2022 - the longest year ever passed - is coming to a close, and that means it's time for us to break down our calculators and tabulate the best-reviewed books of the past 12 months.

Yes, using reviews from over 150 publications, over the next two weeks, we'll reveal the most critically acclaimed books of 2022, in (deep breathing) categories: Memoir & Biography, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Short Story Collections, Essay Collections, and Graphic Literature , poetry, mystery and crime, literature in translation, general fiction, and general realist literature.

1. Crying in H Mart


“...painting powerful maps of a complex mother-daughter relationship so short...Descriptions of Zoner’s food bring us to the table side by side with her … A rare acknowledgment of the harms of cancer in a culture obsessed with seeing it as an enemy that can be fought back with hope and strength … Zoner holds the same candor. It is evident in writing about her mother's death five months after her diagnosis... It is rare that you read about a slow death in such detail, and it is a strange gift in that it forces us to sit with death rather than turn away from it."

2. Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir


“Memorial Drive is, among so many other wondrous things, an exploration of a Black mother and daughter trying to get free in a land that conflates survival with freedom and womanhood with girlhood … A book that makes a reader feel as much as Memorial Drive does cannot be written without an absolute mastery of varied modes of discourse … In one of the book’s most devastating and artful chapters, Trethewey makes an unexpected but wholly necessary switch to the second person … What happens in most riveting literature is seldom located solely in plot. I’ve not read an American memoir where more happens in the assemblage of language than Memorial Drive … Memorial Drive forces the reader to think about how the sublime Southern conjurers of words, spaces, sounds and patterns protect themselves from trauma when trauma may be, in part, what nudged them down the dusty road to poetic mastery.”

3. A Promised Land

“The Obama of A Promised Land seems complicated or elusive or detached only if you think that these two elements of the president’s job—the practical and the symbolic—must be made to add up in every particular. Obama himself doesn’t. Even at his most inspiring, he was never a firebrand speechifier. He preached faith in the ability of Americans’ commonalities to overcome their differences. This is a creed in which he continues to believe, even if A Promised Land contains its share of dark allusions to the advent of division and acrimony in the form of Donald Trump. Obama is not angry, the sole quality that seems obligatory across party lines in every form of political discourse today … while A Promised Land is a pleasure to read for the intelligence, equanimity, and warmth of its author—from his unfeigned delight in his fabulously wholesome family to his manifest fondness for the people who worked for and with him, especially early on—it’s also a mournful one. Not because Obama doesn’t believe in us anymore, but because no matter how much we adore him, we no longer believe in leaders like him.”

4. Vesper Flights


“… a stunning book that urges us to reconsider our relationship with the natural world, and fight to preserve it … The experience of reading Vesper Flights is almost dizzying, in the best possible way. Macdonald has many fascinations, and her enthusiasm for her subjects is infectious. She takes her essays to unexpected places, but it never feels forced … Macdonald is endlessly thoughtful, but she’s also a brilliant writer—Vesper Flights is full of sentences that reward re-reading because of how exquisitely crafted they are … What sets Vesper Flights apart from other nature writing is the sense of adoration Macdonald brings to her subjects. She writes with an almost breathless enthusiasm that can’t be faked; she’s a deeply sincere author in an age when ironic detachment seems de rigueur … a beautiful and generous book, one that offers hope to a world in desperate need of it.”

5. What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life


“… excellent … as a major poet who worked at both evading and establishing his sexual identity, [Whitman] is almost a perfect topic for Doty, who recalls (in some of this book’s most powerful opening chapters) his own youth spent trying to live his life as others expected him to live it … Doty has long been one of our best living American poets, and his recent memoirs, including 2008’s Dog Years, prove him one of our best prose writers as well. What is the Grass doesn’t possess a single inelegant sentence or poorly expressed thought. Doty does what traditional academic criticism often fails to do: He makes poetry part of how we live and how we think about living … [Doty] doesn’t simply ‘analyze’ poems or narrate events; instead he continually illuminates how those who love books can grow old reading writers who help make sense of their lives … provides an excellent opportunity to re-examine the work of one of America’s first major poets through the prose of one of its best living ones.”