100 Great Novels by Living Authors

1/30/2019 100 great novels by living authors – Blair Mahoney – Medium
100 great novels by living authors

Blair Mahoney Follow
Jan 7, 2015 · 78 min read
The following is a list of 100 books by living authors that I have read
and highly recommend. I wanted to put together a list of ‘modern
classics’, and having the criterion of a living author is a way to impose
some currency while at the same time allowing for a certain breadth.
Of course, this leaves out plenty of great authors who have
unfortunately passed on, whether recently (Chinua Achebe) or
centuries ago (Laurence Sterne). I have another list for the dead
authors and a list for graphic novels. Every now and then I get around
to updating them.
Adair, Gilbert, A Closed Book
Gilbert Adair previously won the Scott-Moncrie prize for his

extraordinary translation of the late Georges Perec’s A Void–a novel
composed without the letter “e”– and some of that author’s wit,
allusiveness and self- conscious artistry nd their way into Adair’s new
https://medium.com/@blairmahoney/100-great-novels-by-living-authors-95c7646d7007 1/54
book, transmuted into something altogether more sinister. This is a

powerful psychological thriller, well-paced, energetic (and occasionally
very funny) but it also incorporates some subtle philosophical and
literary questions into its narrative: How far can we believe what we
read (or hear) and how does a reader’s trust in a writer’s ctional world
equate with the trust required in allowing someone to interpret the
world for us? See for yourself. (Amazon.co.uk review)
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, Purple Hibiscus
Purple Hibiscus, Nigerian-born writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s

debut, begins like many novels set in regions considered exotic by the
western reader: the politics, climate, social customs, and, above all,
food of Nigeria (balls of fufu rolled between the ngers, okpa bought
from roadside vendors) unfold like the purple hibiscus of the title, rare
and fascinating. But within a few pages, these details, however vividly
rendered, melt into the background of a larger, more compelling story
of a joyless family. Fifteen-year-old Kambili is the dutiful and self-
e acing daughter of a rich man, a religious fanatic and domestic tyrant
whose public image is of a politically courageous newspaper publisher
and philanthropist. No one in Papa’s ancestral village, where he is titled
“Omelora” (One Who Does For the Community), knows why Kambili’s
brother cannot move one of his ngers, nor why her mother keeps
losing her pregnancies. When a widowed aunt takes an interest in
Kambili, her family begins to unravel and re-form itself in
unpredictable ways. (Amazon.com review)
Amis, Martin, Time’s Arrow
Amis attempts here to write a path into and through the inverted
morality of the Nazis: how can a writer tell about something that’s
fundamentally unspeakable? Amis’ solution is a deft literary conceit of
narrative inversion. He puts two separate consciousnesses into the
person of one man, ex-Nazi doctor Tod T. Friendly. One identity wakes
at the moment of Friendly’s death and runs backwards in time, like a
movie played in reverse, (e.g., factory smokestacks scrub the air clean,)
unaware of the terrible past he approaches. The “normal”
consciousness runs in time’s regular direction, eeing his ignominious
history. (Amazon.com review)
Amsterdam, Steven K., Things We Didn’t See Coming
Given that its nine linked stories are set in a postapocalyptic near
future, the pleasure of Amsterdam’s debut collection is surprising. Over
the course of the book, just about every possible disaster assails the
unidenti ed country in which the stories are set. Floods, drought, mob
rule, and a virus that has one deranged character coughing up blood —
each play a role in the disintegration of the world as we know it, and
Amsterdam’s narrator survives them all, rst as a thief, later as a
bureaucrat (which turns out to be not much di erent from a thief), and
nally as a 40-year-old, cancer-ridden tour guide. Among the high
points are Dry Land, in which the narrator encounters a drunken
mother and her daughter clinging to each other in a cataclysmic ood,
though each is more likely to survive alone; and Cake Walk, with a
narrator who hides in a tree while a man infected with a deadly virus
destroys his campsite. Though a couple of the later stories lack polish
and punch, Amsterdam’s varied catastrophes are vividly executed,
while his resilient narrator’s travails are harrowing. (Publishers Weekly
review)
Atkinson, Kate, Life After Life
What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you
nally got it right? During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is
born and dies before she can take her rst breath. During a snowstorm
in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale.
What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an
in nite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be
able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you
even want to? Life After Life follows Ursula Todd as she lives through
the turbulent events of the last century again and again. With wit and
compassion, Kate Atkinson nds warmth even in life’s bleakest
moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past. Here
she is at her most profound and inventive, in a novel that celebrates the
best and worst of ourselves. (Amazon.com review)
Atwood, Margaret, The Blind Assassin
The Blind Assassin is a tale of two sisters, one of whom dies under
ambiguous circumstances in the opening pages. The survivor, Iris
Chase Gri en, initially seems a little cold-blooded about this death in
the family. But as Margaret Atwood’s most ambitious work unfolds–a
tricky process, in fact, with several nested narratives and even an entire
novel-within-a-novel–we’re reminded of just how complicated the

familial game of hide-and-seek can be: “What had she been thinking of
as the car sailed o the bridge, then hung suspended in the afternoon
sunlight, glinting like a dragon y, for that one instant of held breath
before the plummet? Of Alex, of Richard, of bad faith, of our father and
his wreckage; of God, perhaps, and her fatal, triangular bargain.”
Meanwhile, Atwood immediately launches into an excerpt from Laura
Chase’s novel, The Blind Assassin, posthumously published in 1947. In
this double-decker concoction, a wealthy woman dabbles in blue-collar
passion, even as her lover regales her with a series of science- ctional
parables. Complicated? You bet. But the author puts all this variegation
to good use, taking expert measure of our capacity for self-delusion and
complicity, not to mention desolation. (Amazon.com review)
Auster, Paul, The New York Trilogy
The New York Trilogy is an astonishing and original book: three cleverly
interconnected novels that exploit the elements of standard detective
ction and achieve a new genre that is all the more gripping for its
starkness. In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable
coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man
ultimately becomes a startling investigation of what it means to be
human. Auster’s book is modern ction at its nest: bold, arresting and
unputdownable. (Publisher’s description)
Barker, Nicola, Darkmans
There isn’t much plot to Barker’s Man Booker-shortlisted novel, but a

cast of eccentric characters, a torrent of inventive prose and an
irresistible synthesis of wickedly humorous and unsettlingly
supernatural elements more than compensate for the loose itinerary.
The novel is set in a contemporaneous British district bisected by the
arrival of the Channel Tunnel’s international passenger station, a sore
point for one of the central characters, cranky 61-year-old Daniel
Beede, distraught at the loss of local landmarks. Beede is estranged
from his prescription drug-dealing son Kane, though they share a at,
where Ga ar, a muscular Kurdish refugee with a rabid fear of salad
greens, takes up residence. Beede is friends with Elen, a podiatrist, and
with Isidore, Elen’s paranoid and narcoleptic husband; their young son
Fleet is a spooky prodigy who, in one of this intricate tale’s several
instances of mind-bending nuttiness, may actually be Isidore’s ancestor
from nine generations ago. This improbable premise is supported by

the boy’s propensity for quoting bits of the biography of King Edward
IV’s court jester, one John Scogin, the dark man who haunts the book.
Despite the story’s plotless sprawl, any reader open to the appeal of an
ambitious author’s kaleidoscopic imagination will relish this bravura
accomplishment. (Publishers Weekly review)
Barker, Pat, The Regeneration Trilogy
Pat Barker’s work never makes comfortable reading, for she chooses to
explore, with an un inching eye, controversial, often taboo subjects
such as prostitution, homosexuality, child rape, mental illness,
paci sm, war, and murder by minors. Many readers come to Barker’s
work through her best-known books, the Regeneration (1991–1995)
trilogy, the third book of which won the Booker Prize in 1995. There is
no doubt that Regeneration, with its attention to historical detail and
skilful blending of factual and ctional characters is her most subtle
and satisfying work. These novels have often been criticised as horri c,
brutal, even brutish, yet only by getting close to the base, shocking,
palpable detail of the First World War and the mental, as well as
physical distress caused by close proximity to danger and death, can we
better understand it. (contemporarywriters.com critical perspective)
Barnes, Julian, The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
A revisionist view of Noah’s Ark, told by the stowaway woodworm. A

chilling account of terrorists hijacking a cruise ship. A court case in
16th-century France in which the woodworm stand accused. A
desperate woman’s attempt to escape radioactive fallout on a raft. An
acute analysis of Gericault’s “Scene of Shipwreck.” The search of a
19th-century Englishwoman and of a contemporary American
astronaut for Noah’s Ark. An actor’s increasingly desperate letters to his
silent lover. A thoughtful meditation on the novelist’s responsibility
regarding love. These and other stories make up Barnes’s witty and
sometimes acerbic retelling of the history of the world. The stories are
connected, if only tangentially, which is precisely Barnes’s point:
historians may tell us that “there was a pattern,” but history is “just
voices echoing in the dark; . . . strange links, impertinent connections.”
Fascinating reading from the author of Flaubert’s Parrot, but not for
those wanting conventional plot. (Library Journal review)
Barry, Sebastian, A Long Long Way
Willie Dunne is born in a storm during the “dying days” of Ireland. It is

not an auspicious beginning. This novel of Ireland and World War I
wears a cloak of gloom and doom as thick as the opening storm.
Willie’s mother dies young. Willie enlists in the army and ghts on the
Western Front. Willie’s sweetheart marries another, and so on. The
wartime scenes are brutally realistic. Throughout this dark novel,
though, are glimpses of sweetness and light, such as a scene where
Willie’s father bathes the returning soldier in an attempt to rid him of
lice. Those not familiar with British-Irish history may nd some of the
personal con icts and politics in the novel confusing, but nevertheless a
compellingly sad, if di cult, read. (Booklist review)
Barth, John, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor
Just when you may have concluded, like Queen Scheherazade’s

husband, that you’ve “heard them all,” Barth (The Tidewater Tales)
proves again how original and entertaining he is. Like many of the
author’s previous works, his latest blends fantasy, mythology,
existentialist wit, bawdy humor and meta ctional conceits. But though
his opening words declare, “The machinery’s rusty,” the new novel is a
testament both to Barth’s undiminished generative powers and to his
maturity of vision. In the elaborate plot, a “ fty-plus,” “once-sort-of-
famous” New Journalist named Simon William Behler is mysteriously
transported to the medieval Baghdad of Sindbad the Sailor. Behler–
known variously as “Somebody the Sailor,” “Baylor” and “Sayyid Bey
el-Loor,” falls in love with Sindbad’s daughter Yasmin and gets
enmeshed in Arabian intrigues. The intrigues revolve around such
nagging questions as the intactness of Yasmin’s virginity, the veracity of
Sindbad’s tall tales and the whereabouts of a wristwatch Behler needs
in order to return home. All this is dealt with in the course of six
evenings of storytelling at Sindbad’s dinner table. Barth creates whole
and engaging characters with his usual wealth of wordplay, allusion
and satire. But the novel’s greatest achievement is how it connects the
conventionally realistic story of Behler’s 20th-century life with the
outsize and metaphorical world of Sindbad, re ecting in the process on
the nature of stories, dreams, voyages and death. (Publishers Weekly
review)
Byatt, A.S., The Children’s Book
Bristling with life and invention, The Children’s Book is a seductive work
by an extraordinarily gifted writer. Set primarily in the downs and
marshes of the Kent countryside and the southeastern coast at
Dungeness, the story also ings characters to London, Paris, Munich,
the Italian Alps and the battle elds of Europe, where real historical
gures such as J.M. Barrie and Emma Goldman mix with invented
characters including layabout students, Fabian socialists, potters,
puppeteers, randy novelists and poets in the trenches of France. In its
encyclopaedic form, The Children’s Book is a kind of anatomy of the age
in which the young men and women of the Edwardian era were
confronted by a rapidly changing society and the grim reality of the
Great War. But more compelling than the social and political history is
the domestic drama among the dozen or more characters that Byatt
draws in vivid detail. (Washington Post review)
Carey, Peter, My Life as a Fake
Carey, who won the Man Booker Prize for his True History of the Kelly
Gang, takes another strange but much less well-known episode in
Australian history as the basis for this hypnotic novel of personal and
artistic obsession. He tells it through the eyes of Lady Sarah Wode-
Douglass, editor of a struggling but prestigious London poetry journal,
who one day in the early 1970s nds herself accompanying an old
family friend, poet and novelist John Slater, out to Malaysia. There they
encounter an eccentric Australian expatriate, Christopher Chubb, who
concocted, Slater says, a huge literary hoax in Australia just after the
war, creating an imaginary genius poet, Bob McCorkle, whose
publication by a little magazine led to the suicide of the magazine’s
editor. Now Chubb o ers Lady Sarah a page of poetry that shows
undoubted genius and claims it is from a book in his possession. The
tale is a tour de force, with a positively Graham Greene-ish relish in the
seamy side of the tropics, a mix of literary detective story and
murderous nightmare that is piquantly hair-raising. And just when it
seems that Carey’s story is his greatest fantastic creation to date, he lets
on that the hoax at the heart of it actually took place in Melbourne in
1946. As so often before, this extravagantly gifted writer has created
something bewilderingly original and powerful. (Publishers Weekly
review) (see my review at The Modern Word)
Catton, Eleanor, The Luminaries
Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2013. It is 1866, and Walter Moody
has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand gold elds. On
arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who
have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man
has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous
fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is
soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as
complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky. The Luminaries is
an extraordinary piece of ction. It is full of narrative, linguistic and
psychological pleasures, and has a endishly clever and original
structuring device. Written in pitch-perfect historical register, richly
evoking a mid-19th century world of shipping and banking and
goldrush boom and bust, it is also a ghost story, and a gripping mystery.
It is a thrilling achievement for someone still in her mid-20s, and will
con rm for critics and readers that Catton is one of the brightest stars
in the international writing rmament. (Amazon.com review)
Chabon, Michael, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Virtuoso Chabon takes intense delight in the practice of his art, and
never has his joy been more palpable than in this funny and profound
tale of exile, love, and magic. In his last novel, The Wonder Boys (1995),
Chabon explored the shadow side of literary aspirations. Here he revels
in the crass yet inventive and comforting world of comic-book
superheroes, those masked men with mysterious powers who were
born in the wake of the Great Depression and who carried their fans
through the horrors of war with the guarantee that good always
triumphs over evil. In a luxuriant narrative that is jubilant and
purposeful, graceful and complex, hilarious and enrapturing, Chabon
chronicles the fantastic adventures of two Jewish cousins, one
American, one Czech. It’s 1939 and Brooklynite Sammy Klayman
dreams of making it big in the nascent world of comic books. Joseph
Kavalier has never seen a comic book, but he is an accomplished artist
versed in the “autoliberation” techniques of his hero, Harry Houdini.
He e ects a great (and surreal) escape from the Nazis, arrives in New
York, and joins forces with Sammy. They rapidly create the Escapist, the
rst of many superheroes emblematic of their temperaments and
predicaments, and attain phenomenal success. But Joe, tormented by
guilt and grief for his lost family, abruptly joins the navy, abandoning
Sammy, their work, and his lover. As Chabon–equally adept at
atmosphere, action, dialogue, and cultural commentary–whips up
wildly imaginative escapades punctuated by schtick that rivals the best

