departure from his previous work and, at a stroke, The Sound of Things Falling – Juan Gabriel From The New York Times Top demolishes any talk of twilight. Vásquez. Ten of 2013 The Infatuations– Javier Marías This gripping Colombian novel, built on the country’s tragic Amid a proliferation of alternative perspectives, Marías’s *Bleeding Edge – Thomas Pynchon history with the drug trade, meditates on love, fate and *Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. novel explores its female narrator’s relationship with the Airliners crash not only into the twin towers but into a death. By turns tender and trenchant, Adichie’s third novel takes widow and the best friend of a murdered man. shaggy-dog tale involving a fraud investigator and a white- on the comedy and tragedy of American race relations from collar outlaw in this vital, audacious novel. *The Interestings – Meg Wolitzer *Tenth of December: Stories -- George Saunders the perspective of a young Nigerian immigrant. From the Wolitzer’s enveloping novel offers a fresh take on the theme Saunders’s relentless humor and beatific generosity of spirit office politics of a hair-braiding salon to the burden of The Circle – Dave Eggers of self-invention, with a heroine who asks herself whether keep his highly moral tales from succumbing to life’s darker memory, there’s nothing too humble or daunting for this Walter’s witty sixth novel, set largely in Hollywood, reveals the ambitious men and women in her circle have aspects. fearless writer, who is so attuned to the various worlds and an American landscape of vice, addiction, loss and shifting selves we inhabit — in life and online, in love, as inaccurately defined success. *Twelve Tribes of Hattie – Ayana Mathis disappointed hopes. Mathis’s deeply felt first novel works at the rough edges of agents and victims of history and the heroes of our own Local Souls: Novellas – Allan Gurganus stories. *Claire of the Sea Light– Edwidge Danticat history, within a brutal and poetic allegory of a black family This triptych, set in Gurganus’s familiar Falls, N.C., Danticat’s novel is less about a Haitian girl who disappears beset by tribulations after the Great Migration to the North. showcases the increasing universality of his imaginative *The Flamethrowers– Rachel Kushner on her birthday than about the heart of a magical seaside Radical politics, avant-garde art and motorcycle racing all powers. Two Hotel Francforts – David Leavitt village. In Leavitt’s atmospheric novel of 1940 Lisbon, as two spring to life in Kushner’s radiant novel of the 1970s, in *Longbourn – Jo Baker *A Constellation of Vital Phenomena – Anthony couples await passage to New York, the husbands embark which a young woman moves to New York to become an Baker’s charming novel offers an affecting look at the world on an affair. artist, only to wind up involved in the revolutionary protest Maara of “Pride and Prejudice” from the point of view of the movement that shook Italy in those years. The novel, Odds against survival are high for the characters of Maara’s Bennets’ servants’ hall. The Valley of Amazement – Amy Tan Kushner’s second, deploys mordant observations and extraordinary first novel, set in war-torn Chechnya. This wrenching novel by the author of The Joy Luck Club chiseled sentences to explore how individuals are swept Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish – The Dinner – Herman Koch follows mother and daughter courtesans over four decades. along by implacable social forces. David Rakoff In this clever, dark Dutch novel, two couples dine out under Rakoff completed his novel-in-couplets, whose characters *Want Not – Jonathan Miles – the cloud of a terrible crime committed by their teenage *The Goldfinch Donna Tartt live the title’s verbs, just before his death in 2012. Linking disparate characters and story threads, Miles’s Tartt’s intoxicating third novel, after The Secret History and sons. novel explores varieties of waste and decay in a consumer The Little Friend, follows the travails of Theo Decker, who The Lowland – Jhumpa Lahiri *Dirty Love – Andre Dubus III world. emerges from a terrorist bombing motherless but in After his radical brother is killed, an Indian scientist brings possession of a prized Dutch painting. Like the best of Four linked stories expose their characters’ bottomless his widow to join him in America in Lahiri’s efficiently *We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves – Karen needs and stubborn weaknesses. Dickens, the novel is packed with incident and populated written novel. Joy Fowler with vivid characters. At its heart is the unwavering belief This surreptitiously smart novel’s big reveal slyly recalls a Dissident Gardens – Jonathan Lethem *The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton that come what may, art can save us by lifting us above tabloid headline: “Girl and Chimp Twinned at Birth in Spanning 80 years and three generations, Lethem’s novel In her Booker Prize winner, a love story and mystery set in ourselves. realistically portrays an enchanted — or disenchanted — Psychological Experiment.” New Zealand, Catton has built a lively parody of a 19th- *Life After Life – Kate Aktinson garden of American leftists in Queens. century novel, while creating something utterly new for the We Need New Names – NoViolet Bulawayo

