The 2020 Lariat list is here!

The goal of the Texas Library Association’s Lariat Adult Fiction Reading List is to highlight outstanding fiction that is “simply a pleasure to read.” To that end, a nine-member committee of librarians from the TLA annually selects twenty-five outstanding fiction titles.

This year’s list includes the magical and the occult (Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, about a freshman at Yale investigating Yale’s secret societies) as well as the romantic and relatable (Linda Holmes’ Evvie Drake Starts Over, about a widowed woman consumed with guilt about not missing her late husband and her fledgling romance with a former pro baseball player.) The spine-tingling The Whisper Man, by Alex North, is a psychological thriller, while the beautifully rendered The Beekeeper of Aleppo, by Christy Lefteri, puts a human face on the victims of the Syrian war.

No matter what your taste in fiction runs to, there’s sure to be something on the list that you’ll enjoy.

Here is the list:

•  The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri (Ballantine Books)
•  The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Richardson (Sourcebooks Landmark)
•  The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman (Berkley)
•  Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton (Harper)
•  The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins (Harper)
•  Coyote Songs by Gabino Iglesias (Broken River Books)
•  Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Ballantine Books)
•  Dominicana by Angie Cruz (Flatiron Books)
•  Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes (Ballantine Books)
•   Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen (MIRA Books)
•  Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton (Grand Central Publishing)
•  The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal (Pamela Dorman Books/Viking)
•  Lanny by Max Porter (Graywolf Press)
•  Lot: Stories by Bryan Washington (Riverhead Books)
•  My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Doubleday)
•  The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
•  The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (Flatiron Books)
•  On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press)
•  The Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Faye (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
•  The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott (Knopf Publishing Group)
•  The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides (Celadon Books)
•  The Weight of a Piano by Chris Cander (Vintage)
•   The Whisper Man by Alex North (Celadon Books)
•   The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey (Soho Press)
•   Zero Sum Game by S.L. Huang (Tor Books)