of Jewish comedians, he plumbs the depths of the human heart and
celebrates the healing properties of escapism and the “genuine magic
of art” with exuberance and wisdom. (Booklist review)
Chandra, Vikram, Red Earth and Pouring Rain
Setting 18th- and 19th-century Mogul India against the open highways
of contemporary America and fusing Indian myth, Hindu gods, magic
and mundane reality, this intricate rst novel is a magni cent epic that
welds the exfoliating storytelling style of A Thousand and One Nights
to modernist ctional technique. Abhay, an Indian college student
studying in the U.S. but home on vacation in Bombay, shoots a
scavenging monkey; the dying creature reveals itself to be the
reincarnation of Sanjay Parasher, a ery, iconoclastic 19th-century poet
and freedom- ghter against British rule. To remain alive, the monkey
strikes a deal with the gods: he must keep Abhay’s family entertained
each day by telling stories of his former lives. Around this fanciful
premise, Indian novelist Chandra has built a powerful, moving saga
that explores colonialism, death and su ering, ephemeral pleasure and
the search for the meaning of life. Through the monkey’s tales, we learn
of Sanjay’s lethal estrangement from his best friend, Sikander, an
Anglo-Indian warrior who serves the British; of the suicide of
Sikander’s mother, Janvi, who throws herself on a funeral pyre after
her English husband gives away their daughters to missionaries; of
Sanjay’s avenging showdown in London with Dr. Paul Sarthey,
renowned orientalist and murderous imperialist. Abhay also narrates
his own sprawling tale about his drive across the U.S. with two
alienated fellow students, providing a dramatic contrast between
America’s throwaway pop culture and India’s ancient, venerated ways,
bound up with the concepts of dharma (right conduct), karma and
reincarnation. This is an astonishing and brilliant debut. (Publishers
Weekly review)
Clarke, Susanna, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
It’s 1808 and that Corsican upstart Napoleon is battering the English
army and navy. Enter Mr. Norrell, a fusty but ambitious scholar from
the Yorkshire countryside and the rst practical magician in hundreds
of years. What better way to demonstrate his revival of British magic
than to change the course of the Napoleonic wars? Susanna Clarke’s
ingenious rst novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, has a cleverness
and lightness of touch, but is less a fairy tale of good versus evil than a
fantastic comedy of manners, complete with elaborate false footnotes,
occasional period spellings, and a dense, lively mythology teeming
beneath the narrative. Mr. Norrell moves to London to establish his
in uence in government circles, devising such powerful illusions as an
11-day blockade of French ports by English ships fabricated from
rainwater. But however skillful his magic, his vanity provides an
Achilles heel, and the di ering ambitions of his more glamorous
apprentice, Jonathan Strange, threaten to topple all that Mr. Norrell
has achieved. A sparkling debut from Susanna Clarke–and it’s not all
fairy dust. (Amazon.com review)
Coetzee, J.M., Waiting For the Barbarians
For decades the Magistrate has run the a airs of a tiny frontier
settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and
the Empire, whose servant he is. But when the interrogation experts
arrive, he is jolted into sympathy with the victims and into a quixotic
act of rebellion which lands him in prison, branded as an enemy of the
state. Waiting for the Barbarians is an allegory of oppressor and
oppressed. Not just a man living through a crisis of conscience in an
obscure place in remote times, the Magistrate is an analogue of all men
living in complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency.
(Publisher’s description)
Coupland, Douglas, Girlfriend in a Coma
After making love for the rst time, high school senior Karen Ann
McNeil con des to her boyfriend Richard of the dark visions she’s been
recently su ering. It’s only a few hours later on that snowy Friday night
in 1979 that she descends into a coma. Nine months later she gives
birth to a daughter, Megan, her child by Richard, the protagonist of this
disturbingly funny novel. Karen remains comatose for the next
seventeen years. Richard and her circle of friends reside in an
emotional purgatory throughout the next two decades; passing
through careers as models, lm special e ects technicians, doctors, and
demolition experts, before nally being reunited on a conspiracy-
driven supernatural television series. Upon Karen’s reawakening, life
grows as surreal as their television show. With apocalyptic events
occurring, Karen, Richard, and their friends explore the essential
mysteries of life, faith, decency, and existence. Amid the world’s rubble
they attempt to restore their own humanity. (Publisher’s description)
Crace, Jim, Being Dead
Crace is a brilliant British writer whose novels are always varied in

historical setting, voice, theme and writing style, and are surprising in
content. This latest, sixth e ort (after Quarantine), a stunning look at
two people at the moment of their deaths, is the riskiest of his works,
the most mesmerizing and the most deeply felt. Joseph and Celice,
middle-aged doctors of zoology married to each other for almost 30
years, revisit the seaside where they rst met and made love “in the
singing salt dunes of Baritone Bay.” They are surprised on the dunes,
murdered and robbed, and their bodies lie undiscovered for days. In
alternating chapters of chronological counterpoint, Crace traces their
last day, working backwards from the moment of their murders to their
awakening that morning, innocent of what is to come. At the same
time, he recreates the day they were introduced, in the 1970s, when
they were researching their doctoral dissertations. In juxtaposing the
remorselessness of nature against the hopes, desires and con icted
emotions of individuals, Crace gracefully integrates the facts and myths
about the end of human life, and its transcendence (in Syl’s epiphanic
vision), into a narrative of dazzling virtuosity. (Publishers Weekly
review)
Crowley, John, Little, Big
John Crowley’s masterful Little, Big is the epic story of Smoky Barnable,
an anonymous young man who travels by foot from the City to a place
called Edgewood — not found on any map — to marry Daily Alice
Drinkwater, as was prophesied. It is the story of four generations of a
singular family, living in a house that is many houses on the magical
border of an otherworld. It is a story of fantastic love and heartrending
loss; of impossible things and unshakable destinies; and of the great
Tale that envelops us all. It is a wonder. (Publisher’s description)
Danielewski, Mark, House of Leaves
When Johnny Truant attempts to organize the many fragments of a

strange manuscript by a dead blind man, it gains possession of his very
soul. The manuscript is a complex commentary on a documentary lm
(The Navidson Record) about a house that de es all the laws of physics.
Navidson’s exploration of a seemingly endless, totally dark, and

constantly changing labyrinth in the house becomes an examination of
truth, perception, and darkness itself. The book interweaves the
manuscript with over 400 footnotes to works real and imagined, thus
illuminating both the text and Truant’s mental disintegration. First
novelist Danielewski employs avant-garde page layouts that are
occasionally a bit too clever but are generally highly e ective. Although
it may be consigned to the “horror” genre, this novel is also a
psychological thriller, a quest, a literary hoax, a dark comedy, and a
work of cultural criticism. It is simultaneously a highly literary work
and an absolute hoot. This powerful and extremely original novel is
strongly recommended. (Library Journal review)
DeLillo, Don, White Noise
Something is amiss in a small college town in Middle America.

Something subliminal, something omnipresent, something hard to put
your nger on. For example, teachers and students at the grade school
are falling mysteriously ill: “Investigators said it could be the
ventilating system, the paint or varnish, the foam insulation, the
electrical insulation, the cafeteria food, the rays emitted by
microcomputers, the asbestos reproo ng, the adhesive on shipping
containers, the fumes from the chlorinated pool, or perhaps something
deeper, ner-grained, more closely woven into the fabric of things.”
J.A.K. Gladney, world-renowned as the living center, the absolute font,
of Hitler Studies in North America in the mid-1980s, describes the
malaise a ecting his town in a superbly ironic and detached manner.
But even he fails to mask his disquiet. There is menace in the air, and
ultimately it is made manifest: a poisonous cloud–an “airborne toxic
event”–unleashed by an industrial accident oats over the town,
requiring evacuation. In the aftermath, as the residents adjust to new
and blazingly brilliant sunsets, Gladney and his family must confront
their own poses, night terrors, self-deceptions, and secrets. DeLillo is at
his dark, hilarious best in this 1985 National Book Award winner, a
novel that preceded but anticipated the explosion of the Internet,
tabloid television, and the dialed-in, wired-up, endlessly accelerated
tenor of the culture we live in. (Amazon.com review)
DeWitt, Helen, The Last Samurai
DeWitt’s ambitious, colossal debut novel tells the story of a young

genius, his worldly alienation and his eccentric mother, Sibylla
Newman, an American living in London after dropping out of Oxford.
Her son, Ludovic (Ludo), the product of a one-night stand, could read
English, French and Greek by the age of four. His incredible intellectual
ability is matched only by his insatiable curiosity, and Sibylla attempts
to guide her son’s education while scraping by on typing jobs. To avoid
the cold, they ride the Underground on the Circle Line train daily,
traveling around London as Ludo reads the Odyssey, learns Japanese
and masters mathematics and science. Sybilla uses her favorite lm,
Akira Kurosawa’s classic Seven Samurai, as a makeshift guide for her
son’s moral development. As Ludo matures and takes over the story’s
narration, Sibylla is revealed as less than forthcoming on certain topics,
most importantly the identity of Ludo’s father. Knowing only that his
male parent is a travel writer, Ludo searches through volumes of
adventure stories, but he is unsuccessful until he happens upon a folder
containing his father’s name hidden in a sealed envelope. He arranges
to meet the man, pretending to be a fan. The funny, bittersweet
encounter ends with a gravely disappointed Ludo, unable to confront
his father with his identity. Afterward, the sad 11-year-old resumes his
search for his ideal parent gure. Using a test modeled after a scene in
Seven Samurai, he seeks out ve di erent men, claiming he is the son of
each. While energetic and relentlessly unpredictable, the novel often
becomes belabored with its own inventiveness, but the bizarre
relationship between Sibylla and Ludo maintains its resonant, rich
centrality, giving the book true emotional cohesion. (Publishers Weekly
review)
Doctorow, E.L., Billy Bathgate
In the poorest part of the Bronx, in the depths of the Depression, a

teenage, fatherless street kid who will adopt the name Billy Bathgate
comes to the attention of his idol, master gangster Dutch Schultz.
Resourceful, brash, daring and brave, the narrator understands that
morality will have no in uence in lifting him from his poverty; by
hitching his wagon to the mobster’s star he can hope to provide his
gentle, mad mother and himself with a way to rise out of their desolate
existence. The astonishing story of Billy’s apprenticeship to Schultz and
his education at the hands of the mobster’s minions is related by
Doctorow with masterful skill, grace and lucidity of prose, inspired
inventiveness of scene and true-voiced dialogue. Equally a rollicking
adventure and a cautionary tale, both parable of the prodigal son and
poignant coming-of-age story, it is mesmerizing reading that soars from
the shocking rst scene of a gangland execution through episodes of
horror, hilarity and sudden, deepening insights. In this stunning, lyrical
novel, Doctorow has perfected the narrative voice of a lower-class boy
encountering the world. He falters only in a sentimental, almost
fairytale ending that belies the harsh realities by which the narrative is
propelled. But so ne and convincing is this story that the reader
accepts in its entirety Doctorow’s mythical vision, a dark version of the
Horatio Alger fable related with a brilliant twist. (Publishers Weekly
review)
Dorst, Doug and J.J. Abrams., S.
One book. Two readers. A world of mystery, menace and desire. A

