EW Best Books of 2015

Entertainment Weekly ♥s us! Three Macmillan titles made their Best of Books 2015 list:

2) A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN by Lucia Berlin
Like a lot of brilliant but erratic artists, Lucia Berlin found her best work mislaid by history and largely forgotten after her death in 2004. To her credit, she might have been too busy living to care: A hard-drinking, easy-marrying ex-debutante whose compass led her everywhere from Alaska and El Paso to Chile’s cotillions and the ER wards of California, she put it all into these stories — a MANUAL as smart and nervy and unforgettable as the woman who wrote them.

3) DREAMLAND: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones
Like a David Simon TV show gone cosmic, this investigation into our country’s opiate epidemic cuts feverishly between national nightmares: the rise of Big Pharma, the decline of the Rust Belt, the drug-trade underworld along the America–Mexico border, the fear that health insurance does everything besides ensure health. Quinones builds every hyperprecise detail and desperately human story into a coherent portrait of American rot.

9) HOME IS BURNING by Dan Marshall (tied with BETTYVILLE by George Hodgman)
Think nothing sounds duller or more depressing than memoirs about caregiving? Think again: Both these funny, touching, quirky, heartbreaking, and — in Marshall’s case — occasionally profane books about nursing elderly parents are destined to become modern classics. You’ll root for both Hodgman, a book editor who jettisoned New York City life to care for his mother in small-town Missouri, and Marshall, who left L.A. and moved back in with his dad, who had ALS, and his mom, who was suffering from cancer.

See the full list, plus their 5 Worst Books of 2015 view here.