→ June 11, 2023
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Demon Copperhead.

Barbara Kingsolver shared this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – the first time the honor was split among two books – for her novel Demon Copperhead, which shared the honor with Hernan Diaz’s Trust. Demon Copperhead borrows its structure and characters from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, transplanting the whole story to a poor mining county in the Appalachians, narrated by its title character from his early childhood to adulthood as the opioid crisis devastates his community, family, and his own life.

Demon is born to a single mother in Lee County, where the mining industry employed nearly everyone and then left them underemployed, injured, and increasingly addicted to painkillers. Demon, whose real name is Damon but acquired the nickname “Demon” early in life and had it stick, never knows any stability from the word go – his mother is a recovering addict, marries a local tough guy who terrorizes her and abuses Demon, only to have his mother die and his stepdad toss him out into the hands of social services. His path takes him through two foster homes, including the con-artist McCobbs, then to his estranged grandmother’s house, then back to Lee County and the high school football team, only to have a knee injury push him into the bottomless well of oxycontin. It’s a parade of tragedies interspersed with dark humor, leading towards eventual small triumphs, told by one of the most memorable narrator characters I’ve ever encountered.

If you know the bones of David Copperfield, from the book or perhaps from Armando Iannucci’s faithful 2020 film adaptation, then you’ll know the general plot outline of Demon Copperhead, as it adheres to the former book’s major story beats right to the end. Almost every character here has a clear analogue in the original – Demon is David, the McCobbs are the Micawbers, U-Haul is Uriah Heep, and so forth – that also provides the foundation for the modern versions, although they’re fleshed out enough to feel different from the originals. You could see U-Haul becoming Demon’s main antagonist early on, especially once you connect him to Uriah, but the way in which this plays out is different enough from the original to make it seem new.

This novel’s real strength is Demon, though. Kingsolver has given him a unique voice that combines the wisdom of his experiences through the story, the naïveté of his place of birth, and layers of empathy that appear at surprising times throughout the work. Kingsolver has used interesting narrative techniques before, as in The Poisonwood Bible, but here she does so with a single character who is thoroughly developed, who grows and learns throughout the novel, and whose flaws are right there on display even in his own telling. David Copperfield is someone you root for throughout Dickens’s novel because he’s so inherently good, and his travails are the result of encounters with terrible people and the extreme economic inequality of England in the early 1800s. Demon is more complex, making poor choices, sometimes to the point of treating people who care for him quite badly, even missing out on opportunities and lifelines. It’s a little harder to root for him, although ultimately I came down on that side, bearing in mind that it was clear where things were all going to end.

Dickens’s work was a social commentary on that inequality and the abysmal treatment of the poor, especially children, in his era, a theme he’d first covered in Oliver Twist and would return to many times in the later parts of his life. Kingsolver does the same here, with two focal points – the opioid epidemic and its main drivers in Purdue Pharmaceuticals; and the abandonment of rural people by nearly every stage of government, from counties and school districts up to the federal level. It’s not subtle by any means, and that’s been a criticism of the book, but I don’t know how you can be subtle about the harm that opioids have wreaked on these parts of the country. Kingsolver delivers the commentary in the most granular fashion, by showing the epidemic’s impact on individual characters and their families, most notably children neglected, abused, or left orphaned by those addicted, with scant discussion of policy questions or legal maneuvers. Purdue gets its mention, but mostly because Demon’s Aunt June briefly dates a guy who’s a sales rep for the company, and for the rest of the book they’re an offscreen villain, while every form of government is asleep at its respective wheel. It’s very Dickensian in a contemporary way, trading the workhouse for rehab, sharing its disdain for the central government’s failure to protect its most vulnerable charges.

It’s an arduous read because of all of the slings and arrows Demon suffers along the way, but Kingsolver does it more concisely than Dickens, and with such a compelling voice as the narrator that it’s both quicker than its page count would imply and more enjoyable than you’d think for a story where people do horrible things to each other and themselves. The adult Damon’s wry, wise telling of his own life is what truly powered me through the book so quickly. And with such a distinctly American plot and setting, it’s a worthy winner of the Pulitzer honor.

Next up: Susanna Hoffs, one of my favorite musicians of the 1980s and early 1990s, just released her first novel, This Bird Has Flown.

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→ April 9, 2023
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The Trees.

Percival Everett has been publishing novels since the mid-1980s, but the 66-year-old author has come into much greater critical acclaim with his three most recent works, becoming a Pulitzer finalist for 2021’s Telephone, a Booker finalist for 2022’s The Trees, and, so far, already a finalist for the NBCC Fiction award for Dr. No. I’d never read any of his work before The Trees, which I read on my flight to Phoenix and enjoyed so much that I went to Changing Hands that same day and bought Dr. No. The Trees is a massive fake-out of a novel, starting out as a bawdy, neo-noir sort of detective novel, before taking a sudden turn into more serious and philosophical territory, resolving the question of the crime in the least satisfying way possible – because that was never the point.

A couple of white men are found brutally murdered in the minuscule, backwards town of Money, Mississippi, a town only known for being the site of the murder of Emmett Till. In each case, they’ve been castrated, with their genitalia in the fist of a Black man’s corpse found in the same room. And each time, it’s the same Black man’s corpse. It goes from the morgue to the next murder scene, making a mockery of the local authorities, who did not need the help. Two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations show up to try to solve the murders, which doesn’t go over well with the white cops in Money or even the victims’ families, although the assistance the two receive from some of the Black residents is only slightly better. The victims turn out to have a surprising connection, and just as the MBI agents and the FBI agent assigned to help them have started to put this together, reports come in of nearly identical crimes in Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.

The Trees is part dark comedy, part revenge fantasy, part detective story (at least at the start), but it is entirely a story about the weight of history. The systemic racism that pervades the entire history of the United States is reflected in the murders, the authorities, the investigation, almost every aspect of The Trees. It’s in the banter – much of it very, very funny – between the two MBI agents, who absolutely could have stepped out of The Wire. It’s in the diner where Gertrude, a fair-skinned woman who lives in Money, works as a waitress, often serving white people who conveniently forget that she’s Black. It’s practically woven into the pages of the book.

While the novel doesn’t have the same psychological horror element as Get Out, it mines very similar thematic territory, combining it with the sort of over-the-top humor that made Paul Beatty’s The Sellout such a critical success. There’s a seething rage beneath the surface here that Everett holds in check with the various layers of humor, especially with the MBI agents Jim Davis and Ed Morgan, who combine the “old married couple” vibe of McNulty and Bunk with wry commentary on the dangers of their situation as two Black feds in a town that has is still debating whether to acknowledge the advent of Reconstruction. (These two characters could have their own TV series, although doing so would strip out the theme of historical racism that underlies the novel, and I think the novel is unfilmable given its somewhat ambiguous ending.) It’s a delicate balance to strike, and Everett never seems to waver, mixing in humor highbrow and low, even throwing in some ridiculous character names like Cad Fondle or Herberta Hind, to allow him to escalate the extent and violence of the crimes at the narrative’s heart without turning the reader away.