young woman picks up a book left behind by a stranger. Inside it are his
margin notes, which reveal a reader entranced by the story and by its
mysterious author. She responds with notes of her own, leaving the
book for the stranger, and so begins an unlikely conversation that
plunges them both into the unknown. THE BOOK: Ship of Theseus, the
nal novel by a proli c but enigmatic writer named V. M. Straka, in
which a man with no past is shanghaied onto a strange ship with a
monstrous crew and launched on a disorienting and perilous journey.
THE WRITER: Straka, the incendiary and secretive subject of one of the
world’s greatest mysteries, a revolutionary about whom the world
knows nothing apart from the words he wrote and the rumours that
swirl around him. THE READERS: Jennifer and Eric, a college senior
and a disgraced grad student, both facing crucial decisions about who
they are, who they might become, and how much they’re willing to
trust another person with their passions, hurts and fears. S., conceived
by lmmaker J.J. Abrams and written by award-winning novelist Doug
Dorst, is the chronicle of two readers nding each other in the margins
of a book and enmeshing themselves in a deadly struggle between
forces they don’t understand. It is also Abrams and Dorst’s love letter to
the written word. (Publisher’s description)
Doyle, Roddy, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
In Roddy Doyle’s Booker Prize-winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha,

an Irish lad named Paddy rampages through the streets of Barrytown
with a pack of like-minded hooligans, playing cowboys and Indians,
etching their names in wet concrete, and setting res. Roddy Doyle has
captured the sensations and speech patterns of preadolescents with
consummate skill, and managed to do so without resorting to
sentimentality. Paddy Clarke and his friends are not bad boys; they’re
just a little bit restless. They’re always taking sides, bullying each other,
and secretly wishing they didn’t have to. All they want is for
something–anything–to happen. Throughout the novel, Paddy teeters
on the nervous verge of adolescence. In one scene, Paddy tries to make
his little brother’s hot water bottle explode, but gives up after stomping
on it just one time: “I jumped on Sinbad’s bottle. Nothing happened. I
didn’t do it again. Sometimes when nothing happened it was really
getting ready to happen.” Paddy Clarke senses that his world is about to
change forever–and not necessarily for the better. When he realizes
that his parents’ marriage is falling apart, Paddy stays up all night
listening, half-believing that his vigil will ward o further ghting. It
doesn’t work, but it is sweet and sad that he believes it might. Paddy’s
logic may be fuzzy, but his heart is in the right place. (Amazon.com
review)
Du y, Bruce, The World as I Found It
Vienna, 1900. The trenches of World War I and the dark slide into Nazi
Europe. The intellectual lights of Cambridge University and the nabobs
on the outskirts of Bloomsbury. Marriage and domestic life. These are
just a few of the worlds the reader enters in this exhilarating novel of
ideas, romance, and imagination. Irreverently trespassing on the turf of
history, biography, and philosophy, The World as I Found It is the tale of
three wildly di erent men adrift in the twentieth century. At the center
is Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most magnetic philosophers of our
time: brilliant, tortured, mercurial, forging his own solitary path while
leaving a permanent mark-and sometimes a scar-on lives all around
him. Playing in counterpoint are Wittgenstein’s two reluctant mentors:
Bertrand Russell, past his philosophical prime yet eager to break new
ground as a public intellectual, educational theorist, and sexual
adventurer; and G. E. Moore, the great Cambridge don who exercised
such an in uence on E. M. Forster and who was devoted to the
pleasures of the table and pure thought until, late in life, he discovered
real ful llment in marriage and fatherhood. By turns history,
biography, and philosophy, The World as I Found It is the tale of three
wildly di erent men adrift in the twentieth century: Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore. Rich in humor and
tragedy, lust and violence, spirit and striving, this is a novel that will
enthrall any reader. (Publisher’s description)
Egan, Jennifer, A Visit From the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an

aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the
passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and
Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate
detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose
paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New
York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa. We rst meet Sasha in her mid-
thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her
longstanding compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her
turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then a
runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the
suicidal impulses of her best friend. We meet Bennie Salazar at the
melancholy nadir of his adult life — divorced, struggling to connect
with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed up band in the
basement of a suburban house — and then revisit him in 1979, at the
height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk
scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting
talent. We learn what became of his high school gang — who thrived
and who faltered — and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s
catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left
behind in the wake of Lou’s far ung sexual conquests and meteoric rise
and fall. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of
time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations
set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our
fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy
to satire to Powerpoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction
that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger
for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both — and
escape the merciless progress of time — in the transporting realms of
art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest
writers. (Amazon.com review)
Eggers, Dave, What is the What
Valentino Achak Deng, real-life hero of this engrossing epic, was a

refugee from the Sudanese civil war-the bloodbath before the current
Darfur bloodbath-of the 1980s and 90s. In this ctionalised memoir,

Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) makes him an icon
of globalisation. Separated from his family when Arab militia destroy
his village, Valentino joins thousands of other “Lost Boys,” beset by
starvation, thirst and man-eating lions on their march to squalid
refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, where Valentino pieces together
a new life. He eventually reaches America, but nds his quest for safety,
community and ful lment in many ways even more di cult there than
in the camps: he recalls, for instance, being robbed, beaten and held
captive in his Atlanta apartment. Eggers’s limpid prose gives Valentino
an una ected, compelling voice and makes his narrative by turns
harrowing, funny, bleak and lyrical. The result is a horri c account of
the Sudanese tragedy, but also an emblematic saga of modernity-of the
search for home and self in a world of unending upheaval. (Publishers
Weekly review)
Eugenides, Je rey, Middlesex
Eugenides’s second novel (after The Virgin Suicides) opens “I was born
twice: rst, as a baby girl…in January of 1960; and then again, as a
teenage boy…in August of 1974.” Thus starts the epic tale of how
Calliope Stephanides is transformed into Cal. Spanning three
generations and two continents, the story winds from the small Greek
village of Smyrna to the smoggy, crime-riddled streets of Detroit, past
historical events, and through family secrets. The author’s eloquent
writing captures the essence of Cal, a hermaphrodite, who sets out to
discover himself by tracing the story of his family back to his
grandparents. From the beginning, the reader is brought into a world
rich in culture and history, as Eugenides extends his plot into forbidden
territories with unique grace. His con dence in the story, combined
with his sure prose, helps readers overcome their initial surprise and
focus on the emotional revelation of the characters and beyond. Once
again, Eugenides proves that he is not only a unique voice in modern
literature but also well versed in the nature of the human heart. Highly
recommended. (Library Journal review)
Ferris, Joshua, Then We Came to the End
In this wildly funny debut from former ad man Ferris, a group of

copywriters and designers at a Chicago ad agency face layo s at the
end of the ’90s boom. Indignation rises over the rightful owner of a
particularly coveted chair (“We felt deceived”). Gonzo e-mailer Tom

Mota quotes Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the midst of
his tirades, desperately trying to retain a shred of integrity at a job that
requires a ruthless attention to what will make people buy things.
Jealousy toward the aloof and “inscrutable” middle manager Joe Pope
spins out of control. Copywriter Chris Yop secretly returns to the o ce
after he’s laid o to prove his worth. Rumors that supervisor Lynn
Mason has breast cancer inspire blood lust, remorse, compassion. Ferris
has the downward-spiraling o ce down cold, and his use of the
narrative “we” brilliantly conveys the collective fear, pettiness, idiocy
and also humanity of high-level o ce drones as anxiety rises to a fever
pitch. Only once does Ferris shift from the rst person plural (for an
extended fugue on Lynn’s realization that she may be ill), and the
perspective feels natural throughout. At once delightfully freakish and
entirely credible, Ferris’s cast makes a real impression. (Publishers
Weekly review)
Flanagan, Richard, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
A novel of the cruelty of war, and tenuousness of life and the

impossibility of love. August, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW
camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo
Evans is haunted by his love a air with his uncle’s young wife two years
earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation,
from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life
forever. This savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of
love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers,
only to discover all that he has lost. (Publisher’s description)
Fowler, Karen Joy, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
As a girl in Indiana, Rosemary, Fowler’s breathtakingly droll 22-year-

old narrator, felt that she and Fern were not only sisters but also twins.
So she was devastated when Fern disappeared. Then her older brother,
Lowell, also vanished. Rosemary is now prolonging her college studies
in California, unsure of what to make of her life. Enter tempestuous and
sexy Harlow, a very dangerous friend who forces Rosemary to confront
her past. We then learn that Rosemary’s father is a psychology
professor, her mother a nonpracticing scientist, and Fern a chimpanzee.
Fowler, author of the best-selling The Jane Austen Book Club (2004),
vigorously and astutely explores the profound consequences of this
unusual family con guration in sustained ashbacks. Smart and

frolicsome Fern believes she is human, while Rosemary, unconsciously
mirroring Fern, is instantly tagged “monkey girl” at school. Fern,
Rosemary, and Lowell all end up traumatized after they are abruptly
separated. As Rosemary — lonely, unmoored, and caustically funny —
ponders the mutability of memories, the similarities and di erences
between the minds of humans and chimps, and the treatment of
research animals, Fowler slowly and dramatically reveals Fern and
Lowell’s heartbreaking yet instructive fates. Piquant humor, refulgent
language, a canny plot rooted in real-life experiences, an irresistible
narrator, threshing insights, and tender emotions — Fowler has outdone
herself in this deeply inquisitive, cage-rattling novel. (Booklist review)
Frayn, Michael, Spies
By the author of the bestselling Booker Prize nalist Headlong, this

dark, nostalgic and bittersweet parable evokes the childhood escapades
of an isolated and hapless young boy caught up in the uncertainties of
wartime London in the early 1940s, just after the horrors of the
Luftwa e blitz. Stephen Wheatley, now a grandfather living abroad, is
drawn back to London to revisit his boyhood home, to deal with the
complexities and eventual tragedy engendered by what seemed a
harmless game of spy when he was just a schoolboy during WWII. His
best friend at the time was Keith Hayward, the bright son of rather
stando sh parents; Keith and Stephen embark on a childish adventure
after Keith announces that his British mother is a German spy. The
murky plot follows their frustrations as they try to shadow Keith’s mum
as she goes through the mundane ritual of stopping by her sister’s
house with letters and a shopping basket, only to disappear into the
neighboring streets. Discovering at last that she takes a route through
the culvert beneath the railroad and leaves letters in a box hidden on
the other side, they eventually learn that she sometimes meets a
tattered, bearded tramp hiding in a bombed-out cellar. When Keith’s
mum nally realizes they have found her out, she secretly seeks
Stephen’s loyalty, making him complicit. Thrust into a role far beyond
his years, but helpless to refuse, he is overwhelmed. As it plays out to a
surprising denouement, this enigmatic melodrama will keep readers’
attention rmly in hand. (Publishers Weekly review)
Gaiman, Neil, Anansi Boys
If readers found the Sandman series creator’s last novel, American

Gods, hard to classify, they will be equally nonplussed — and equally
entertained — by this brilliant mingling of the mundane and the
fantastic. “Fat Charlie” Nancy leads a life of comfortable workaholism
in London, with a stressful agenting job he doesn’t much like, and a
pleasant ancée, Rosie. When Charlie learns of the death of his
estranged father in Florida, he attends the funeral and learns two facts
that turn his well-ordered existence upside-down: that his father was a
human form of Anansi, the African trickster god, and that he has a
brother, Spider, who has inherited some of their father’s godlike
abilities. Spider comes to visit Charlie and gets him red from his job,
steals his ancée, and is instrumental in having him arrested for
embezzlement and suspected of murder. When Charlie resorts to magic
to get rid of Spider, who’s sel sh and unthinking rather than evil,
things begin to go very badly for just about everyone. Other characters
— including Charlie’s malevolent boss, Grahame Coats (“an albino
ferret in an expensive suit”), witches, police and some of the folk from
American Gods — are expertly woven into Gaiman’s rich myth, which
plays o the African folk tales in which Anansi stars. But it’s Gaiman’s
focus on Charlie and Charlie’s attempts to return to normalcy that make
the story so winning — along with gleeful, hurtling prose. (Publishers
Weekly review)
Ghosh, Amitav, The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers,