Demonstrating the agile style and theatrical bravado of her 21st. A Zimbabwean moves to Detroit in Bulawayo’s striking *Doctor Sleep – Stephen King much-admired Jackson Brodie mystery novels, Atkinson first novel. takes on nothing less than the evils of mid-20th-century Now grown up, Danny, the boy with psycho-intuitive *Maddaddam – Margaret Atwood history and the nature of death as she moves back and forth powers in The Shining, helps another threatened magic child The survivors of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood Woke Up Lonely – Fiona Maazel in a novel that shares the virtues of King’s best work. await a final showdown, in a trilogy’s concluding entry. Maazel’s restlessly antic novel examines the concurrent in time, fitting together versions of a life story for a heroine who keeps dying, then being resurrected — and sent off in urges for solitude and intimacy. Duplex – Kathryn Davis *Schroder – Amity Gaige different, but entirely plausible, directions. A schoolteacher takes an unusual lover in this astonishing, In Gaige’s scenic novel, a man with a long-established false *The Woman Upstairs -- Claire Messud double-hinged novel set in a fantastical suburbia. identity goes on the run with his 6-year-old daughter. Messud’s ingenious, disquieting novel of outsize conflicts From The New York Times Top tells the story of a thwarted artist who finds herself The End of Point– Elizabeth Graver *The Signature of All Things – Elizabeth Gilbert bewitched by a boy and his parents. 100 List of 2013 A summer house on the Massachusetts coast both shelters In this winning novel by the author of Eat, Pray, Love, a and isolates the wealthy family in Graver’s eloquent botanist’s hunger for explanations carries her through the Library Journal *The Accursed – Joyce Carol Oates multigenerational novel. better part of Darwin’s century, and to Tahiti. Oates’s extravagantly horrifying, funny and prolix *And the Mountains Echoed – Khaled Hosseini postmodern Gothic novel purports to be the definitive *The Good Lord Bird – James McBride *Someone – Alice McDermott This ambitious and emotionally stirring work follows account of a curse that infected bucolic Princeton, N.J., in McBride’s romp of a novel, the 2013 National Book Award Through scattered recollections, this novel sifts the myriad characters all across the globe over six decades. At 1905 and 1906. winner, is narrated by a freed slave boy who passes as a girl. significance of an ordinary life. the heart of the narrative is the wrenching separation of two

It’s a risky portrait of the radical abolitionist John Brown in siblings, Pari and Abdul, a loss that haunts both for the rest *The Son – Philipp Meyer All That Is – James Salter which irreverence becomes a new form of homage. of their days. Salter’s first novel in more than 30 years, which follows the Members of a Texas clan grope their way from the ordeals loves and losses of a World War II veteran, is an ambitious Impossible Lives of Greta Wells – Andrew Greer of the frontier to celebrity culture’s absurdities in this The Daughters of Mars – Thomas Keneally A distraught woman inhabits different selves across the 20th masterly multigenerational saga. Following the death of their mother, Australian sisters century in Greer’s elegiac novel. Naomi and Sally Durance volunteer as nurses during World

War I. It isn’t often that war is presented through the eyes dusty rural poverty and goes on to achieve status and wealth... at Jon and Ray share a pure determination to run a race neither of

of those who take care of the dying. a price. them can win.

Harvest – Jim Crace Middle C – William H. Gass The Burgess Boys – Elizabeth Strout

A master at creating worlds at once familiar and startlingly In Gass’s third novel, average professor Joseph Skizzen flees Siblings — variously rich, broke, needy, loving, bitter — get

his own, Crace takes us to a premodern English village 1938 Austria and ends up teaching at an average Ohio college, caught up in family drama and post-9/11 trauma when one where a burning stable is blamed on strangers camping where he lives out his average days while tending to his attic’s teenage son throws a pig’s head into a mosque. Strout’s humane nearby, thus moving the villagers inexorably toward a “Inhumanity Museum” and privately worrying about what portrayal proves adept at complicating our easy judgments.

humanity might do to itself. tragedy they provoke. – The Explanation of Everything Lauren Grodstein Bookmarks In this smart, assured novel, a biologist is asked by a young *Nos4A2 – Joe Hill – evangelist to advise her study of intelligent design. Hill, son of horror master Stephen King, comes into his own *& Sons David Gilbert as a full-fledged literary star with this gripping epic of good A.N. Dyer became a Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist at age 28. Flora – Gail Godwin vs. evil. Now a frail, elderly recluse, Dyer wishes that he’d never written The still, humid days of summer are fraught with impending a single word. consequence as a polio scare keeps 10-year-old Helen trapped in – The Storyteller Jodi Picoult the house with her mother’s cousin Flora. Godwin channels the Linking the stories of baker Sage Singer, retired German Benediction – Kent Haruf Dad Lewis, an elderly man and hardware store owner in Holt, girl’s precocious sophistication and youthful cluelessness. teacher Josef Weber, Sage’s grandmother Minka, and of a Colorado, is suffering from terminal cancer. Before he dies, mythological beast, Picoult’s page-turner challenges its The Last Summer of the Camperdowns – Elizabeth Dad tries to right his life.

