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Book lovers, it’s time to celebrate. The winners of Goodreads Choice Awards 2015 are announced!
Among many book awards, Goodreads Choice Awards is a very special – and extremely popular. It’s the only one where those who decide are not the book critics or editors, but readers.
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It’s why Goodreads Awards is so attractive for readers. Besides the excitement of exploring new books to read, we want to see how our picks compare with the final results.
The 7th edition of Goodreads Awards opened at the beginning of November. In the opening round, users were selecting their favorites from 300 nominees in 20 categories, but could also add their own picks, from over 20,000 titles that qualified for this year’s edition.
More than 3 million votes were cast. The number seems huge, but the record was not beaten, though. In Goodreads Awards 2014, readers had left as much as 3.3 million votes.
The Girl on the Train, a debut thriller by Paula Hawkins, has become a huge publishing success. It was awarded by the Goodreads readers, as well. The book is the Best Mystery & Thriller of 2015, getting 106,149 votes and taking out the new novels by J.K. Rowling and Stephen King.
The most talked-about book this year – Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee’s surprising continuation of To Kill a Mockingbird’s – has won the Best Fiction title, despite mixed reviews.
Among the winners, there are also the books by Kristin Hannah (Nightingale), Neil Gaiman (Trigger Warning), or Mindy Kaling (Why Not Me?).
No matter whether the results reflect your votes or not, Goodreads Choice Awards is a great way to discover new books to read or gift – something very much needed by the end of the year.
And if you want to find out how readers’ favorites compare to those from editors, take a look at Amazon’s Best Books of 2015. Hint: a surprisingly large number of the titles appear in both rankings.
Below, you’ll see the winners in the most important categories. We present them together with short descriptions and links to both print and Kindle versions.
To see the nominees in specific categories, as well as the winners in six previous editions, please visit the Goodreads Awards 2015 official page.
We want to hear from you. Let us know what you think about this year’s results in the comments below. You can also see all the winners in our handy Goodreads Awards 2015 infographic.
Congratulations to the best books of the year!
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Goodreads Awards 2015 – winners
Best Fiction of 2015
Go Set a Watchman
Harper Lee
Originally written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman was the novel Harper Lee written before To Kill a Mockingbird. Assumed to have been lost, the manuscript was discovered in late 2014.
Go Set a Watchman features many of the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird some twenty years later. Returning home to Maycomb to visit her father, Jean Louise Finch—Scout—struggles with issues both personal and political, involving Atticus, society, and the small Alabama town that shaped her.
Exploring how the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird are adjusting to the turbulent events transforming mid-1950s America, Go Set a Watchman casts a fascinating new light on Harper Lee’s enduring classic. Moving, funny and compelling, it stands as a magnificent novel in its own right.
Best Mystery & Thriller of 2015
The Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins
Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck.
She’s even started to feel like she knows them. “Jess and Jason,” she calls them. Their life — as she sees it — is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost.
And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough. Now everything’s changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel offers what she knows to the police, and becomes inextricably entwined in what happens next, as well as in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?
Compulsively readable, The Girl on the Train is an emotionally immersive, Hitchcockian thriller and an electrifying debut.
Best Historical Fiction of 2015
The Nightingale
Kristin Hannah
It’s 1939. In a small French village, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front.
Soon Germans invade France, and a German captain requisitions Vianne’s home. She and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything.
Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive…
Vivid and exquisite in its illumination of a time and place that was filled with atrocities, but also humanity and strength, Kristin Hannah’s novel will provoke thought and discussion that will have readers talking long after they finish reading.
Best Fantasy of 2015
Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances
Neil Gaiman
Trigger Warning includes previously published pieces of short fiction—stories, verse, and a very special Doctor Who story that was written for the fiftieth anniversary of the beloved series in 2013—as well “Black Dog,” a new tale that revisits the world of American Gods, exclusive to this collection.
The collection explores the masks we all wear and the people we are beneath them to reveal our vulnerabilities and our truest selves.
Here is a rich cornucopia of horror and ghosts stories, science fiction and fairy tales, fabulism and poetry that explore the realm of experience and emotion. In Adventure Story — a thematic companion to The Ocean at the End of the Lane — Gaiman ponders death and the way people take their stories with them when they die.
His social media experience A Calendar of Tales are short takes inspired by replies to fan tweets about the months of the year—stories of pirates and the March winds, an igloo made of books, and a Mother’s Day card that portends disturbances in the universe.
Best Romance of 2015
Confess: A Novel
Colleen Hoover
From the New York Times bestselling author Colleen Hoover comes a new novel about risking everything for love.
At age twenty-one, Auburn Reed has already lost everything important to her. In her fight to rebuild her shattered life, she has her goals in sight and there is no room for mistakes.