Delirium & Discovery
The Calcutta Chromosome is one of those books that’s marketed as a

mainstream thriller even though it is an excellent science ction novel
(It won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award). The main character is
a man named Antar, whose job is to monitor a somewhat nicky
computer that sorts through mountains of information. When the
computer nds something it can’t catalog, it brings the item to Antar’s
attention. A string of these seemingly random anomalies puts Antar on
the trail of a man named Murugan, who disappeared in Calcutta in
1995 while searching for the truth behind the discovery of the cure for
malaria. This search for Murugan leads, in turn, to the discovery of the
Calcutta Chromosome, which can shift bits of personality from one
person to another. That’s when things really get interesting.
(Amazon.com review)
Gold, Glen David, Carter Beats the Devil
In Carter Beats the Devil, Glen David Gold subjects the past to the same
wondrous transformations as the rabbit in a skilled illusionist’s hat.
Gold’s debut novel opens with real-life magician Charles Carter
executing a particularly grisly trick, using President Warren G. Harding
as a volunteer. Shortly afterwards, Harding dies mysteriously in his San
Francisco hotel room, and Carter is forced to ee the country. Or does
he? It’s only the rst of many misdirections in a magical performance
by Gold. In the course of subsequent pages, Carter nds himself
pursued by the most hapless of FBI agents; falls in love with a beautiful,
outspoken blind woman; and confronts an old nemesis bent on
destroying him. Throw in countless stunning (and historically accurate)
illusions, some beautifully rendered period detail, and historical gures
like young inventor Philo T. Farnsworth and self-made millionaire
Francis “Borax” Smith, and you have old-fashioned entertainment
executed with a decidedly modern sensibility. Gold has written for
movies and TV, so it’s no surprise that he delivers snappy, fast-paced
dialogue and action scenes as expertly scripted as anything that’s come
out of Hollywood in years. Carter Beats the Devil has a mustachioed
villain, chase scenes, a lion, miraculous escapes, even pirates, for God’s
sake. Yet none of this is as broadly drawn as it might sound: Gold’s
characters are driven by childhood sorrows and disappointments in
love, just like the rest of us, and they’re limned in clever, quicksilver
prose. By turns suspenseful, moving, and magical, this is the historical
novel to give to anyone who complains that contemporary ction has
lost the ability to both move and entertain. (Amazon.com review)
Grass, Gunter, The Tin Drum
The greatest German novel since the end of World War II, The Tin
Drum is the autobiography of Oskar Matzerath, thirty years old,
detained in a mental hospital, convicted of a murder he did not
commit. On the day of his third birthday, Oskar had “declared,
resolved, and determined [to] stop right there, remain as I was, stay the
same size, cling to the same attire” (striped pullover and patent-leather
shoes). That same day Oskar receives his rst tin drum, and from then
on it is the means of his expression, allowing him to draw forth
memories from the past as well as judgments about the horrors,
injustices, and eccentricities he observes through the long nightmare of
the Nazi era. As that era ebbs bloodily away, as drum succeeds drum,
Oskar participates in the German postwar economic miracle — working
variously in the black market, as an artist’s model, in a troupe of
traveling musicians. With the onset of a uence and fame, Oskar

decides to grow a few inches, only to develop a humpback. But despite
his newfound status (and stature), Oskar remains haunted by the
deaths of his parents, a icted by his responsibility for past sins — and
so assumes guilt for a murder he did not commit as an act of atonement
and an opportunity to nd consolation. The rhythms of Oskar’s drums
are intricate and insistent, and they lead us, often by way of shocking
fantasies, through the dark forest of German history. Through Oskar’s
piercing, outspoken voice and deformed little gure, through the
imaginative distortion and exaggeration of historical experience, a
pathetically hilarious yet startlingly true portrayal of the human
situation comes into view. (Publisher’s description)
Grenville, Kate, The Secret River
William Thornhill, a boatman in pre-Victorian London, escapes the

harsh circumstances of his lower-class, hard-scrabble life and ends up a
prosperous, albeit somehow unsatis ed, settler in Australia. After being
caught stealing, he is sentenced to death; the sentence is commuted to
transportation to Australia with his pregnant wife. Readers are lled
with a sense of foreboding that turns out to be well founded. Life is
di cult, but through hard work and initiative the Thornhills slowly get
ahead. During his sentence, William has made his living hauling goods
on the Hawkesbury River and thirsting after a piece of virgin soil that
he regularly passes. Once he gains his freedom, his family moves onto
the land, raises another rude hut, and plants corn. The small band of
Aborigines camping nearby seems mildly threatening: William cannot
communicate with them; they lead leisurely hunter/gatherer lives that
contrast with his farming labor; and they appear and disappear eerily.
They are also masterful spearmen, and Thornhill cannot even shoot a
gun accurately. Other settlers on the river want to eliminate the
Aborigines. The culture clash becomes violent, with the protagonist
unwillingly drawn in. The characters are sympathetically and colorfully
depicted, and the experiencing of circumstances beyond any single
person’s control is beautifully shown. (School Library Journal review)
Haddon, Mark, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Christopher Boone, the autistic 15-year-old narrator of this revelatory

novel, relaxes by groaning and doing math problems in his head, eats
red-but not yellow or brown-foods and screams when he is touched.
Strange as he may seem, other people are far more of a conundrum to

him, for he lacks the intuitive “theory of mind” by which most of us
sense what’s going on in other people’s heads. When his neighbor’s
poodle is killed and Christopher is falsely accused of the crime, he
decides that he will take a page from Sherlock Holmes (one of his
favorite characters) and track down the killer. As the mystery leads him
to the secrets of his parents’ broken marriage and then into an odyssey
to nd his place in the world, he must fall back on deductive logic to
navigate the emotional complexities of a social world that remains a
closed book to him. Though Christopher insists, “This will not be a
funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them,” the
novel brims with touching, ironic humor. The result is an eye-opening
work in a unique and compelling literary voice. (Publishers Weekly
review)
Harrison, M. John, Light
In M. John Harrison’s dangerously illuminating new novel, three

quantum outlaws face a universe of their own creation, a universe
where you make up the rules as you go along and break them just as
fast, where there’s only one thing more mysterious than darkness. In
contemporary London, Michael Kearney is a serial killer on the run
from the entity that drives him to kill. He is seeking escape in a future
that doesn’t yet exist — a quantum world that he and his physicist
partner hope to access through a breach of time and space itself. In this
future, Seria Mau Genlicher has already sacri ced her body to merge
into the systems of her starship, the White Cat. But the “inhuman” K-
ship captain has gone rogue, pirating the galaxy while playing cat and
mouse with the authorities who made her what she is. In this future, Ed
Chianese, a drifter and adventurer, has ridden dyna ow ships, run old
alien mazes, surfed stellar envelopes. He “went deep” — and lived to tell
about it. Once crazy for life, he’s now just a twink on New Venusport,
addicted to the bizarre alternate realities found in the tanks — and in
debt to all the wrong people. Haunting them all through this maze of
menace and mystery is the shadowy presence of the Shrander — and
three enigmatic clues left on the barren surface of an asteroid under an
ocean of light known as the Kefahuchi Tract: a deserted spaceship, a
pair of bone dice, and a human skeleton.(Publisher’s description)
Hartnett, Sonya, Of a Boy
Rarely is a sentence turned so well, a setting so remarkably established,

and a plot so evenly polished as in this book. Immediately, in the
preface, readers are confronted with a spellbinding scenario. Three
children head down the footpath from their home in Australia to the
ice-cream shop, and they are never seen again. In a neighboring town,
nine-year-old Adrian is fearful of much, talented, perceptive, curious, a
virtual outcast in his school, and an unhappy resident in his
grandmother’s home. He notices the three children who move into a
house across the road and wonders if they could possibly be the missing
trio. Adrian subsequently meets the oldest girl, Nicole, in the park one
afternoon as she cares for a dying bird. His suspicions of her identity
are further aroused by her sly answers to his inquiries. A psychic
reports that the missing children are located near water, and Nicole
and Adrian take it upon themselves to nd them. Tightly composed and
ripe with symbolism, this complex book will o er opportunities for rich
discussion. (School Library Journal review)
Hemon, Aleksander, The Lazarus Project
America has a richer literary landscape since Aleksandar Hemon,

stranded in the United States in 1992 after war broke out in his native
Sarajevo, adopted Chicago as his new home. He completed his rst
short story within three years of learning to write in English, and since
then his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Paris
Review and in two acclaimed books, The Question of Bruno and Nowhere
Man. In The Lazarus Project, his most ambitious and imaginative work
yet, Hemon brings to life an epic narrative born from a historical event:
the 1908 killing of Lazarus Averbuch, a 19-year-old Jewish immigrant
who was shot dead by George Shippy, the chief of Chicago police, after
being admitted into his home to deliver an important letter. The
mystery of what really happened that day remains unsolved (Shippy
claimed Averbuch was an anarchist with ill intent) and from this
opening set piece Hemon springs a century ahead to tell the story of
Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian-American writer living in Chicago who gets
funding to travel to Eastern Europe and unearth what really happened.
The Lazarus Project deftly weaves the two stories together, cross-
cutting the aftermath of Lazarus’s death with Brik’s journey and the
tales from his traveling partner, Rora, a Bosnian war photographer. And
while the novel will remind readers of many great books before it–
Ragtime, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Everything Is
Illuminated–it is a masterful literary adventure that manages to be
grand in scope and intimate in detail. It’s an incredibly rewarding

reading experience that’s not to be missed. (Amazon.com review)
Hensher, Philip, The Mulberry Empire
In 1839, about 50,000 British troops entered Afghanistan to replace the

amir with someone more palatable to the Empire. In this ctionalized
account, we meet Burnes, a British explorer who ventures into the
capital city of Kabul and befriends the soon-to-be-ousted Amir Dost
Mohammed Khan. Through no planning of his own, Burnes becomes
an emissary for the British government and attempts to forge a
relationship with Afghanistan. The novel switches between Afghanistan
and England, and in addition to Burnes, the reader meets many other
characters, among them Bella, the woman who falls for Burnes but
won’t follow him on his exotic journeys; Charles Masson, a deserter of
the English forces who one day nds himself in Kabul and who later
plots the downfall of Burnes; and Vitkevich, Burnes’s Russian
counterpart, who is attempting to double-cross the amir. Hensher,
winner of the Somerset Maugham Award for Kitchen Venom, combines
numerous characters, plot lines, locales, and time shifts to tell an
incredibly complex saga of rulers, empires, politics, imperialism, and
revolt. The past events of which he writes mirror the present and
maybe the future, giving the book a timeless quality. This well-executed
work will appeal to serious fans of historical ction. (Library Journal
review)
Hoban, Russell, Riddley Walker
‘Walker is my name and I am the same. Riddley Walker. Walking my

riddels where ever theyve took me and walking them now on this paper
the same. There aint that many sir prizes in life if you take noatis of
every thing. Every time will have its happenings out and every place
the same. Thats why I nely come to writing all this down. Thinking on
what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing whats in us lorn
and loan and oansome.’ Composed in an English which has never been
spoken and laced with a storytelling tradition that predates the written
word, Riddley Walker is the world waiting for us at the bitter end of the
nuclear road. It is desolate, dangerous and harrowing, and a modern
masterpiece. (Publisher’s description)
Hornby, Nick, High Fidelity
It has been said often enough that baby boomers are a television
generation, but High Fidelity reminds that in a way they are the record-
album generation as well. This hilarious novel is obsessed with music;
Hornby’s narrator is an early thirtysomething bloke who runs a London
record store. He sells albums recorded the old-fashioned way–on vinyl–
and is having a tough time making other transitions as well, speci cally
to adulthood. The book is in one sense a love story, both sweet and
interesting; most entertaining, though, are the hilarious arguments
over arcane matters of pop music. (Amazon.co.uk review)
Howrey, Meg, The Wanderers
In an age of space exploration, we search to nd ourselves. In four years,

aerospace giant Prime Space will put the rst humans on Mars. Helen
Kane, Yoshihiro Tanaka, and Sergei Kuznetsov must prove they’re the
crew for the historic voyage by spending seventeen months in the most
realistic simulation ever created. Constantly observed by Prime Space’s
team of “Obbers,” Helen, Yoshi, and Sergei must appear ever in control.
But as their surreal pantomime progresses, each soon realizes that the
complications of inner space are no less fraught than those of outer
space. The borders between what is real and unreal begin to blur, and
each astronaut is forced to confront demons past and present, even as
they struggle to navigate their increasingly claustrophobic quarters —
and each other. Astonishingly imaginative, tenderly comedic, and
unerringly wise, The Wanderers explores the di erences between those
who go and those who stay, telling a story about the desire behind all
exploration: the longing for discovery and the great search to
understand the human heart. (Publisher’s description)
Hulme, Keri, The Bone People
Powerful and visionary, Keri Hulme has written the great New Zealand
novel of our times. The Bone People is the story of Kerewin, a despairing
part-Maori artist who is convinced that her solitary life is the only way
to face the world. Her cocoon is rudely blown away by the sudden
arrival during a rainstorm of Simon, a mute six-year-old whose past
seems to hold some terrible trauma. In his wake comes his foster-father
Joe, a Maori factory worker with a nasty temper. The narrative unravels
to reveal the truths that lie behind these three characters, and in so
doing displays itself as a huge, ambitious work that tackles the clash
between Maori and European characters in beautiful prose of a

heartrending poignancy. (Publisher’s description)
Hyland, MJ, Carry Me Down
John Egan is a mis t, ‘a twelve-year old in the body of a grown man

with the voice of a giant who insists on the ridiculous truth’. With an
obsession for the Guinness Book of Records and faith in his ability to
detect when adults are lying, John remains hopeful despite the
unfortunate cards life deals him. During one year in John’s life, from his
voice breaking, through the breaking-up of his home life, to the near
collapse of his sanity, we witness the gradual unsticking of John’s mind,
and the trouble that creates for him and his family. Set in early
seventies Ireland, Carry Me Down is a deeply sympathetic take on one
sad boyhood, told in gripping, and at times unsettling, prose. It plays
out its tragic plot against a disarmingly familiar background and
refuses to portray any of its lovingly drawn characters as easy heroes or
villains. (Publisher’s description)
Ihimaera, Witi, The Whale Rider
A poetic blend of reality and myth provides a riveting tale of adventure

