Top 10 books of 2014
FICTION
All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr (Scribner; 531 pages; $27). Set during World War II, Doerr’s novel portrays a blind French girl and a German soldier fated to meet in August 1944. On a stage that is at once vast and intimate, Doerr works his magic on the great themes of destiny versus choice, entrapment versus liberation, atrocity versus honor. Propelled by one finely tuned sentence after another, the novel imagines the unseen grace that, occasionally, surprisingly, breaks to the surface even in the worst of times.
— Dan Cryer Euphoria, by Lily King (Atlantic Monthly Press; 261 pages; $25). You need know not one thing about 1930s cultural anthropology, or about the late, controversial anthropologists Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson (Mead’s second and third husbands) to delight in King’s novel. Her superb coup is to have imagined a story loosely founded on the intertwined lives of the three that instantly becomes its own, thrilling saga.
— Joan Frank Redeployment, by Phil Klay (The Penguin Press; 291 pages; $26.95). In Klay’s closely observed first collection of stories, this former Marine officer makes a fine contribution to the growing body of literature detailing what the years of Sisyphean war in Iraq and Afghanistan have done to American soldiers, both abroad and at home. From the opening titular story, Klay establishes an impressive authority over his subject,
which he maintains throughout the book in clipped prose.
— Thomas Chatterton Williams
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf; 333 pages; $24.95). Mandel’s book is a postapocalyptic novel, that loudest and showiest of genres. But what makes it so impressive is the way that, tonally and stylistically, it departs from generic convention. The novel is less horror story than elegiac lament; its pacing is slow and its style understated. “Station Eleven” is terrifying, reminding us of how paper-thin the achievements of civilization are. It is also surprisingly — and quietly — beautiful.
— Anthony Domestico Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, by Elena Ferrante; translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions; 418 pages; $18 paperback). In Ferrante’s third book in her “Neapolitan Novels” series, serious feminist questions spill from every page, not as tidy scholarly inquiries but as body and blood, a true, sustained cri de coeur. Like its two predecessors, this novel’s roller coaster of anguish, advances and setbacks roars on. The miracle is that Ferrante can keep the shocks coming.
— Joan Frank
NONFICTION
Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set
Them Free, by Héctor Tobar (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 309 pages; $26). In this extraordinary book, Tobar combines a historian’s eye for context with a gifted storyteller’s ear for minor-key character traits. He seems to know what each of his nearly three dozen protagonists was feeling at any given moment, and he relates their fears and yearnings in unvarnished present-tense prose, imbuing
the events with an added jolt of urgency.
— Kevin Canfield The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the
New World, by Greg Grandin (Metropolitan; 360 pages; $30). In his exquisite and lively retelling of the story of a slave ship insurrection aboard a ship named the Tryal — the subject of Herman Melville’s 1854 novella “Benito Cereno” — Grandin doesn’t simply enrich us with an exciting and illuminating narrative; he challenges us to see the dark side of “the Age of Revolution.”
— Imani Perry The Secret History of Wonder Woman, by Jill Lepore (Knopf; 410 pages; $29.95). With acrobatic research prowess, muscular narrative chops and disarming flashes of humor, Lepore brings to light previously unknown details and deliberately ob- fuscated connections in relating the improbable story behind Wonder Woman. Her origins lie in the feminism of the early 1900s, and the intertwined dramas that surrounded her creation are the stuff of pulp fiction and tabloid scandal.
— Audrey Bilger The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League, by Jeff Hobbs (Scribner; 406 pages; $27). Can a man transcend the circumstances into which he’s born? Can he embody two wildly divergent souls? Few lives put such questions into starker relief than that of Robert Peace, the ferociously brilliant son of a charismatic drug dealer imprisoned for double homicide. As Hobbs reveals in tremendously moving and painstaking detail, although Peace graduated from Yale with a degree in molecular biochemistry and biophysics, he may never have had a chance.
— Thomas Chatterton Williams The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert (Henry Holt; 319 pages; $28). It is not possible to overstate the importance of this book, in which Kolbert reviews the history of the very concept of extinction. Her prose is lucid, accessible and even entertaining as she reveals the dark theater playing out on our globe. And her riveting narrative follows the excitement, the controversies and the long slogs by which theories about how extinction operates have come to be widely accepted.
— Mary Ellen Hannibal