When she walks into a Dallas art studio in search of a job, she doesn’t expect to find a deep attraction to the enigmatic artist who works there, Owen Gentry.
Owen is keeping a major secret from coming out. To save their relationship, he must confess. This confession could be much more destructive than the actual sin.
Best Science Fiction of 2015
Golden Son
Pierce Brown
Golden Son is the second book in the stunning saga of Darrow, a rebel forged by tragedy, battling to lead his oppressed people to freedom.
As a Red, Darrow grew up working the mines deep beneath the surface of Mars, enduring backbreaking labor while dreaming of the better future he was building for his descendants.
But the Society he faithfully served was built on lies. Darrow’s kind have been betrayed and denied by their elitist masters, the Golds—and their only path to liberation is revolution.
And so Darrow sacrifices himself in the name of the greater good for which Eo, his true love and inspiration, laid down her own life.
Best Horror of 2015
Saint Odd (Odd Thomas #7)
Dean Koontz
The seventh and final Odd Thomas thriller from the master storyteller.
The future is haunting Odd Thomas.
The carnival has returned to Pico Mundo, the same one that came to town when Odd was just sixteen. Odd is drawn to an arcade tent where he discovers Gypsy Mummy, the fortune-telling machine that told him that he and Stormy Llewellyn were destined to be together forever.
But Stormy is dead and Pico Mundo is under threat once more. Odd grapples with a satanic cult intent on bringing destruction to his town. An unseasonal storm is brewing, and as the sky darkens and the sun turns blood-red, it seems that all of nature is complicit in their plans.
Meanwhile Odd is having dreams of a drowned Pico Mundo, where the submerged streetlamps eerily light the streets. But there’s no way Pico Mundo could wind up underwater . . . could it?
Best Humor of 2015
Why Not Me?
Mindy Kaling
In Why Not Me?, Mindy Kaling shares her ongoing journey to find contentment and excitement in her adult life, whether it’s falling in love at work, seeking new friendships in lonely places, attempting to be the first person in history to lose weight without any behavior modification whatsoever, or most important, believing that you have a place in Hollywood when you’re constantly reminded that no one looks like you.
Mindy has put the anxieties, the glamour and the celebrations of her second coming-of-age into this book, to which anyone can relate.
Best Nonfiction of 2015
Modern Romance
Aziz Ansari
A hilarious, thoughtful, and in-depth exploration of the pleasures and perils of modern romance from one of this generation’s most popular and sharpest comedic voices.
Single people today have more romantic options than at any point in human history. With technology, our abilities to connect with and sort through these options are staggering. So why are so many people frustrated?
In Modern Romance, Ansari combines his irreverent humor with cutting-edge social science to give us an unforgettable tour of our new romantic world.
Best Debut Goodreads Author of 2015
Red Queen
Victoria Aveyard
A sweeping tale of seventeen-year-old Mare Barrow, a common girl whose once-latent magical power draws her into the dangerous intrigue of the king’s palace.
Here, surrounded by the people she hates the most, Mare discovers that, despite her red blood, she possesses a deadly power of her own. One that threatens to destroy the balance of power.
Despite knowing that one misstep would mean her death, Mare works silently to help the Red Guard, a militant resistance group, and bring down the Silver regime.
Best Young Adult Fiction of 2015
All the Bright Places
Jennifer Niven
An intense, gripping novel for fans of John Green, Gayle Forman, and Jenny Downham from a talented new voice in young adult fiction, Jennifer Niven.
This is a heartbreaking love story about two funny, fragile, and wildly damaged high school kids: Theodore Finch and Violet Markey.
Theodore is fascinated by death, and he constantly thinks of ways he might kill himself. But each time, something good, no matter how small, stops him.
Violet lives for the future, counting the days until graduation, when she can escape her Indiana town and her aching grief in the wake of her sister’s recent death.
Finch and Violet meet on the ledge of the bell tower at school. They pair up on a project to discover the “natural wonders” of their state.
Best Young Adult Fantasy of 2015
Queen of Shadows
Sarah J. Maas
This is the fourth book in The New York Times bestselling Throne of Glass series.
Bloodthirsty for revenge on the two men responsible for destroying her life, and desperate to find out if the prince and his captain are safe, Celaena returns to Rifthold, the seat of so much evil.
She has accepted her identity as Aelin Galathynius, Queen of Terrasen. But before she can reclaim her throne, there are dark truths to learn and debts to be paid.
Aelin must stay hidden beneath her assassin’s hood and draw on her mortal strength as Celaena to prevent the King of Adarlan from tearing her world apart.
Only then can she fight for her people.
Goodreads Awards 2015 – infographic
Here are all the winners of Goodreads Awards 2015 in one visual. Feel free to share it with your friends and followers.
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