TIME: Best and Worst of Books in 2002

Ian McEwan authored a delectable novel about a not-so-delightful family

ATONEMENT by Ian McEwan
The year's indisputable masterpiece. At an English country house in the 1930s, a self-regarding 13-year-old with a budding writer's powers of invention witnesses a romantic scene that she does not understand, then tells a lie with terrible consequences for the people around her. Virginia Woolf would have admired the way McEwan observes how the mind operates upon the world, how misunderstanding is a form of understanding. Then in the final pages he performs a bewitching narrative sleight of hand that deepens everything that came before. A book that persuades you on every page of the power of the imagination to transfigure, to console, to destroy and to create — above all to create fictions as magnificent as this one.

THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE, by Michel Faber
How is it that a historical novel about a prostitute in Victorian England made most other fiction this year feel hopelessly dated? Faber's sprawling, sexy fable follows his heroine, a whore named Sugar with many talents and few inhibitions, as she wriggles her way up the social ladder. One of the rare 800-page novels that feels too short, it's a sprawling, sexy triumph: witty as a Duchess, cruel as a corset, and smart as the Dickens.

YOU ARE NOT A STRANGER HERE, by Adam Haslett
A debut collection of nine beautifully fashioned short stories, many about people who are mentally troubled and helpless to escape themselves. Haslett's characters are often people who suffer in a terrible subdepartment of hell — they feel their own minds are gaining on them — but he makes their pain graspable, their confusions lucid. Is his book a downer? Only if a first rate young writer bursting out of the box can't make you smile.

THE LOVELY BONES, by Alice Sebold
As a rule, novels are supposed to end when the heroine is brutally raped and murdered. Then again, a delicate, devastatingly sad literary novel isn't supposed to knock Tom Clancy off the bestseller lists this year, either. Sebold's novel follows a murdered suburban teenager into heaven, from which celestial vantage point she observes the aftermath of her tragedy. It's a luminous, lyrical performance that hits the heart like a sledgehammer. Rules, like hearts, and sales records, were made to be broken.

UNLESS, by Carol Shields
Reta Winters is a middle-aged novelist in a comfy, middle-class marriage. From the outside, she has everything she should ever want. So why is her daughter panhandling on a streetcorner? Why is sorrow eating her up from the inside? The answers to these and other urgent questions can be found in this brief, bittersweet, and unforgettable novel about facing the tragedy of the ordinary with humor and courage.

HEART OF A SOLDIER by James Stewart
Most books about the attacks on September 11th felt like they were written in 10 minutes. James Stewart's Heart Of A Soldier reads like the product of 10 years of careful research and meditation. It's a biography of Rick Rescorla, an American soldier of fortune whose life ended at the World Trade Center, and it takes the reader through his harrowing service in Vietnam, an unexpectedly tender romance late in life, and, with searing clarity, his final minutes in Manhattan. War story, love story, history, Heart of a Soldier is everything you want and need it to be: calm, beautifully composed and consoling.

THE PIRATE HUNTER by Richard Zacks
It was all a frame-up. Captain Kidd, legendary scourge of the high seas, was actually a good guy, commissioned by the King of England in the 1600s to catch pirates. But that doesn't make this biography any less swash-bucklingly gripping. A cocksure Scottish charmer, Kidd roams the ocean swapping broadsides and crossing cutlasses in fine style, and with Zacks at the helm you can smell the brine and taste the hardtack. In those days the ocean was a no-man's-land of freebooters and privateers, where everybody flew false flags and switched sides with the change of the tide. Kidd's mission ultimately founders in political waters, but Zacks's telling of it can stand with anything by Patrick O'Brian as a magnificent naval adventure.

ONE HUNDRED DEMONS by Lynda Barry
Has anybody noticed that Lynda Barry is a national treasure? She writes about being a child, but her books are decidedly for adults. One Hundred Demons is a collection of Barry's recollections of life growing up in Seattle: taking dance classes, playing kickball, fighting with her Filipino mother, getting her first job, having crushes, having sex. Nothing extraordinary about it, except the fact that Barry writes like an angel and draws like one of her titular demons. It's a graphic novel, but don't confuse it with a comic book — if David Sedaris and Paul Gauguin collaborated on an autobiography, they might come up with something half as good. You'll wonder how anything can be so sad and so funny at the same time.

NINETY DEGREES NORTH by Fergus Fleming
For much of the 19th Century, the North Pole was the geographical Holy Grail, and everybody wanted a piece of it. Never mind that nobody knew what was up there: hundreds of explorers hurled themselves northward, ill-informed and unprepared, and met with disaster. Their ships were frozen in pack ice for years at a time. Their brandy froze in their bottles. It snowed inside their tents. Their stories, told with a perfect balance of compassion and humor, make chilling reading. Ninety Degrees North is a testament to the heights of human perseverance and the depths of human folly.

COMPLICATIONS by Atul Gawande
Would you trust your life to somebody who was sleep deprived and wacked out on caffeine? On their first day on the job? One day, you probably will. Gawande, a surgical resident, tells you how they feel about it. He tackles eternal questions — like why routine operations go wrong — with the crisp pacing of a good ER episode, and the stories of his patients read like novels in miniature. Everybody who's thinking about becoming a doctor, or even about seeing one, should read this book.

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