Tag: best books

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.

 

Notable fiction & poetry selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.

Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson
A young hacker on the run in the Mideast is the protagonist of this imaginative first novel.

Almost Never by Daniel Sada
In this glorious satire of machismo, a Mexican agronomist simultaneously pursues a prostitute and an upright woman.

An American Spy by Olen Steinhauer
In a novel vividly evoking the multilayered world of espionage, Steinhauer’s hero fights back when his C.I.A. unit is nearly destroyed.

Arcadia by Lauren Groff (eBook)
Groff’s lush and visual second novel begins at a rural commune, and links that utopian past to a dystopian, post-global-warming future.

At Last by Edward St. Aubyn
The final and most meditative of St. Aubyn’s brilliant Patrick Melrose novels is full of precise observations and glistening turns of phrase.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter (eBook)
Walter’s witty sixth novel, set largely in Hollywood, reveals an American landscape of vice, addiction, loss and disappointed hopes.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
The survivors of a fierce firefight in Iraq are whisked stateside for a brief victory tour in this satirical novel.

Blasphemy by Sherman Alexie
The best stories in Alexie’s collection of new and selected works are moving and funny, bringing together the embittered critic and the yearning dreamer.

The Book of Mischief: New and Selected Stories by Steve Stern
Jewish immigrant lives observed with effusive nostalgia.

Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (audio download, CD book, large print book)
Mantel’s sequel to “Wolf Hall” traces the fall of Anne Boleyn, and makes the familiar story fascinating and suspenseful again.

Building Stories by Chris Ware
A big, sturdy box containing hard-bound volumes, pamphlets and a tabloid houses Ware’s demanding, melancholy and magnificent graphic novel about the inhabitants of a Chicago building.

By Blood by Ellen Ullman (audio download)
This smart, slippery novel is a narrative striptease, as a professor listens in on the sessions between the therapist next door and her patients.

Canada by Richard Ford (CD book, eBook, MP3 CD)
A boy whose parents rob a bank in Montana in 1960 takes refuge across the border in this mesmerizing novel, driven by fully realized characters and an accomplished prose style.

Carry the One by Carol Anshaw (large print book)
Anshaw pays close attention to the lives of a group of friends bound together by a fatal accident in this wry, humane novel, her fourth.

City of Bohane by Kevin Barry
Somewhere in Ireland in 2053, people are haunted by a “lost time,” when something calamitous happened, and hope to reclaim the past. Barry’s extraordinary, exuberant first novel is full of inventive language.

Collected Poems by Jack Gilbert
In orderly free verse constructions, Gilbert deals plainly with grief, love, marriage, betrayal and lust.

Dear Life: Stories by Alice Munro
This volume offers further proof of Munro’s mastery, and shows her striking out in the direction of a new, late style that sums up her whole career.

The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle
LaValle’s culturally observant third novel is set in a shabby urban mental hospital.

Enchantments by Kathryn Harrison
Harrison’s splendid and surprising novel of late imperial Russia centers on Rasputin’s daughter Masha and the hemophiliac ­czarevitch Alyosha.

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (eBook, large print book)
An Appalachian woman becomes involved in an effort to save monarch butterflies in this brave and majestic novel.

Fobbit by David Abrams
Clerks, cooks and lawyers at a forward operating base in Iraq populate this first novel.

The Forgetting Tree by Tatjana Soli
In Soli’s haunting second novel, a mysterious Caribbean woman cares for a cancer patient on an isolated California ranch.

Gathering of Waters by Bernice L. McFadden
Three generations of black women confront floods and murder in Mississippi.

Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru
Related stories, spanning centuries and continents, and all tethered to a desert rock formation, emphasize interconnectivity across time and space in Kunzru’s relentlessly modern fourth novel.

HHhH by Laurent Binet
This gripping novel examines both the killing of an SS general in Prague in 1942 and Binet’s experience in writing about it.