Where The Trees ends may frustrate you if you need a firm conclusion that wraps up all of a novel’s loose ends, as Everett does very little of that. You’ll know who’s responsible for the murders, but beyond that, he offers little resolution and far more doubt than is conventional for any novel, let alone one that at least draws on the traditions of the detective genre. It’s in service of the book’s larger themes of historical racism and the double-edged sword of vengeance. Your mileage may vary, of course. I found myself so drawn in by the humor and the tight prose that I was willing to follow The Trees wherever it led me.

Next up: Elizabeth McCracken’s The Hero of this Book.

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→ March 24, 2023
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The Rabbit Hutch.

Tess Gunty won the National Book Award in 2022 for her debut novel The Rabbit Hutch, the title of which refers to a low-income housing complex in a declining Rust Belt town called Vacca Vale that is home to a broad cast of peculiar characters. It’s a compelling read and the prose is lovely, although the stories of the various characters don’t tie together that well, giving the book the feel of a series of nested short stories rather than a single, coherent work.

The most prominent characters in The Rabbit Hutch are the four young adults who have just recently left the town’s foster-care system, including 18-year-old Blandine Watkins, the star of the show in more ways than one. She’s beautiful and eccentric, unknowable in many ways, bewitching at least one of her three male roommates (Malik), delving into all sorts of mysticism and woo while redefining who she is as she enters adulthood. Those three roommates are all just a little further into their majority, none of them doing very well at adulting, which is why, we’re led to believe, they so easily fall into a bizarre pattern of ritual violence against animals. Gunty also gives us an extended flashback to a former student at the local high school, Tiffany, who becomes the subject of the school’s 42-year-old music teacher’s advances and eventually his victim as well; and a long digression about Elsie, who was once the child star of a TV sitcom called Meet the Neighbors that’s beloved by one of the Hutch’s residents, and whose son, it turns out, hated her guts and is completely out of his mind. He doesn’t even live in Vacca Vale, and the thickness of the thread that brings him there by the end of the novel could be measured in nanometers.

It’s a disjointed novel, but Gunty has a real knack for crafting characters and describing her settings so that the reader observes from both the bird’s-eye view and from up close, putting you right there in the action through her use of both detail and metaphor. She refers to a dowdy 40-year-old woman named Joan who moderates the forums on an obituaries web site as having “the posture of a question mark (and) a stock face,” which only underscores the woman’s insignificance in the town and to some degree in her own life. She speaks of an older man failing on dating apps as hating women “an anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument.” Even when the plot was all over the place – and it was, a lot, especially when Gunty jerks us out of Vacca Vale to follow Elsie and her idiot son – the prose carried it through.

The novel opens with a passage where Blandine “exits her body,” which is going to lead readers to assume she’s been killed and they’ll have to wait the whole book to find out how and why. I’m going to spoil this right now, because it’s a dumb gimmick: She is alive at the end of the book. There’s more to it than this, but I can’t tell you how irritated I was even when I figured out before the midpoint that this was a scam – and it’s just not necessary. The progression of the story around these characters, and the way Gunty brings together the various subplots, is more than enough to sustain the narrative greed here. The strong implication that Blandine is dead, boosted by some other hints throughout the novel, only to reveal at the end that she’s not is cheap and unworthy of the rest of the book.

The Rabbit Hutch follows in the Richard Russo tradition of profiling dying industrial towns through their residents, here with less humor but with far better-written women than Russo ever provided. It also reminded me of J. K. Rowling’s poorly-received novel The Casual Vacancy, her first novel for adults and one that received a lot of criticism because it wasn’t Harry Potter. That book was set in a fictional town in southwest England that also seemed a bit down on its luck and followed a very broad, and in that case more diverse, cast of residents in the wake of the death of a parish councillor, working in themes of income inequality, racial injustice, drug policy, and more. I liked that book more than critics did as a whole, and think it’s a fair comparison here, with a more ambitious plot but inferior prose to Gunty’s.

I can’t speak to the National Book Award for last year, as I haven’t read any of the five other finalists, but The Rabbit Hutch feels much more to me like a promising rookie season that points to superstar potential than a “best of the year” sort of work. I enjoyed it, I loved the prose, I thought some of the subplots worked but as many didn’t, and there was too much manipulation of the reader’s interest for a novel this serious. I hope and expect that her next work will play more to her strengths, and dispense with the stunt writing.

Next up: Percival Everett’s The Trees.

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→ March 7, 2023
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The Fortune Men.

I may have mentioned a few times that my in-laws are Welsh, as in born in Wales, so I’ve explored a bit of Welsh culture in the last few years while dabbling in the language as well. I discovered quite recently that Llenydiaeth Cymru (Literature Wales) has its own annual prizes under the Wales Book of the Year banner, and the most recent Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award went to Nadifa Mohammed for her latest novel The Fortune Men. It’s based on the true story of Somalian immigrant Mahmood Mattan, the last man hanged in Cardiff, whose 1952 trial and execution for the murder of Lily Volpert were a tragic miscarriage of justice. His conviction was quashed 45 years later, followed by a payment to his family of over £700,000 and then a police apology in 2022, although by then his widow and three sons had all died.

Mohammed reimagines the time from just before the murder through the crime, arrest, and sham trial, where Mattan barely received a defense and, in the retelling, the police misconduct was appalling. There were no witnesses to the murder, and the only two people who were certain to have seen the assailant, the victim’s sister and niece, both said Mattan didn’t match their recollection. A Black man came to the door of Lily’s shop after hours, but as a moneylender as well as a seller of fabric and other odds and ends, she was accustomed to such visits. Her sister closed the door between the shop and the family’s dining room, but about twenty minutes later, someone knocked to say that her sister had been found dead, her throat slashed, and £100 taken from the safe. A combination of racism, police incompetence, and coincidence put Mattan at the center of the investigation, and once the authorities had settled on him as their man, very little could stop the wheels of justice from crushing him under their weight.

