Best Fiction 2015

From The New York Times Top .From The New York Times Top 100 *God Help the Child – Toni Morrison Preparation for the Next Life – Atticus Lish Child abuse cuts a jagged scar through Morrison’s novel, a Lish’s gorgeous, upsetting debut novel follows the doomed Ten of 2015 List of 2015 brisk modern-day fairy tale with shades of the Brothers love affair of a traumatized soldier and a Muslim immigrant.

*The Door – Magda Szabo Grimm, and a blunt moral: What you do to children matters. Beatlebone – Kevin Barry *Purity – Jonathan Franzen In Szabo’s haunting novel, a writer’s intense relationship In razor-sharp prose, Barry’s novel imagines John Lennon in Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders – Connections emerge slowly as lies and secrets are revealed in with her servant — an older woman who veers from aloof 1978, on a journey through the west of Ireland in search of Julianna Baggott this intricately plotted novel about the corruptions of money indifference to inexplicable generosity to fervent, implacable his creative self, conversing with an Irish driver. The title character’s final novel has gone missing in this and power. rage — teaches her more about people and the world than her tenderhearted story about the legacy of loss. – Valeria -Luiselli long days spent alone, in front of her typewriter. This supple The Beautiful Bureaucrat – Helen Phillips *The Story of My Teeth translation shows how a story about two women in 20th- Hollow Land – Jane Gardam This playful collaborative novel invites reader participation. An administrative worker’s experiences pose existential century Hungary can resonate in a very different time and questions in Phillips’s riveting, drolly -surreal debut novel. Subtle linked stories about two boys’ friendship, first *The Sympathizer – Viet Thanh Nguyen place. With a mix of dark humor and an almost uncanny published in Britain in 1981, illuminate family and Nguyen’s tragicomic debut novel fills a void in Vietnam War sense of the absurd, she traces the treacherous course of a *Beauty Is a Wound – Eka Kurniawan. community ties. literature, giving a voice to the Vietnamese and compelling country’s history, and the tragic course of a life. A novel about Indonesia’s turbulent 20th century. *Honeydew: Stories – Edith Pearlman the rest of us to look at the events of 40 years ago in a new A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories– *City on Fire – Garth Risk Hallberg With simultaneous intimacy and distance, the tales in light. Hallberg’s ambitious -Dickens-scale descent into New York Lucia Berlin Pearlman’s majestic collection excel at capturing the *Thirteen Ways of Looking – Colum McCann City circa 1976 ‑77 doesn’t shortchange the era’s squalor. Berlin, who died in 2004, left behind a substantial but -little- complex and surprising turns in seemingly ordinary lives. A novella and three stories display -McCann’s empathetic known trove of stories that in her lifetime appeared mostly in Many of its characters are lost kids in flight from their How to Be Both – Ali Smith imagination and -belief in the capabilities of literature. literary journals and small-press books. This revelatory parents. The two parts of Smith’s novel link a modern teenage girl collection gathers 43 of them, introducing her to a wider The Truth and Other Lies – Sascha Arango The Complete Stories – Clarice Lispector and a 15th--century Italian painter. audience as an uncompromising and large-hearted observer The writer in Arango’s cunningly plotted, darkly humorous The Brazilian was one of the true originals of Latin of life whose sympathies favor smart, mouthy women The Incarnations – Susan Barker novel is a fraud — and a murderer. American literature. struggling to get by much as Berlin herself…. frequently did. In Barker’s astonishing novel, a Beijing taxi driver learns of *The Tsar of Love and Techno – Anthony Marra *Delicious Foods – James Hannaham his previous lives as a bit player during 15 centuries of *Outline – Rachel Cusk Interconnected stories set in a Russian industrial city are This ambitious, sweeping novel of American captivity and China’s past. Cusk’s subtle, unconventional and lethally intelligent novel, seamlessly narrated, with flashes of dark h–umor. -exploitation involves an addicted mother laboring on a “Outline,” her eighth, is a string of one-sided conversations. commercial farm. Leaving Berlin – Joseph Kanon *The Turner House – Angela Flournoy A divorced woman traveling in Greece, our narrator, talks — In Kanon’s thriller, a German-born American writer becomes The -African-American family story told in this engrossing, or rather listens — to the people she meets, absorbing their Dragonfish – Vu Tran a spy in East Berlin. remarkably mature first -novel is also a story of the city of stories of love and loss, deception, pride and folly. Well- In Tran’s elegant and entertaining novel, a cop searches for *A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara Detroit. worn subjects — adultery, divorce, ennui — become freshly his ex-wife, a -haunted Vietnamese immigrant, in the sleazy In Yanagihara’s novel, four friends from college grapple with menacing under Cusk’s gaze, and her mental clarity can seem -underbelly of Las Vegas. *Vanessa and Her Sister – Priya Parmar so penetrating, a reader might fear the same risk of invasion adulthood in New York. A novel of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, constructed *Fates and Furies – Lauren Groff and exposure. *The Love Object: Stories – Edna O’Brien around an invented diary and letters. Groff’s complex and remarkable novel about marriage offers An Ireland gripped between tradition and change finds *The Sellout – Paul Beatty two critically different narratives, first from the husband’s *The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories – illumination in O’Brien’s brilliant and memorable tales. This year’s most cheerfully outrageous satire takes as its point of view, then from the wife’s. Joy Williams subject a young black man’s desire to segregate his local *The Mare – Mary Gaitskill These tales, spanning a period of nearly 50 years, are marked school and to reinstate slavery in his home — before *Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years – Thomas A subtle depiction of a relationship between two families, by queasy humor and a wry nihilism. careening off to consider almost 400 years of black survival Mallon their communities and a horse touches on tricky questions of – in America, puncturing every available piety. Sharp-minded The strong sense of foreboding that reigns here stands in class and race. *The Whites Richard Price writing as Harry and fabulously profane, Beatty’s novel is a fearless, arresting counterpoint to today’s notion of the Teflon Brandt metaphorical multicultural pot almost too hot to touch. president. *The Mersault Investigation – Kamel Daoud Most readers will never come close to a New York homicide This rich and inventive Algerian novel imagines the -story of investigation, but they will instinctively know that Price’s *The Story of the List Child – Elena Ferrante First Bad Man – Miranda July the Arab murdered on the beach in Camus’s “The Stranger.” insightful crime novel has this world down right. Like the three books that precede it in Ferrante’s Neapolitan In July’s wry, smart first novel, two women’s consensually quartet, this brilliant conclusion offers a clamorous, headlong violent host-guest relationship leads to an erotic awakening. *Mislaid – Nell Zink Library Journal exploration of female friendship set against a backdrop of Zink’s screwball comic novel about the making and *The Fishermen – Obioma Chogizie poverty, ambition, violence and political struggle. As Elena unmaking of an American family lays bare our assumptions In its exploration of the murderous and the mysterious, the *Best Boy – Eli Gottlieb and Lila, the girlhood rivals whose relationship spans the about race and sexuality. mind’s terrors and a vibrant Africa, this debut novel is heir to To have a middle-aged autistic character as a first-person series, enter the middle terrain of marriage and motherhood, Chinua Achebe. *My Struggle: Book 4 – Karl Ove Knausgaard narrator would seem to be an almost impossible feat for even the Ferrante’s preoccupations remain with the inherent This is the fleetest, funniest and — in keeping with its most talented writer, but Gottlieb succeeds brilliantly in this radicalism of modern female identity. *Fortune Smiles – Adam Johnson adolescent protagonist — most sophomoric of the volumes deeply moving novel. The author of “The Orphan Master’s Son” offers a collection translated into English thus far. that is at once pervasively dark and shot through with humor.

