NPR’s Book Concierge

The Book Concierge is NPR's annual, interactive, year-end reading guide. Mix and match tags such as Book Club Ideas, Biography & Memoir, or Ladies First to filter results and find the book that's perfect for you or someone you love.

Each fall, we reach out to our staffers and trusted critics and ask them to nominate their favorite books of the year. They respond with hundreds of titles. Then, the editors and producers at NPR Books sit down with a huge spreadsheet of responses; we select our favorites, resolve duplications, note omissions and consider the overall mix and balance of books recommended.

Back in 2013 the NPR Books staff was suffering from an acute case of list fatigue. So we teamed up with our friends at NPR Visuals, and started to think about a site that would be more Venn diagram-y than list-y — a site that could help you seek out the best biographies that were also love stories, or the best mysteries that were also set in the past. We wholeheartedly believe that human beings are capable of absorbing new information in formats that are 1) not sequentially ordered and 2) wait ... dammit! and 3) never mind.

We got you. To view these books as a list of titles rather than an array of covers, you are welcome to select the "List" option in the upper right-hand corner of the site.

At NPR Books we're all about discovery: Helping you find your next great read — the mystery you can't put down, the memoir you recommend to all your friends. In 2013 we hashed out a basic taxonomy that was both functional (i.e., Biography & Memoir or Kids' Books) and fun (i.e., It's All Geek To Me and Let's Talk About Sex). Over the years we've refined our filters and added new tags — The States We're In and No Biz Like Show Biz are the most recent newcomers.

The States We're In is for stories of the American experience both true and fictional. It's All Geek To Me is for deep dives on particular topics — trees, personality tests, tiny houses, you name it. In The Dark Side you'll find dystopias, serial killers, true crime and people behaving badly in general. Eye-Opening Reads will give you a new perspective on the topic at hand, whether it's the state of philanthropy or a new pair of shoes.

Our critics and staffers make suggestions, but to ensure we are applying tags consistently, the producers and editors at NPR Books consider and discuss every tag on every book.

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If you want to know more about how the Concierge was designed and coded, you can read about the process here. And if you're curious to see the code and adapt it for your own project, you can check it out here.

Yes. And you can read more about how that works here.

You can find our picks from 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014 and 2013 right here.

Thanks for visiting the Book Concierge — we hope you find something wonderful to read today!

Beth Novey, Petra Mayer, Rose Friedman and Ellen Silva NPR Books