The year’s best books, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
FICTION
By Anthony Doerr
Scribner, $27.
With
brisk chapters and sumptuous language, Doerr’s second novel follows two
characters whose paths will intersect in the waning days of World War
II: an orphaned engineering prodigy recruited into the Nazi ranks, and a
blind French girl who joins the Resistance. Tackling questions of
survival, endurance and moral obligations during wartime, the book is as
precise and artful and ingenious as the puzzle boxes the heroine’s
locksmith father builds for her. Impressively, it is also a vastly
entertaining feat of storytelling.
By Jenny Offill
Alfred A. Knopf, $22.95.
Offill’s
slender and cannily paced novel, her second, assembles fragments,
observations, meditations and different points of view to chart the
course of a troubled marriage. Wry and devastating in equal measure, the
novel is a cracked mirror that throws light in every direction — on
music and literature; science and philosophy; marriage and motherhood
and infidelity; and especially love and the grueling rigors of domestic
life. Part elegy and part primal scream, it’s a profound and
unexpectedly buoyant performance.
By Lily King
Atlantic Monthly Press, $25.
In
1933, the anthropologist Margaret Mead took a field trip to the Sepik
River in New Guinea with her second husband; they met and collaborated
with the man who would become her third. King has taken the known
details of that actual event and created this exquisite novel, her
fourth, about the rewards and disappointments of intellectual ambition
and physical desire. The result is an intelligent, sensual tale told
with a suitable mix of precision and heat.
By Akhil Sharma
W. W. Norton & Company, $23.95.
Sharma’s
austere but moving novel tells the semi-autobiographical story of a
family that immigrates from India to Queens, and has just begun to build
a new life when the elder son suffers severe brain damage in a swimming
pool accident. Deeply unnerving and gorgeously tender, the book
chronicles how grief renders the parents unable to cherish and raise
their other son; love, it suggests, becomes warped and jagged and even
seemingly vanishes in the midst of mourning.
By Phil Klay
The Penguin Press, $26.95.
In
this brilliant debut story collection, Klay — a former Marine who
served in Iraq — shows what happens when young, heavily armed Americans
collide with a fractured and deeply foreign country few of them even
remotely understand. Iraq comes across not merely as a theater of war
but as a laboratory for the human condition in extremis. The collection
is hilarious, biting, whipsawing and sad: the best thing written so far
on what the war did to people’s souls.
NONFICTION
By Roz Chast
Bloomsbury, $28.
Cartoons,
it turns out, are tailor-made for the absurdities of old age, illness
and dementia. In Chast’s devastating and sublime graphic memoir, the odd
dramas and repetitive minutiae find perfect expression in her signature
antic drawings as she describes helping her parents navigate their
final years — from packing up their cluttered Brooklyn apartment to
getting a seat at the “right” table in the nursing home. No one has
perfect parents, and no one can write a perfect book about them. But
Chast has come close.
By Eula Biss
Graywolf Press, $24.
In
this spellbinding blend of memoir, science journalism and literary
criticism, Biss unpacks what the fear of vaccines tells us about larger
anxieties involving purity, contamination and interdependency. Deeply
researched and anchored in Biss’s own experiences as a new mother, this
ferociously intelligent book is itself an inoculation against bad
science and superstition, and a reminder that we owe one another our
lives.
By Hermione Lee
Alfred A. Knopf, $35.
The
life and times of that elusive, original miracle worker, the English
novelist and biographer Penelope Fitzgerald, have been brilliantly
captured by Lee, previously the author of masterly portraits of Virginia
Woolf, Willa Cather and Edith Wharton. Growing up steeped in literature
but sidetracked by the vicissitudes of life, Fitzgerald published her
first book at 58 and did not become famous until she was 80. But her
fiction, when it finally emerged, had a tamped-down force and intense
compression, as if the decades-long wait had worked its own clarifying,
crystallizing magic.
By Elizabeth Kolbert
Henry Holt & Company, $28.
Kolbert
reports from the front lines of the violent collision between
civilization and our planet’s ecosystem — from the Great Barrier Reef to
her own backyard — in this, her third, book. Traveling to some of the
world’s remotest corners, she examines how man-made climate change
threatens to eliminate 20 to 50 percent of all living species on earth
within this century. This is environmental writing at its most rigorous
and richly detailed — and as riveting as any thriller.
By Lawrence Wright
Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95.
In
1978, over 13 days at Camp David, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin and Jimmy
Carter hammered out a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt that
remains the most profound diplomatic achievement to emerge from the
Mideast conflict. In a fascinating account of the talks, Wright combines
history, politics and, most of all, a gripping drama of three clashing
personalities into a tale of constant plot twists and dark humor. He
reminds us that Carter’s visionary idealism and doggedness represented
an act of surpassing political courage.
