BEST OF 2014: 100 RECOMMENDED BOOKS
FICTION
All the Birds, Singing, by Evie Wyld (Pantheon; 231 pages; $24.95). Set on an unnamed British island and in the Australian outback, Wyld’s dark and wickedly captivating second novel follows a woman who is on the run from her past.
All Our Names, by Dinaw Mengestu (Knopf; 256 pages; $25.95). This profoundly moving novel by the Ethiopian American writer explores relationships between workmates, comrades, friends and lovers. The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories, by Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt; 256 pages; $27). Mantel’s latest is a collection of disturbing and funny literary horror stories.
Astonish Me, by Maggie Shipstead (Knopf; 263 pages; $25.95). Shipstead’s novel reconfigures recognizable intrigues of the ballet world, though it does so deftly, drawing on stereotypes that are hard to defy.
Bark: Stories, by Lorrie Moore (Knopf; 192 pages; $24.95). Moore’s collection is a vibrant and nimble display of her signature wit.
The Blazing World, by Siri Hustvedt (Simon & Schuster; 357 pages; $26). Through its absence of an authoritative narrator, Hustvedt’s mashup of a novel poses questions about the nature of perception. The Book of Unknown Americans, by Cristina Henríquez (Knopf; 286 pages; $24.95). In her ambitious novel, Henríquez sharpens her preoccupation with family, terrible grief and a life lived across the boundaries of cultures.
Boy, Snow, Bird, by Helen Oyeyemi (Riverhead; 308 pages; $27.95). Oyeyemi’s latest novel is shrewdly allegorical, only on this occasion she ups
her game and transforms a centuries-old fairy tale into a modern-day morality tale.
Can’t and Won’t: Stories, by Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 289 pages; $26). Davis’ collection holds up to her former works, maintaining a level of tragic comedy, introspection and poetry expected from her followers.
Casebook, by Mona Simpson (Knopf; 318 pages; $25.95). Mothers, it is sometimes said, are only as happy as their least happy child. Could it also be that children are only as happy as their moms? That’s one of the many questions Simpson explores in her beguiling novel. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrim
age, by Haruki Murakami; translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel (Knopf; 386 pages; $25.95). Murakami’s novel chronicles a spiritual quest that might also be a love story. But here the author strips away the magical quavers of reality and the mindbending plot structures that have become hallmarks of his work.
Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill (Knopf; 180 pages; $22.95). Offill’s introspective and resonant second novel explores the question of how to be an artist as well as a wife and mother.
The Dog, by Joseph O’Neill (Pantheon; 241 pages; $25.95). In O’Neill’s fourth novel, the first-person narrator’s ultracandid, warts-and-all account of his alienation in Dubai keep us engaged and entertained but also rooting for him.
Dust, by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Knopf; 369 pages; $25.95). Owuor brings Kenya to life on the page in her imageladen and frequently poetic intergenerational epic.
The End of the Book, by Porter Shreve (Louisiana State University Press; 211 pages; $22.50 paperback). Shreve’s charming novel harks back to a previous era of American storytelling to raise some big questions about the future of books and even about the act of reading.
Every Day Is for the Thief, by Teju Cole (Random House; 162 pages; $23). Cole’s novella, which traces the wanderings of a New York psychiatrist who returns to Nigeria, is a luminous rumination on storytelling and place, exile and return. Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng (The Penguin Press; 297 pages; $26.95). Ng’s novel is a subtle meditation on gender, race and the weight of one generation’s unfulfilled ambitions upon the shoulders of the next.
F, by Daniel Kehlmann; translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway (Pantheon; 256 pages; $25.95). Kehlmann’s novel is a lollapalooza of a family comedy, dryly hilarious at every mazelike turn. Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014, by Alice Munro (Knopf; 620 pages; $30). The nuance and generosity with which Munro draws each character in this extraordinary collection feels vivid and fresh at every turn. Famous Writers I Have
Known, by James Magnuson (Norton; 313 pages; $25.95). In this sly and ridiculously entertaining novel, a New York con man, on the run from the mob, is mistaken for a famous but reclusive author and takes his place as a visiting writer in Texas.
Florence Gordon, by Brian Morton (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 306 pages; $25). In Morton’s hilarious and addictive novel, a feminist who puts her activism above her family suddenly achieves recognition in the last act of her life.
Frog Music, by Emma Donoghue (Little, Brown; 405 pages; $27). The latest novel by the author of “Room” is a dazzling historical crime drama set in 1870s San Francisco that features a frog-catching crossdresser, a once-great trapeze artist and a burlesque dancer
turned reluctant mother.
Funny Once: Stories, by Antonya Nelson (Bloomsbury; 292 pages; $26). The question of time — the passage of it, and what we leave behind — hangs over this brilliant collection like a storm does on the horizon.
Goodhouse, by Peyton Marshall (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 322 pages; $26). Reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report,” Marshall’s dystopian novel raises relevant political and ethical questions in unusually graceful prose.
Let Me Be Frank With You, by Richard Ford (Ecco; 240 pages; $27.99). Frank Bascombe, who made his first appearance in “The Sportswriter” in 1986, returns in his fourth novel, and there are abundant reasons to be grateful.
Lila, by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 261 pages; $26). Robinson’s latest novel, set once again in the fictitious town of Gilead, is a very good book that sees one of our premier storytellers settling back into a familiar groove.
Love & Treasure, by Ayelet Waldman (Knopf; 334 pages; $26.95). In this novel, Waldman ambitiously takes on the monumental atrocities of the
Holocaust — and much more.
