This year wasn’t short on the best kind of book: the type that polarizes opinion. While hype is nice for authors and their publishers, the widely-praised and easily-accepted book is a less enticing prospect for the public than the book critics have disagreed over bitterly. The most important consequence of a wave of adoring reviews, followed by a backlash of negative opinion is that it suddenly matters whether you’re the kind of person who loved A Little Life or just didn’t. It’s one thing to learn, for instance, that this “trauma-packed” novel has become “a runaway hit” with readers. It’s another to have Daniel Mendelsohn declare in the New York Review of Books that the same novel has “duped” its readers into feeling “confusing anguish and ecstasy, pleasure and pain.” If I’m going to read this book, it will be because Mendelsohn disdains it and I need to know why.

 Here is your guide to the most hotly-contested, FOMO-inducing books of 2015. Some of these books have been nominated for prestigious prizes while others remain unlaureled, some have sold well and while others have flopped. But they have one thing in common: Negative reviews that have made each of these books far more fun to read.   MORE