Our Best Books of 2015 list is the result of an alchemy mixing the joy of choosing wonderful books with anguish over what we couldn't include. So here it is, after blood, sweat and tears. See our reviews below.
Fiction:
American Blood by Ben Sanders (Minotaur Books)
Carter & Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard (Thomas Dunne Books)
Circling the Sun by Paula McLain (Ballantine Books)
Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum (Random House)
In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware (Scout Press)
The Incarnations by Susan Barker (Touchstone)
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (Doubleday)
The Sellout by Paul Beatty (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua (Pantheon)
Under the Udala Trees by Chinela Okapranta (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Nonfiction:
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel & Grau)
Drinking in America by Susan Cheever (Twelve)
H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (Grove Press)
The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander (Grand Central)
Midnight's Furies by Nisid Hajari (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Missoula by Jon Krakauer (Doubleday)
The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery (Atria)
This Old Man by Roger Angell (Doubleday)
Thunder & Lightning by Lauren Redniss (Random House)
Wanted by Chris Hoke (HarperOne)
Children's/YA:
Over the Hills and Far Away: A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes, collected by Elizabeth Hammill, illus. by 77 artists (Candlewick)
Ask Me by Bernard Waber, illus. by Suzy Lee (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
The Way to School by Rosemary McCarney with Plan International (Second Story Press)
Double Trouble for Anna Hibiscus by Atinuke, illus. by Lauren Tobia (Kane Miller)
Piper Green and the Fairy Tree by Ellen Potter, illus. by Qin Leng (Knopf)
Listen to the Moon by Michael Morpurgo (Feiwel & Friends/Macmillan)
Gone Crazy in Alabama by Rita Williams-Garcia (Amistad/HarperCollins)
The Hired Girl by Laura Amy Schlitz (Candlewick)
Orbiting Jupiter by Gary D. Schmidt (Clarion/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Calvin by Martine Leavitt (Margaret Ferguson/FSG)