Best Fiction 2014
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*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 – Chang-Rae 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.