Mattan receives a fascinatingly open portrayal in this novel, as Mohammed does not canonize her subject, depicting him as a dissolute gambler and a bit of a layabout. He was a sailor who fled a suffocatingly predictable life in what was then British Somaliland, eventually taking to the seas, settling in Cardiff, and marrying Laura over her family’s objections, only to jump back on a ship almost immediately after their wedding. He’s largely out of work at the time of his arrest, only half-heartedly looking for jobs, spending what little he gets in public assistance at the horse tracks. He doesn’t pay the people who lend him money back, at least not promptly. He’s also prone to verbal outbursts that come back to bite him at the trial. Yet he’s also quite clearly innocent of the crime in question, and a loving if sometimes inattentive husband and father to three sons.

We see Mattan as a whole person, rather than just a victim of a racist society, or even just a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. He has a childlike faith that the truth will set him free in a literal sense, until it becomes clear that the British justice system is not interested in justice. Flashbacks to his childhood also lay bare the irony of a man leaving a predictable but relatively safe life in Somaliland only to move to the supposedly more enlightened colonizer country to face racism, poverty, and ultimately murder at the hands of the state.

The story, and the end, are already known, so Mohammed’s challenge is to make this story with a defined arc and conclusion interesting, which she does, while generating empathy in the reader for a relatively unsympathetic main character. Being condemned isn’t a character trait, so Mohammed fleshes out Mattan in a fascinating way to make him real and expand him beyond the common tragedy of an innocent man sent to his death. It’s a serious novel in multiple senses of the term, with a topic that seems contemporary despite the setting seventy years in the past.

Next up: Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s The House of Rust, winner of the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.

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→ March 1, 2023
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The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

Shehan Karunatilaka won this year’s Booker Prize for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a fascinating work of magical realism that might as well be called Maali Almeida in the Bardo, as its protagonist is dead from the moment the book begins. Set in Sri Lanka in 1989, in the early years of what would be a 36-year civil war between the governing Sinhalese majority and Tamil rebels, the book follows the title character, a photographer who took many photos of victims of the war, through his seven days (moons) in purgatory as he tries to figure out who killed him and how.

Maali Almeida is dead, and finds himself in a bureaucratic afterlife where multiple entities try to coax him into different directions, one of which is “the Light” and promises some sort of salvation, while another might give him the chance to communicate with the living to try to direct them to solve the mystery of his death by retrieving an important set of incriminating photographs he’s hidden. One possible explanation is that his work for a shadowy non-governmental organization or his freelance work for the AP and other journalistic outlets covering atrocities committed by both sides during the war. Almeida photographed corpses, but also murders and murderers, and any number of people might have wanted him dead.

Almeida was also gay in a society that was not particularly hospitable to gay people, although in his tales of his life there were closeted gay men all over Colombo (the capital of Sri Lanka). He lived with two friends, Jaki, who was supposed to be his girlfriend; and Dilan, known as DD, who was one of those closeted men and becomes Maali’s lover, although the photographer is serially unfaithful to him. DD’s father is the powerful businessman and politician Stanley, who would strongly prefer that his son not be gay and join his business rather than working for an environmental activist group, and who is emblematic of the byzantine connections across Sri Lankan society at the time, where even the “good” guys could be tied to one side of the civil war or the other.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a richly layered novel that explores themes beyond just that of the civil war, which ended in 2009 with the defeat of the main Tamil rebel group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and the death of their leader. Maali is a complicated protagonist, part hero and part anti-hero, a drunk, a philanderer, a degenerate gambler, an atheist, and more. He professed to just taking photographs as a job, although of course he took photographs as a hobby as well; he’s not explicitly political, but hoped to take pictures that could end wars and bloodshed. His multifaceted character opens up all kinds of thematic possibilities, from discrimination to morality to how we cope with our own mortality, and Karunatilaka explores all of these, some more successfully than others.

Of course, because of the photographs Maali took, the authorities become very keen to find this missing stash – more keen than they are to find out who killed him, even with pressure from his family, from Jaki and DD, even from Stanley at one point. This creates two parallel narratives and a real sense of time pressure, as Maali tries to direct his friends to get to the photographs so they can expose the atrocities of both sides, while the authorities are trying to get the photos for themselves, and there’s an inherent tension from the question of who’ll get to the photos first – or whether the authorities will get to Jaki and DD before anyone finds the cache. There’s also the clock of the seven moons, referring to seven days before which Maali must decide whether he’s going to move into the Light or follow one of the other shades offering a different experience in the afterlife.

Karunatilaka seems to be well-versed in the history of this sort of political satire with elements of magical realism, from The Master and Margarita to One Hundred Years of Solitude. This novel isn’t at the level of those two masterpieces, but it’s an heir to their legacy, drawing heavily on the former’s sense of the absurd and fantastical, and on the latter’s sense of outrage, especially outrage at the lack of outrage. Both of those earlier novels targeted authoritarian regimes that would torture and disappear opponents, which is exactly what the Sinhalese government in Sri Lanka did during the civil war. So much of this novel takes place in the afterworld – an especially ridiculous one, with bureaucrats, flunkies, and talking leopards – that it shields the reader from some of the worst horrors of the civil war, allowing Karunatilaka to push forward with a narrative that might otherwise have been unreadable.

I haven’t read any of the other longlisted novels for last year’s Booker Prize, although Percival Everett’s The Trees is on my to-read shelf right now. As Booker winners go, though, this is one of the better ones among the 40 I’ve read, and I hope it signals a return to the peak the prize had from 2008 to 2018, with just one dud in those eleven years and several of my all-time favorite novels winning during the span.

Next up: Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men, which won the Wales Book of the Year award in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Booker in 2021, losing to Damon Galgut’s The Promise.

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→ February 24, 2023
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Death is Hard Work.

Death is Hard Work is the most recent novel by Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa to be translated into English, first published in Arabic in 2016 and appearing in translation three years later. It’s a play on William Faulkner’s classic tragicomic novel As I Lay Dying, this time set in Syria during the present civil war, as three siblings try to transport their father’s corpse to a specific graveyard where he’d asked to be buried, working as a commentary on the collapse of Syrian society as well as a window into the internecine squabbles of the family.

Abdel Latif el-Salim has died, not long after his beloved second wife, Navine, preceded him in death, and Abdel’s dying wish to his son Bolbol was that he be buried in a certain graveyard in his hometown of Anabiya, a long way from where he died somewhere in Damascus. Bolbol takes this request very seriously despite the obvious practical complications of transporting a corpse in a hot country that is bitterly divided by civil war, where passing between two checkpoints can be more complicated than crossing an international border. Bolbol then recruits his brother, the arrogant and short-tempered Hussein, and their sister, Fatima, to accompany him on what seems like a suicide mission to drive a van with their father’s corpse in back to Anabiya. The novel follows them through interactions with friends and acquaintances who try to help them, rebels and soldiers who usually try to hold them up, to a jail and a hospital and across roads that barely exist, before the trio finally reach their destination.