*Did You Ever Have a Family? – Bill Clegg *A God in Ruins – Kate Atkinson A Slant of Light – Jeffrey Lent A house explodes, killing everyone a woman named June holds A sequel of sorts to her beloved Life After Life , this new Lent’s heartbreaking novel chronicles the agonized aftermath dear, and as the polished, quietly captivating prose moves back and forth in time and from character to character, Clegg explores novel tells the story of Teddy Todd, who served as a Royal of a Union veteran’s return to the Finger Lakes region of how we live with unbearable loss. Air Force bomber pilot in World War II. A powerful work New York.

about young men and war. *A Spool of Blue Thread – Anne Tyler Washington Post – *Gold Fame Citrus Claire Vay Watkins These quirky characters — adult children and the aging *The Buried Giant – Kazuo Ishiguro Luz Dunn is living in a starlet’s abandoned mansion in Los parents they come to help — initially look like the same This daring venture into a medieval wilderness is a Angeles when she and her partner kidnap a child they assume Baltimore family members we’ve socialized with for 50 spectacular, rousing departure from anything Ishiguro has is being neglected. When this makeshift family flees into the years in Tyler’s fiction. But somehow what’s familiar is

ever written, and yet it’s a classic Ishiguro story: graceful, desert, they find an isolated colony of survivors. infused with freshness and surprise.

