2015 Categories Include Books That Started a Conversation, Hoping for a Movie, Celebrity Behind-the-Curtain Memoirs, and More
 
Bookseller Picks Help Guide Creative Gifting This Holiday Season
 
New York, NY (December 8, 2015) – With the popularity of lists this time of year, from holiday shopping to New Year’s Resolutions, Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS) is releasing its picks for the top books of 2015, with thoughtfully created categories to guide creative gift-giving. Spanning serious literature to pop culture sensations, the nation’s largest retail bookseller and a leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products has identified the books that got people talking, debating, laughing, imagining and reading through the night.

“From sweeping narratives to in-depth looks into personal lives, it’s been an exciting year for books,” said Mary Amicucci, VP, Adult Trade and Children’s Books. “We hope this collection of year-end lists can help shoppers discover new books for themselves and extra-special gifts for others.”
 
Barnes & Noble has compiled this year’s lists based on proprietary criteria, most notably the trendspotting expertise of its booksellers in nearly 650 stores nationwide who converse daily with customers. With the complete lists available online at www.bn.com/bestof2015, categories and books include:
 
Books That Started a Conversation
In a year of sociopolitical upheaval, both in the U.S. and around the globe, a range of books and corresponding topics sparked conversations among readers in 2015. Barnes & Noble’s picks in this category include Between the World and Me, a moving work by Ta-Nehisi Coates offering fresh perspective on the nation’s complicated history and current racial crisis, and Go Set A Watchman, Harper Lee’s much-awaited precursor to her Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece To Kill a Mockingbird, which ignited controversy around the story’s moral underpinnings as well as its origins. The complete list is as follows:

 
Hoping for a Movie
Hollywood executives take note: on the heels of The Hunger Games, Divergent, Gone Girl and other film adaptations which translated to smashing box office success, books with equal storytelling power and cinematic potential wait in the wings. Consider The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot’s intimate journey of scientific discovery and consequences; Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walters’ dazzling love story set against an idyllic Italian coastline; and Christina Baker Kline’s Orphan Train, heartbreaking historical fiction spotlighting American children abandoned during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Other books featured on this list include:

 
Books from Authors Who Drew Crowds Around the Block
This year, eager fans couldn’t wait to get their hands on the hard-copy manifestations of favorite on-screen sensations. Social media stars such as Color Me Creative’s artistic whiz Kristina Webb, YouTube stars  Dan Howell and Phil Lester (The Amazing Book Is Not on Fire: The World of Dan and Phil), and Tyler Oakley (Binge) have adapted their social media success to the written page for their massive follower bases. Books that inspired lines around the block are:

 
Bestselling Books with Staying Power
Books that capture – and continue to hold – the nation’s collective attention prove their enduring appeal by resonating with readers everywhere. In this category are such diverse titles as Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Atul Gawande’s heartfelt take on how medicine can improve life and the process of its ending, and All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece. The complete list is as follows:

 
Books That Colored the Imagination
As adults increasingly channel their creativity to alleviate stress, coloring books harkening back to our childhood made a nostalgic and grown-up resurgence this year. Books such as Secret New York: Color Your Way to Calm allow people of all ages to relax, flex their creative muscles and be immersed in a youthful sense of the present. Barnes & Noble’s top picks are as follows:

 
Binge-Reading Page-Turners
With downtime during the holidays and the winter travel season approaching, Barnes & Noble recommends the following addictive page-turners that will keep readers up into all hours of the night, including The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins’ gripping chiller (widely considered the next Gone Girl)and the third installation of James Dashner’s bestselling, edge-of-your-seat Morality Doctrine series.  The complete list is as follows:

 
Celebrity Behind-the-Curtain Memoirs
Whether they’re actors or musicians whose talents we admire or reality personalities we just love to follow, the seemingly magical lives of celebrities offer an escape from our own. This year, some of the most interesting celebrity memoirs include Leah Remini’s Troublemaker, which examines her immersion in – and escape from – Scientology, Drew Barrymore’s Wildflower, her first adult book about how young stardom affected her life, and Willie Nelson’s It’s a Long Story, which twists up the best tales from the country legend’s eight-decade career. The complete list is as follows:

 
The complete lists are available at www.bn.com/bestof2015. To browse these great reads and all of the hottest books and gifts this holiday season, visit any of Barnes & Noble’s nearly 650 stores nationwide or visit www.bn.com.
 
About Barnes & Noble, Inc.
Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS) is a Fortune 500 company, the nation’s largest retail bookseller, and a leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products.  The Company operates 647 Barnes & Noble bookstores in 50 states, and one of the Web’s premier e-commerce sites, BN.com (www.bn.com). The Nook Digital business offers a lineup of popular NOOK® tablets and eReaders and an expansive collection of digital reading and entertainment content through the NOOK Store®. The NOOK Store features more than 4 million digital books in the US (www.nook.com) and UK (www.nook.co.uk), plus periodicals, comics, apps, movies and TV shows, and offers the ability to enjoy content across a wide array of popular devices through Free NOOK Reading Apps™ available for Android™, iOS® and Windows®.
 
General information on Barnes & Noble, Inc. can be obtained by visiting the Company’s corporate website at www.barnesandnobleinc.com.
 
Barnes & Noble®, Barnes & Noble Booksellers® and Barnes & Noble.com® are trademarks of Barnes & Noble, Inc. or its affiliates. NOOK® and the NOOK logos are trademarks of Nook Digital, LLC or its affiliates.
 
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