Best Fiction 2018
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From The New York Times Top Early Work – Andrew Martin The Kites – Romain Gary. Translated by Miranda Ten of 2018 This marvelous debut novel, about a male writer’s romantic Richmond Mouillot A Princess in Theory – Alyssa Cole entanglements, is like one of those restaurant dishes that Rendered in English for the first time, Gary’s last novel Cole’s main character, a young epidemiologist pursuing her present multiple preparations of a vegetable on the same before committing suicide tells a story of the French Ph.D. in New York, is refreshingly down-to-earth, and her Lisa Halliday *Asymmetry – plate — “beets, three ways” — to capture its essence. Resistance as it was lived in the Norman countryside while love affair with a young African prince develops at a This stunning debut comprises two novella-like sections, one also capturing the themes of identity and reinvention. satisfying slow burn. about a young editor’s affair with an older author and the Eternal Life – Dara Horn other about an Iraqi-American economist detained at What are the downsides of living forever? Horn explores this *Lake Success – Gary Shteyngart Property – Lionel Shriver Heathrow. idea through the story of Rachel, who has been alive for Shteyngart’s prismatic new road-trip novel stars a Wall A collection of short fiction that becomes a wry catalog of 2,000 years and is getting a little tired of it. Street finance bro, loaded down with job and family woes, the many ways an acquisitive urge can go astray. *The Great Believers – Rebecca Makkai who impulsively hops on a Greyhound bus headed west. A novel that ricochets between Chicago in the mid-1980s, an Everything Under – Daisy Johnson Pure Hollywood and Other Stories – Christine era when AIDS was a death sentence, and present-day Paris, This bewitching debut novel, a finalist for the Booker Prize, *The Largesse of the Sea Maiden – Denis Johnson Schutt where the shadow of its contagion still looms over a mother follows a young woman’s search for the mother who Johnson’s long preoccupation with mortality culminates in a These expert stories by a Pulitzer finalist are awash in in search of her errant daughter. abandoned her 16 years earlier. money, lush foliage and menace, in prose so offbeat it’s posthumous collection. revelatory. *The Perfect Nanny – Leila Slimani *The Female Persuasion – Meg Wolitzer Last Stories – William Trevor Two children die at the hands of their nanny in this Of all the political threads that permeate Wolitzer’s 12th This seemingly quiet but ultimately volcanic collection is Severance – Ling Ma devastating novel, an unnerving cautionary tale that won novel, the most interesting is the challenge of Trevor’s final gift to us. Laced within this novel’s dystopian narrative — a France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt and analyzes the intimate intergenerational feminism. But Wolitzer is an infinitely semi-surreal sendup of a workplace and its utopia of rules, relationship between mothers and caregivers. capable creator of human identities as real as the type on this *The Mars Room – Rachel Kushner offering commentary on “dizzying abundance” and page…. A powerful and realistic page turner about a former lap unrelenting consumption — is an arresting encapsulation of a – *There, There Tommy Orange dancer serving two life sentences in a women’s prison…. first-generation immigrant’s nostalgia for New York. Orange’s devastatingly beautiful debut novel, about a group *Freshwater – Akwaeke Emezi of characters converging on the San Francisco Bay Area for This remarkable debut novel traces the course of mental Mirror, Shoulder, Signal – Dorthe Nors Slave Old Man – Patrick Chamoiseau. Translated Nors trains her gaze on a woman many people would look an event called the “Big Oakland Powwow,” explores what it illness in a young Nigerian-born woman. by Linda Coverdale past, a middle-aged translator learning to drive. means to be an urban Native American. Set in plantation-era Martinique, this novel is a kind of action *The Friend – Sigrid Nunez *Washington Black – Esu Edugyan The narrator of Nunez’s wry novel inherits a Great Dane My Struggle: Book 6 – Karl Ove Knausgaard. pastoral, tracing a slave’s desperate escape from a savage This eloquent novel, Edugyan’s third, is a daring work of after her friend and mentor, an aging author, commits Translated by Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken master and his monstrous mastiff. His exhilarating flight This hefty volume concludes the Norwegian author’s evokes the shock of freedom with tactile immediacy. empathy and imagination, featuring a Barbados slave boy in suicide. the 1830s who flees barbaric cruelty in a hot-air balloon and mammoth autobiographical novel with lengthy exegeses on Go, Went, Gone – Jenny Erpenbeck. Translated by *The Sparsholt Affair – Alan Hollinghurst embarks