original and humane. Golden Age – Jane Smiley *The State We’re In: Maine Stories – Anne Beattie The Country of Ice Cream Star – Sandra Newman The final installment of Jane Smiley’s Last Hundred Years Beattie’s unsurpassed talent for rural tragicomedy is on Newman’s richly imagined future world is inhabited almost trilogy, which traces the history of one Iowa farm family over display in a splendid collection of short stories largely set in entirely by African American children and teens who are five generations. Maine.

immune to a deadly virus. *The Green Road – Anne Enright *A Strangeness in My Mind – Orhan Pamuk Welcome to the Madigan family of County Clare: four adult The Discreet Hero – Mario Vargas Llosa In telling the story of a sweet-tempered village boy who children, all contending with the emotional tyranny of their This exquisite concoction — a delicious melodrama of sex moves to Istanbul and scrapes by for 40 years, Pamuk and betrayal, love and revenge — demonstrates that the never-satisfied mother. lovingly does for Istanbul something like what James Joyce Peruvian Nobel laureate is still at the top of his game. I Am Radar – Leif Larsen did for Dublin.

*The Dying Grass – William K. Vollmann This ingenious masterpiece of geekhood ranges over There’s Something I Want You to Do – Charles continents and decades. It’s thick with scientific references, This complex recounting of noble Indian Chief Joseph’s Baxter tech talk, arcane erudition and historical research, and it doomed fight for survival is a masterpiece — an American Most of the tales here focus on love, both romantic and tragedy with all the vast distances and unforgiving climates features a child born black to white parents. familial, and Baxter is wonderful at capturing the delicate (political, emotional, physical) of our nation. – mysteries of courtship.] The Illuminations Andrew O’Hagan In this perceptive novel about the way we fight our wars *Eileen – Ottessa Moshfegh *Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights In this dark, Hitchockian novel, Eileen Dunlop — an today, the misadventures of a British platoon in Afghanistan – Salman Rushdie endearing misfit who works in a boys’ prison outside Boston alternate with the story of its captain’s grandmother, who is This weirdly funny novel translates the bloody conflicts in the early ’60s — is clearly headed for disaster. falling prey to dementia back home. between rationalists and religious fanatics into the comic- These titles were chosen by Library *Epitaph – Mary Doria Russell The Marriage of Opposites – Alice Hoffman book antics of warring jinn. An epic retelling of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral that sets Hoffman imagines the interior lives of Camille Pissarro and Journal, The New York Times, and – the 30-second battle within the broader context of the times. his parents and surrounds them with a full-bodied supporting We That Are Left Clare Clark cast of characters When Theo Melville, heir to the Ellinghurst estate, is killed The Washington Post as the best Finders Keepers – Stephen King in Flanders, the cataclysmic events of World War I upend his fiction of 2015 A disgruntled reader sets off this complex tale of literary Our Souls at Night – Kent Haruf family’s quiet country manor life. obsession and its consequences. A superb stay-up-all-night Neighbors Addie and Louis live alone in Holt, Colo., nursing – thriller, this sly story recalls the themes of King’s classic memories of doleful marriages. Neither has any reason to And West Is West Ron Childress You can find all of them here at 1987 novel , Misery . expect the remaining years will offer relief from retirement, This gritty debut novel pairs a nail-biter about a drone pilot but then a surprising love affair develops. involved in a major intelligence screw-up with a provocative Frog – Mo Yan story about currency traders who profit from the financial The Ridgefield Library Saint Maizie – Jamie Attenberg The Nobel Prize-winning author grapples daringly with impact of global terrorism. China’s recently relaxed one-child policy. A fictionalized telling of the life of Mazie Phillips-Gordon, the Queen of the Bowery, who occupied the ticket booth of West of Sunset – Stewart O’Nan (*Designates books found on “best *Get in Trouble: Stories – Kelly Link New York’s famous Venice movie theater at the south end of O’Nan compassionately and beautifully evokes the grim last books” lists of more than one In Link’s stories, you won’t find tediously believable the Bowery from the beginning of Prohibition to the end of act of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life, when he worked as a publication) situations or even truthfulness to life. Instead, you’ll find the Depression. Hollywood screenwriter. magic and wonder. The Secret Chord – Geraldine Brooks A Window Opens – Elizabeth Egan (Annotations taken from publications) *Girl Waits with Gun – Amy Stewart Brooks directs her skill at re-creating the past to the story of When her husband’s career tanks, Alice takes a job at a high- Based on the little-known story of the real Constance Kopp, David, the Hebrew warrior king. In some ways, the novel tech book-selling venture, while continuing to care for her one of America’s first female deputy sheriffs, the novel is an reads like a prose poem, filled with battles, passions, small children and her aging parents. This comic novel is entertaining story of how far one woman will go to protect loyalties and betrayal, but it’s a page-turner of a poem. about the elusive work/life balance

her family.