and passion. An ancient whale ridden by a mystical man rises from the
sea, the rider throwing spears that blossom like seeds into gifts of
nature. One last spear “- ew across a thousand years. When it hit the
earth, it did not change but waited for another hundred and fty years
to pass until it was needed.” It sprouts when Kahu, a girl child, is born
to the eldest grandson of the chief of the Maori in Whangara, New
Zealand. Koro Apirana is disgusted; he needs a male child to continue
the line of descent in the tribe. The years that follow further harden his
heart toward his great-granddaughter in spite of the bottomless love
and respect she showers upon him. The child’s great-grandmother, the
irreverent Nanny Flowers, proves to be the strength of this family; she
nurtures the girl whom she knows holds the key to the future. The
complex mixture of archetypal characters and cultural troubles make
this novel appropriate for mature readers. This story, originally
published in New Zealand in 1987, is the basis of the recently released
lm by the same name. It’s a tale rich in intense drama and sociological
and cultural information. (School Library Journal review)
Irving, John, The World According to Garp
This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields —
a feminist leader ahead of her times. This is the life and death of a
famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual
extremes — even of sexual assassinations. It is a novel rich with “lunacy
and sorrow”; yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine
a comedy both ribald and robust. In more than thirty languages, in
more than forty countries — with more than ten million copies in print
— this novel provides almost cheerful, even hilarious evidence of its
famous last line: “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal
cases.” (Publisher’s description)
Ishiguro, Kazuo, Never Let Me Go
Kathy, Ruth and Tommy were pupils at Hailsham — an idyllic

establishment situated deep in the English countryside. The children
there were tenderly sheltered from the outside world, brought up to
believe they were special, and that their personal welfare was crucial.
But for what reason were they really there? It is only years later that
Kathy, now aged 31, nally allows herself to yield to the pull of
memory. What unfolds is the haunting story of how Kathy, Ruth and
Tommy, slowly come to face the truth about their seemingly happy
childhoods — and about their futures. Never Let Me Go is a uniquely
moving novel, charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of our
lives. (Publisher’s description)
Jemisin, N.K., The Broken Earth Trilogy (The Fifth Season, The
Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky)
In the rst volume of [the] trilogy, a fresh cataclysm besets a physically

unstable world whose ruling society oppresses its most magically
powerful inhabitants. The continent ironically known as the Stillness is
riddled with fault lines and volcanoes and periodically su ers from
Seasons, civilization-destroying tectonic catastrophes. It’s also occupied
by a small population of orogenes, people with the ability to sense and
manipulate thermal and kinetic energy. They can quiet earthquakes
and quench volcanoes…but also touch them o . While they’re
necessary, they’re also feared and frequently lynched. The “lucky” ones
are recruited by the Fulcrum, where the brutal training hones their
powers in the service of the Empire. The tragic trap of the orogene’s life
is told through three linked narratives (the link is obvious fairly
quickly): Damaya, a erce, ambitious girl new to the Fulcrum; Syenite,
an angry young woman ordered to breed with her bitter and

frighteningly powerful mentor and who stumbles across secrets her
masters never intended her to know; and Essun, searching for the
husband who murdered her young son and ran away with her daughter
mere hours before a Season tore a ery rift across the Stillness. Jemisin
(The Shadowed Sun, 2012, etc.) is utterly un inching; she tackles racial
and social politics which have obvious echoes in our own world while
chronicling the painfully intimate struggle between the desire to
survive at all costs and the need to maintain one’s personal integrity.
Beneath the story’s fantastic trappings are incredibly real people who
undergo intense, sadly believable pain. With every new work, Jemisin’s
ability to build worlds and break hearts only grows. (Kirkus review)
Jennings, Kate, Moral Hazard
This short, self-assured novel by Australian-born Jennings (Snake)

brilliantly depicts the complicated life of a working woman on Wall
Street during the dot-com boom. Cath, a freelance writer in her 40s, is
married to Bailey, who’s 25 years her senior. When he develops
Alzheimer’s, she takes a speech-writing job at an investment bank to
pay for his expensive medical care. Wry but realistic, and realizing her
position in a rigid boys’ club hierarchy, she suppresses her liberal
sensibility and defers to the chauvinists who dominate the rm, even
cozying up to Horace, the company’s most Machiavellian executive.
Cath’s Virgil through this hell is Mike, a cynical but gabby risk manager
whose gossip and instruction illuminate the high-stakes o ce politics
and dismal science of Wall Street. As Bailey deteriorates, in scene after
heartbreaking scene, Cath nds unexpected succor “in the belly of the
beast.” Jennings, herself a former Wall Street speechwriter, makes it
clear that the mad math of high nance and the delusions of
Alzheimer’s resemble one another: it’s a metaphor she exploits with
dramatic consequences in this piercing novel, gleaming with facets of
hard-won knowledge, polished by experience and a keen intelligence.
An ideal subway read for smart working men and women, it masterfully
documents the culture of economic and corporate arrogance, while
never losing sight of the human cost of such hubris. (Publishers Weekly
review)
Jones, Gwyneth, Life
The lives of biologist Anna Senoz; her husband, Spence; and their
university friends intertwine as they evolve from idealistic students into
adults with concerns that may a ect their world. When Anna discovers
a curious genetic trend with implications for the human sexual identity
and gender relations, she nds herself a pariah among her colleagues.
This latest novel from British author Jones (Divine Endurance) portrays
a near future of commercial globalisation in which gender
discrimination persists in subtle ways, forcing biology to nd a way to
ght back to equalise the sexes. Beautifully written and elegantly
paced, this story conveys bold speculative concepts through intensely
human characters. (Library Journal review)
Jones, Lloyd, Mister Pip
“You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So
will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to
breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will
not look up until the wallpaper is in ames.” It is Bougainville in 1991
— a small village on a lush tropical island in the South Paci c. Eighty-
six days have passed since Matilda’s last day of school as, quietly, war is
encroaching from the other end of the island. When the villagers’ safe,
predictable lives come to a halt, Bougainville’s children are surprised to
nd the island’s only white man, a recluse, re-opening the school. Pop
Eye, aka Mr Watts, explains he will introduce the children to Mr
Dickens. Matilda and the others think a foreigner is coming to the
island and prepare a list of much needed items. They are shocked to
discover their acquaintance with Mr Dickens will be through Mr Watts’
inspiring reading of Great Expectations. But on an island at war, the
power of ction has dangerous consequences. Imagination and beliefs
are challenged by guns. Mister Pip is an unforgettable tale of survival by
story; a dazzling piece of writing that lives long in the mind after the
last page is nished. (Publisher’s description)
Kunzru, Hari, Transmission
Transmission is Hari Kunzru’s second novel and, in a similar vein to

Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, the title is instructive; it’s
guratively and literally, the book’s pulsing leitmotif. To transmit is, by
de nition, to “send across”, and the migration of information and
people, the destruction and the erection of borders in our hi-tech,
supposedly global village, (a world where Indian graduates gain
Australian accents working in local call centres) is what this novel is all
about. Leaving aside the broader forces of globalisation, Kunzru’s chief
dramatic agent is a computer virus that meshes together the lives of his
main characters: Arjun Mehta, a sexually-naïve Indian programmer
working in America who unleashes the contagion; Leela Zahir, a
Bollywood actress whose image the bug zooms across the globe and
Guy Swift, head of Tomorrow, a Shoreditch-based consultancy whose
ongoing quest to harness the “emotional magma that wells from the
core of planet brand”, becomes somewhat nobbled in the immediate
technological fallout. Of his cast, not unsurprisingly Guy comes closest
to caricature (though his scheme to rebrand European border police as
Ministry of Sound-style nightclub bouncers–”Europe: No Jeans, No
Trainers”–sounds alarming believable). But then Guy’s is the incarnate
of the worst, Panglossian traits of the West in this callow information
age. His certainty and self-absorbed fecklessness (which thankfully he
does eventually su er, horribly for) contrasts jarringly with poor,
Mehta, whose American dreams tip, all too swiftly into nightmare.
(Amazon.co.uk review)
Kureishi, Hanif, The Black Album
Again cleverly mining the chaos and contradictions of multicultural,

postmodern England, Kureishi (The Buddha of Suburbia) follows the
turbulent social and spiritual education of an impressionable young
Pakistani at an inferior London college, where he struggles with
con icting personal, familial and cultural allegiances. The year is 1989,
and the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses has caused
an international controversy. Shahid Hasan has left his bourgeois
family in Kent to study in the city. As he falls in with a group of
crusading young Muslims whose charismatic leader lives next door,
Shahid also becomes deeply involved — both intellectually and sexually
— with his liberal, humanistic professor Deedee Osgood, who has
assigned him a term paper on the rock icon then known as Prince.
Irresolute to the point of spinelessness, Shahid allows his beliefs to
vacillate until a violent confrontation erupts. Kureishi insightfully
probes issues of faith and individualism against a memorable landscape
of urban and academic upheaval. While Shahid’s lack of conviction and
personal loyalty make him a less than likable protagonist, there is
ample fervor in the colorful supporting cast, and the author’s wit and
considerable narrative talents easily embroil the reader in the novel’s
unfolding drama. (Publishers Weekly review)
Lahiri, Jhumpa, The Namesake
Any talk of The Namesake–Jhumpa Lahiri’s follow-up to her Pulitzer

Prize-winning debut, Interpreter of Maladies–must begin with a name:
Gogol Ganguli. Born to an Indian academic and his wife, Gogol is
a icted from birth with a name that is neither Indian nor American
nor even really a rst name at all. He is given the name by his father
who, before he came to America to study at MIT, was almost killed in a
train wreck in India. Rescuers caught sight of the volume of Nikolai
Gogol’s short stories that he held, and hauled him from the train.
Ashoke gives his American-born son the name as a kind of placeholder,
and the awkward thing sticks. Awkwardness is Gogol’s birthright. He
grows up a bright American boy, goes to Yale, has pretty girlfriends,
becomes a successful architect, but like many second-generation
immigrants, he can never quite nd his place in the world. There’s a
lovely section where he dates a wealthy, cultured young Manhattan
woman who lives with her charming parents. They fold Gogol into their
easy, elegant life, but even here he can nd no peace and he breaks o
the relationship. His mother nally sets him up on a blind date with the
daughter of a Bengali friend, and Gogol thinks he has found his match.
Moushumi, like Gogol, is at odds with the Indian-American world she
inhabits. She has found, however, a circuitous escape: “At Brown, her
rebellion had been academic … she’d pursued a double major in
French. Immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been
her refuge–she approached French, unlike things American or Indian,
without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind.” Lahiri
documents these quiet rebellions and random longings with great
sensitivity. There’s no cleverness or showing-o in The Namesake, just
beautifully con dent storytelling. Gogol’s story is neither comedy nor
tragedy; it’s simply that ordinary, hard-to-get-down-on-paper
commodity: real life. (Amazon.com review)
LeGuin, Ursula, The Dispossessed
Most of Le Guin’s science ction is set in a human galaxy where the

distance of time and space imposed by relativity is mitigated by
instantaneous transmission of information through a gadget called the
ansible. The Dispossessed was the book in which she told us of Shevek,
the ansible’s inventor, and the ironies of his career. Shevek is a loyal
citizen of a poor anarchist world, Anarres, which nds frills like
research hard to a ord; he travels to the neighbouring world of Urras,
to nd that unbridled capitalism is not much fun either. “Nio Esseia, a

city of four million souls, lifted its delicate glittering towers across the
green marshes of the Estuary as if it were built of mist and sunlight…
Was all Nio Esseia this? Huge shining boxes of stone and glass,
immense, ornate, enormous packages, empty, empty.” At once one of
the greatest of SF novels about political ideas and idealism, and a
stunning novel of character, The Dispossessed has at its centre Shevek,
scientist and near-saint, a awed human being whom we come to know
as we know few characters in modern science ction. (Amazon.co.uk
review)
Leigh, Julia, The Hunter
The young Australian writer, Julia Leigh, has been hailed as a talent to
watch in the 21st century. The Hunter, her rst novel, is a strange and
haunting story which opens straight onto the world of its protagonist,
M: “The mini-bus takes fteen minutes to arrive in town: “Welcome to
Tiger Town” reads a sign by the highway, “Population: 20,000″”.
Assuming the identity of Martin David, Naturalist, M makes his
preparations for a hunt: he, and the reader, will be spending some time
in the Tasmanian wilderness in search of the legendary tiger, the
thylacine. In crafted, measured and often beautiful prose, Leigh o ers
her readers glimpses of who M is, or might be, and what he is looking
for. There is a hint that the thylacine’s genetic material has been
“declared capable of winning a thousand wars”, a gift to bio-weaponry,
but M remains detached: “M does not know, cannot know and does not
want to know, but there is no question the race is on to harvest the
beast”. M’s not wanting to know guides the narrative: he is solitary,
unconnected, only occasionally giving in to the desires for human and
sexual, contact which emerge through M’s vague, yet somehow
yearning, association with the woman and two children with whom he
stays when not out on the hunt. But the feeling centre of the book is
anchored elsewhere in the unique connection between M and the tiger,
in Leigh’s meticulous exploration of the beauty–and terror–of the
relation between killer and killed. (Amazon.co.uk review)
Lethem, Jonathan, The Fortress of Solitude
If there still remains any doubt, this novel con rms Lethem’s status as
the poet of Brooklyn and of motherless boys. Projected through the
prism of race relations, black music and pop art, Lethem’s stunning,
disturbing and authoritatively observed narrative covers three decades

