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