Recommended to us by Bryan Washington, Pizza Girl traces a pregnant, eighteen year old pizza delivery girl working in Los Angeles. Washington said the book felt “like every moment is earned and inevitable. It’s one I recommend when someone asks me what they should read next.”

The winner of the 2020 National Book Award, this satire does not disappoint. It’s one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time. It’s witty, yet daringly moving as it traces Wills Wu’s journey through Chinatown and his own identity.

The only fantasy book on this list, and therefore the only one that can actually help you escape reality in the strictest sense of it, The City We Became traces multiple stories through New York. Read just one chapter, and you’ll be hooked.

I haven’t read a more gripping book in a long time. Kolker traces the lives of the Galvin family, a family of twelve. Six of the boys were diagnosed with schizophrenia. It reads like a tragedy because it is one.

If you're a Shakespeare fan, this one’s for you. Since Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died a few years before he wrote “Hamlet,” O’Farrell wonders if this is how the famous play was born. It’s an excellent story of turning something horrible into something beautiful and everlasting.