The absurdity of the novel comes primarily from the fact that their father was wanted by the brutal authoritarian regime that still controls Syria for some unknown offense, likely just thoughtcrimes, which causes problems almost every time they are stopped by any entity connected to the central government. At one point, the soldiers “arrest” the corpse, although fortunately for all concerned, it never progresses to a trial. There’s also the grotesque humor that comes from the decomposition of the body, the stench of which actually helps the siblings escape trouble on more than one occasion on their journey.

The quarreling among the siblings, and the back stories of all four of the main characters (including the father, whose life was full of joy and heartbreak), all give the novel its dramatic heft. There’s a contrast between the almost mundane lives they all lived prior to the start of the civil war in 2011-12 and the life-and-death struggle going on every day across Syria in the novel’s present day, as well as a parallel between the siblings arguing with each other and the split within Syrian society, pitting neighbor against neighbor in a conflict that has at least a half-dozen different groups fighting the government and sometimes each other. I have just superficial knowledge of the civil war, but it seemed clear that Khalifa was at least in part crafting a metaphor for the conflict and for his country, where siblings continue to argue long after the thing that ties them together – a nation, their father – is dead and decaying.

There’s another, less positive aspect to the connection between this work and Faulkner – the challenging prose. Khalefa’s writing is dense, without the long sentence structures of the bard of Yoknapatawpha County but a similar grounding in the details of every scene and every character. That creates a richer tapestry, with even secondary characters becoming more three-dimensional on the page, but also makes it a slower read for a novel just short of 200 pages.

Khalefa’s previous novel, No Knives in this City’s Kitchens, won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, given annually since 1996 to a novel written in Arabic that has not yet been translated into English, with such a translation part of the prize. I’d be curious if any of you have read that novel (or this one), since I liked Death is Hard Work enough to seek it out.

Next up: I’m currently reading the most recent Booker Prize winner, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka.

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→ December 1, 2022
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A Burning.

Megha Majumdar’s debut novel A Burning became a surprise bestseller in 2020, shortly after its release, catching fire (pun intended) in part because of a page-turning narrative and terse chapters that keep the pace moving. It’s a well-written book, crafted as if by a far more experienced writer, but a simple plot and poorly developed characters make it a less satisfying read than other novels with similar themes and settings.

A Burning revolves around three characters in Kolkata: Jivan, a teenaged girl who aspires to the middle class; PT Sir, her former physical education teacher who finds himself rising quickly in the ranks of a Hindu nationalist party; and Lovely, a hijra and aspiring actress whom Lovely is teaching to read English. When Jivan witnesses a terrorist attack on a train near her home, she posts some anti-government comments on Facebook, and finds herself arrested and charged as an accessory to the crime. Lovely could serve as her alibi, as Jivan was with her right before the bombing took place, and PT Sir could be a character witness. Yet they both find that helping Jivan would hurt their own aspirations. PT Sir has gained this status with the party by serving as a witness against various defendants in criminal cases, claiming he saw them commit the crimes in exchange for a small payment and increased favor. Lovely seems to be falling for some kind of predatory scheme aimed at would-be actors, but when a demo reel she posts to WhatsApp goes viral, she’s suddenly famous for that and her connection to Jivan’s case.

The book is gripping, and extremely hard to put down; I read it inside of 48 hours, even knowing more or less what would happen to Jivan. The short chapters keep the book humming along, and the prose itself is clear and concrete. There’s little here beyond the purely descriptive – we don’t get a lot of inner monologues and there are no characters of any note beyond the main three. It’s a just-the-facts novel, almost like an old detective story, which makes the book feel urgent throughout.

There’s also some unsubtle commentary here about upward mobility in modern India, a society that has seen rapid growth of its middle and upper classes in the last 30 years, but that still has an enormous underclass that measures in the hundreds of millions of people. That backdrop may explain how, or why, two otherwise moral individuals, neither of whom had any real status prior to the terror attack, would consider throwing away the life of someone they knew just to help themselves. PT Sir comes across as venal, but Majumdar gives Lovely enough of a back story to depict her with nuance, as someone who survives, and has always had to grab any lifeline she sees.

However, there’s not a lot else going on below the surface, starting with Jivan. She’s less a character than a victim of fate and circumstance, bobbing along on the surface of an ocean she can barely see. She’s an object of pity, and Majumdar gives us just a sliver of her life in flashbacks, as a journalist interviews her, somewhat covertly, for a profile in a tabloid newspaper. They’re not that illustrative of why Jivan is in the situation she’s in, because Jivan didn’t actually do anything wrong – her Facebook comments weren’t even that inflammatory, and it’s a little hard to believe she’d end up charged with a capital crime for them, although that’s probably part of the point. It’s mob justice dispensed by a religious plurality operating with the power and impunity of governmental authority.

The religious divide in India forms a key subtext to the novel, although it doesn’t show itself directly much in the content. Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister since 2014, is a Hindu nationalist and member of a paramilitary group aligned with that ethnocentric philosophy. Since taking office, he’s overseen the passage of laws discriminating against the country’s large Muslim population and Muslims trying to emigrate to India while also revoking the special status of the disputed Jammu and Kashmir regions. PT Sir’s political rise is tied to a Modi-like politician whose party also espouses Hindu nationalist aims, so Jivan, a Muslim girl, is a convenient target for them, a way to stoke outrage and try to drive voters to the party, just as the current Republican Party in the U.S. is targeting LGBT people, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, and so on.

That reduces Jivan to a prop, a useful plot device without much agency or complexity as a character, and that’s ultimately what led me to feel like A Burning fell short of the mark. It’s such an easy, fast-paced read that it’s understandable why it became a bestseller, and it has the veneer of a Very Important Novel. It’s more of a facsimile of works that deal with similar subjects, like the novels of Arundhati Roy or Salman Rushdie, without their thematic depth or character development.

Next up: After finishing Scott Hershovitz’s Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids, I’m reading my friend Eden Robins’s debut novel When Franny Stands Up.

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→ October 24, 2022
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The Anomaly.

Hervé Le Tellier won the Prix Goncourt, the French equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 2020 for his psychological thriller The Anomaly, which was subsequently translated into over three dozen languages and became a worldwide bestseller, an uncommon outcome for a literary prize in a language other than English. It’s an impressive combination of a page-turning plot with a fascinating thought experiment in speculative fiction, crafted in expert fashion so that the twist comes late enough in the novel that you’re already engaged with its diverse characters.

