The year’s best books, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.FICTIONAMERICANAHBy Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95.By turns tender and trenchant, Adichie’s third novel takes on the comedy and tragedy of American race relations from the perspective of a young Nigerian immigrant. From the office politics of a hair-braiding salon to the burden of memory, there’s nothing too humble or daunting for this fearless writer, who is so attuned to the various worlds and shifting selves we inhabit — in life and online, in love, as agents and victims of history and the heroes of our own stories.THE FLAMETHROWERSBy Rachel Kushner.Scribner, $26.99.Radical politics, avant-garde art and motorcycle racing all spring to life in Kushner’s radiant novel of the 1970s, in which a young woman moves to New York to become an artist, only to wind up involved in the revolutionary protest movement that shook Italy in those years. The novel, Kushner’s second, deploys mordant observations and chiseled sentences to explore how individuals are swept along by implacable social forces.
THE GOLDFINCHBy Donna Tartt.Little, Brown & Company, $30.Tartt’s intoxicating third novel, after “The Secret History” and “The Little Friend,” follows the travails of Theo Decker, who emerges from a terrorist bombing motherless but in possession of a prized Dutch painting. Like the best of Dickens, the novel is packed with incident and populated with vivid characters. At its heart is the unwavering belief that come what may, art can save us by lifting us above ourselves. LIFE AFTER LIFEBy Kate Atkinson.A Reagan Arthur Book/Little, Brown & Company, $27.99.Demonstrating the agile style and theatrical bravado of her much-admired Jackson Brodie mystery novels, Atkinson takes on nothing less than the evils of mid-20th-century history and the nature of death as she moves back and forth in time, fitting together versions of a life story for a heroine who keeps dying, then being resurrected — and sent off in different, but entirely plausible, directions. TENTH OF DECEMBERStoriesBy George Saunders.Random House, $26.Saunders’s wickedly entertaining stories veer from the deadpan to the flat-out demented: Prisoners are force-fed mood-altering drugs;
ordinary saps cling to delusions of grandeur; third-world women, held aloft on surgical wire, become the latest in bourgeois lawn ornaments. Beneath the comedy, though, Saunders writes with profound empathy, and this impressive collection advances his abiding interest in questions of class, power and justice.NONFICTIONAFTER THE MUSIC STOPPEDThe Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work AheadBy Alan S. Blinder.The Penguin Press, $29.95. Blinder’s terrific book on the financial meltdown of 2008 argues that it happened because of a “perfect storm,” in which many unfortunate events occurred simultaneously, producing a far worse outcome than would have resulted from just a single cause. Blinder criticizes both the Bush and Obama administrations, especially for letting Lehman Brothers fail, but he also praises them for taking steps to save the country from falling into a serious depression. Their response to the near disaster, Blinder says, was far better than the public realizes.
DAYS OF FIREBush and Cheney in the White HouseBy Peter Baker.Doubleday, $35.Baker succeeds in telling the story of the several crises of the Bush administration with fairness and balance, which is to say that he is sympathetic to his subjects, acknowledging their accomplishments but excusing none of their errors. Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The Times, is fascinated by the mystery of the Bush-Cheney relationship, and even more so by the mystery of George W. Bush himself. Did Bush lead, or was he led by others? In the end, Baker concludes, the “decider” really did decide. FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIALLife and Death in a Storm-Ravaged HospitalBy Sheri Fink.Crown, $27.In harrowing detail, Fink describes the hellish days at a hospital during and after Hurricane Katrina, when desperate medical professionals were suspected of administering lethal injections to critically ill patients. Masterfully and compassionately reported and as gripping as a thriller, the book poses reverberating questions about end-of-life care, race discrimination in medicine and how individuals and institutions break down during disasters.
THE SLEEPWALKERSHow Europe Went to War in 1914By Christopher Clark.Harper, $29.99.Clark manages in a single volume to provide a comprehensive, highly readable survey of the events leading up to World War I. He avoids singling out any one nation or leader as the guilty party. “The outbreak of war,” he writes, “is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over a corpse.” The participants were, in his term, “sleepwalkers,” not fanatics or murderers, and the war itself was a tragedy, not a crime.WAVEBy Sonali Deraniyagala.Alfred A. Knopf, $24.On the day after Christmas in 2004, Deraniyagala called her husband to the window of their hotel room in Sri Lanka. “I want to show you something odd,” she said. The ocean looked foamy and closer than usual. Within moments, it was upon them. Deraniyagala lost her husband, her parents and two young sons to the Indian Ocean tsunami. Her survival was miraculous, and so too is this memoir — unsentimental, raggedly intimate, full of fury.
At Book World, we poll our regular reviewers about the books they enjoyed during the year, and then the editors weigh and consider, count and recount. We’re not worried so much about making the perfect choices (those don’t exist). We just want to make sure our choices provide a rich investment for your time. Here’s to another profitable year of reading. BOOK OF AGES: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin Jill Lepore’s luminous story of the life of Benjamin Franklin’s sister is stitched together from fragments and scraps. There is no record of anything Jane Franklin might have thought or felt in her youth. Her brother does not mention her in his autobiography. Yet she emerges here as witty, curious and resilient in the face of unimaginable grief, largely from listless, sickly or lost children. Lepore, a history professor at Harvard, shows that Jane’s importance lies in her ordinariness — her learning thwarted by circumstance, but her intelligence shaped by her uniquely female experience.
