The Golden Goulds: The Topsfield Town Library Book Awards. The most borrowed books and authors of 2022!

In our second installment of the Golden Goulds, we are highlighting the top ten most borrowed items from the Topsfield Town Library in 2022! Those select items chosen win the prestigious Golden Gould award, named after the library’s benefactor George L. Gould. Only the best of the best will come away with a Golden Gould in 2022…so who will it be?

View the first installment of the 2022 Golden Goulds here, where we highlighted staff choices for the year! Looking for less prestigious award lists, like the Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize in Literature, or Booker Prize? View our Award Winners reading list here.

Most Borrowed Adult Titles

10. It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover
Combining a captivating romance with a cast of all-too-human characters, It Ends With Us is an unforgettable tale of love that comes at the ultimate price.
Read our Colleen Hoover reading list!

9. Book Lovers by Emily Henry
A by-the-book literary agent must decide if happily ever after is worth changing her whole life for.

8. The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
The remarkable, little-known story of Belle da Costa Greene, J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian-who became one of the most powerful women in New York despite the dangerous secret she kept in order to make her dreams come true.

7. This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger
1932, Minnesota. The Lincoln School is a pitiless place where hundreds of Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to an orphan named Odie O’Banion, a lively boy whose exploits earn him the superintendent’s wrath. Forced to flee, he and his brother Albert, their best friend Mose, and a little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own.

6. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Drawn to two young men from town, who are each intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world — until the unthinkable happens.

5. Verity by Colleen Hoover
Jeremy Crawford, husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford, has hired Lowen to complete the remaining books in a successful series his injured wife is unable to finish. Lowen arrives at the Crawford home, to sort through years of Verity’s notes and outlines, hoping to find enough material to get started. What Lowen doesn’t expect to uncover in the chaotic office is an unfinished autobiography Verity never intended for anyone to read.
Read our Colleen Hoover reading list!

4. The It Girl by Ruth Ware
After John Neville, the man convicted of killing her best friend April ten years earlier, dies in prison, expectant mother Hannah Jones, after new evidence surfaces proving his innocence, reconnects with old friends to solve the mystery of April’s death and realizes they all have something to hide–including a murder.

3. The Hotel Nantucket by Elin Hilderbrand
“The queen of beach reads” (New York Magazine) delivers another immensely satisfying page-turner in this tale about a summer of scandal at a storied Nantucket hotel.

2. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Set in 1960s California, this blockbuster debut is the hilarious, idiosyncratic and uplifting story of a female scientist whose career is constantly derailed by the idea that a woman’s place is in the home, only to find herself starring as the host of America’s most beloved TV cooking show.

1. The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.