The Anomaly opens with a series of what appear to be unconnected short stories about various people around Europe and the United States, all of whom happened to be on the same Air France flight Paris to New York that encountered severe turbulence on its way into JFK. Each of those stories ends with police approaching those individuals, for an unknown reason, and given how different each of these characters and their lives are, it’s especially foreboding. Anything else would just be a spoiler.

Le Tellier tries to accomplish two very different goals in The Anomaly, and succeeds on both counts. The story picks up the pace and intensity as it goes along; he wisely starts out the novel with a section on a contract killer, which sets a specific tone that doesn’t last but immediately grabs the reader’s interest. You’re already on edge before you even get to the second character, so despite the fact that this isn’t a novel about a hit man, that opening sets up the possibility that anything might happen. By the time you find out what’s actually going on, you’re already flying through the book (pun intended), and that’s when Le Tellier really messes with your head.

There’s a real philosophical question at the heart of The Anomaly, centering on identity and the nature of self, along with more modest questions of personal rights and ownership in a modern capitalist society. Once we find out why the police are gathering everyone who was on that flight, we’re thrown into the existential crisis that’s about to face the passengers, turning what seemed like a potboiler murder or spy mystery into a work that explores deeper and unanswerable questions through the actions and reactions of its characters. It’s a hard line to travel, but Le Tellier manages to do so because he’s set up a collection of characters who would naturally respond differently to the massive shock they receive.

Le Tellier has a solid sense of humor as well, working in a couple of misfit scientists who were first called in by the feds in the wake of 9/11 to come up with a packet of recommendations for the response to all manner of improbable events, only to have them befuddled by this impossible event and responding in kind – by making it up as they go along. There’s a slew of pop culture and other contemporary references, which might not age that well but do give the novel an added sense of realism that balances out the unreality of the latter half.

Whether this novel ultimately works for you will probably come down to your willingness to suspend disbelief for the thought experiment in the latter half. I had no issue with this because it’s so well crafted, even before we get to the reveal, and because the novel does not wallow in the details or make the event itself the center of the story. This is a humanist story – although there’s a brief detour into a meeting of religious leaders that is wryly funny – that has characters at its heart, with Le Tellier writing believable reactions for each of them and representing a broad range of emotions in the process. I found it incredibly compelling from start to finish, even as the author leaves some questions unresolved.

Next up: I’m reading this year’s Hugo winner, Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace.

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→ June 22, 2022
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Lemon.

Kwon Yeo-Sun’s novella Lemon made a slew of best-of lists last year, from most-anticipated to top novels of 2021, for its unusual, incisive treatment of what might otherwise have been an ordinary murder mystery. Set in 2002, as the World Cup that took place in South Korea and Japan was coming to a close, Lemon examines the brutal murder of a beautiful high school student and the impact it had on her family, friends, the suspects, and others, while only partially unwrapping the mystery of who actually killed her.

Written through the perspective of three women who knew the victim, Hae-on, Lemon defies the conventions of the modern literary mystery, where a murder or other horrific crime defines the story’s structure and its solution must inform the ending of the book. Da-on is Hae-on’s younger sister, but was the more worldly of the two, often taking care of Hae-on when the older girl seemed ill-equipped to handle reality, forgetting even the most basic personal tasks; after Hae-on’s death, Da-on reacts in increasingly hysterical ways, including undergoing plastic surgery to try to resemble her dead sister. Taerim is the girlfriend of one of the two main suspects in the murder, and her sections are written as her halves of conversations with a suicide prevention line and a psychiatrist, and it becomes clear that she knows more than she has let on. She marries that suspect in question, but their life is shattered by a subsequent tragedy with a subtle connection to the original murder. Sanghui was a new student and classmate of Hae-on and plays the part of the demos from Greek tragedies, standing in for the audience (or the reader) and observing the story as a third party. Within all of these is the possible answer to the mystery, the obliquely described revenge plot Da-on takes on who she believes is the killer, and a powerful exploration of grief and the lack of meaning in this senseless death.

Kwon has won multiple literary awards in her native Korea, but this is her first work to be translated into English, which may explain some of the rapturous praise for Lemon – it’s our first exposure to her voice and style, even though she’s been publishing works in Korean for more than a quarter-century. She weaves poetry into the story, and her prose writing often has the metaphorical quality of poetry, with descriptions that leave the reader feeling like they’re looking at the story from an angle that leaves it shrouded in mist. There are recurring images and symbols, including the lemons of the title, and frequent mention of the color yellow, such as the dress the victim was supposedly wearing on the night of her murder, and meditative passages on appearance and identity or the meaning (or lack thereof) of life.

What the book doesn’t do, and what might frustrate a lot of readers, is give you a clear answer to the murder. The first chapter of the novella’s eight, each of which takes place in a different year, sets up what appears to be the plot of a literary mystery, with a police interrogation of one of those two suspects where the cop tries to coerce a confession, but Kwon defies any of those expectations afterwards. You just have to go with it, and what I believe is the answer is buried within other text without anything definitive, so you might miss it and you certainly don’t get the Big Confession that modern book culture has led us to expect. It’s a good ride because it challenges your reading mind, but if you need clear and unequivocal answers, it’s going to leave you frustrated.

Next up: I just finished Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning book The Line of Beauty.

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→ June 20, 2022
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Top 50 novels of the century (so far).

I’ve been planning to do some sort of ranking of the best novels of this century for at least four years now, but for a variety of reasons never sat down to actually do it. I think one reason is the constant sense that I haven’t read enough books to make such a list, although that’s probably silly given how much I read, and since nobody, not even full-time book critics (is there such a job any more?), can read absolutely everything. I can’t read every book, play every game, hear every album, or watch every movie before sitting down to decide which ones are my favorites.

The Twitter replies to my comment about The Netanyahus being the worst Pulitzer winner in at least 25 years finally got me back to the spreadsheet I’d started in 2018, although I ended up trashing it and starting over, to prepare for this post. I originally had about 67 books on the list, cut a few, ranked 50, and put ten honorable mentions at the end. Then I started writing the blurbs and moved a few books around the rankings too, which is, coincidentally, how I do player rankings for work as well. Sometimes you put down some words and realize you liked something more or less than you thought you did. It’s good to be flexible.

I’ve written the rankings in reverse order, so we’ll start at 50, with honorable mentions at the end. The hyperlink on each title goes to Bookshop.org, for which I have an affiliate account (so I get a small commission for each book sold through those links). They give 10% of earnings to local bookstores, and allow stores to sell via their site and keep all of the profits. If you can’t buy a book from your local independent bookstore, this is the next best option.