A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers (CD book, MP3 CD)
Eg­gers’s novel is a haunting and supremely readable parable of America in the global economy, a nostalgic lament for a time when life had stakes and people worked with their hands.

Home by Toni Morrison (audio download, eBook)
A black Korean War veteran, discharged from an integrated Army into a segregated homeland, makes a reluctant journey back to Georgia in a novel engaged with themes that have long haunted Morrison.

Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander
Hilarity alternates with pain in this novel about a Jewish man seeking peace in upstate New York who discovers Anne Frank in his attic.

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
The narrator (also named Sheila) and her friends try to answer the question in this novel’s title.

In One Person by John Irving
Irving’s funny, risky new novel about an aspiring writer struggling with his sexuality examines what happens when we face our desires honestly.

A Land More Kind than Home by Wiley Cash (audio download, eBook)
An evil pastor dominates Cash’s mesmerizing first novel.

Married Love: And Other Stories by Tessa Hadley
Hadley’s understatedly beautiful collection is filled with exquisitely calibrated gradations and expressions of class.

NW by Zadie Smith
The lives of two friends who grew up in a northwest London housing project diverge, illuminating questions of race, class, sexual identity and personal choice, in Smith’s energetic modernist novel.

On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths by Lucia Perillo
Taut, lucid poems filled with complex emotional reflection.

Pure by Julianna Baggott (audio download)
Children battle for the planet’s redemption in this precisely written postapocalyptic adventure story.

The Right-Hand Shore by Christopher Tilghman
A dark, magisterial novel set on a Chesapeake Bay estate.

The Round House by Louise Erdrich (eBook)
In this novel, an American Indian family faces the ramifications of a vicious crime.

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (eBook)
A pregnant 15-year-old and her family await Hurricane Katrina in this lushly written novel.

San Miguel by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Two utopians from different eras establish private idylls on California’s desolate Channel Islands; this novel preserves their tantalizing dreams.

Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer
This thought-provoking debut novel presents a geeky astronaut and his pregnant wife.

Shout Her Lovely Name by Natalie Serber
The stories in Serber’s first collection are smart and nuanced.

Silent House by Orhan Pamuk
A family is a microcosm of a country on the verge of a coup in this intense, foreboding novel, first published in Turkey in 1983.

The Starboard Sea by Amber Dermont
Dermont’s captivating debut novel, whose narrator is a boarding school student and a sailor, takes pleasure in the sea and in the exhilarating freedom of being young.

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan (CD book, eBook, MP3 CD)
The true subject of this smart and tricky novel, set inside a cold war espionage operation, is the border between make-believe and reality.

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
In this spare, disturbing and frequently funny novel, a troubled young woman tests the marriages of two couples.

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon (eBook)
Chabon’s rich comic novel about fathers and sons in Berkeley and Oakland, Calif., juggles multiple plots and mounds of pop culture references in astonishing prose.

The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin
This beautiful work takes power from the surprises of its language and its almost shocking characterization of Mary, mother of Jesus.

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz
The stories in this collection are about love, but they’re also about the undertow of family history and cultural mores, presented in Díaz’s exciting, irresistible and entertaining prose.

Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye
In loosely linked narratives, three women from Senegal struggle with fathers and husbands in France. This subtle, hypnotic novel won the Prix Goncourt in 2009.

Toby’s Room by Pat Barker
This novel, a sequel to “Life Class,” delves further into the lives of an English family torn apart by World War I.

Watergate by Thomas Mallon
This novelistic re­imagining of the “third-rate burglary” proposes surprising motives for the break-in and the 18-minute gap, and has a sympathetic Nixon.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories by Nathan Englander (audio download, eBook)
Englander tackles large questions of morality and history in a masterly collection that manages to be both insightful and ­uproarious.

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers
A young private and his platoon struggle through the war in Iraq but find no peace at home in this powerful and moving first novel about the frailty of man and the brutality of war.