of turbulent events on Dean Street, Brooklyn. When Abraham and
Rachel Ebdus arrive there in the early 1970s, they are among the rst
whites to venture into a mainly black neighborhood that is just
beginning to be called Boerum Hill. Abraham is a painter who
abandons his craft to construct tiny, virtually indistinguishable movie
frames in which nothing happens. Ex-hippie Rachel, a misguided
liberal who will soon abandon her family, insists on sending their son,
Dylan, to public school, where he stands out like a white ag.
Desperately lonely, regularly attacked and abused by the black kids
(“yoked,” in the parlance), Dylan is saved by his unlikely friendship
with his neighbor Mingus Rude, the son of a once-famous black singer,
Barnett Rude Jr., who is now into cocaine and rage at the world. The
story of Dylan and Mingus, both motherless boys, is one of loyalty and
betrayal, and eventually di erent paths in life. Dylan will become a
music journalist, and Mingus, for all his intelligence, kindness, verbal
virtuosity and courage, will wind up behind bars. Meanwhile, the plot
manages to encompass pop music from punk rock to rap, avant-garde
art, gra ti, drug use, gentri cation, the New York prison system-and to
sing a vibrant, sometimes heartbreaking ballad of Brooklyn
throughout. Lethem seems to have devoured the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s-
inhaled them whole-and he reproduces them faithfully on the page, in
prose as supple as silk and as bright, explosive and illuminating as
reworks. Scary and funny and seriously surreal, the novel hurtles on a
trajectory that feels inevitable. By the time Dylan begins to break out of
the fortress of solitude that has been his life, readers have shared his
pain and understood his dreams. (Publishers Weekly review)
Malouf, David, An Imaginary Life
In the rst century A.D., Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and
irreverent poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on
the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, Malouf has
fashioned an audacious and supremely moving novel. Marooned on the
edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends
on the kindness of barbarians who impale their dead and converse with
the spirit world.Then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage
creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a
luminous encounter between civilisation and nature, as enacted by a
poet who once cataloged the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly
learns how to give it. (Publisher’s description)
Mantel, Hilary, Wolf Hall
No character in the canon has been writ larger than Henry VIII, but that
didn’t stop Hilary Mantel. She strides through centuries, past acres of
novels, histories, biographies, and plays–even past Henry himself–
con dent in the knowledge that to recast history’s most mercurial
sovereign, it’s not the King she needs to see, but one of the King’s most
mysterious agents. Enter Thomas Cromwell, a self-made man and
remarkable polymath who ascends to the King’s right hand. Rigorously
pragmatic and forward-thinking, Cromwell has little interest in what
motivates his Majesty, and although he makes way for Henry’s
marriage to the infamous Anne Boleyn, it’s the future of a free England
that he honours above all else and hopes to secure. Mantel plots with a
sleight of hand, making full use of her masterful grasp on the facts
without weighing down her prose. The opening cast of characters and
family trees may give initial pause to some readers, but persevere: the
witty, whip-smart lines volleying the action forward may convince you
a short stay in the Tower of London might not be so bad… provided you
could bring a copy of Wolf Hall along. (Amazon.com review)
McCarthy, Cormac, The Road
Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic

blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of
wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-
encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the
environment with pieces of human esh stuck between their teeth. If
this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set
to paper the de nitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this
recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it’s not
much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far o the mark nor, sadly,
right around the corner. Stealing across this horri c (and that’s the
only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated
son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels
for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise
readers of McCarthy’s previous work. McCarthy’s Gnostic impressions
of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love
a air in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy
Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate
father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always
written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness
usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the

weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road,
those batteries are almost out–the entire world is, quite literally, dying–
so the nal a rmation of hope in the novel’s closing pages is all the
more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of
his father’s (and McCarthy’s) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays
it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith.
(Amazon.com review by Dennis Lehane)
McCarthy, Tom, Remainder
McCarthy’s debut novel, set in London, takes a clever conceit and

pumps it up with vibrant prose to such great e ect that the narrative’s
pointlessness is nearly a nonissue. The unnamed narrator, who su ers
memory loss as the result of an accident that “involved something
falling from the sky,” receives an £8.5 million settlement and uses the
money to re-enact, with the help of a “facilitator” he hires, things
remembered or imagined. He buys an apartment building to replicate
one that has come to him in a vision and then populates it with people
hired to re-enact, over and over again, the mundane activities he has
seen his imaginary neighbors performing. He stages both ordinary acts
(the xing of a punctured tire) and violent ones (shootings and more),
each time repeating the events many times and becoming increasingly
detached from reality and fascinated by the scenarios his newfound
wealth has allowed him to create — even though he professes he doesn’t
“want to understand them.” McCarthy’s evocation of the narrator’s
absorption in his fantasy world as it cascades out of control is brilliant
all the way through the abrupt climax. (Publishers Weekly review)
McEwan, Ian, Enduring Love
On a windy spring day in the Chilterns, the calm, organized life of

science writer Joe Rose is shattered when he witnesses a tragic
accident: a hot-air balloon with a boy trapped in its basket is being
tossed by the wind, and in the attempt to save the child, a man is killed.
A stranger named Jed Parry joins Rose in helping to bring the balloon
to safety. But unknown to Rose, something passes between Parry and
himself on that day–something that gives birth to an obsession in Parry
so powerful that it will test the limits of Rose’s beloved rationalism,
threaten the love of his wife, Clarissa, and drive him to the brink of
murder and madness. Brilliant and compassionate, this is a novel of
love, faith, and suspense, and of how life can change in an instant.
(Publisher’s description)
Mieville, China, The City and the City
Better known for New Weird fantasies (Perdido Street Station, etc.),
bestseller Miéville o ers an outstanding take on police procedurals
with this barely speculative novel. Twin southern European cities
Beszel and Ul Qoma coexist in the same physical location, separated by
their citizens’ determination to see only one city at a time. Inspector
Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad roams through the
intertwined but separate cultures as he investigates the murder of
Mahalia Geary, who believed that a third city, Orciny, hides in the blind
spots between Beszel and Ul Qoma. As Mahalia’s friends disappear and
revolution brews, Tyador is forced to consider the idea that someone in
unseen Orciny is manipulating the other cities. Through this
exaggerated metaphor of segregation, Miéville skillfully examines the
illusions people embrace to preserve their preferred social realities.
(Publishers Weekly review)
Mistry, Rohinton, Such a Long Journey
Mistry, Bombay-born author of Swimming Lessons and Other Stories

from Firozsha Baag, serves up an exotic feast with this novel. The year is
1971, and India is ready to pursue a war against Pakistan over the
region that will become Bangladesh. This chaotic period is seen
through the eyes of one Gustad Noble, a family man and Parsi bank
clerk in Bombay. Gustad’s fortunes have begun to change for the worse,
with disappointments and bad luck sweeping through his previously
secure way of life. When an old friend secretly recruits him to assist in a
seemingly heroic mission under the aegis of Indira Gandhi’s CIA-like
operatives, he becomes enmeshed in a series of dangerous events, with
tragic results. Mistry’s prose displays the lightest of witty touches, and
the narrative is often quite funny, particularly when it invites us inside
the minds of the knowable, likable, somehow familiar men and women
whose activities propel the plot. A writer of enormous range and
shrewdness, Mistry delivers no manifesto, but an intelligent portrait of
the corrupt aspects of Indira Gandhi’s years in power. Throughout his
byzantine scenario, he demonstrates empathy for and deep
understanding of his characters. His novel evokes Rushdie in its denser,
orid moments, and T. Coraghessan Boyle in its more madcap ights.

(Publishers Weekly review)
Mitchell, David, Cloud Atlas
Mitchell’s virtuosic novel presents six narratives that evoke an array of

genres, from Melvillean high-seas drama to California noir and
dystopian fantasy. There is a naïve clerk on a nineteenth-century
Polynesian voyage; an aspiring composer who insinuates himself into
the home of a syphilitic genius; a journalist investigating a nuclear
plant; a publisher with a dangerous best-seller on his hands; and a
cloned human being created for slave labor. These ve stories are
bisected and arranged around a sixth, the oral history of a post-
apocalyptic island, which forms the heart of the novel. Only after this
do the second halves of the stories fall into place, pulling the novel’s
themes into focus: the ease with which one group enslaves another,
and the constant rewriting of the past by those who control the present.
Against such forces, Mitchell’s characters reveal a quiet tenacity. When
the clerk is told that his life amounts to “no more than one drop in a
limitless ocean,” he asks, “Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of
drops?” (The New Yorker review)
Morrison, Toni, Sula
Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become
something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni
Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as
children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is erce
enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It
endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black
community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in
an unforgivable betrayal — or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and
tragic, Sula is a work that over ows with life. (Publisher’s description)
Murakami, Haruki, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat
disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for
his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of
characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced
teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese
mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady
politician. Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose.

Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted
without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for
the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into
a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an
extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami’s
earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective
stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the
hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century. If it
were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that
theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the
Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed
memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take
responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive
nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is
in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own
nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the
titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story
into something of considerable weight. (Amazon.com review)
Murnane, Gerald, The Plains
“Twenty years ago, when I rst arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes
open. I looked for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at
some elaborate meaning behind appearances.” There is no book in
Australian literature like The Plains. In the two decades since its rst
publication, this haunting novel has earned its status as a classic. A
nameless young man arrives on the plains and begins to document the
strange and rich culture of the plains families. As his story unfolds, the
novel becomes, in the words of Murray Bail, ‘a mirage of landscape,
memory, love and literature itself’. (Publisher’s description)
O’Brien, Tim, The Things They Carried
A nalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics
Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but de nitive line
of demarcation between Tim O’Brien’s earlier works about Vietnam, the
memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the ctional Going After Cacciato,
and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel
nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all
three. Vietnam is still O’Brien’s theme, but in this book he seems less
interested in the war itself than in the myriad di erent perspectives

from which he depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with
reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth. The narrator of most
of these stories is “Tim”; yet O’Brien freely admits that many of the
events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. He never
killed a man as “Tim” does in “The Man I Killed,” and unlike Tim in
“Ambush,” he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a
thing never happened doesn’t make it any less true. In “On the Rainy
River,” the character Tim O’Brien responds to his draft notice by driving
north, to the Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted
lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles
with the choice between dodging the draft or going to war. The real
Tim O’Brien never drove north, never found himself in a shing boat 20
yards o the Canadian shore with a decision to make. The real Tim
O’Brien quietly boarded the bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into
the United States Army. But the truth of “On the Rainy River” lies not in
facts but in the genuineness of the experience it depicts: both Tims
went to a war they didn’t believe in; both considered themselves
cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things They Carried speaks
another truth that Tim O’Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred
line between truth and reality, fact and ction, that makes his book
unforgettable. (Amazon.com review)
Okri, Ben, The Famished Road
You have never read a novel like this one. Winner of the 1991 Booker
Prize for ction, The Famished Road tells the story of Azaro, a spirit-
child. Though spirit-children rarely stay long in the painful world of the
living, when Azaro is born he chooses to ght death: “I wanted,” he
says, “to make happy the bruised face of the woman who would
become my mother.” Survival in his chaotic African village is a struggle,
though. Azaro and his family must contend with hunger, disease, and
violence, as well as the boy’s spirit-companions, who are constantly
trying to trick him back into their world. Okri lls his tale with
unforgettable images and characters: the bereaved policeman and his
wife, who try to adopt Azaro and dress him in their dead son’s clothes;
the photographer who documents life in the village and displays his
pictures in a cabinet by the roadside; Madame Koto, “plump as a
mighty fruit,” who runs the local bar; the King of the Road, who gets
hungrier the more he eats. At the heart of this hypnotic novel are the
mysteries of love and human survival. “It is more di cult to love than
to die,” says Azaro’s father, and indeed, it is love that brings real
sharpness to su ering here. As the story moves toward its climax, Azaro
must face the consequences of choosing to live, of choosing to walk the
road of hunger rather than return to the benign land of spirits. The
Famished Road is worth reading for its last line alone, which must be
one of the most devastating endings in contemporary literature (but
don’t skip ahead). (Amazon.com review)
Ondaatje, Michael, The English Patient
Haunting and harrowing, as beautiful as it is disturbing, The English

Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an
Italian monastery as World War II ends. The exhausted nurse, Hana;
the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by
the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in
an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue
illuminate this book like ashes of heat lightning. In lyrical prose
informed by a poetic consciousness, Michael Ondaatje weaves these
characters together, pulls them tight, then unravels the threads with
unsettling acumen. A book that binds readers of great literature, The
English Patient garnered the Booker Prize for author Ondaatje.
(Amazon.com review)
Perez-Reverte, Arturo, The Club Dumas
Fallen angels, satanic manuals, and a passion for the works of Raphael
Sabatini and Alexandre Dumas among others–this is the stu of
Spanish author Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s engrossing novel The Club
Dumas. Set in a world of antiquarian booksellers where dealers would
gladly betray their own mothers to get their hands on a rare volume,
The Club Dumas is a thinking person’s thriller: in addition to a riveting
plot, the book is full of intriguing details that range from the working
habits of Alexandre Dumas to how one might go about forging a 17th-
century text. Woven through these meditations is enough murder, sex,
and the occult to keep both the hero, Lucas Corso, and the reader
hopping. As in his previous novel, The Flanders Panel, set in the world of
art restoration, Mr. Pérez-Reverte has written a literary thriller to tease
both the intellect and adrenaline gland. Lucas Corso makes a complex,
ultimately sympathetic hero, and there’s plenty to delight in the
intricate twists and turns the story takes before the mystery of The Club
Dumas is nally solved. (Amazon.com review)
Perlman, Elliott, Three Dollars
One of Australia’s acclaimed young writers, rst novelist Perlman

explores the conundrums of conscience in one man’s desire to
understand his place as a husband, father and complicated human
being amid late capitalism’s ever-escalating pressure. Idealistic,
intelligent Eddie Harnovey, a 38-year-old chemical engineer, tells his
life story from boyhood through college years to the present. Eddie’s
narrative revolves largely around the women in his life: his childhood
love, the beautiful, privileged Amanda, pops into his world every nine
and a half years to bewilder him; his brilliant wife, Tanya, a passionate,
quixotic academic, is plagued by bouts of depression; their precocious
daughter, Abby, raises the stakes on every decision Eddie makes. After a
soulful, progressive youth, Eddie has wound up working for a
government agency in Melbourne, where he struggles to maintain his
integrity and provide for his family in an increasingly hostile corporate
world. When he loses his job, he nds himself with only three dollars to
his name, about to lose his house and on the edge of terror. He gets
survival lessons from an unexpected source, and then, after brute
accident and violence signal the end for him, salvation occurs because
of his own previous decency and kindness. Eddie’s blend of self-
deprecating wit, caustic social comment, spirited sensitivity and big
heart carries the narrative in beautifully controlled passages that brim
with insight, humor and feeling. His world is rich with the pleasures
and pains of love, family, friendship and marriage, and the supporting
characters in this prize-winning narrative are smart and likable; some
are unabashedly erudite, facilitating entertaining philosophical debate.
Perlman’s sheer storytelling virtuosity gives this essentially domestic
tale the narrative drive of a thriller and the unforgettable radiance of a
novel that accurately re ects essential human values. Melbourne’s
newspaper The Age awarded this novel its best ction award for 1998,
and named it as the Best Book of the Year. It also won the Best Book of
the Year award from the Fellowship of Australian Writers. (Publishers
Weekly review)
Phillips, Arthur, Angelica
Phillips’s third novel, set in Victorian London, starts as a ghost story.

When Joseph instructs his wife, Constance, to have their four-year-old
daughter, Angelica, moved from their bedroom into a room of her own,
Constance becomes convinced that a seductive spectral force is preying
on the child. The catastrophe that follows is relayed from the

perspectives of Constance; of her supposed redeemer, an actress turned
exorcist; and of Joseph — each view ultimately being rendered by the
adult Angelica. What at rst appears a rather glib ghost story
predicated on Victorian clichés of sexual repression and patriarchal
tyranny turns into a spectacular, ever-proliferating tale of mingled
motives, psychological menace, and delicately told crises of appetite
and loneliness. Phillips sustains a pastiche of Victorian writing and
ideas with enticing playfulness, and without making his characters or
their complex fears and desires laughable. (The New Yorker review)
Portman, Frank, King Dork
‘I’m small for my age, uncomfortable in most situations, skinny and

awkward. Most of the time I walk around here feeling like a total idiot.’
But when Tom Henderson nds his father’s copy of The Catcher In The
Rye, it change his world. It puts him in the middle of several
interlocking conspiracies and at least half a dozen mysteries involving
dead people, naked people, fake people, ESP, blood, guitars, monks,
witchcraft, a devil’s head and rock & roll. It appears to be just the tip of
the iceberg of clues that could help Tom unravel the puzzle of his
father’s death, and — bizarrely — reveal the secret of attracting semi-hot
girls . . . (Publisher’s description)
Powers, Richard, The Overstory
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018, The Overstory is a

wondrous, exhilarating novel about nine strangers brought together by
an unfolding natural catastrophe. An artist inherits a hundred years of
photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A
hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself,
dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing-
and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating
with one another. An Air Force crewmember in the Vietnam War is shot
out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. This is the story of
these and ve other strangers, each summoned in di erent ways by the
natural world, who are brought together in a last stand to save it from
catastrophe. (Publisher’s description)
Pratchett, Terry, The Colour of Magic
The Colour of Magic is Terry Pratchett’s maiden voyage through the

bizarre land of Discworld. His entertaining and witty series has grown
to more than 20 books, and this is where it all starts–with the tourist
Two ower and his hapless wizard guide, Rincewind (“All wizards get
like that … it’s the quicksilver fumes. Rots their brains. Mushrooms,
too.”). Pratchett spoofs fantasy clichés–and everything else he can
think of–while marshalling a profusion of characters through a madcap
adventure. (Amazon.com review)
Presser, Bram, The Book of Dirt
Jakub Rand ees his village for Prague, only to nd himself trapped by
the Nazi occupation. Deported to the Theresienstadt concentration
camp, he is forced to sort through Jewish books for a so-called Museum
of the Extinct Race. Hidden among the rare texts is a tattered prayer
book, hollow inside, containing a small pile of dirt. Back in the city,
Františka Roubíčková picks over the embers of her failed marriage,
despairing of her conversion to Judaism. When the Nazis summon her
two eldest daughters for transport, she must sacri ce everything to
save the girls from certain death. Decades later, Bram Presser embarks
on a quest to nd the truth behind the stories his family built around
these remarkable survivors. The Book of Dirt is a completely original
novel about love, family secrets, and Jewish myths. And it is a heart-
warming story about a grandson’s devotion to the power of storytelling
and his family’s legacy. (Publisher’s description)
Priest, Christopher, The Adjacent
Like some sort of self-assembling jigsaw puzzle, Priest’s new novel

starts out as a handful of stories that appear unconnected either by
character or by chronology. But, as we follow the stories, we eventually
realize that these characters, despite being separated by time, are
linked via a Nobel-winning theoretical physicist and his discovery, the
Perturbative Adjacent Field. Priest, a master of deception and
misdirection (The Separation, 2005), is being especially mysterious
here, leaving us to work out even such basic things as whether the book
is set in this reality or an alternate version (the photographer’s story
seems set in a world in which Britain is an Islamic state, but, on the
other hand, the story about a stage magician tasked by the British
military to make airplanes appear invisible to ground-based observers
seems pretty clearly set during the historical WWII). We frequently get
the sense that, like a stage magician, Priest is deliberately focusing our
attention on one thing, while he’s doing something else, something
subtle, between the lines. While it’s de nitely not a book for people
who prefer their ction to be linear, The Adjacent is a wonderful piece of
ction, an intricate puzzle that asks the reader to pay close attention
and to read not just the text, but also the subtext and its implications.
(Booklist review)
Pynchon, Thomas, The Crying of Lot 49
Returning home one ne summer afternoon from a particularly

disappointing Tupperware party, Mrs. Oedipa Maas — of Kinneret-
Among-The-Pines, California — opens a letter from the Los Angeles law
rm of Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus and discovers that
she has been named executor of the estate of Pierce Inverarity, late
Southern California real-estate mogul, entrepreneur, and Oedipa’s
former lover. Things then did not delay in turning curious. Totally in
the dark about what an executor does, Oedipa leaves her disk-jockey
husband Wendell (“Mucho”) to cope by himself with his “regular crises
of conscience about his profession,” and sets o for Los Angeles and a
meeting with lawyer Metzgar, her designated co-executor. Thus begins
her Oedipa-in-Wonderland journey through the rococo spider’s-web
tangle of her late lover’s leavings and her last-frontier, reality-check
confrontations with the Paranoids (an anglicized rock band), Yoyodyne
Corporation (“one of the giants of the aerospace industry”), an o -the-
cybernetic-wall inventor (Nefastis by name) attempting to defeat the
Second Law of Thermodynamics, stamp collector Genghis Cohen, and
“all manner of revelations” concerning herself and the mysterious,
centuries-old Tristero. This subversive, underground mail-delivery
system — with its drop boxes labeled W.A.S.T.E. (“We Await Silent
Tristero’s Empire”) and its alienated carriers — appears to be a
worldwide conspiracy of mind-boggling reach. Oedipa has never before
had to deal with a worldwide conspiracy. Especially one whose
existence and nefarious goals are hinted at in a collection of forged U.S.
postage stamps, a collection that Pierce Inverarity has left to be
auctioned. That collection of Tristero stamps gives Oedipa nightmares,
and Pynchon’s fascinating novel its title. There is also a resurrected
Restoration revenge tragedy, The Courier’s Tragedy, with lines long
suppressed by the Vatican. Not to mention a group of anti-love
dropouts called the Inamorati Anonymous. Oedipa uncovers clue after
clue after clue, only to reach uncertainty. Does The Tristero exist? Do
we need another postal service? Are there vast conspiracies ruling our
lives? Or are we hallucinating it all? At last, Oedipa sits in the auction
room, with only herself and America to rely on. (Publisher’s
description)
Roy, Arundhati, The God of Small Things
With sensuous prose, a dreamlike style infused with breathtakingly

beautiful images and keen insight into human nature, Roy’s debut novel
charts fresh territory in the genre of magical, prismatic literature. Set in
Kerala, India, during the late 1960s when Communism rattled the age-
old caste system, the story begins with the funeral of young Sophie
Mol, the cousin of the novel’s protagonists, Rahel and her fraternal twin
brother, Estha. In a circuitous and suspenseful narrative, Roy reveals
the family tensions that led to the twins’ behavior on the fateful night
that Sophie drowned. Beneath the drama of a family tragedy lies a
background of local politics, social taboos and the tide of history, all of
which come together in a slip of fate, after which a family is irreparably
shattered. Roy captures the children’s candid observations but clouded
understanding of adults’ complex emotional lives. Rahel notices that
“at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things
lurk unsaid inside.” Plangent with a sad wisdom, the children’s view is
never oversimpli ed, and the adult characters reveal their frailties —
and in one case, a repulsively evil power — in subtle and complex ways.
While Roy’s powers of description are formidable, she sometimes
succumbs to overwriting, forcing every minute detail to symbolize
something bigger, and the pace of the story slows. But these lapses are
few, and her powers coalesce magni cently in the book’s second half.
Roy’s clarity of vision is remarkable, her voice original, her story
beautifully constructed and masterfully told. (Publishers Weekly
review)
Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children
Saleem Sinai was born at midnight, the midnight of India’s

independence, and nds himself mysteriously ‘handcu ed to history’ by
the coincidence. He is one of 1,001 children born at the midnight hour,
each of them endowed with an extraordinary talent — and whose
privilege and curse it is to be both master and victims of their times.
Through Saleem’s gifts — inner voices and a wildly sensitive sense of
smell — we are drawn into a fascinating family saga set against the vast,
colourful background of the India of this century. (Publisher’s

description)
Safran Foer, Jonathan, Everything is Illuminated
The simplest thing would be to describe Everything is Illuminated,