So, here we go – as of June 20, 2022, here are my top 50 books of this century:

50. The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey. Full review. A novelization of an old folk tale, The Snow Child tells the story of a couple who move to Alaska after their infant dies, where a girl, Faina, appears to have come to life from the snowchild they made. Is she real? A fairy? A hallucination? Ivey’s tale of grief, loss, and hope is haunting while balancing the possibilities of life against its inevitable tragedies.

49. The Teleportation Accident, by Ned Beauman. Full review. A madcap romp of sex, devil-worship, and, yes, teleportation, this book runs through multiple genres, both paying homage to them while sending them up, along with slapstick and other lowbrow humor, such as the side character who can’t tell a person from a painting of that person and keeps talking to the portraits of his ancestors as if they’re real.

48. All Our Names, by Dinaw Mengestu. Full review. A love story wrapped in a tale of identity, as we meet two men in an African country on the brink of civil war, with one later fleeing to America, where he falls in love with Helen, a social worker assigned to help him assimilate. Names and dates are left ambiguous or omitted entirely, while the importance of remembering as well as deliberate forgetting hover over both narratives.

47. Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi. Full review. What begins as a straightforward narrative about a high school play and a team-building exercise turns into metafictional, time-shifting story that asks questions about, to borrow a phrase, who lives, who dies, and who tells your story – and specifically who has the right to tell your story.

46. Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff. Full review. A novel in two distinct halves, the first about the husband, the second about the wife, where the second half reveals unseen truths about the first. It’s ambitious yet feels deeply personal, and the surfeit of literary references actually works in favor of the narrative, rather than coming off as showy.

45. Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. Full review. The use of the first-person plural is gimmicky, but there’s a reason for the conceit in this novel that looks at the decline of the American workplace more than ten years before COVID-19 (may have) killed it off for good. There’s a related but distinct short story in the middle of the novel that breaks things up in a suboptimal way, but the two parts that form the shell are compelling and prescient.

44. The Oracle Year, by Charles Soule. Full review. The debut novel from comic book author Soule, this work speculative fiction gives us bassist Will Dando, who wakes up one day with 108 highly specific predictions in his head … and they start to come true. It’s imperfect in some ways but incredibly well-told, witty, and intense.

43. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon. Full review. I do not agree with the critical and, I think, popular consensus that The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is Chabon’s best work; that book is incredibly imaginative and rich with story, but it’s bloated and loses its focus, while this novel, a neo-noir detective story set in an alternate universe where the world’s Jews have been given a homeland in southeastern Alaska, hits similar themes with precision while hewing closely to its target style.

42. Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. Full review. If you’re going to go sixteen years between novels, the return ought to be something special. Piranesi is far shorter than her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but has the same prose, imagery, and sense of wonder as the earlier work. It’s a mystery in a fantasy novel, as the narrator and the reader try to understand exactly where the narrator is, and how he got there. It’s like reading a dream.

41. HHhH, by Laurent Binet. Full review. Winner of France’s Prix Goncourt Prize, this historical novel has a metafictional element, combining a fictionalized telling of the assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942 with a story about the difficulty of telling that very story. It’s bold and ambitious, not entirely successful, but highly compelling, and of course there’s some satisfaction in reading about the successful assassination of one of the principal architects of the murders of 8 million Jews, Roma, gays, and other minority peoples.

40. From a Low and Quiet Sea, by Donal Ryan. Full review. A scant novel that tells the stories of three men, with no apparent connection, struggling with grief and sadness, until another catastrophe brings them together in the brief, final section. The novel took some criticism for its portrayal of Farouk, a Syrian refugee, in too-generic terms, but Ryan’s tremendous empathy for his characters ruled the day for me.

39. Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi. Full review. A daring structure that follows ten generations of a family through two separate lines takes the reader from west Africa and the enslavement of its people to modern-day American and back to Ghana where the story began. Gyasi’s debut novel manages to develop and humanize its many characters in just a few pages each, allowing the story to build and grow even with this tenuous framework.

38. The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett. Full review. I thought this deserved the Pulitzer in 2021 rather than Louise Erdich’s fine but not award-worthy The Night Watchman. Inspired by Nella Larson’s novella Passing, which was the basis for the superb film directed by Rebecca Hall, this novel covers a pair of sisters, one of whom chooses to pass for white while the other does not, while exploring critical themes of race and identity in our modern society.

37. All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders. Full review. Such a clever concept for a novel – All the Birds gives us two related, intertwined narratives, one from modern fantasy and one from hard science fiction, bringing them together, pulling them apart, and allowing the two main characters to show their flaws as they develop while heading towards a surprising resolution in a world not too far off from our own late-stage capitalist dystopia.

36. Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday. Full review. Halliday takes her romantic relationship with Philip Roth, who was over forty years her senior, and fictionalizes it in this wonderful, multi-part novel that revels in the asymmetry of that affair while giving Halliday’s stand-in, Alice, an unusual agency for the situation. That portion of the novel is followed by an absurdist section on a man with dual Iraqi-US citizenship who gets caught in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic trap at a London airport, a story with no apparent connection to the first one until the coda brings them together.

35. Blackout/All Clear, by Connie Willis. Full review. Published as two novels but sharing a continuous narrative, this time-travel story, sending historians from future Oxford back to World War II, where they get stuck (as often happens in Willis’s time-travel stories) and involved in the action in ways they shouldn’t, is grand, emotional, and evocative of the great British literature of the era it depicts.

34. Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. Full review. Diminishing returns set in quickly with its sequels, but Gilead, which was Robinson’s first novel in over twenty years when it was published, is a marvel of simplicity. It’s an epistolary novel, written as letters from its protagonist, a dying clergyman named John Ames, to his seven-year-old son for the child to read when he’s older. It’s a meditation on forgiveness and our limited capacity to understand the plights of others.

33. Grief is the Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter. Full review. I’m stretching the qualifications here, as this novella – it’s too short to properly call it a novel – is a marvel of wordplay and empathy, poetry in motion on the pages of a book. The Crow visits a father of two whose wife has died suddenly, and who is paralyzed by grief just as his sons need him most. Porter does not shy away from the man’s grief, but the Crow is there for a purpose, and the way Porter plays with language to advance the story is utterly extraordinary.

32. No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood. My favorite book of 2021, Lockwood’s novel is extremely online – or at least her main character is, and it’s not going well, so when something bad happens IRL, she’s not ready to handle it. The novel varies in style from stream-of-consciousness to poetry to standard prose, jumping around in perspective and playing with language in ways that earned the book comparisons to the experimental novels of Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Nabokov.

31. The White Tiger, by Aravind Ariga. Full review. A dark comedy and satire of the upwardly mobile culture of contemporary Indian cities, The White Tiger gives us one of the great anti-heroes of the century in Balram, who rises from poverty through his own determination and a convenient lack of scruples to prosperity – but not without leaving some bodies behind him, figuratively and eventually literally.

