Three million voters reveal the books of 2014 - how many have you read?

Published: 4 years ago

If, like us, you've got the panic over the sheer volume of incredible talent published this year and can't decide what book to next lose yourself in on your commute, never fear - 2014's best reads have been handily collated once more, just in time for Christmas.

Over three million votes in the Goodreads Choice Awards decided the cream of 2014's literary crop in 20 categories, and big winners included Rainbow Rowell's Landline in the Fiction category, a novel about a woman in a struggling marriage who finds a way to communicate with her husband in the past.

But the win perhaps notable for its bittersweet nature was the triumph of The Opposite of Loneliness in the Nonfiction category - a collection of stories and essays written by Marina Keegan [pictured above], a Yale student with a job at the prestigious New Yorker lined up who tragically died after graduation in 2012 at the age of just 22.

Hailed as a prodigious talent and an “icon for a generation”, Marina's work has been critically acclaimed since its release in April.

Suzanne Boboneau, managing director of Simon & Schuster’s adult publishing division, said the book was of “true worth, all the more precious for being Marina Keegan’s only volume of work. She nails human emotion with incredible wisdom beyond her years.”

Marina was killed in a car accident when her boyfriend fell asleep at the wheel, and her final essay at Yale went viral following a memorial service, a piece that looked toward her post-university future with the words: “We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re 22 years old. We have so much time.”

Other winners included Yes Please by Amy Poelher in the Humour category, We Were Liars by E. Lockhart coming top of Young Adult Fiction and This Star Won't Go Out winning best Memoir & Autobiography, a collection of 16-year-old Esther Earl's work, who died in 2010 of cancer and whose story was the inspiration for novel and subsequent film, The Fault in Our Stars.

Oh wow! #wewereliars @goodreads award. https://t.co/asEejoHS1b. Hooray for @rainbowrowell! best novel, Landline. pic.twitter.com/Ba53THQlBd
— E. Lockhart (@elockhart) December 2, 2014