Jonathan Safran Foer’s accomplished debut, as a novel about the
Holocaust. It is, but that really fails to do justice to the sheer ambition
of this book. The main story is a grimly familiar one. A young Jewish-
American–who just happens to be called Jonathan Safran Foer–travels
to the Ukraine in the hope of nding the woman who saved his
grandfather from the Nazis. He is aided in his search by Alex Perchov, a
naïve Ukrainian translator, Alex’s grandfather (also called Alex) and a
atulent mongrel bitch, named Sammy Davis JR JR. On their journey
through Eastern Europe’s obliterated landscape they unearth facts
about the Nazi atrocities and the extent of Ukrainian complicity that
have implications for Perchov as well as Safran Foer. This narrative is
not, however, recounted from (the character) Jonathan Safran Foer’s
perspective. It is relayed through a series of letters that Alex sends to
Foer. These are written in the kind of broken Russo-English normally
reserved for Bond villains and Latka from the US television series Taxi.
(Sentences such as “It is mammoth honour for me write for a writer,
especially when he is American writer, like Ernest Hemingway”; “It is
bad and popular habit for people in Ukraine to take things without
asking” are the norm.) Interspersed between these letters are
fragments of a novel by “Safran Foer”–a wonderfully imagined, almost
magical realist, account of life in the Shetl before the Nazis destroyed it.
These are in turn commented on by Alex creating an additional
meta ctional angle to the tale. If all this sounds a little daunting don’t
be put o ; Safran Foer is an extremely funny as well as intelligent
writer. Admittedly he has an annoying habit of capitalising great
chunks of text, but minor typographical nuances are easy to ignore in a
book that combines some of the best Jewish folk yarns since Isaac
Bashevis Singer with a quite heartbreaking meditation on love,
friendship and loss. (Amazon.co.uk review)
Seth, Vikram, A Suitable Boy
Seth previously made a splash with his 1986 novel in verse, The Golden
Gate. Here he abandons the compression of poetry to produce an
enormous novel that will enthrall most readers; those who are fazed by
a marathon read, however, may gasp for mercy. Set in the post-colonial
India of the 1950s, this sprawling saga involves four families–the
Mehras, the Kapoors, the Chatterjis and the Khans–whose domestic
crises illuminate the historical and social events of the era. Like an old-
fashioned soap opera (or a Bombay talkie), the multi-charactered plot
pits mothers against daughters, fathers against sons, Hindus against
Muslims and small farmers against greedy landowners facing
government-ordered dispossession. The story revolves around
independent-minded Lata Mehra: Will she defy the stern order of her
widowed upper-caste Hindu mother by marrying the Muslim youth she
loves? The search for Lata’s husband expands into a richly detailed and
exotically vivid narrative that crisscrosses the fabric of India. Seth’s
panoramic scenes take the reader into law courts, religious processions,
bloody riots, academia–even the shoe trade. Portraits of actual gures
are incisive; the cameo of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, for
example, captures his high-minded, well-meaning indecision. Seth’s
point of view is both wry and a ectionate, and his voluble, palpably
atmospheric narrative teems with chaotic, irrepressible life. (Publishers
Weekly review)
Smith, Ali, The Accidental
While the Smarts are a happy, prosperous British family on the surface,
underneath they are as friable as a Balkan republic. Eve su ers from a
block about writing yet another of her popular Genuine Article books
(a series of imaginary reconstructions of obscure, actual gures from
the past). Michael, her English professor husband, is a philanderer
whose sexual predation on his students has reached critical mass.
Teenaged Magnus, Eve’s son by rst husband Adam, is consumed by
guilt around a particularly heinous school prank. And Astrid, Eve and
Adam’s daughter, is a 12-year- old channeling the angst of a girl three
years older. Into this family drops one Amber MacDonald, a mysterious
stranger who embeds herself in the family’s summer rental in Norfolk
and puts them all under her bullying spell. By some collective
hallucination — one into which Smith (Hotel World) utterly and
completely draws the reader — each Smart sees Amber as a savior, even
as she violates their codes and instincts. So sure-handed are Smith’s
overlapping descriptions of the same events from di erent viewpoints
that her simple, disquieting story lifts into brilliance. When Eve nally
breaks the spell and kicks Amber out, it precipitates a series of long
overdue jolts that destroys the family’s fraught equilibrium, but the
shock of Smith’s facility remains. (Publishers Weekly review)
Smith, Zadie, The Autograph Man
When Alex-Li Tandem is 12 years old, his father takes him and his
friends Adam and Rubin ne to a wrestling match at the Albert Hall in
London. By the end of the evening, the pivotal events of Alex-Li’s youth
have occurred: he has met Joseph Klein, a boy whose fascination with
autographs proves infectious; his friendships with Adam and Rubin ne
are cemented; and his father has dropped dead. This is enough action
for an entire book, and in fact things slow down dramatically after page
35 of Zadie Smith’s sophomore novel The Autograph Man. When we
meet Alex again, he is a grown man, an autograph dealer and devoted
slacker, su ering the physical and spiritual after-e ects of a three-day
romance with a drug called “Superstar.” While under its malign
in uence, Alex has managed to wreck his sports car, alienate his
girlfriend Esther, and–possibly–forge the rare autograph of his idol, the
1950s movie star Kitty Alexander. Will his friends save him from the
embarrassment of trying to sell this suspect autograph? Will they pull
him together in time to perform Kaddish on the 15th anniversary of his
father’s death? Although not as enthralling or politically resonant as
White Teeth, Smith’s hallowed debut, The Autograph Man amply
demonstrates her ability to juggle several main characters, several
themes, and a host of plots and subplots, with the occasional purely
comic episode thrown up in the air beside them like a chainsaw or a
cheesecake. Readers will want to step away to a safe distance during
the chaotic nal scenes. (Amazon.com review)
Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, A Grain of Wheat
Originally published in 1967, Ngugi’s third novel is his best known and
most ambitious work. A Grain of Wheat portrays several characters in a
village whose intertwined lives are transformed by the 1952–1960
Emergency in Kenya. As the action follows the village’s arrangements
for Uhuru (independence) Day, this is a novel of stories within stories, a
narrative interwoven with myth as well as allusions to real-life leaders
of the nationalist struggle, including Jomo Kenyatta. At the centre of it
all is the reticent Mugo, the village’s chosen hero and a man haunted by
a terrible secret. As events unfold, compromises are forced, friendships
are betrayed and loves are tested. (Publisher’s description)
Thomas, Scarlett, The End of Mr. Y
A cursed book. A missing professor. Some nefarious men in gray suits.

And a dreamworld called the Troposphere? Ariel Manto has a
fascination with nineteenth-century scientists — especially Thomas
Lumas and The End of Mr. Y, a book no one alive has read. When she
mysteriously uncovers a copy at a used bookstore, Ariel is launched into
an adventure of science and faith, consciousness and death, space and
time, and everything in between. Seeking answers, Ariel follows in Mr.
Y’s footsteps: She swallows a tincture, stares into a black dot, and is
transported into the Troposphere — a wonderland where she can travel
through time and space using the thoughts of others. There she begins
to understand all the mysteries surrounding the book, herself, and the
universe. Or is it all just a hallucination? With The End of Mr. Y, Scarlett
Thomas brings us another fast-paced mix of popular culture, love,
mystery, and irresistible philosophical adventure. (Publisher’s
description)
Tokarczuk, Olga, House of Day, House of Night
Nowa Ruda is a small town in Silesia, an area that has been a part of
Poland, Germany, and the former Czechoslovakia in the past. When the
narrator moves into the area, she discovers everyone — and everything
— has a story. With the help of Marta, her enigmatic neighbor, the
narrator accumulates these stories, tracing the history of Nowa Ruda
from the its founding to the lives of its saints, from the caller who wins
the radio quiz every day to the man who causes international tension
when he dies straddling the border between Poland and
Czechoslovakia. Each of the stories represents a brick and they
interlock to reveal the immense monument that is the town. What
emerges is the message that the history of any place — no matter how
humble — is limitless, that by describing or digging at the roots of a life,
a house, or a neighborhood, one can see all the connections, not only
with one’s self and one’s dreams but also with all of the universe. Richly
imagined, weaving anecdote with recipes and gossip, Tokarczuk’s novel
is an epic of a small place. Since its publication in 1998 it has remained
a bestseller in Poland. House of Day, House of Night is the English-
language debut of one of Europe’s best young writers. (Publisher’s
description)
Tuck, Lily, The News from Paraguay
A rich historical novel — part love story and part tragedy — about the
Irish courtesan Eliza Lynch, and how she became mistress to one of
South America’s rst, and most extravagant, dictators. 1854. In Paris,
Francisco Solano — the future dictator of Paraguay — picks up a blue
feather fallen from the hat of a beautiful woman. With this small
gesture begins his pursuit of the remarkable Irish courtesan Eliza
Lynch. Captivated by a unique courtship involving a poncho and a
Paraguayan band, Eliza follows Francisco to Paraguay where she reigns
as his mistress. Isolated and estranged in this new world, she embraces
her lover’s ill-fated imperial dream — one fuelled by a heedless
arrogance that will devestate all of Paraguay, and throw this European
woman into a world of unprecedented privilege, ruthless exploitation
and even revolution…With the urgency of the narrative, the rich
romantic detail, and a wealth of skillfully layered characters, The News
from Paraguay recalls the vibrant colour of Isabel Allende and the epic
sweep of Mario Vargas Llosa. (Publisher’s description)
Vann, David, Bright Air Black
It is 13th century B.C. and aboard the ship Argo, Medea, Jason and the
Argonauts make their return journey across the Black Sea from Persia’s
Colchis, in possession of the Golden Fleece. David Vann, in brilliant
poetic prose, gives us a nuanced and electric portrait of one of Greek
mythology’s most fascinating and notorious gures, Medea; an ancient
tale reimagined through the eyes of the woman often cast as sorceress
and monster. Atmospheric and spellbinding, Bright Air Black is an
indispensable and provocative take on one of our earliest texts and the
most intimate and corporal version of Medea’s story ever told.
Waters, Sarah, The Night Watch
Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets,
illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The
Night Watch is the work of a truly brilliant and compelling storyteller.
This is the story of four Londoners — three women and a young man
with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy. Kay, who drove an
ambulance during the war and lived life at full throttle, now dresses in
mannish clothes and wanders the streets with a restless hunger,
searching …Helen, clever, sweet, much-loved, harbours a painful
secret …Viv, glamour girl, is stubbornly, even foolishly loyal, to her
soldier lover …Duncan, an apparent innocent, has had his own demons
to ght during the war. Their lives, and their secrets connect in
sometimes startling ways. War leads to strange alliances …Tender,
tragic and beautifully poignant, set against the backdrop of feats of
heroism both epic and ordinary, here is a novel of relationships that
o ers up subtle surprises and twists. The Night Watch is thrilling. A
towering achievement. (Publisher’s description)
Wol , Tobias, Old School
Tobias Wol ’s Old School is at once a celebration of literature and a

delicate hymn to a lost innocence of American life and art. Set in a New
England prep school in the early 1960s, the novel imagines a nal,
pastoral moment before the explosion of the Civil Rights movement,
the Vietnam War, the assassination of John F Kennedy, and the suicide
of Ernest Hemingway. The unnamed narrator is one of several boys
whose life revolves around the school’s English teachers, those
polymaths who seemed to know “exactly what was most worth
knowing”. For the boys, literature is the centre of life, and their
obsession culminates in a series of literary competitions during their
nal year. The prize in each is a private audience with a visiting writer
who serves as judge for the entries. At rst the narrator is entirely taken
with the battle. As he fails in his e ort to catch Robert Frost’s attention
and then is unable–due to illness–to even compete for his moment with
Ayn Rand, he devotes his energies to a masterpiece for his hero,
Hemingway. But, confronting the blank page, the narrator discovers his
cowardice, his duplicity. He has withheld himself, he realises, even
from his roommate. He has used his ction to create a patrician
gentility, a mask for his middle-class home and his Jewish ancestry.
Through the competition for Hemingway, ttingly, all of his illusions
about literature dissolve. Near the end of the novel, the narrator
imagines that he might one day write about his school days. But he is
daunted. “Memory”, he says, “is a dream to begin with, and what I had
was a dream of memory, not to be put to the test”. Old School enters
this interplay between dreams and the adult interrogation of memory.
Risking sentimentality, Wol confronts a golden age that never was.
From the confrontation, he distills a powerful novel of failed
expectations and, ultimately, redemptive self-awareness. (Amazon.com
review)

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1/30/2019 100 great novels by living authors – Blair Mahoney – Medium

Adair, Gilbert, A Closed Book

Gilbert Adair previously won the Scott-Moncrie prize for his

book, transmuted into something altogether more sinister. This is a

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, Purple Hibiscus

Purple Hibiscus, Nigerian-born writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s

Amis, Martin, Time’s Arrow

Amsterdam, Steven K., Things We Didn’t See Coming

Atkinson, Kate, Life After Life

Atwood, Margaret, The Blind Assassin

novel-within-a-novel–we’re reminded of just how complicated the

Auster, Paul, The New York Trilogy

Barker, Nicola, Darkmans

There isn’t much plot to Barker’s Man Booker-shortlisted novel, but a

from nine generations ago. This improbable premise is supported by

Barker, Pat, The Regeneration Trilogy

Barnes, Julian, The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

A revisionist view of Noah’s Ark, told by the stowaway woodworm. A

Barry, Sebastian, A Long Long Way

Willie Dunne is born in a storm during the “dying days” of Ireland. It is

Barth, John, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Just when you may have concluded, like Queen Scheherazade’s

Byatt, A.S., The Children’s Book

Carey, Peter, My Life as a Fake

Catton, Eleanor, The Luminaries

Chabon, Michael, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

wildly imaginative escapades punctuated by schtick that rivals the best

Chandra, Vikram, Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Clarke, Susanna, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Coetzee, J.M., Waiting For the Barbarians

Coupland, Douglas, Girlfriend in a Coma

Crace, Jim, Being Dead

Crace is a brilliant British writer whose novels are always varied in

Crowley, John, Little, Big

Danielewski, Mark, House of Leaves

When Johnny Truant attempts to organize the many fragments of a

Navidson’s exploration of a seemingly endless, totally dark, and

DeLillo, Don, White Noise

Something is amiss in a small college town in Middle America.

DeWitt, Helen, The Last Samurai

DeWitt’s ambitious, colossal debut novel tells the story of a young

Doctorow, E.L., Billy Bathgate

In the poorest part of the Bronx, in the depths of the Depression, a

Dorst, Doug and J.J. Abrams., S.

One book. Two readers. A world of mystery, menace and desire. A

Doyle, Roddy, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

In Roddy Doyle’s Booker Prize-winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha,

Du y, Bruce, The World as I Found It

Egan, Jennifer, A Visit From the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an

Eggers, Dave, What is the What

Valentino Achak Deng, real-life hero of this engrossing epic, was a

Darfur bloodbath-of the 1980s and 90s. In this ctionalised memoir,

Eugenides, Je rey, Middlesex

Ferris, Joshua, Then We Came to the End

In this wildly funny debut from former ad man Ferris, a group of

particularly coveted chair (“We felt deceived”). Gonzo e-mailer Tom

Flanagan, Richard, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

A novel of the cruelty of war, and tenuousness of life and the

Fowler, Karen Joy, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

As a girl in Indiana, Rosemary, Fowler’s breathtakingly droll 22-year-

unusual family con guration in sustained ashbacks. Smart and