30. The Sellout, by Paul Beatty. Full review. The first American-authored novel to win the Booker Prize, The Sellout is a vicious satire that’s also completely bonkers. The narrator, a Black man who lives in an “agrarian ghetto” in Los Angeles County, stands trial for trying to bring back slavery – the conclusion of a series of ill-conceived attempts to resegregate the area so that his unincorporated town, Dickens, will return to the map.

29. An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon. Full review. Set on a massive spaceship with its own highly structured, race-based caste society, this dystopian novel upends conventions of the child-hero genre while exploring racial power dynamics as well as how elites maintain their grip on society through fear and myth.

28. Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid. Full review. From the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist comes a light sci-fi novel where refugees can flee through special portals that appear as actual doors and allow passage through to other places on the globe. The story follows a couple fleeing war in an unnamed country in southeast or south Asia through a series of those doors, allowing them to experience the poor treatment and mistrust refugees face across the world, a journey that also tests their feelings for each other.

27. Bowlaway, by Elizabeth McCracken. Full review. McCracken is Ann Patchett’s primary editor, and there’s some similarity in their fiction as both authors show deep empathy and understanding for their characters. Set in a small town outside Boston, Bowlaway follows a cast of characters through multiple generations, starting with the strange woman who appeared in the town’s graveyard with no memory of where she’d been, after which she founds a candlepin bowling alley and hires a couple of the town’s (many) eccentrics.

26. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. Full (but short) review. Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle­ remains my favorite of his works, with this follow-up novel second for me thanks to similar themes and literary techniques – notably his extensive use of magical realism in a context beyond that seen in the Latin American or African traditions of magical realism.He doesn’t write women well at all, though, a failing that has become more apparent in his novels since this one.

25. Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee. Full review. I’ll quote my own review: “If Dickens or Eliot had written a novel about Koreans living as part of the underclass in Japan, it would probably look a lot like Pachinko.” An epic work of fiction set among the pachinko parlors of Japan, the novel explores themes of alienation and isolation by looking at Koreans living and working in a foreign country that has always viewed them as an inferior minority.

24. The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin. Full review. Jemisin won the Hugo Award for each of the books in her Broken Earth trilogy, but this book, her first after that series ended, is her best so far. Six people find themselves transformed so that each of them is a borough of New York City or the city entire – not metaphorically, but physically, in a sort of transubstantiation, and their personalities match the character of the geographies they have become.

23. Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon. Full review. I have read several Pynchon novels, but none made me laugh like this one did – it’s a sort of slacker noir, a detective novel set in drug-addled California in the 1970s, with a detective who’s seldom sober enough for the job. It is far, far more accessible than Gravity’s Rainbow, and doesn’t require esoteric knowledge to understand it like The Crying of Lot 49.

22. Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. Full review. As ambitious a work of fiction as any I’ve read this century, Cloud Atlas contains six nested novellas, five of them split into two parts (so that the novella that starts the book also finishes it), with one element tying each one to the next. Each novella has a unique style – I’m partial to “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery,” a detective story – and Mitchell moves so deftly from one to the next that the whole work remains cohesive.

21. Lush Life, by Richard Price. Full review. Price has written for The Wire and The Night Of, as well as authoring nine novels, including 1992’s Clockers and this one, a broad, gritty piece of highly realistic fiction that follows a broad ensemble of characters through the ramifications of what appears to be an ordinary (if awful) street crime.

20. The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton. Full review. Another novel with a complex structure, this epic work follows a prospector who arrives in a New Zealand mining town, only to walk into a set of mysteries including a dead hermit, a prostitute who may have attempted suicide, stolen claims, and much more. The structure itself relates to the twelve signs of the zodiac and to the planets in the solar system, although I don’t think you need to see or follow that to appreciate its incredible story and rich characterization.

19. The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson. Full review. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction’s guidelines say it is for a work “by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” Johnson is American, but this remarkable novel definitely does not deal with American life – it is about North Korea, and opens a window on to that most isolated nation, following a young boy in a North Korean orphanage through his military service, time in a prison mine, and then a fantastical life after prison that puts him in the crosshairs of the Dear Leader himself.

18. The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. Full review. A novel that finds hope in hopelessness, giving us Leo Gorsky, perhaps the most ill-fated man in the universe, a Holocaust survivor whose lover thought he was dead and married someone else while carrying Leo’s baby. His story intertwines with two others around a book within the book, also called The History of Love, leading to a deeply emotional, unlikely-but-not-impossible conclusion.

17. The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. Full review. One of the most acclaimed books of the last twenty years (I think), this book reimagines the network of people, including Quakers, free Blacks, and other abolitionists who helped slaves escape the antebellum South as an actual subterranean railroad that served the same purpose – but that exposes the fleeing slaves of the book to the horrors of multiple Confederate states before they get close to freedom.

16. Wizard of the Crow, by Ng?g? wa Thiong’o. wa Thing’o is a revered Kenyan author, playwright, and Fanonist dissident who was imprisoned in the 1970s for writing a play that criticized the government. He’s written only two novels in the last 30 years, but one of them, 2004’s Wizard of the Crow, is an epic work of magical realism, satire, and scathing political commentary. Set in a corrupt African dictatorship, where allegiances change with the wind, a new power emerges in the form of an inadvertent charlatan calling himself the Wizard of the Crow, who threatens the country’s Ruler in the days after the end of colonialism.

15. Among Others, by Jo Walton. Full review. I first read this book because it won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for its year, but that may undersell it, because it’s far from just a genre book – this is a beautiful if somewhat dark coming-of-age novel with just a hint of fantasy in the setting. Calling it a fantasy novel might deter some people from reading it; this isn’t swords and sorcery, or knights and damsels, just a damn good story about growing up when one of the people who should love and protect you turns out to be an evil witch.

14. Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Adichie. Full review. Adichie has received more attention for her novel Americanah and her non-fiction writing, including We Should All Be Feminists (which, yes, we should), but this is her best work to date – a novel set during the Nigerian Civil War, when the Nigerian government blockaded the secessionist state of Biafra, causing a famine that killed two million people. I don’t see any particular parallels to anything happening today, though. Adichie follows five characters, including two couples, from before the war began through the depths of the conflict, through personal losses and the collapse of what had been a reasonably prosperous society.

13. Empire Falls, by Richard Russo. Full review. Russo is one of the funniest writers I’ve read, but in this, his best novel, he also works in wry commentary on how economic declines hit blue-collar American towns (this one in New England, like most of his settings) and affect the people in them at a deeply personal level. His characters are well-built and contribute to the sense of a specific place – you may not live in this town, but you understand it, and picture it, and have your favorites among the people in it. And when the big plot point finally comes in this book, one that could easily happen in a novel set today, you’re affected because the characters you care about are affected.

