Notable fiction and poetry selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates (audio download, eBook)
Oates’s extravagantly horrifying, funny and prolix postmodern Gothic novel purports to be the definitive account of a curse that infected bucolic Princeton, N.J., in 1905 and 1906.
All That Is by James Salter
Salter’s first novel in more than 30 years, which follows the loves and losses of a World War II veteran, is an ambitious departure from his previous work and, at a stroke, demolishes any talk of twilight.
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (eBook)
This witheringly trenchant novel scrutinizes blackness in America, Nigeria and Britain.
Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon
Airliners crash not only into the twin towers but into a shaggy-dog tale involving a fraud investigator and a white-collar outlaw in this vital, audacious novel.
Children Are Diamonds: An African Apocalypse by Edward Hoagland
The adventure-seeking protagonist of Hoagland’s novel is swept up in the chaos of southern Sudan.
The Circle by Dave Eggers
In a disturbing not-too-distant future, human existence flows through the portal of a company that gives Eggers’s novel its title.
Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat
Danticat’s novel is less about a Haitian girl who disappears on her birthday than about the heart of a magical seaside village.
The Color Master: Stories by Aimee Bender
Physical objects help Bender’s characters grasp an overwhelming world.
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra (eBook)
Odds against survival are high for the characters of Marra’s extraordinary first novel, set in war-torn Chechnya.
The Dinner by Herman Koch (audio download, CD book, large print book)
In this clever, dark Dutch novel, two couples dine out under the cloud of a terrible crime committed by their teenage sons.
Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III
Four linked stories expose their characters’ bottomless needs and stubborn weaknesses.
Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem
Spanning 80 years and three generations, Lethem’s novel realistically portrays an enchanted — or disenchanted — garden of American leftists in Queens.
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King (CD book)
Now grown up, Danny, the boy with psycho-intuitive powers in “The Shining,” helps another threatened magic child in a novel that shares the virtues of King’s best work.
Duplex by Kathryn Davis
A schoolteacher takes an unusual lover in this astonishing, double-hinged novel set in a fantastical suburbia.
The End of the Point by Elizabeth Graver (eBook)
A summer house on the Massachusetts coast both shelters and isolates the wealthy family in Graver’s eloquent multigenerational novel.
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
In Kushner’s frequently dazzling second novel, an impressionable artist navigates the volatile worlds of New York and Rome in the 1970s.
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (CD book)
The “Goldfinch” of the title of Tartt’s smartly written Dickensian novel is a painting smuggled through the early years of a boy’s life — his prize, his guilt and his burden.
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
McBride’s romp of a novel, the 2013 National Book Award winner, is narrated by a freed slave boy who passes as a girl. It’s a risky portrait of the radical abolitionist John Brown in which irreverence becomes a new form of homage.
A Guide to Being Born: Stories by Ramona Ausubel
Ausubel’s fantastical collection traces a cycle of transformation: from love to conception to gestation to birth.
Half the Kingdom by Lore Segal
In Segal’s darkly comic novel, dementia becomes contagious at a Manhattan hospital.
I Want to Show You More: Stories by Jamie Quatro
Quatro’s strange, thrilling and disarmingly honest first collection draws from a pool of resonant themes (Christianity, marital infidelity, cancer, running) in agile recombinations.
The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer (eBook)
A distraught woman inhabits different selves across the 20th century in Greer’s elegiac novel.
The Infatuations by Javier Marías
Amid a proliferation of alternative perspectives, Marías’s novel explores its female narrator’s relationship with the widow and the best friend of a murdered man.
The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer (audio download, CD book, eBook, large print book)
Wolitzer’s enveloping novel offers a fresh take on the theme of self-invention, with a heroine who asks herself whether the ambitious men and women in her circle have inaccurately defined success.
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (audio download, CD book, large print book)
Atkinson’s heroine, born in 1910, keeps dying and dying again, as she experiences the alternate courses her destiny might have taken.
Local Souls: Novellas by Allan Gurganus
This triptych, set in Gurganus’s familiar Falls, N.C., showcases the increasing universality of his imaginative powers.
Longbourn by Jo Baker (CD book, large print book)
Baker’s charming novel offers an affecting look at the world of “Pride and Prejudice” from the point of view of the Bennets’ servants’ hall.
Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish by David Rakoff
Rakoff completed his novel-in-couplets, whose characters live the title’s verbs, just before his death in 2012.
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (CD book, large print book)
After his radical brother is killed, an Indian scientist brings his widow to join him in America in Lahiri’s efficiently written novel.
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
In her Booker Prize winner, a love story and mystery set in New Zealand, Catton has built a lively parody of a 19th-century novel, while creating something utterly new for the 21st.
Maddaddam by Margaret Atwood
The survivors of “Oryx and Crake” and “The Year of the Flood” await a final showdown, in a trilogy’s concluding entry.
A Marker to Measure Drift by Alexander Maksik (audio download)
Maksik’s forceful novel illuminates the life of a Liberian woman who flees her troubled past to seek refuge on an Aegean island.
Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart
To immerse oneself in these poems is to enter a crowd of unusual characters: artistic geniuses, violent misfits, dramatic self-accusers (including the poet himself).
Our Andromeda by Brenda Shaughnessy
In these emotionally charged and gorgeously constructed poems, Shaughnessy imagines a world without a child’s pain.
Schroder by Amity Gaige
In Gaige’s scenic novel, a man with a long-established false identity goes on the run with his 6-year-old daughter.
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert (CD book, large print book)
In this winning novel by the author of “Eat, Pray, Love,” a botanist’s hunger for explanations carries her through the better part of Darwin’s century, and to Tahiti.
Someone by Alice McDermott (CD book)
Through scattered recollections, this novel sifts the significance of an ordinary life.
The Son by Philipp Meyer (audio download, eBook)
Members of a Texas clan grope their way from the ordeals of the frontier to celebrity culture’s absurdities in this masterly multigenerational saga.
The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
This gripping Colombian novel, built on the country’s tragic history with the drug trade, meditates on love, fate and death.
Submergence by J.M. Ledgard
This hard-edged, well-written novel involves a terrorist hostage-taking and a perilous deep-sea dive.
Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush
Amid dark humor both mournful and absurd, former classmates converge on the hilltop estate of a friend who has died in a freak accident.
Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders (audio download, CD book, eBook)
Saunders’s relentless humor and beatific generosity of spirit keep his highly moral tales from succumbing to life’s darker aspects.
The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis (audio download, CD book, eBook,)
Mathis’s deeply felt first novel works at the rough edges of history, within a brutal and poetic allegory of a black family beset by tribulations after the Great Migration to the North.
The Two Hotel Francforts by David Leavitt
In Leavitt’s atmospheric novel of 1940 Lisbon, as two couples await passage to New York, the husbands embark on an affair.
The Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan (CD book, large print book)
This wrenching novel by the author of “The Joy Luck Club” follows mother and daughter courtesans over four decades.
Want Not by Jonathan Miles
Linking disparate characters and story threads, Miles’s novel explores varieties of waste and decay in a consumer world.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (audio download)
This surreptitiously smart novel’s big reveal slyly recalls a tabloid headline: “Girl and Chimp Twinned at Birth in Psychological Experiment.”
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo (audio download)
A Zimbabwean moves to Detroit in Bulawayo’s striking first novel.
Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel
Maazel’s restlessly antic novel examines the concurrent urges for solitude and intimacy.
The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud (audio download, CD book, eBook)
Messud’s ingenious, disquieting novel of outsize conflicts tells the story of a thwarted artist who finds herself bewitched by a boy and his parents.
