*Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of From The New York Times Top From The New York Times Top *Panic in a Suitcase – Yelena Akhtiorskaya Ten of 2014 100 List of 2014 Pilgrimage – Haruki Murakami Through scattered recollections, this novel sifts the A novel of a man’s traumatic entrance into adulthood and significance of an ordinary life. *All the Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr the shadowy passages he must then negotiate. *All Our Names – Dinaw Mengestu With brisk chapters and sumptuous language, Doerr’s *The Paying Guests – Sarah Waters With great sadness and much hard truth, Mengestu’s novel Department of Speculation – Jenny Offill second novel follows two characters whose paths will Hard times, forbidden love, murder and justice are the looks at a relationship of shared dependencies between a Building its story from fragments, observations, meditations intersect in the waning days of World War II: an orphaned themes of this nevertheless comic novel, set in London after Midwestern social worker and a bereft African immigrant. and different points this cannily paced second novel charts

engineering prodigy recruited into the Nazi ranks, and a World War I. the course of a marriage. blind French girl who joins the Resistance. Tackling All the Birds Singing – Evie Wyld Remember Me Like This – Bret Anthony Johnston questions of survival, endurance and moral obligations Wyld’s emotionally wrenching novel traces a solitary sheep The Dog – Joseph O’Neill In Johnston’s skillful and enthralling debut novel, a family during wartime, the book is as precise and artful and farmer’s attempt to outrun her past on a remote British O’Neill’s disturbing, elegant novel, his first since is reunited after an abducted son comes home. ingenious as the puzzle boxes the heroine’s locksmith father island. Netherland, a lost and tormented New York lawyer builds for her. Impressively, it is also a vastly entertaining recognizes more darkness within himself than in the A Replacement Life – Boris Fishman *The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories – feat of storytelling. iniquitous place he works, Dubai. In Fishman’s bold, ambitious and wickedly smart first

Hilary Mantel novel, a Soviet émigré writer in New York becomes *Dept. of Speculation– Jenny Offill One has the sense that Mantel is working with some *Everything I Never Told You – Celeste Ng disturbingly adept at forging applications for Holocaust Offill’s slender and cannily paced novel, her second, complex private material in these suavely stylish, vastly In this novel, a tragedy tears away at a mixed-race family in reparations. assembles fragments, observations, meditations and entertaining contemporary fables. 1970s Ohio. different points of view to chart the course of a troubled *Song of the Shank – Jeffery Renard Allen marriage. Wry and devastating in equal measure, the novel *Bark: Stories – Lorrie Moore *Fourth of July Creek – Smith Henderson Allen’s masterly novel blends the personal story of the is a cracked mirror that throws light in every direction — on The uncrowded format of Moore’s first collection in 16 In Henderson’s impressive novel, an overburdened social enslaved autistic piano prodigy Thomas Wiggins with the music and literature; science and philosophy; marriage and years allows each story the chance it deserves for leisurely worker becomes involved with a near-feral boy and his history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. motherhood and infidelity; and especially love and the appreciation, and lets the reader savor just what makes her survivalist father in 1980 Montana. 10:04 – Ben Lerner grueling rigors of domestic life. Part elegy and part primal work unique. A Brooklyn-based narrator preoccupied with identity scream, it’s a profound and unexpectedly buoyant *A Girl is a Half-formed Thing – Eimear McBride *The Blazing World – Siri Hustvedt decides to help his best friend have a child in this frequently performance. An Irish writer’s odd, energetic first novel.

