Welcome to the annual Locus Recommended Reading List!

Published in Locus magazine’s February 2020 issue, the list is a consensus by the Locus editors, columnists, outside reviewers, and other professionals and critics of genre fiction and non-fiction — editor-in-chief Liza Groen Trombi; reviews editor Jonathan Strahan; reviewers Liz Bourke, Katharine Coldiron, Carolyn Cushman, Paul Di Filippo, Amy Goldschlager, Paula Guran, Rich Horton, John Langan, Russell Letson, Adrienne Martini, Ian Mond, Colleen Mondor, Tim Pratt, Tom Whitmore, Gary K. Wolfe, and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro; Bob Blough; online editor Mark R. Kelly; critics Paul Kincaid, Cheryl Morgan, and Graham Sleight. The YA group wrapped in assistant editor Laurel Amberdine, Gwenda Bond, Dhonielle Clayton, Justine Larbalestier, and Mark Oshiro. Art books had help from Arnie Fenner, Karen Haber, and design editor Francesca Myman. Short fiction recommenders included editors and reviewers John Joseph Adams, Rachel S. Cordasco, Ellen Datlow, John DeNardo, Maria Haskins, Charles Payseur, Sean Wallace, and Alison Wise, plus our own reviewers. Locus thanks all involved for their time and their expertise. Essays by many of these contributors, highlighting and discussing their particular favorite books and stories, are also published in the February issue, along with the Magazine Summary and Book Summary for 2019.

We considered over a thousand titles between short and long fiction. The final list comprises our best recommendations for your consideration. There will be titles you loved that do not appear here; it happens every year. Any one of the recommending group would have built a different list, but this is the aggregate, compiled with great affection for the field.

You can let us know what your favorites were by voting in the 2020 Poll & Survey [closed as of 4/15/20]. The Poll decides the winners of the Locus Awards, presented in June 2020 at the Locus Awards Weekend in Seattle, and is open to all to vote on.