Best Kindle books of 2013
Check out the newest list: Best Kindle books of 2016, based on sales
As usual, at the end of the year Amazon announces a list of best books of the year, both in print and Kindle editions. Opposite to Editor’s Picks, the December list is based on sales of the books in the year that ends.
Dan Brown’s Inferno is the best-selling book in both print and electronic editions. The book repeats the success of two earlier titles in the Robert Langdon series. The Lost Symbol was #1 in 2009, and The Da Vinci Code in 2004.
Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg is the only book in the Top 20 list to sell more print copies than Kindle editions.
Three authors – David Baldacci, Sylvia Day and John Grisham – also made the Top 10 best-selling books list last year.
What’s very interesting, two self-publishers who released their books via Amazon’s KDP platform, Morgan Rice and Abbi Glines, took five places of the Top 20 in Kids & Teens category.
Adult – Top 5 bestselling adult books in combined lists (print & Kindle):
- Inferno by Dan Brown
- And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
- The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith
- The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty
- Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg
Kids & Teens – Top 5 bestselling books in combined lists:
- Allegiant by Veronica Roth
- The House of Hades by Rick Riordan
- Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hard Luck by Jeff Kinney
- Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims: Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans by Rush Limbaugh
- Never Too Far by Abbi Glines
Below there are 10 best Kindle books for adults, as well as for kids & teens.
The entire list, with Top 100 in every category, is available at amazon.com/bestsellingbooks2013.
10 best Kindle books of 2013 – adult
1. Inferno: A Novel (Robert Langdon)
Dan Brown
In his international blockbusters The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, and The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown masterfully fused history, art, codes, and symbols. In this riveting new thriller, Brown returns to his element and has crafted his highest-stakes novel to date.
In the heart of Italy, Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon is drawn into a harrowing world centered on one of history’s most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces… Dante’s Inferno.
Against this backdrop, Langdon battles a chilling adversary and grapples with an ingenious riddle that pulls him into a landscape of classic art, secret passageways, and futuristic science. Drawing from Dante’s dark epic poem, Langdon races to find answers and decide whom to trust… before the world is irrevocably altered.
Average rating: 3.9/5, 11,683 customer reviews
2. The Husband’s Secret
Liane Moriarty
My darling Cecilia, if you’re reading this, then I’ve died…
Imagine that your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret—something with the potential to destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others as well. Imagine, then, that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much alive…
Cecilia Fitzpatrick has achieved it all—she’s an incredibly successful businesswoman, a pillar of her small community, and a devoted wife and mother. Her life is as orderly and spotless as her home. But that letter is about to change everything, and not just for her: Rachel and Tess barely know Cecilia—or each other—but they too are about to feel the earth-shattering repercussions of her husband’s secret.
Acclaimed author Liane Moriarty has written a gripping, thought-provoking novel about how well it is really possible to know our spouses—and, ultimately, ourselves.
Average rating: 4.3/5, 3,337 customer reviews
3. The Cuckoo’s Calling
Robert Galbraith
The Cuckoo’s Calling is a 2013 crime fiction novel by J. K. Rowling, published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
A brilliant mystery in a classic vein: Detective Cormoran Strike investigates a supermodel’s suicide.
After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.
Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.
You may think you know detectives, but you’ve never met one quite like Strike. You may think you know about the wealthy and famous, but you’ve never seen them under an investigation like this.
Average rating: 4.0/5, 5,554 customer reviews
4. And the Mountains Echoed: A Novel
Khaled Hosseini
An unforgettable novel about finding a lost piece of yourself in someone else.
Khaled Hosseini, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations.
In this tale revolving around not just parents and children but brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers, Hosseini explores the many ways in which families nurture, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for one another; and how often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the times that matter most.
Following its characters and the ramifications of their lives and choices and loves around the globe—from Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos—the story expands gradually outward, becoming more emotionally complex and powerful with each turning page.
Average rating: 4.2/5, 4,349 customer reviews
5. The Hit (Will Robie)
David Baldacci
From David Baldacci – #1 bestselling author and one of the world’s most popular, widely read storytellers – comes the most thrilling novel of the year.
A highly skilled assassin, Robie is the man the U.S. government calls on to eliminate the worst of the worst-enemies of the state, monsters committed to harming untold numbers of innocent victims.
No one else can match Robie’s talents as a hitman…no one, except Jessica Reel. A fellow assassin, equally professional and dangerous, Reel is every bit as lethal as Robie. And now, she’s gone rogue, turning her gun sights on other members of their agency.