12. All The Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr. Full review. One of the best-plotted novels I’ve ever read, All The Light runs about 500 pages, yet I read it in two days on a work trip because I absolutely could not wait to see how the novel’s twin storylines would come together – and they do, in almost miraculous fashion, as two children, a blind French girl and a true-believer German boy, navigate the closing windows of Europe on the brink of war.

11. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, by Honorée Fannone Jeffers. Full review. I’m trying to avoid recency bias here, but this is the best book I’ve read in a few years – if we’re just going off this list, I think it’s the best I’ve read in about five years. Jeffers’ debut novel covers centuries of history through the lens of one Black family, from their ancestors in slavery to the contemporary struggles of three sisters, focused on one named Ailey Pearl, to cope with the weight of their racial history and a very personal trauma that has affected all of them. The prose is beautiful and the characters are rich and compelling, even many of the secondary ones.

10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Full review. Gaiman takes forgotten gods from religions around the world and brings them back to modern-day America in a complex fight for the soul of the country. For some reason, this centers on Shadow, a man just out of prison, who runs into Odin incarnate on the flight home. The book also spawned a related work, Anansi Boys, which is also excellent but not as ambitious as this tour de force, which seems to twist the fantasy genre inside-out along with a wildly exciting, action-packed story.

9. Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett. Full review. Inspired by the takeover of the Japanese Embassy in Lima, Peru, by the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, Bel Canto paints a rich portrait of a huge ensemble of characters, both hostages and terrorists, who become a village of sorts, learning about each other as we do, facing their fears and weaknesses, falling in love, becoming oblivious to the outside world. Patchett is always a beautiful writer who creates complex characters and shows empathy for even the worst of them, and her skills were most on display here, a novel she has indicated was inspired by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

8. Station Eleven, by Emily St. John. Full review. How is one of the most lyrical novels I’ve ever read set during a global pandemic that wipes out a huge portion of the planet’s population and leads to the complete collapse of civilized society? Perhaps because St. John focuses so much on the humanity within the crisis, and sees the good and the bad that come about when people are pushed beyond their limits. There’s also a small plot strand that doubles as an ode to the enduring power of great stories to entertain and enrich us.

7. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Full review. Ishiguro wrote two of the best novels I’ve ever read – this one and Remains of the Day, written in 1989. Never Let Me Go starts out like a work of classic British literature, perhaps a coming-of-age drama in the vein of Brideshead Revisited, but then the novel’s big secret is revealed and it turns into a Greek tragedy that confronts impossible questions of identity, ethics, and sacrifice.

6. The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes. Full review. I read this and The Orphan Master’s Son back-to-back in the summer of 2013, finishing this slim novel in just two days; it was such a great week of reading that I still remember it clearly, with two books that were so great, so compelling, that I was just lost in them. The Sense of an Ending gives us Tony Webster, now retired, divorced, living alone, first remembering a period from his school days with his girlfriend Veronica and his precocious friend Adrian. When Veronica’s mother dies, leaving Tony a bit of money, he reconnects with Veronica, and the edifice in his memory starts to crumble as he learns things he never knew about his own past.

5. In the Light of What We Know, by Zia Haider Rahman. Full review. Rahman’s lone novel to date is a knockout, combining the U.S.’s failed war in Afghanistan and the 2007-08 financial crisis in a story that ranges from delving into the roots of one man’s personal crises to blistering attacks on the power of global elites. It’s postcolonial literature through an entirely different, diasporic lens, and the story moves at a brisk pace despite a lack of traditional action. When the ending hits, it is a metaphorical bomb on the page, and throws everything that has come before into question.

4. Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders. Full review. Saunders is a master of the short story, winning awards for his collection Tenth of December, but didn’t publish his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, until he was 59, and all that book did was win the Booker Prize. Set mostly over the course of a single night in the bardo, a Tibetan term for the Buddhist concept of a state between life and rebirth, and follows Abraham Lincoln through his grief over the death of his son Willie, who died at age 11 of typhoid fever, just a year into his father’s first term as President, while working in snippets from real and fictional news stories of the time. It’s a profound look at parenthood and the unendurable loss of a child, from one of our greatest contemporary prose writers.

3. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Full review. Harrowing, dark, and unforgettable in so many ways, The Road is the most powerful book I have ever read on what it is like to be a parent and be willing to give up everything, including yourself, for your child. Set in a post-apocalyptic America where society is gone and humanity may be headed for extinction, The Road follows the Man and the Boy as they walk down abandoned interstates towards the sea and an unknown, possibly nonexistent, hope. It is graphic and horrifying, often difficult to read for its content, but it is the exemplar of how fiction can illuminate core truths about life.

2. White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. Full review. Out of the 1200+ novels I’ve read in my life, this is the one about which I have most changed by opinion from my initial reading. I was so unused to Smith’s incredible storytelling style, dubbed “hysterical realism” by critic James Wood in his review, that my first response was rather negative – but that’s because I was used to very specific styles of literature. The more I thought about the book after finishing, over days and months, the more I realized the incredible genius of it. So much literature of this century owes a debt to Smith and White Teeth and Hortense’s many root canals. It will defy your expectations for a novel in all of the best ways and its themes are both very much of its moment and utterly timeless.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. Full review. A fantasy novel, yes, but so much more, and the fastest 1000-page novel I’ve ever read. (The Executioner’s Song was close, but it’s also not really a novel.) The two characters of the title are magicians in 19th century London, the latter an older, curmudgeonly man who proves that magic still exists centuries after its decline in England, and the former a younger upstart who becomes Norrell’s pupil. The two clash over magic’s use and end up engaged in a public battle of philosophies, while Norrell’s bargain with an underworld fairy known as “the gentleman with the thistle-down hair” has brought curses upon many within London, including Strange’s wife, Arabella. It is a work of stupendous imagination, written very much in the style of literature of that period, but with the very modern touch of fabricated footnotes that contain much of the book’s great wit. The book was also adapted into a seven-part BBC series that contained one of my favorite TV lines ever, and that hewed closely to the story and characters from the original text. Clarke has created a world like ours and yet so very unlike it, with two of the most memorable characters I’ve ever encountered, and uses fantasy as her vehicle but not her raison d’être (d’écrire?): Magic just lets her tell this majestic story of two men and their egos, fighting each other over philosophy while the world around them burns. It is gripping right until the end, and will leave you wanting more.

Honorable mentions, in alphabetical order:

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