A N Y H U M A N H E A R T B y W i l l i a m B o y d This was perhaps the most wise, beautiful, compulsively readable and profoundly funny novel published this year — and hardly anyone noticed. Any Human Heart is the diary of a fictional English writer named Logan Mountstuart, a witty, mildly sinful dilettante who lives through most of the 20th Century, meets lots of famous people (Picasso, Hemingway, the Duke of Windsor), loves, fights, suffers and doesn't get much writing done. Scene by scene, the book prickles with sharp wit and aches with tenderness. Taken as a whole, it is a stunning, moving meditation on art, life, pleasure and the tragic transience of pretty much everything. Seek it out.
T H E F O R T R E S S O F S O L I T U D E B y J o n a t h a n L e t h e m
Two boys — one black, one white — grow up together on a shabby block in Brooklyn in the 1970's. This is the stuff sappy after-school specials are made of, but in Lethem's hands their shared childhood becomes a rich, complicated story about race, money, music and friendship that captures the essence of a mighty city and a freaky, turbulent decade.
Q U I C K S I L V E R B y N e a l S t e p h e n s o n
This is the thriller The Da Vinci Code should have been: an ambitious, intellectually omnivorous tale set in 17th and 18th Century England that pits scientific geniuses (Isaac Newton is a major character), duplicitous noblemen, grizzled mercenaries and saucy ladies against each other in a gargantuan, galactic page-turner about money, power, knowledge and the origins of the modern Western world.
T H E N A M E S A K E B y J h u m p a L a h i r i
A bittersweet, quietly poignant account of a Bengali couple who immigrate to chilly Massachusetts, and of their son's efforts to navigate between his two lives as an Indian and American. Lahiri's crystalline prose captures the rhythms of experience with astonishing vividness, and the joy, sadness and confusion of a life lived in exile.
A B O X O F M A T C H E S B y N i c h o l s o n B a k e r
Further proof that great novels don't have to be titanic, towering tomes. A Box of Matches is an almost plotless book about a middle-aged man who gets up every morning before dawn, stares into the fire, and thinks about things: his life, his marriage, his daughter, his pet duck, his small mistakes, his small successes. Each page glows with humor and deft observation, but one senses a wasteland of pain and loss outside that tiny circle of warmth.
G A M E T I M E B y R o g e r A n g e l l
To enjoy this book it is in no way necessary to play, watch or even to have heard of the game of baseball. This collection of Angell's writing on our national pastime is a series of perfect miniatures, witty and wistful and animated by a warm, generous spirit. Within the narrow confines of a baseball diamond Angell finds a wealth of human drama and the full range of human venality and nobility, and he brings it home to us in prose that's the equal of any sports writing anywhere, period.
A B S O L U T E L Y A M E R I C A N B y D a v i d L i p s k y
Lipsky spent four years at West Point, watching an eclectic mob of adolescents being transmuted into officers through the pain and discipline of a strange and uniquely American military institution. It's a mesmerizing and powerfully human spectacle; a glimpse into a parallel world, separate and alienated from the civilian reality that depends so deeply on it.
R E D S B y T e d M o r g a n
In a lucid rethinking of McCarthyism, Morgan examines the long arc of America's attempts to come to grips with the Russian revolution from its first days, when U.S. expeditionary forces briefly fought the new Bolshevik regime, through the genuine growth of Soviet espionage in the 1930 and '40s to Sen. Joe McCarthy's cunning exploitation of facts, half truths and lies.
T H E Y M A R C H E D I N T O S U N L I G H T B y D a v i d M a r a n i s s
Through powerful writing and endless research and interviews, Maraniss juxtaposes the experiences of an infantry unit in Vietnam with those of a gang of anti-war protesters at the University of Wisconsin during a single month in 1967. It's a virtuoso act of historiography that captures a single moment and uses it to illuminate an entire century.
K R A K A T O A B y S i m o n W i n c h e s t e r
It takes an unusual talent to shape reams of historical detail into a narrative of almost Crichtonian power and fascination, but Winchester does it in this account of a catastrophic volcanic eruption that rocked the entire world and changed our puny human lives forever.
