The year’s best novels...
(Knopf, $28)
“If Matrix were written by anyone else, it would be a hard sell,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. But Lauren Groff, the deft author of Fates and Furies, has reimagined the life of 12th-century poet Marie de France so that we can’t help but stay with this royal castoff as she’s sent away, at 17, to run an impoverished abbey. Though she initially despises the assignment and contemplates running away, she eventually converts it into a sanctuary for women and a latent challenge to the male-dominated world that surrounds it on all sides. We know little about the real Marie de France, but “what a life Groff designs,” said Hillary Kelly in NYMag.com. “I wanted to live inside this novel, to peel apples and dig in the soil and repair the stone walls of the nunnery.” Who wouldn’t want in? This book “has its own racing heartbeat.” It “practically draws blood in its bid to evince ecstasy—physical, spiritual, and emotional.”
Klara and the Sun
by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf, $28)
The narrator of Klara and the Sun is kind, smart, sympathetic—and solar-powered, said Heller McAlpin in CSMonitor.com.
An android that has been programmed to be a sickly teenager’s “Artificial Friend,” Klara serves as our eyes on a troubling near future in which technological progress is pushing ethical boundaries. But her outsider perspective allows the author of Remains of the Day, now a Nobel laureate, to explore what makes people irreplaceable. His new novel evolves into “a surprisingly warm morality tale about love, hope, and empathy.” Ishiguro’s “brave new world and the inhabitants within it cast a mesmerizing spell,” said Malcolm Forbes in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “The more time Klara spends with her ailing companion, the more she learns about the frailty of life, the nature of love, and what it takes to be human.”
No One Is Talking About This
by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead, $25)
“Novel, memoir, primal scream”—the latest from memoirist and internet poet Patricia Lockwood is “almost impossible to label,” said Leah Greenblatt in Entertainment Weekly. Like Lockwood, the book’s unnamed heroine is a woman famous for her witty social media posts. She travels the world to speak about the medium, all the while swimming in the unpredictable flow of its hive mind—until a quiet family tragedy intrudes. “Most novels about how the internet has transformed our lives are fundamentally opposed to it,” said Laura Miller in Slate.com. Lockwood captures the bad and the good, using the internet’s own language to fill this book with “delightful and amusing shards of thought, story, and experience.” The protagonist adores that realm. “When her attention finally switches to that thing no one is talking about—the beauty and sorrow of one very brief life—the effect is even more piercing.”
Cloud Cuckoo Land
by Anthony Doerr (Scribner, $30)
“Of all our contemporary literary fiction writers, Anthony Doerr is the one whose novels seem to be the most full-hearted response to the primal request,
‘Tell me a story,’” said Maureen Corrigan in NPR .org. Doerr’s first novel since 2014’s All the Light We Cannot See spans several hundred years—from 1453 Constantinople to a 22nd-century spaceship fleeing Earth—with each of three distinct tales linked by the way several young characters draw strength and hope from a comic fable that predates them all. The book runs 640 pages, “but without a wasted syllable,” said Gail Pennington in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “As engaging as a great bedtime story and as compulsively readable as Harry Potter,” it’s above all “an ode to the human spirit and its power to dream impossible dreams.”
How the books were chosen
Our top-5 lists were created by tallying and weighting end-of-year recommendations published by more than 20 other print and online sources, including Bookpage.com, BuzzFeed .com, the Chicago Tribune, CSMonitor.com, Entertainment Weekly, Fortune.com, Library Journal, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, New York magazine, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, NPR.org, OprahDaily .com, People, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Publishers Weekly, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Slate.com, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Time, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.