— Joanna Scutts DRINK: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol By Ann Dowsett Johnston (HarperWave) Ann Dowsett Johnston, a recovering alcoholic, veers between reporting and memoir as she untangles the messy realities behind women’s rising rate of alcohol abuse and why it is so much more dangerous for them than for men. A past editor of Maclean’s magazine in Canada and former vice principal at McGill University, Johnston alarms us, one searing fact at a time. There are moments in “Drink” when the parade of alcoholic women seems endless. So many sad stories. So many alcohol-fueled ways to ruin a large swath of one’s life. It feels relentless and frightening. For a lot of women brave enough to read it, it may feel a little too familiar, too. Therein lies the hope. — Connie Schultz GOING CLEAR: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief By Lawrence Wright (Knopf) Lawrence Wright, winner of a 2007 Pulitzer Prize for “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” brings a clear-eyed, investigative fearlessness to Scientology — its history, its theology, its hierarchy.
The result is a rollicking, if deeply creepy, narrative ride, evidence that truth can be stranger even than science fiction. He builds a portrait of its founder, the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, as a voluble, charismatic, imaginative man who liked to spin fantastical stories. “Going Clear” asks exactly the right questions: What is it that makes the religion alluring? What do its adherents get out of it? How can seemingly rational people subscribe to beliefs that others find incomprehensible? — Lisa Miller THE GUNS AT LAST LIGHT:The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 By Rick Atkinson (Henry Holt) In this, the third volume of his Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson reconstructs the period from D-Day to V-E Day by weaving a multitude of tiny details into a tapestry of sublime prose. He conveys the immensity of the war, the absurdity, the heroism and iniquity, the pomposity of generals and politicians. His capacity for whimsy provides welcome respite from the oppressive horror.
“The Guns at Last Light” is a very long book, but in contrast to so many popular histories, this one seems too short.— Gerard DeGroot THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE By David Finkel(Sarah Crichton/Farrar Straus Giroux) In this sequel to “The Good Soldiers,” his 2009 account of an American infantry battalion at war in Iraq, David Finkel attends to what he calls the “after war.” His concern is with the soldiers who return from the war zone bearing wounds — and with the loved ones on whom those wounds also become imprinted. Above all, Finkel, an editor at The Washington Post, is concerned with wounds that may not be fully visible: post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury and related conditions. What he finds is anxiety, shame, depression, guilt, sleeplessness, self-abuse, spousal abuse, child abuse, drug abuse and suicidal tendencies, but not much in the way of useful therapy.— Andrew Bacevich A CONSTELLATION OF VITAL PHENOMENA Here, in fresh, gorgeous prose, is a story that dares to be as tender as it is ghastly.
Marra’s first novel opens in 2004 in a tiny, blood-soaked Chechen village, when the father of an 8-year-old girl is abducted by federalist thugs. A peasant doctor is determined to save his old friend’s daughter by spiriting her away to an all-but-abandoned hospital in a nearby town. The experiences of these neighbors come to us in flashbacks that reach back years. As the elements of this complicated plot begin to align in ways too tragic and moving to anticipate, the past resolves into focus; the future is freighted with anguish but flecked with hope. — Ron Charles THE GOOD LORD BIRD This boisterous, highly entertaining novel, winner of a National Book Award, presents Henry Shackleford, who claims to be the only black person to have survived John Brown’s raid on the Virginian town of Harpers Ferry in 1859. As the story begins, Brown mistakes 11-year-old Henry for a little girl, and “Henrietta” becomes the abolitionist’s inspiration. For the next three years, he takes us from adventure to misadventure;
from riding the plains with Brown’s Bible-thumping roughnecks to palavering with Harriet Tubman. Against the grim grid of history, we see a bumptious American tale, and McBride’s use of the vernacular makes for a comical ride. A terrible climax will come to pass, and we hurtle toward it, laughing, in this deeply researched, richly imagined book. — Marie Arana HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN The ninth novel in Louise Penny’s series starring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his sidekick, Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir, is extraordinary. When the story begins, Beauvoir has transferred into the command of Gamache’s archrival, Chief Superintendent Francoeur. Meanwhile, in a small house in Quebec, a woman is found murdered: the last member of the Ouellet quintuplets, wh o had been born in the Great Depression. (Penny lifts liberally here from the real-life story of the Dionne quintuplets, whose parents ceded custody of their daughters to the government of Ontario.) Another narrative thread involves the possible suicide of a government worker.
Penny has written a magnificent mystery that appeals not only to the head, but also to the heart and soul. — Maureen Corrigan THE SON With its vast scope — stretching from pre-Civil War cowboys to post-9/11 immigrants — “The Son” makes a viable claim to being a Great American Novel. Here is the tale of the United States written in blood across the Texas plains, a 200-year cycle of theft and murder that shreds any golden myths of civilized development. The story rotates chapter by chapter through three distinct voices born about 50 years apart: Col. Eli McCullough describes his harrowing life in captivity with the Comanche Indians who murdered his family; Eli’s misanthropic son mourns the brutal conflict with his Mexican neighbors; and Eli’s great-granddaughter considers her life as one of the world’s wealthiest women. Meyer has produced a remarkable orchestration of American history. — R.C. THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS Claire Messud’s ferocious novel arrives at a curious time in our national conversation about gender roles.