Everything I Never Told You tops Amazon’s 100 best books of 2014

Amazon.com has chosen Celeste Ng’s debut novel Everything I Never Told You as its book of the year, ahead of a wealth of prominent titles from Richard Flanagan’s Booker-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North (93rd) to Hilary Mantel’s short story collection The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (61st) and Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest (81st). Ng’s novel, due to be published in the UK this week, is about a Chinese-American family whose oldest daughter, Lydia, is found drowned in a lake. “There isn’t a false note in this book, and my only concern in describing my profound admiration for Everything I Never Told You is that it might raise unachievable expectations in the reader,” said Amazon senior books editor Chris Schluep. “But it’s that good. Achingly, precisely, and sensitively written.”

Amazon’s editorial team read 480 books to come up with a top 100 list for the online retailer – equating to around 250,000 pages of text. The company’s editorial director of books, Sara Nelson described Ng’s debut as a “sleeper” that initially attracted less attention than other novels. But it was “the kind of novel that people say doesn’t get published any more … we’re so happy it did”, she said.

Anthony Doerr’s novel about a blind French girl and a German boy who meet in occupied France, All the Light We Cannot See, came second in the list. Already a finalist for America’s National Book Awards, it was described by Carmen Callil in the Guardian as “such a page-turner, entirely absorbing: one of those books in which the talent of the storyteller surmounts stylistic inadequacies and ultimately defies one’s better judgment”.

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In a wide-ranging top 10, Iraq war veteran Phil Klay’s short story collection Redeployment makes the cut, as does Stephen King’s new horror novel Revival. So does Hampton Sides’s history of polar exploration, In the Kingdom of Ice, Jeff Hobbs’s biography The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, which details how the young black man left Newark for Yale, and Emily St John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic tale of a world devastated by disease, Station Eleven.

Only four books by the publishing giant Hachette make the top 100, books industry newsletter Publishers Lunch points out: Michael Koryta’s Those Who Wish Me Dead, which comes in 29th place, Joshua Ferris’s award-winning To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (54), Megan Abbott’s The Fever (96), and Tom Rob Smith’s The Farm (97). “All four are the only hardcovers offered at full retail price, without any discount,” said Publishers Lunch. Hachette and Amazon have been embroiled in a dispute over ebook prices since the summer, with the retailer delaying delivery on some of Hachette’s titles, and a group of hundreds of writers appealing to Amazon “to stop harming the livelihood of the authors on whom it has built its business”.

“It would have been hard for the editors to pick these [100] titles without being aware of the wider message,” said Philip Jones, editor of the Bookseller. “But the Hachette titles they’ve chosen are all in stock, which may be a sign of things beginning to thaw a bit ... I’d describe it as quite an eclectic list, rather than one designed to have a political message behind it.”

Best picture book of the year, according to Amazon.com, was Mo Willems’s The Pigeon Needs a Bath! We Were Liars by E Lockhart, a mystery about four friends that was shortlisted for the Guardian children’s fiction prize, tops the retailer’s best teen reads list, and Amy Poehler’s Yes Please is Amazon.com’s humour book of the year.

The list: Amazon’s 100 best books of 2014

1 Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

2 All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

3 In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides

4 The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League by Jeff Hobbs

5 Redeployment by Phil Klay

6 Revival by Stephen King

7 Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art by Carl Hoffman

8 The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez

9 Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

10 Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

11 Updike by Adam Begley

12 The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

13 Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande

14 The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

15 The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson

16 Euphoria by Lily King

17 The Painter by Peter Heller

18 What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe

19 We Were Liars by E Lockhart

20 A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention by Matt Richtel

21 The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

22 I’ll Drink to That: A Life in Style, with a Twist by Betty Halbreich

23 Bad Feminist: Essays by Roxane Gay

24 Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks

25 War of the Whales: A True Story by J Horwitz

26 Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult

27 No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald

28 A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

29 Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta

30 The Oldest Living Things in the World by Rachel Sussman

31 Hollow City (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children) by Ransom Riggs

32 We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas

33 Flash Boys by Michael Lewis

34 Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín

35 In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen

36 The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

37 Fives and Twenty-Fives by Michael Pitre

38 Red Rising by Pierce Brown

39 The Long Way Home: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel by Louise Penny

40 Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

41 Lucky Us by Amy Bloom

42 Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s ‘Learned’ by Lena Dunham

43 Casebook by Mona Simpson

44 A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre

45 The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad) by Tana French

46 Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld by Jake Halpern

47 Prince Lestat: The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice

48 Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival by Peter Stark

49 Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars by Daniel P Bolger

50 Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters

51 The Magician’s Land: A Novel (Magicians Trilogy) by Lev Grossman

52 The Invisible Front: Love and Loss in an Era of Endless War by Yochi Dreazen

53 Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking) by Christian Rudder

54 To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris

55 Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts

56 Stone Mattress: Nine Tales by Margaret Atwood

57 The Remedy for Love by Bill Roorbach

58 Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West by Judith Nies

59 All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid by Matt Bai

60 Cosby: His Life and Times by Mark Whitaker

61 The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories by Hilary Mantel

62 Landline by Rainbow Rowell

63 The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book by Peter Finn

64 Us by David Nicholls

65 Yes Please by Amy Poehler

66 Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life by Tom Robbins

67 Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

68 One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War by Bing West

69 Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West by Bryce Andrews

70 Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? A Memoir by Roz Chast

71 The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison

72 Let Me Be Frank With You: A Frank Bascombe Book by Richard Ford

73 The Martian by Andy Weir

74 Natchez Burning (Penn Cage) by Greg Iles

75 White Tiger on Snow Mountain: Stories by David Gordon

76 Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness by Neil Swidey

77 Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade by Walter Kirn

78 The Fracking King by James Browning

79 Liberty’s Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty by Elizabeth Mitchell

80 The Forgers by Bradford Morrow

81 The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis

82 Seconds: A Graphic Novel by Bryan Lee O’Malley

83 Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble by Marilyn Johnson

84 On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee

85 Annihilation (The Southern Reach Trilogy) by Jeff VanderMeer

86 Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi

87 Lila by Marilynne Robinson

88 Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island by Will Harlan

89 Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line by Michael Gibney

90 Belzhar by Meg Wolitzer

91 The Heroes of Olympus, Book Five: The Blood of Olympus by Rick Riordan

92 An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine

93 The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

94 My Struggle: Book One by Karl Ove Knausgård

95 Secrecy by Rupert Thomson

96 The Fever by Megan E Abbott

97 The Farm by Tom Rob Smith

98 Caught by Lisa Moore

99 Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War by Karen Abbott

100 Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes by Svante Pääbo