To stop one of their own, the government looks again to Will Robie. His mission: bring in Reel, dead or alive. Only a killer can catch another killer, they tell him.
But as Robie pursues Reel, he quickly finds that there is more to her betrayal than meets the eye. Her attacks on the agency conceal a larger threat, a threat that could send shock waves through the U.S. government and around the world.
Average rating: 4.4/5, 2,820 customer reviews
6. Sycamore Row
John Grisham
John Grisham’s A Time to Kill is one of the most popular novels of our time. Now we return to that famous courthouse in Clanton as Jake Brigance once again finds himself embroiled in a fiercely controversial trial-a trial that will expose old racial tensions and force Ford County to confront its tortured history.
Seth Hubbard is a wealthy man dying of lung cancer. He trusts no one. Before he hangs himself from a sycamore tree, Hubbard leaves a new, handwritten, will. It is an act that drags his adult children, his black maid, and Jake into a conflict as riveting and dramatic as the murder trial that made Brigance one of Ford County’s most notorious citizens, just three years earlier.
The second will raises far more questions than it answers. Why would Hubbard leave nearly all of his fortune to his maid? Had chemotherapy and painkillers affected his ability to think clearly? And what does it all have to do with a piece of land once known as Sycamore Row?
In Sycamore Row, John Grisham returns to the setting and the compelling characters that first established him as America’s favorite storyteller. Here, in his most assured and thrilling novel yet, is a powerful testament to the fact that Grisham remains the master of the legal thriller, nearly twenty-five years after the publication of A Time to Kill.
Average rating: 4.5/5
7. Entwined with You (A Crossfire Novel)
Sylvia Day
The worldwide phenomenon continues as Eva and Gideon face the demons of their pasts, and accept the consequences of their obsessive desires…
From the moment I first met Gideon Cross, I recognized something in him that I needed. Something I couldn’t resist. I saw the dangerous and damaged soul inside–so much like my own. I was drawn to it. I needed him as surely as I needed my heart to beat.
No one knows how much he risked for me. How much I’d been threatened, or just how dark and desperate the shadow of our pasts would become.
Entwined by our secrets, we tried to defy the odds. We made our own rules and surrendered completely to the exquisite power of possession…
Average rating: 3.7/5, 5,253 customer reviews
8. Never Go Back: A Jack Reacher Novel
Lee Child
Never go back—but Jack Reacher does, and the past finally catches up with him… Never Go Back is Lee Child’s new novel of action-charged suspense starring “one of the best thriller characters at work today” (Newsweek).
Former military cop Jack Reacher makes it all the way from snowbound South Dakota to his destination in northeastern Virginia, near Washington, D.C.: the headquarters of his old unit, the 110th MP. The old stone building is the closest thing to a home he ever had.
Reacher is there to meet – in person – the new commanding officer, Major Susan Turner, so far just a warm, intriguing voice on the phone.
But it isn’t Turner behind the CO’s desk. And Reacher is hit with two pieces of shocking news, one with serious criminal consequences, and one too personal to even think about.
When threatened, you can run or fight.
Reacher fights, aiming to find Turner and clear his name, barely a step ahead of the army, and the FBI, and the D.C. Metro police, and four unidentified thugs.
Combining an intricate puzzle of a plot and an exciting chase for truth and justice, Lee Child puts Reacher through his paces—and makes him question who he is, what he’s done, and the very future of his untethered life on the open road.
Average rating: 4.3/5, 3,218 customer reviews
9. The Storyteller
Jodi Picoult
Sage Singer is a baker. She works through the night, preparing the day’s breads and pastries, trying to escape a reality of loneliness, bad memories, and the shadow of her mother’s death.
When Josef Weber, an elderly man in Sage’s grief support group, begins stopping by the bakery, they strike up an unlikely friendship. Despite their differences, they see in each other the hidden scars that others can’t, and they become companions.
Everything changes on the day that Josef confesses a long-buried and shameful secret – one that nobody else in town would ever suspect—and asks Sage for an extraordinary favor. If she says yes, she faces not only moral repercussions, but potentially legal ones as well. With her own identity suddenly challenged, and the integrity of the closest friend she’s ever had clouded, Sage begins to question the assumptions and expectations she’s made about her life and her family. When does a moral choice become a moral imperative? And where does one draw the line between punishment and justice, forgiveness and mercy?
In this searingly honest novel, Jodi Picoult gracefully explores the lengths we will go in order to protect our families and to keep the past from dictating the future.
