The Super Rooster—a battle royale among the 16 books that won the Rooster from 2005 to 2020—was presented by Bookshop.org, and our champion was A Mercy by Toni Morrison.

From the original Super Rooster “how it works” page:

We started the Tournament of Books in 2005. For the last 16 years, tens of thousands of readers have gathered here each March to passionately discuss a field of 16 works from that year’s most interesting fiction—a field whittled down by a panel of expert judges over four weeks until a single book is left standing to take home our big, silly, enormously significant prize, the Rooster.

And in 16 years, not a single author of the winning title has accepted our offer of a live rooster. (For more Rooster lore, read “A Brief History of the Tournament of Books” by Angela Chen.)

From David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas to Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout to Sally Rooney’s Normal People, we’ve celebrated some of the most exciting novels from the last two decades. And now, finally, 16 Tournaments later, we have enough winners to field a Tournament entirely consisting of Rooster winners.

We call it the Super Rooster. And it’s happening all month long in October 2020.

Over on our books page you’ll see the full list of the novels in play—all our Rooster winners from 2005 to 2020. You’ll also see that alongside each novel we’ve included a “potential Zombie.” That’s because the Super Rooster, like previous Tournaments, will include a Zombie Round, where a novel previously knocked out of play has a chance to come back for a shot at the Rooster. But for the Super Rooster it will be a little different: Our Zombies are those books that lost in their original championship matches to the Rooster winners that are now in play. For example, that means if The Road reaches the semifinals, it’ll face Absurdistan, the book it beat in 2007. If A Visit From the Good Squad gets there, then it’s up against Freedom, over which it squeaked out a win, 9-8, in 2011.

Otherwise, our standard ToB rules apply.