readers to face the horrors and rare moments of compassion Kelly that defined the Holocaust. The Execution of Noa P. Singleton – Elizabeth L. It’s 1972 on Cape Cod, and 13-year-old Riddle Camperdown Silver feels like she’s in heaven. But her father is running for *The Woman Who Lost Her Soul – Bob Shacochis Noa P. Singleton never uttered a single word in her own defense Congress, and an old friend shows up with a memoir that Opening with photojournalist Jackie Scott’s death in Haiti, throughout a trial that found her guilty of the first-degree contains embarrassing details. Then Riddle witnesses a murder. moving to events in post-World War II Croatia that confirm murder of a young woman. Just months before her execution, – Stjepan Kovacevic’s hatred of anything that’s not the she receives a surprise visitor. The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Adelle glorious Christian West, and finally showing U.S. diplomat Waldman Steve Chambers training his daughter to serve her country, The Heart Broke In – James Meek If you think there’s not much new to be found in a novel about this richly detailed, magnificently flowing novel deeply Two decades ago, Ritchie and Bec Shepherd’s father, a British contemporary dating, think again. Waldman creates a brilliant ponders the forces that have shaped the contemporary soldier, was shot by Northern Irish guerrillas, and his death still taxonomy of homo erectus brooklynitis and the women who are world. casts a pull over them. disappointed by him.

The Husband’s Secret – Liane Moriarity My Education – Susan Choi Publishers Weekly If you found a letter that your husband marked “ to be opened A determined graduate student who has mastered the pose of only in the event of my death,” would you open it? A The Blind Man’s Garden – Nadeem Aslam “enchanted absorption” sets out to seduce her English professor These titles were chosen by Tupperware saleswoman in Sydney with a devoted husband and but ends up with his wife instead. What makes this witty story There are already a number of stateside-set 9/11 novels, but three daughters does not. so delicious is Choi’s style, the unflagging force of her scrutiny. Bookmarks, Library Journal, The Aslam moves the drama to Central Asia with two Pakistani brothers who venture across the border to Afghanistan with The Love Song of Jonny Valentine – Teddy Wayne Night Film -- Marisha Pessl New York Times, Publishers humanitarian intentions that place them in the center of the Jonny Valentine, 11, who grew up in a poor rural backwater, When he hears that the daughter of a cult filmmaker has thrown Weekly, and The Washington Post chaos of war. became a tween pop idol. Underneath his coolness, he’s a herself off a roof, reporter Scott McGrath realizes he was the vulnerable, lonely boy. last person to see her alive. This dastardly fun novel folds the as the best fiction of 2013. Brown Dog – Jim Harrison plots, characters and motifs of horror films into Scott’s panicked -- Harrison returns with 500 pages of the preposterously amusing *The Maid’s Version Daniel Woodrell investigation. shenanigans of Brown Dog, one of literature’s great characters. Woodrell explores the most momentous event in the history of You can find all of them here at An essential collection from an American legend. West Table, Missouri: the 1929 Arbor Dance Hall explosion, Schroder – Amity Gaige which left 42 dead, including an illiterate maid’s sister. From his prison cell, a divorced father who abducted his 6-year- The Daylight Gate – Jeanette Winterson old daughter writes to his ex-wife, telling a life story that is The Ridgefield Library – Winterson thrusts the reader back to the countryside of 17th- TransAtlantic Colum McCann simultaneously plea, apology and defense. (*Designates books found on “best century England, where witches and Catholicism are eradicated TransAtlantic tells the stories of former British World War I with equal force. The brutal happenings are lovely in the aviators; the freed slave Frederick Douglass; and in 1998, Sparta – Roxana Robinson books” lists of more than one author’s hands, and because the characters are prone to betrayal Senator George Mitchell, in Northern Ireland to broker a deal “Sparta” takes us deep inside the troubled head of a Marine publication) and mystery, the pages turn very quickly. between the British and the Irish. returning from Iraq. Robinson dramatizes how we fail our veterans…deploying emotional insight, moral nuance and *How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia – Mohsin Washington Post intellectual depth. (Annotations taken from publications) Hamid Pakistani, Ivy League–educated Hamid keeps reinventing Brewster – Mark Slouka A Tale for the Time Being – Ruth Ozeki himself with wild storytelling and a clear view into today’s The story of a friendship so potent that it’s taken years for the On a Canadian beach, a novelist finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox society. In this third novel, he claims, wickedly, to deliver the narrator to understand what happened. Trapped in a suffocating containing the diary of a Japanese girl chronicling her “last days ultimate self-help book, with a protagonist who begins life in blue-collar town and their different but equally painful families, on earth.”