Average rating: 4.5/5, 3,104 customer reviews
10. Alex Cross, Run
James Patterson
Kill Alex Cross was “Patterson at the top of his game” (Washington Post). Alex Cross, Run is even better.
Top plastic surgeon Elijah Creem is renowned for his skills in the operating room, and for his wild, no-expense-spared “industry parties,” bringing in underage exotic dancers and models for nights of drugs, champagne, and uninhibited sex. That is, until Detective Alex Cross busts one of Creem’s lavish soirees and ruins his fun. Now Creem is willing to do anything to avoid going to jail.
But Alex doesn’t have time to dwell on that case. A beautiful woman has been found murdered in her car, a lock of her hair viciously ripped off. Then a second woman is found hanging from a sixth-floor window with a brutal scar slashed across her stomach. When a third mutilated body is discovered, rumors of three serial killers on the loose send Washington D.C. into an all-out frenzy.
Alex is under so much pressure to solve these three grim cases that he hasn’t noticed that someone else investigating him-someone so obsessed and so twisted that they’ll do anything – anything – to get the vengeance they require.
Average rating: 4.4/5, 1,933 customer reviews
10 best Kindle books of 2013 – kids & teens
1. Allegiant (Divergent Series)
Veronica Roth
What if your whole world was a lie? What if a single revelation—like a single choice—changed everything? What if love and loyalty made you do things you never expected?
The explosive conclusion to Veronica Roth’s #1 New York Times bestselling Divergent trilogy reveals the secrets of the dystopian world that has captivated millions of readers in Divergent and Insurgent.
An Amazon Best Books of the Month, October 2013: Veronica Roth had her work cut out for her, ending a trilogy that had fans rabid for the final book, and she pulled it off like a champ. Allegiant kicks off right where Insurgent ended, so if it’s been a while since you read that one you might want to re-read the last couple of chapters to orient yourself.
The first surprise in Allegiant is that Roth has switched to using alternating narratives of Tris and Four. At last readers get to see Tris as Four sees her and if, like me, you’ve been dying to get inside his head, you finally get your chance. One of the best things about this trilogy is the messy, passionate, and wholly authentic love story between these two.
For Tris and Four, there is no love triangle, there are no sides to take – as in life, it’s only a matter of how their relationship will play out. Allegiant answers a lot of questions and also delivers some jaw-dropping twistsreaders will go outside the fence, learn the origin story of the factions, and, of course, see how it all ends in a finale that packs a wallop and confirms Roth as a writer to watch for a long time to come. –Seira Wilson
Average rating: 2.9/5, 4,351 customer reviews
2. The Heroes of Olympus, Book Four: The House of Hades
Rick Riordan
At the conclusion of The Mark of Athena, Annabeth and Percy tumble into a pit leading straight to the Underworld. The other five demigods have to put aside their grief and follow Percy”s instructions to find the mortal side of the Doors of Death.
If they can fight their way through the Gaea”s forces, and Percy and Annabeth can survive the House of Hades, then the Seven will be able to seal the Doors both sides and prevent the giants from raising Gaea. But, Leo wonders, if the Doors are sealed, how will Percy and Annabeth be able to escape? They have no choice. If the demigods don”t succeed, Gaea”s armies will never die.
They have no time. In about a month, the Romans will march on Camp Half-Blood. The stakes are higher than ever in this adventure that dives into the depths of Tartarus.
Average rating: 4.6/5, 1,854 customer reviews
3. Never Too Far (Fallen Too Far)
Abbi Glines
The story that started with the New York Times Bestseller Fallen too Far continues…
Rush withheld a secret that had destroyed her world. Her entire life had all been a lie. Blaire couldn’t stop loving him but she knew she could never forgive him.
Now, she was back home and learning to live again. Moving on with life… until something happened to send her world spinning once again.
What do you do when the one person you can never trust again is the one that you need to trust so desperately?
You lie, hide, avoid, and pray that your sins never find you out.
Average rating: 4.5/5, 2,090 customer reviews
4. Out of Breath (The Breathing Series, #3)
Rebecca Donovan
“My insides still burned. I considered what I could do to push the torment back into the dark and return to my numb state. I couldn’t do it on my own. I needed help. I was desperate.”
Emma Thomas is hiding. From everything and everyone… including herself. But she can’t hide forever. Her past will find her, and her secrets won’t remain quiet—not if she wants to be forgiven. Emma learns that honesty can hurt worse than betrayal, and the truth may cost her the only love she’s ever known.
