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.

Did You Ever Have A Family by Bill Clegg



This unremarkable novel about a family’s disintegration occasioned some pristinely anodyne reviews when it first came out in September. Unlike Clegg’s first book, a memoir of his cocaine addiction while working as a literary agent, his debut novel explores the emotional fallout of a disaster—a house goes up in the flames the morning before a wedding, killing the bride, groom, and several more family members. The story is told from multiple perspectives, all of them heavy with grief and self-importance. The Financial Times called it “heartfelt and convincing;” the Boston Globe called in “absorbing” and “psychologically-astute.” Most puzzling were the reviewers who praised the book by claiming it didn’t have any of the flaws it clearly had. (The Washington Post claimed it “never strains for profundity” and the Los Angeles Times declared it “without… prurience or mawkishness.”)

Then Dwight Garner destroyed it: “We get the author’s point.” He wrote in an intolerant review in the New York Times. “Life is easy for none of us and, as he might put it, funny how time slips away. But these events don’t resonate as they scroll past. It’s like watching someone stir plastic toads in an unlit caldron.” Finding the book undeservingly longlisted for the Man Booker Prize—“a big deal in the book world”—Garner was dismayed that “critics have arranged warm reviews around it like tea candles.” Not this one.

Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own by Kate Bolick

In its April review, The New York Times made some big claims for this “eloquent” and “engrossing” exploration of singledom, which was said to offer “a clear vision not just for single women, but for all women: to disregard the reigning views of how women should live, to know their own hearts and to carve out a little space for their dreams.” In a blurb, the discerning New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm praised the “bracing feminist consciousness” Bolick brought “to bear on the lives of five unconventional women of the past.”