Top 10 books of 2018

Race relations. The opioid epidemic. The American prison system. These are just a few of the subjects that gifted reporters, memoirists and novelists — among them Shane Bauer, Kiese Laymon, Beth Macy and Rachel Kushner — tackled in some of the best books published this year. Yes, these are somber works. To their credit, they don’t sugarcoat issues or offer easy solutions or facile redemptive endings. Instead, they raise important questions that would get any reader thinking — and starting conversations. Happily, many of the year’s other notable books leaven their seriousness with plenty of humor, much of it mordant (hey, it’s 2018). So, here’s to Patrick deWitt, Lauren Groff, Susan Orlean, David Sedaris, Gary Shteyngart, Luis Alberto Urrea and Meg Wolitzer. They made us laugh, and no one can take that away.

— John McMurtrie

FICTION

Lake Success, by Gary Shteyngart (Random House; 338 pages; $28). In Shteyngart’s latest novel — an artistic triumph centered on a hedge fund manager who is down on his luck — hard-won family love trumps the false values of materialism.

— Dan Cryer The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner (Scribner; 338 pages; $27). What happens behind the walls of Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility — and the stories of how some of the women ended up in prison — are the focus of Kushner’s absorbing, in-your-face third novel.

— Alexis Burling There There, by Tommy Orange (Knopf; 294 pages; $25.95). Told with exasperation and fury and grim humor, Orange’s exceptional debut novel tells of American Indian life in Oakland.

— Chelsea Leu The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason (Little, Brown; 323 pages; $28). Mason has harnessed the harsh clarity of winter to frame his urgent, cinematically beautiful World War I novel, which fully qualifies as epic.

— Joan Frank Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories, by Deborah Eisenberg (Ecco; 240 pages; $25.99). In her latest, masterful collection, Eisenberg conjures a spiritual communion between reader and writer, a levitation of sorts, all produced by her hypnotic prose and astute insights into what it means to be alive.

— S. Kirk Walsh

NONFICTION

American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey Into the Business of Punishment, by Shane Bauer (Penguin Press; 351 pages; $28). Bauer weaves his prison guard experiences into a history of private prisons in America. It is a relentless and uncompromising book, one that takes a crowbar to the private prison industry and yanks hard, letting just enough daylight slip inside to illuminate the contours of the beast.

— Gabriel Thompson Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America, by Beth Macy (Little, Brown; 376 pages; $28). Macy digs into the explosion of opioid addiction in Appalachia, in a book that is a scorching indictment of American greed and indifference.

— Gabriel Thompson Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David W. Blight (Simon & Schuster; 888 pages; $37.50). Blight’s exquisitely researched and incisively argued book is a richly detailed intellectual biography, full of new sources and interpretations that add clarity, meaning and verve to Douglass’ personal story.

— John David Smith Heavy: An American Memoir, by Kiese Laymon (Scribner; 241 pages; $26). Structured as an intimate address from a son to a mother, Leymon’s memoir delves into the violence of his boyhood, making for a generous conversation about the weight of racism, and the painful pressures placed on familial love.

— Anita Felicelli

Small Fry, by Lisa Brennan-Jobs (Grove Press; 381 pages; $26). Brennan-Jobs, the daughter of Steve Jobs, has written a memoir of uncommon grace, maturity and spare elegance. In no way a lurid account that’s out to settle scores, the book seeks only to come to a better understanding of the author’s father — and mother — and others around her as she grew up in a time of great cultural and societal change, living a fairy-talelike existence in the cauldron of Silicon Valley.

— John McMurtrie