing the best books of every month and then, finally, the best books of the year.

To see the full list of the Best Books of 2018 and buy the print, Kindle or Audible editions, visit: https://amazon.com/bestbooks2018.

Here are Amazon’s Top 5 Picks of 2018:

1Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

Tara Westover didn’t see the inside of a classroom until she was seventeen, and it was an experience that dramatically changed the trajectory of her life. This extraordinary memoir chronicles how she survived her survivalist upbringing, eventually earning a PhD from Cambridge University. Rather than a story about the making of a scholar, Educated is about the making of a person.

2Washington Black: A Novel by Esi Edugyan

When an 11-year-old slave named Wash is picked to serve his master’s brother, he is terrified to leave the Barbados plantation where he lives. But what follows is adventure and scientific exploration on a par with the novels of Jules Verne. Esi Edugyan’s superb writing and inventive story telling drive this thoughtful, entertaining page-turner.

3Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man by Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic

While readers will be riveted by the four days the Indianapolis crew spent adrift in the shark-infested Pacific, the rest of the Indianapolis’s story is equally as tense. Vincent and Vladic include not only the expected tales of heroism under duress but the just-as-human stories of willpower bending and sanity breaking. This is history writing at its finest: shining a spotlight on a wartime tragedy that still echoes within the survivors and the Navy today.

4Elevation: A Novel by Stephen King

Here is a short, heart-lifting parable by a master storyteller. When we first meet Scott Carey, he is aware that he is losing weight every day, even if he does not look any different than he did a year ago. Set in the iconic but fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine, his slow disappearance may somehow be the thing that brings the town together.

5The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantú

The son of a park ranger, Cantú grew up in the southwest. When he joined the Border Patrol, he witnessed the complex realities of illegal immigration, and the obligations of his job weighed heavy against his sense of humanity. With its direct, stoic prose, The Line Becomes a River is a weighty and timely document on one of our most divisive arguments.