The world’s most popular books written since 2010

The print market in the second decade of the century saw sharp fluctuations in reader demand. Old publishing houses printed extra runs on cheap gray paper, barely managing to deliver the boxes to city warehouses and small shops at train stations. Print runs were measured in the millions. Factory printing presses ran around the clock. The workshops smelled of fresh paint and machine oil.

The methods of delivering printed matter to readers have undergone a fundamental transformation. Some customers order hefty bundles delivered directly to their doorsteps by courier, others prefer to read books online for free without registration via their office monitor, and still others listen to narration on the way to the factory. The text retains its original letterform despite any technological advances.

The Disappeared

Gillian Flynn built a detective story around an empty suburban cottage with its door wide open. A forgotten iron hisses in the kitchen. The police discover blood stains on the light-colored linoleum, painstakingly washed with caustic lye a couple of hours before calling the police station. The bedroom is littered with shards of a wooden photo frame. The neighbor’s dog barks near the fence. The cat rubs against the legs of a chair.

Amy buys a used car for cash and hides out in a run-down lakeside motel. False journal entries lead investigators down the wrong path. Nick fumbles over small details in front of news cameras, grins stupidly in front of posters of the missing woman, and completely alienates the state jury. The bills melt before her eyes. The fugitive sews the remains of a wad of dollars into the thick lining of a child’s mattress. Local residents organize search parties in the damp pine forest by the river, combing the gullies with long wooden poles.

The Fault in Our Stars

John Green described the wards of an oncology hospital through the sarcastic remarks of a sixteen-year-old patient. Hazel follows behind, pushing an oxygen tank on wheels.

A trip to the capital of the Netherlands ends with an encounter with a drunken writer in a greasy tracksuit, blasting old Swedish pop music amid empty gin bottles and being rude to his young guests. A light rain falls outside the hotel window. Teenagers eat cheese sandwiches on a wooden bench by the canal. A few crumpled pages from a school notebook lie in an unstamped envelope. A nurse changes an IV in the intensive care unit.

Sapiens

Yuval Noah Harari turned his research attention to the common wild wheat. The grain subjugated ancient forager tribes, forcing nomads to weed from dawn until dusk. Human skeletons were deformed under the weight of wicker baskets filled with grain. Hunting gave way to grain barns.

Human societies are held together by the collective imagination. Paper banknotes, criminal codes, and state borders gain their power solely through the shared faith of millions of citizens in the legitimacy of the stamps printed on official paper. Without this faith, a stack of treasury notes becomes useless woodchips, unsuitable for starting a fire in damp weather.

Humans mastered fire and wiped out the woolly mammoth population on the northern plains within a couple of centuries. Domestic broilers today leave more bones in the soil than all the wild birds on the planet combined. Silicon chips are implanted in the retinas of laboratory monkeys in a university vivarium. Experiments continue in the silence of closed laboratories. Glass test tubes stand in neat rows on metal stands.

Girl on the train

Paula Hawkins made a severely hungover morning commuter train passenger her star witness. Rachel pours a store-bought gin and tonic into an apple juice can. The train slows daily at a switch opposite a row of brick cottages.

An evening’s lapse of memory blurs the details of the bloody incident in the vacant lot by the railroad tracks. Bruises on her elbows ache in the morning. A woman finds a strange button and a torn receipt from a 24-hour pharmacy in the pocket of her dirty wool coat. The kettle on the gas stove has long since gone cold. Cigarette butts overflow the tin ashtray on the kitchen windowsill.

Atomic habits

James Clear begins his account with a severe facial injury from a broken baseball bat on a school field. The shattered skull bones forced the athlete to subordinate his daily routine to the second hand of his wristwatch. Small mechanical actions alter the body’s physical performance after months of monotonous repetition.

British cyclists won gold medals on the track thanks to microscopic adjustments to their equipment. Mechanics painted the walls inside the team truck white to detect dust on the chain drive gears. Doctors taught athletes to properly wash their hands with surgical soap before every meal. Mattresses were transported from hotel to hotel in special canvas covers.

A clerk transfers a metal paper clip from one glass jar to another after each phone call to a potential customer. The brain craves an instant hit of dopamine for the slightest effort. Willpower quickly dwindles by midday. The desk is littered with draft reports. A man places a basket of ripe pears in the middle of the dining room table and hides cigarettes in a metal box in the basement of the garage. A calendar with the days of the week crossed out hangs on the wall.

Midnight Library

Matt Haig has trapped his heroine in an endless labyrinth of olive-green book storage. A digital clock on the wall is frozen at midnight. A dead ginger cat lies on a rubber mat at the apartment’s threshold. Nora thumbs through the heavy leather spines, trying on biographies of a polar explorer, a guitarist, and a vineyard owner in a valley. A cup of strong tea sits on the edge of the librarian’s desk.

Student

Tara Westover spent her childhood on a rocky hillside without a birth certificate or high school diploma. Her Mormon father anticipated the imminent apocalypse, stockpiling barrels of diesel fuel and burying canned peaches in deep holes behind the barn. The children cut up the rusty bodies of old trucks with hydraulic shears. Her mother treated burns from gasoline fires with homemade ointments made from burdock roots.

The girl crammed formulas from discarded textbooks at night by the dim light of a kerosene wick. Her first class in the university building ended in public disgrace due to a misunderstanding of a professor’s lecture on modern history. The sectarians’ domestic life was sustained by bars of coarse lard soap and fear of federal authorities. The city greeted the student with white sinks, toothpaste, and incomprehensible dorm rules. A bottle of rubbing alcohol lay in the pocket of her warm coat. Glass beakers gleamed on the tables of the college chemistry lab.

Where the crayfish sing

Delia Owens has placed an abandoned child in a plank hut near the salt marshes. Kia collects bivalves on the sandbars, bartering matches and kerosene with an old boatman at the dock. Barefoot footprints are washed away by the tide. Seagulls circle over the mudflats.

The case for the death of a local womanizer is built on circumstantial evidence and the empty suspicions of neighbors. Oak benches creak in the courtroom. Jurors fan themselves with cardboard fans in the stuffy heat of a sultry afternoon. A shell necklace on a braided cord lies hidden in a hiding place under the bedroom floorboards. Dust settles on the windowsills.

The fourth wing

Rebecca Yarros has herded the recruits onto a twenty-centimeter-wide rock ledge above a chasm. A strong crosswind sends the cadets plummeting into the abyss within the first few minutes of the challenge. Violet trudges across the slippery cobblestones with short steel stilettos strapped to her hips with rawhide belts. Her weak ligaments snap out of their sockets with every misstep on the obstacle course.

Enormous winged reptiles burn hapless horsemen right on the parade ground during evening platoon roll call. Army chain of command is maintained by a strict curfew and the daily deaths of neighbors in the barracks. Instructors demand fury from the cadets in sparring matches with wooden swords. Fingers cramp from the cold. The pages of the field diary are stained with resin and ash from the fires. Leather boots are soaked through by the morning dew on the parade ground. Biscuits are in the jacket pocket.

It will all end with us

Colleen Hoover’s title explores the theme of breaking the pattern of domestic violence. Lily sets up a flower shop in the basement of an old building. The diary’s pages are addressed to her childhood TV idol.

A kitchen quarrel culminates in a punch and a broken water carafe. Shards of thick glass lie under the kitchen cabinets. A woman covers up bruises on her cheekbone with thick foundation in front of the bathroom mirror. A doctor signs a sick leave form without making any unnecessary notes in the medical record. Apartment keys jingle in her coat pocket.