The highly anticipated conclusion of The Breathing Series will have readers holding their breath until the last page.
The Kindle edition of Out of Breath has been formatted with Rebecca Donovan’s special hand-selected fonts to further optimize the experience for readers using a Kindle Fire, Kindle Fire HD, or Kindle Fire HD 8.9.
Average rating: 4.6/5, 1,385 customer reviews
5. Forever Too Far
Abbi Glines
The final novel in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today Bestselling Fallen Too Far series.
Rush promised her forever… but promises can be broken. Torn between his love for his family and his love for Blaire, Rush has to find a way to save one without losing the other. In the end one has to be more important. Letting go isn’t easy.
Blaire believed in her fairytale… but no one can live in a fantasy. Her love for Rush and desire to have a family keep her believing that they can find a way for this to work. Until she has to make the right decision for her and the baby. Even if it breaks her heart.
Can they find the forever that they both want or has it all just gone… too far?
Average rating: 4.5/5, 1,000 customer reviews
6. Clockwork Princess (The infernal Devices)
Cassandra Clare
Danger intensifies for the Shadowhunters as the New York Times bestselling Infernal Devices trilogy comes to a close.
If the only way to save the world was to destroy what you loved most, would you do it? The clock is ticking. Everyone must choose. Passion. Power. Secrets. Enchantment.
Average rating: 4.7/5, 1,480 customer reviews
7. Twisted Perfection
Abbi Glines
Life outside of her house was a new experience for Della Sloane. The dark secrets of her past weren’t something she ever intended to share with anyone. They would never understand. No one would ever get close enough to find out. There was always a chance she’d go crazy sooner than they expected…
Woods Kerrington had never been one to be attracted to fragile females. They seemed like too much work. He wasn’t in it for the work just the pleasure. A night full of naughty fun had been exactly what was on his mind when he’d laid eyes on the hot little number that didn’t know how to pump gas and needed some help.
What he didn’t know was she was as fragile as they came. The carefree girl who spoke her mind and didn’t care what the world thought of her was more breakable than he could ever imagine…
Average rating: 4.6/5, 1,161 customer reviews
8. The Son of Sobek
Rick Riordan
An exciting new short story from Rick Riordan where Carter Kane meets Percy Jackson.
Rick Riordan is an award-winning mystery writer. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, with his wife and two sons.
Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, Rick’s first novel featuring the heroic young demigod, was the overall winner of the Red House Children’s Book Award in 2006 and is now a blockbuster film franchise, starring Logan Lerman.
Average rating: 4.6/5, 812 customer reviews
9. A Quest of Heroes (Book #1 in the Sorcerer’s Ring)
Morgan Rice
From #1 Bestselling author Morgan Rice comes the debut of a dazzling new fantasy series. A Quest of Heroes revolves around the epic coming of age story of one special boy, a 14 year old from a small village on the outskirts of the Kingdom of the Ring.
The youngest of four, the least favorite of his father, hated by his brothers, Thorgrin senses he is different from the others. He dreams of becoming a great warrior, of joining the King’s men and protecting the Ring from the hordes of creatures on the other side of the Canyon.
When he comes of age and is forbidden by his father to try out for the King’s Legion, he refuses to take no for an answer: he journeys out on his own, determined to force his way into King’s Court and be taken seriously.
Average rating: 3.3/5, 871 customer reviews
10. A March of Kings (Book #2 in the Sorcerer’s Ring)
Morgan Rice
A March of Kings is Book #2 in the bestselling series The Sorcerer’s Ring, following A Quest of Heroes (Book #1) which is available as a free download on Amazon.
A March of Kings takes us one step further on Thor’s epic journey into manhood, as he begins to realize more about who he is, what his powers are, and as he embarks to become a warrior.
After he escapes from the dungeon, Thor is horrified to learn of another assassination attempt on King MacGil. When MacGil dies, the kingdom is set into turmoil. As everyone vies for the throne, King’s Court is more rife than ever with its family dramas, power struggles, ambitions, jealousy, violence and betrayal. An heir must be chosen from among the children, and the ancient Dynasty Sword, the source of all their power, will have a chance to be wielded by someone new.
But all this might be upended: the murder weapon is recovered, and the noose tightens on finding the assassin. Simultaneously, the MacGils face a new threat by the McClouds, who are set to attack again from within the Ring.
Average rating: 3.8/5, 307 customer reviews
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