Love Me Back, by Merritt Tierce (Doubleday; 216 pages; $23.95). Tierce, in her ferociously good novel, forces her readers to feel every burn and spasm of one woman’s wretched, unresolved life, and the author is not at all interested in making this easy for us. Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, by Francine Prose (Harper; 436 pages; $26.99). Prose’s excellent novel, which treads between lightly mischievous (mocking Henry Miller) and deadly serious (invading Nazis), centers on a fictionalized French Olympic hopeful who spied for the Germans — and was killed by the Resistance in 1944.
Man V. Nature: Stories, by Diane Cook (Harper; 257 pages; $25.99). In one story after another, Cook puts forth idiosyncratic and twisted conceits, but manages to deliver the narrative goods when it comes to depicting the tragic, emotional lives of her characters.
Motherland, by Maria Hummel (Counterpoint; 275 pages; $26). Hummel’s astute novel has taken on a complicated task: to write about the Mitläufer, Germans who both benefited from and later were destroyed by Nazism. My Struggle: Book Three: Boyhood, by Karl Ove Knausgaard; translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (Archipelago; 427 pages; $27). Book Three of Knausgaard’s impressive six-volume, 3,600page novel finds the author covering his childhood.
Orfeo, by Richard Powers (Norton; 352 pages; $26.95). Powers’ latest novel, one of his finest yet, tells the story of an avant-garde composer who government authorities fear might be a bioterrorist. It’s science fiction that prefers the science to the fiction.
The Other Language: Sto
ries, by Francesca Marciano (Pantheon; 287 pages; $24.95). In her brilliant collection, Marciano nimbly depicts lives entwined in Italy, Africa and New York, each (per Alice Munro, whose work Marciano’s resembles) “a lifetime glimpsed in a moment.” The Palace of Illusions: Stories, by Kim Addonizio (Soft Skull; 243 pages; $25). This is a collection of many delights, its mirrors reflecting and magnifying the contradictions and conflicts inherent in human experience.
The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters (Riverhead; 566 pages; $28.95). Set in 1920s London, Waters’ vibrant novel offers a window into a period when marriage between women seemed unthinkable to most and yet tantalizingly possible to a few.
Perfidia, by James Ellroy (Knopf; 701 pages; $28.95). The first in a planned quartet of novels set in Los Angeles, “Perfidia” resonates throughout with the dark vibe of noir.
Pioneer Girl, by Bich Minh Nguyen (Viking; 296 pages; $26.95). Nguyen takes two disparate strands of our national mythology and weaves them into a powerful and wholly original American saga.
The Possibilities, by Kaui
Hart Hemmings (Simon & Schuster; 274 pages; $25). Hemmings’ novel is a gorgeous, smart book about letting go, and seeing all that remains, in the wake of shattering grief.
Queen Sugar, by Natalie Baszile (Pamela Dorman Books/ Viking; 372 pages; $27.95). A 34-year-old Los Angeles widow makes a clean start in Louisiana in Baszile’s heartfelt first novel.
Radiance of Tomorrow, by Ishmael Beah (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 242 pages; $25). In his impressive pivot to fiction, Beah, a former child soldier, tells the story of two friends who return to their birthplace seven years after the civil war that has devastated Sierra Leone.
A Replacement Life, by Boris Fishman (Harper; 321 pages; $25.99). Fishman, like his protagonist, is a born storyteller, and his first novel is learned, funny and deeply soulful — frequently all at the same time.
Ruby, by Cynthia Bond (Hogarth; 333 pages; $25). Channeling the lyrical phantasmagoria of early Toni Morrison and the sexual and racial brutality of 20th century East Texas, Bond has created an indelible portrait of a fallen woman.
Skylight, by José Saramago; translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 299 pages; $26). Saramago’s unearthed novel, set in a Lisbon apartment block soon after World War II, is a masterwork of characterization, place and point of view, anticipating the complex female characters and many of the prototypes that would appear in his later work.
Snow in May, by Kseniya Melnik (Henry Holt; 272 pages; $25). In this debut collection set in Siberia, Melnik writes evocatively of the textures, smells and bone-chilling temperatures of an exotic land in prose that is burnished and precise.
Song of the Shank, by Jeffery Renard Allen (Graywolf; 570 pages; $18 paperback). Allen extends the myth of Blind Tom, born a slave and perhaps the most successful concert pianist of the 19th century, in his inventive, earthy, rewarding novel.
Starting Over: Stories, by Elizabeth Spencer (Liveright; 208 pages; $24.95). Spencer is an elegant and subtle writer who focuses on universal concerns, but in this collection her territory is the South and its terrain, physical and emotional.
10:04, by Ben Lerner (Faber and Faber; 244 pages; $25). Though a summary of “10:04”
might make it seem insufferably cerebral, it is in fact heady without being precious, packed with striking, often comic, incidents. The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price Purveyor of Superior Funerals, by Wendy Jones (Europa; 235 pages; $17 paperback). Jones expertly conjures the speech patterns, mores and physical details of a bygone world in this remarkable novel set in Wales.
Three Short Novels, by Gina Berriault (Counterpoint; 340 pages; $19.95 paperback). This posthumous collection creates a dreamlike yet piercingly familiar landscape — and both old and new readers of Berriault will thrill to travel it. Thunderstruck and Other
Stories, by Elizabeth McCracken (The Dial Press; 224 pages; $26). Each story in McCracken’s brilliant collection, her first in nearly 20 years, is an elaborate monument to loss. Families lose mothers, sons and daughters in abrupt and startling ways. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, by Joshua Ferris (Little, Brown; 337 pages; $26). In his latest novel, Ferris has created a Woody Allen-like anhedonic, irksome but surprisingly likable in his oddness.
The UnAmericans: Stories,
by Molly Antopol (Norton; 261