on a life of adventure that is wondrous, melancholy art, literature, poetry and Hitler. For a man in the 1950s, gay sex was a scandal that led to a Susan Bernofsky and strange. prison term. His son comes to maturity in a different era, one This timely novel brings together a retired classics professor *My Year of Rest and Relaxation – Ottessa in which he can take a legal husband. Hollinghurst’s novel From The New York Times Top 100 List in Berlin and a group of African refugees. Moshfegh In Moshfegh’s darkly comic and profound novel, a troubled traces the private and public twists of this process. – Luis Alberto Urrea of 2018 *The House of Broken Angels young woman evading grief decides to renew her spirit by A State of Freedom – Neel Mukherjee In Urrea’s sprawling, tender, funny and bighearted family spending the year sleeping. Mukherjee’s novel, a homage of sorts to V.S. Naipaul, saga — a Mexican-American novel that is also an American *An American Marriage – Tayari Jones presents five interconnected stories set in India and exploring Roy and Celestial are a young black couple in Atlanta “on novel — the de La Cruz clan gathers in San Diego to The Neighborhood – Mario Vargas Llosa This novel, a gritty depiction of a society grounded in the lives of the unmoored. the come up,” as he puts it, when he’s convicted of a rape he celebrate the 70th birthday of its patriarch…. did not commit and sentenced to 12 years in prison. corruption, hedonism and violence, may be a sendup of life in A View of the Empire at Sunset – Caryl Phillips Immigrant, Montana – Amitava Kumar Peru before the downfall of Alberto Fujimori in 2000, but it Set in England, France and the Caribbean, Phillips’s Black Friday – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Kumar’s novel of a young Indian immigrant who recounts his has contemporary relevance for many countries. fragmented novel uses the difficult, lonely life of the Adjei-Brenyah has written a powerful and important and loves lost and won as a college student in the early 1990s has *The Overstory – Richard Powers half-Welsh, half-West Indian writer Jean Rhys to explore strange and beautiful collection of stories meant to be read the feeling of thinly veiled memoir. themes of alienation, colonialism and exile. The science of botany and the art of storytelling merge to right now; this is a dystopian story collection as full of Improvement – Joan Silber ingenious effect in Powers’s magisterial new novel — a story *Warlight – Michael Ondaatje violence as it is of heart. Disparate lives in disparate places intersect in this novel, in which people are merely the underbrush and the real In his latest novel, the author of The English Patient tells the *Cherry – Nico Walker which revolves around a single mother whose boyfriend protagonists are the trees.... story of a London family fractured by Allied intelligence The incarcerated novelist’s debut is a singular portrait of the enlists her in a scheme to smuggle cigarettes across state work. And the danger won’t end when the fighting is over. opioid epidemic and the United States’ failure to provide lines. The Parking Lot Attendant – Nafkote Tamirat An Ethiopian-American teenager living in a mysterious *Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories – Deborah adequate support to veterans. In Every Moment We Are Still Alive – Tom island commune narrates this impressive debut novel, Eisenberg *Crudo – Olivia Lang Malmquist. Translated by Henning Koch recalling her childhood in Boston and her entanglement there These six stories, like all of Eisenberg’s work, are blazingly Written with bristling intelligence, this debut novel by a Based on a true story, this searing autobiographical novel with a charismatic parking-lot attendant…. moral and devastatingly sidelong. British writer pays homage to the iconoclastic author Kathy depicts a father struggling to cope with the tragic loss of his Acker, creating a pastiche of voices and identities. partner just as their daughter is born. French Exit – Patrick deWitt A 6-year-old describes a school shooting — “We kept Library Journal Having squandered her inheritance, an eccentric widow sells hearing the POP sounds outside. And screaming.” — and its Gun Love – Jennifer Clement what property is left and sails with her son to Paris. family-rending aftermath. A 1994 Mercury Topaz is home to Pearl, the precocious, – wryly observant 14-year-old narrator of this devastating, Girls Burn Brighter – Shobha Rao The Pisces Melissa Broder Dogsitting in Los Angeles’s Venice Beach, a troubled lyrical novel, set in a Florida trailer park whose denizens live Two girls survive poverty and cruel fates in India and follow graduate student meets and falls for a beachgoer who turns Best Fiction on the edge of quiet desperation while dreaming of a life separate paths to new lives. out to be part fish. devoid of drugs, guns, and men who can’t be trusted.