Hustvedt’s multifaceted novel is a portrait of a creative titan brilliant second novel. *Euphoria – Lily King whose career and reputation have seemingly been blighted The Laughing Monsters – Denis Johnson Thirty Girls – Susan Minot In 1933, the anthropologist Margaret Mead took a field trip by the art establishment’s ingrained sexism. Johnson’s cheerfully nihilistic novel about two scammers Minot’s novel approaches the atrocities wrought by a to the Sepik River in New Guinea with her second husband; and rogue spies in Africa derives much of its situation from *The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell murderous African rebel army with candor yet without they met and collaborated with the man who would become several of his early journalistic pieces. In this latest head-spinning flight into other dimensions from sensationalism. her third. King has taken the known details of that actual the author of “Cloud Atlas,” all borders between pubby *Let Me Be Frank with You – Richard Ford event and created this exquisite novel, her fourth, about the England and the machinations of the undead begin to blur. In four linked stories, Ford’s aging Everyman surveys life *Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay – Elena rewards and disappointments of intellectual ambition and after Hurricane Sandy batters New Jersey. Ferrante physical desire. The result is an intelligent, sensual tale told The Book of Strange New Things – Michael Faber The third novel in Ferrante’s series, which tracks a long and with a suitable mix of precision and heat. Faber is a master of the weird; in his defiantly unclassifiable *Lila –Marilynne Robinson complicated friendship. novel, a pastor from Earth is picked to satisfy an alien A young woman with a past of hardship and suffering *Family Life – Akhil Sharma planet’s mysterious yen for religious instruction. makes a new start in Robinson’s fictional town of Gilead, The Wallcreeper – Nell Zink Sharma’s austere but moving novel tells the semi- Iowa. Zink’s heady, rambunctious debut is an environmental autobiographical story of a family that immigrates from *The Book of Unknown Americans – Christina novel, if a totally surprising and irreverent one. India to Queens, and has just begun to build a new life when Henríquez *Lovers at the Chamelion Club, Paris 1932 – *We Are Not Ourselves – Matthew Thomas the elder son suffers severe brain damage in a swimming Latino immigrant characters face the challenges of Francine Prose Thomas’s gorgeous family epic follows three Irish- pool accident. Deeply unnerving and gorgeously tender, the assimilation. Prose, a subtle psychologist, has created a genuinely evil character in Lou Villars, a cross-dressing French racecar American generations. book chronicles how grief renders the parents unable to cherish and raise their other son; love, it suggests, becomes *Boy, Snow, Bird – Helen Oyeyemi driver and Nazi collaborator. Library Journal warped and jagged and even seemingly vanishes in the midst Taking “Snow White” as a cultural touchstone, Oyeyemi’s *The Magician’s Land – Lev Grossman of mourning. novel offers up a cautionary tale on post-race ideology, In this strong final installment of a trilogy, an exiled *The Bees – Laline Paull racial limbos and the politics of passing. A debut novel about insects? Really? Paull’s enthralling *Redeployment – Phil Klay magician attempts a risky heist. *A Brief History of Seven Killings – Marlon James fantasy about an orchard beehive will entice even those In this brilliant debut story collection, Klay — a former *The Narrow Road to the Deep North – Richard fiction readers wary of the slightest hint of Marine who served in Iraq — shows what happens when Revolving around the assassination attempt on Bob Marley Flanagan anthropomorphism into eagerly following the journey of young, heavily armed Americans collide with a fractured in 1976, this mesmerizingly powerful novel addresses A frail humanity survives the unspeakable in this novel of Flora 717, a lowly worker bee,as her curiosity and courage and deeply foreign country few of them even remotely politics, class, race and violence in Jamaica. the Burma-Thailand Railway of World War II. drive her ultimately to challenge her hive’s Queen. understand. Iraq comes across not merely as a theater of war Can’t and Won’t – Lydia Davis *Bellweather Rhapsody – Kate Racculia but as a laboratory for the human condition in extremis. The In Davis’s stories, the mundane and the fathomless appear *Nora Webster – Colm Toibin A state high school music festival at a rundown Catskills collection is hilarious, biting, whipsawing and sad: the best together on the same street, and calamity is always close at In Toibin’s luminous, elliptical novel, set in the late 1960s resort hotel is thrown into chaos by the disappearance of a thing written so far on what the war did to people’s souls. hand. and early ’70s, an Irishwoman struggles toward independence after her husband’s unexpected death. young prodigy and an approaching winter storm. Glee meets The Shining in Racculia’s darkly delightful and emotionally while creating one of the most memorable teenage Dooley, who laments that his famous murder ballad “ain’t resonant second novel that is “part ghost story, part mystery, protagonists in recent fiction. done much good since Burl Ives died.” part coming-of-age tale, and part love sonnet to music. Dust – Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor *On Such a Full Sea – ChangRae Lee Fives and Twenty-fives – Michael Pitre Dust opens in 2007 with a panicked chase through the Lee’s dystopian novel opens on a wasted landscape where With kaleidoscopic intensity, this debut chronicles the streets of Nairobi and moves between the lamentation of a the remnants of civilization survive in stratified compounds experiences of a U.S. Marine Corps Road Repair Platoon single family and the corruption of national politics swirling walled off from the lawless scrap heap of North America. led by uncertain Lt. P.E. Donovan with the benefit of an around one young man’s death, creating a vortex of grief *Orfeo – Richard Powers edgy interpreter (“terp”) nicknamed Dodge. that draws in generations of deceit and Kenya’s tumultuous A fascinating novel about the allure and power of music, modern history. *Some Luck – Jane Smiley “Orfeo” centers on an avant-garde composer in his 70s who In a work both grand and intimate, about parents and Frog Music – Emma Donoghue lives alone in a Pennsylvania college town. He has taken up children, hope and disappointment, countryside and country, Set in San Francisco in the summer of 1876, Donoghue’s an alarming hobby: DIY genetic engineering. Smiley moves from the 1920s to the 1950s as she unfurls novel is based on the real-life shooting of a cocky cross- Revival – Stephen King the life of Iowa farmers Rosanna and Walter Langdon. dresser who supported herself by supplying restaurants with Spanning five decades, King’s sweeping tale is narrated by frog legs. This atmospheric tale unfolds as a full-throated -- a man whose life is profoundly affected by a chance meeting The Spinning Heart Donal Ryan murder mystery. The 21 chapters in this spare novel, each narrated by a with a preacher when he was a boy in rural New England. different character, portray an Irish community in disarray In the Night of Time – Antonia Muňoz Molina *Thunderstruck & Other Stories – Elizabeth as its decent members are destroyed and the corrupt vanish. A labyrinthine and spellbinding novel of love and war, this McCracken story of a Spanish architect who falls passionately for a The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry – Gabrielle Zevin The calm, terrifying stories in “Thunderstruck” have the woman who is not his wife is an elaborate, complicated A. J. Fikry, a young widower and the owner of Island Books jittery emotional valence of fairy tales, where to name maze, peppered with historical facts and faces — and one of on Alice Island, is struggling to heal and keep his bookstore dangers — the wicked witch, the hungry wolf — is the most eloquent monuments to the Spanish Civil War ever and himself afloat…. Zevin’s adult fiction debut, “about a somehow to subdue them. to be raised in fiction.

