NY Times Editors Choice 1980-1989

This is one of the 759 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

Every year the New York Times puts together a "Best of the Year" list, and this is all the winners from the 1980s. I had to manually transcribe 1980 by looking at newspaper scans, which upsets me.

who voted:
Trade sources differ: a C-SPAN–based 2015 blog post tallied roughly 16 New York Times Book Review staffers, while a 2023 Publishers Weekly profile said the desk now has “more than 20 editors, critics and reporters” To keep our rankings conservative, we therefore credit each NYT list to 10 voters.

This list is a yearly book award, and was added to this site about 2 years ago.

View: List Grid Table

Rank	Book	Authors	Year	Country	Language
4498	The Rise And Fall Of The Great Powers	Paul Kennedy	1987	British	English
8215	Stories In An Almost Classical Mode	Harold Brodkey	1989	American	English
11662	The Tenants Of Time	Thomas Flanagan	1988	American	English
924	Where I'm Calling From	Raymond Carver	1988	American	English
9073	Billy Bathgate	E. L. Doctorow	1989	American	English
6277	Citizens	Simon Schama	1989	British	English
11662	Federico Garcia Lorca	Ian Gibson	1989	Spanish	English
1217	Foucault's Pendulum	Umberto Eco	1988	Italian	Italian
9261	From Beirut to Jerusalem	Thomas L. Friedman	1989	American	English
11662	Macmillan	Alistair Horne	1988	American	English
2257	A History Of The World In 10 1/2 Chapters	Julian Barnes	1989	British	English
11662	How War Came	Donald Cameron Watt	1989	British	English
11662	If The River Was Whiskey	T. Coraghessan Boyle	1989	American	English
10450	A Peace To End All Peace	David Fromkin	1989	American	English
204	The Remains of the Day	Kazuo Ishiguro	1989	British	English
534	Satanic Verses	Salman Rushdie	1988	British	English
7151	The Shawl	Cynthia Ozick	1989	American	English