Twice a year, Amazon editors share recommendations of the best books released in the recent months.
This year’s June announcement, Amazon Best Books of 2015 so far, just like in previous years, is meant to help readers pick up great summer reads.
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It’s also a convenient way to double check if there is any newly released book that’s worth reading, and that hasn’t been bought or added to a wish list, yet.
Amazon’s best books (both print and Kindle editions) are grouped in a couple of easy to browse lists. This year, the highlighted lists are:
- best books in literature & fiction,
- best books in sci-fi & fantasy,
- best books in arts & photography.
There are also top 20 picks in each of the twelve major categories, including mystery, nonfiction, cookbooks, YA books, as well as audiobooks and Kindle Singles.
Opposite to Amazon book bestsellers list (powered by sales), this selection is based on picks from several members of the Amazon editorial team. First, the newly released books are selected for the Best Book of the Month lists. Then:
In early summer, we look through the best books published between January and June before casting our ballots for the Best Books of the Year So Far.
So, you won’t find here Grey by E.L. James, although it’s the No. 1 bestseller already. You also won’t find here Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, well, at least until it’s released on July 14, 2015.
You can explore the entire list here, and below there are our favorites.
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Amazon best books of 2015 so far
The book of speculation
Erika Swyler
A brilliant debut novel by a writer and playwright Erika Swyler.
Simon Watson lives alone on the Long Island Sound in his family home, a house perched on the edge of a cliff that is slowly crumbling into the sea. His parents are long dead, his younger sister, Enola, works for a travelling carnival and seldom calls.
One day, Simon receives a mysterious book from an antiquarian bookseller. The book tells the story of two doomed lovers who were part of a travelling circus more than two hundred years ago.
The paper crackles with age as Simon turns the yellowed pages filled with notes and sketches. He is fascinated, yet as he reads Simon becomes increasingly unnerved. Why do so many women in his family drown on 24th July? And could Enola, who has suddenly turned up at home for the first time in years, risk the same terrible fate?
As 24th July draws ever closer, Simon must unlock the mysteries of the book, and decode his family history, before it’s too late.
The Nightingale
Kristin Hannah
This is a novel about bravery, courage, fear and love in a time of war.
It’s 1939. In a small French village, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front.
Soon Germans invade France, and a German captain requisitions Vianne’s home. She and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything.
Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive…
Vivid and exquisite in its illumination of a time and place that was filled with atrocities, but also humanity and strength, Kristin Hannah’s novel will provoke thought and discussion that will have readers talking long after they finish reading.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari
From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution — a #1 international bestseller — that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.”
From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas.
Featuring 27 photographs, 6 maps, and 25 illustrations/diagrams, this provocative and insightful work is sure to spark debate and is essential reading for aficionados of Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Sharon Moalem.
The Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins
Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck.
She’s even started to feel like she knows them. “Jess and Jason,” she calls them. Their life — as she sees it — is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost.
And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough. Now everything’s changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel offers what she knows to the police, and becomes inextricably entwined in what happens next, as well as in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?
Compulsively readable, The Girl on the Train is an emotionally immersive, Hitchcockian thriller and an electrifying debut.
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
Erik Larson
From the bestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the a luxury ocean liner Lusitania in 1915.
Erik Larson tells this well known story thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era.
Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love.
Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster whose intimate details and true meaning have long been obscured by history.
The Seven Good Years
Etgar Keret
Over the last seven years Etgar Keret has had plenty of reasons to worry. His son, Lev, was born in the middle of a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv. His father became ill. And he has been constantly tormented by nightmarish visions of the Iranian president Ahmadinejad, anti-Semitic remarks both real and imagined, and, perhaps most worrisome of all, a dogged telemarketer who seems likely to chase him to the grave.
Emerging from these darkly absurd circumstances is a series of funny, tender ruminations on everything from his three-year-old son’s impending military service to the terrorist mindset behind Angry Birds.
Moving deftly between the personal and the political, the playful and the profound, The Seven Good Years takes a life-affirming look at the human need to find good in the least likely places, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our capricious world.
War Hero (Kindle Single)
Stephan Talty
The dramatic and heartfelt story of the Great War’s most unlikely hero – a Parisian stray dog named Rags.
On a July evening in 1918, a young American soldier, private James Donovan, found a little terrier. That dog saved the lives of countless American soldiers on the battlefields of France and changed the way wars are fought.
In “War Hero,” acclaimed historian Stephan Talty (author of A Captain’s Duty) tells an unforgettable tale of friendship, loyalty and survival set against the carnage of the Great War.
Rags’ exploits made him famous back in America, where he became one of the inspirations for the modern “war dog.” He led parades down Broadway, accepted a handful of medals and became more popular than some 5-star generals.
Future Crimes
Marc Goodman
One of the world’s leading authorities on global security, Marc Goodman takes readers deep into the digital underground to expose the alarming ways criminals, corporations, and even countries are using new and emerging technologies against you—and how this makes everyone more vulnerable than ever imagined.
Future Crimes provides a mind-blowing glimpse into the dark side of technological innovation and the unintended consequences of our connected world.
Goodman offers a way out with clear steps we must take to survive the progress unfolding before us. Provocative, thrilling, and ultimately empowering, Future Crimes will serve as an urgent call to action that shows how we can take back control over our own devices and harness technology’s tremendous power for the betterment of humanity—before it’s too late.
Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances
Neil Gaiman
Trigger Warning includes previously published pieces of short fiction—stories, verse, and a very special Doctor Who story that was written for the fiftieth anniversary of the beloved series in 2013—as well “Black Dog,” a new tale that revisits the world of American Gods, exclusive to this collection.
The collection explores the masks we all wear and the people we are beneath them to reveal our vulnerabilities and our truest selves.
Here is a rich cornucopia of horror and ghosts stories, science fiction and fairy tales, fabulism and poetry that explore the realm of experience and emotion. In Adventure Story — a thematic companion to The Ocean at the End of the Lane — Gaiman ponders death and the way people take their stories with them when they die.
His social media experience A Calendar of Tales are short takes inspired by replies to fan tweets about the months of the year—stories of pirates and the March winds, an igloo made of books, and a Mother’s Day card that portends disturbances in the universe.
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