life of books, redemption, and second chances…reminds us – J – Howard Jacobson *Tigerman Nick Harkaway exactly why we read and why we love.” Like a Marvel Comics mad scientist, Harkaway has crossed This chilling novel, a finalist for the Man Booker prize, These titles were chosen by *Us – David Nicholls. imagines an anti-Semitic future where wit and irony, along strains of a modern-day environmental crisis with the sweet Meet the Petersens off on a summer grand tour of Europe, with jazz and literary fiction, have evaporated in the heat of story of a veteran of the Afghan war trying to adopt a little Library Journal, The New York Son Albie, heading to university in the fall, isn’t totally on boy on a doomed island. a second Holocaust sometime in the 21st century.

board, while artist Connie and biochemist Douglas skirt – Times, and The Washington * A Little Lumpen Novelita – Robert Bolaňo *To Rise Again at a Decent Hour Joshua Ferris around the disintegration of their 24-year marriage. This novel stars a Red Sox-loving, misanthropic dentist in a Published in Spanish a few months before Bolaño’s death in Post as the best fiction of Washington Post 2003, this short novel about the struggles of an orphaned midlife crisis. Ferris spins a witty story that chews on Internet scams, relationship killers, crackpot theology, 2014. young woman is a gripping chronicle about urban youth, *All My Puny Sorrows – Miriam Toews baseball mania and the desperate loneliness of modern life. anomie, sex and crime. This sad and improbably witty novel is about two loving Under the Wide and Starry Sky – Nancy Horan sisters: one who wants to live, the other who wants to die. Long Man -- Amy Greene This novel reimagines the story of Robert Louis Stevenson Toews mines the frustration of caring for someone set on This literary thriller unfolds over three dramatic days in the and his American wife, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne. You can find all of them here at self-destruction, offering a nuanced look at the wrenching summer of 1936 as a mother searches for her missing 3- questions about the end of life. year-old daughter in a depressed Tennessee town threatened The Vacationers – Emma Straub by a flood. A dysfunctional family tries — and fails — to find joy on a The Ridgefield Library -- Ian McEwan *The Children Act summer vacation in Straub’s wise and funny novel. Set on This svelte tale tells the story of a British High Court judge Love and Treasure -- Ayelet Waldman an island in the Mediterranean Sea, much of the comedy facing an especially challenging case: a teen refusing life- Waldman’s multigenerational novel centers on a historical (*Designates books found on “best springs from the tension between being required to have the saving medical treatment. McEwan focuses not only on the event largely faded from memory: the Nazi-run Hungarian best time in the world and wanting to stab someone with an books” lists of more than one conflict between faith and science, but on the way a Gold Train, which carried a trove of goods stolen from the ice pick. publication) woman’s well-ordered life is shaken by a confluence of Jews in World War II.

– youthful passion and old betrayal. *Lucky Us – Amy Bloom *We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Karen Joy Fowler *China Dolls – Lisa See Set in World War II and taking place from Ohio to Fowler has conjured a set-up that’s unusual in the extreme: (Annotations taken from publications) From his prison cell, a divorced father who abducted his 6- Hollywood and Brooklyn, the novel centers on two a family of five in which the youngest daughter is a chimp. year-old daughter writes to his ex-wife, telling a life story motherless half-sisters who take it upon themselves to The novel tells an unsettling, emotionally complex story that that is simultaneously plea, apology and defense. reverse their sorry fortunes. plumbs the mystery of our relationship with the animal *Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands – Chris Bohjalian Mr. Tall – Tony Earley kingdom — relatives included. Narrated by a 16-year-old girl in Vermont, Bohjalian’s This collection of engaging stories is topped by a novella- suspenseful and provocative novel pushes some hot buttons length tale that’s a rollicking experimentalist riff on “Jack — child homelessness, mental illness, nuclear energy — and the Beanstalk” — featuring a contemptuous talking dog, a pair of post-feminist maidens and an equally forlorn Tom