Top book picks of 2019

By Dwight Garner, Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai © The New York Times Co.

In the literary world, it has been a year of big, bold ambition. Novelists have stretched their canvases — writing a sentence that runs for a thousand pages; charting the fate of three families in Africa across four generations. Nonfiction writers have made riveting narrative from sprawling, difficult material: The Irish Troubles, the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, the history of the Lakota tribe. And memoirists have confronted harrowing and profound subjects: Life in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina; decades spent in solitary confinement; psychological abuse in intimate relationships. Below, The New York Times’ three daily book critics share their favorites among the books they reviewed this year, each list alphabetical by author.

Dwight Garner

“Night Boat to Tangier” by Kevin Barry (Doubleday). The Irish writer Kevin Barry’s buoyant third novel is about Maurice and Charlie, former drug runners who lift from the page — they’re existentialist and twinkling thugs. This melancholy and comic novel works because Maurice and Charlie are such vivid company on the page.

“The Yellow House” by Sarah M. Broom (Grove Press). This forceful, rolling and many-chambered memoir, set largely on the outer margins of New Orleans, isn’t merely about Hurricane Katrina. But the storm and the way it scattered the author’s large family across America give this book its grease and gravitas.

“Trust Exercise” by Susan Choi (Henry Holt and Co.). Choi’s remarkable fifth novel, the winner of this year’s National Book Award, is about sophomore theater students in high school, their souls in flux. It’s about misplaced trust in adults, and about female friendships gone dangerously awry. In the end, it’s about cruelty. Satisfyingly, it’s also about revenge. At about this novel’s midpoint, Choi pulls the tablecloth from under her narra

tive and forces you to reassess, from a different angle, all that’s come before. “Underland: A Deep Time Journey” by Robert Macfarlane

(W.W. Norton & Co.). Macfarlane recounts a series of explorations under the surface of our planet. In England, he visits caves and studies fungi; in Paris, he goes into the catacombs. He considers sinkholes in the Slovenian highlands, nuclear waste in Finland and global warming in Greenland.

“Baby, I Don’t Care” by Chelsey Minnis (Wave Books). This persuasive and blackly funny book of poems takes its tone and subject matter from old Hollywood movies, but the intensity of the attack is all Minnis’s.

“Normal People” by Sally Rooney (Hogarth). Rooney’s taut and psychologically intense second novel is about Marianne and Connell, teenagers when we first meet them, not yet flowers but small tight buds. At school, he’s popular and an athlete. She is offbeat and withdrawn and friendless. “Normal People” tracks them across four years. They break each other’s hearts over and over again.

“The Old Drift” by Namwali Serpell (Hogarth). An intimate, brainy, gleaming epic, set mostly in what is now Zambia, the landlocked country in southern Africa. It closely tracks the fortunes of three families (black, white, brown) across four generations.

“Lot: Stories” by Bryan Washington (Riverhead Books). Washington’s subtle, dynamic and flexible short stories crack open a vibrant, polyglot side of Houston about which few outsiders are aware. His characters move through streets that he names so often — Richmond and Waugh, Rusk and Fairview — that they come to have talismanic power, like the street names in Springsteen songs. “Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Conf inement. My Story of Transformation and Hope” by Albert Woodfox with Leslie George (Grove

Press). For a crime he did not commit, Woodfox spent more than four decades in solitary confinement at Angola, the notorious maximum-security prison farm in Louisiana: 23 hours a day in a 6-by-9-foot cell. This powerful, closely observed memoir is the story of how he survived.

“Doxology” by Nell Zink (Ecco/harpercollins Publishers). In terms of its author’s ability to throw dart after dart after dart into the center of your mediawarped mind and soul, this is the novel of the year. It’s a ragged chunk of ecstatic cerebral-satirical intellection. It’s bliss. Zink writes as if the political madness of the last four decades had been laid on for her benefit as a novelist. Parul Sehgal “Ducks, Newburyport” by

Lucy Ellmann (Biblioasis). Ellman’s novel — told mostly in

one 426,000-word sentence that stretches over 1,000 pages — seems designed to thwart the timid or lazy reader but shouldn’t. We are locked in the mind of an Ohio woman, a mother of four with a cutting power of observation. “Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power” by Pekka

Hamalainen (Yale University Press). Hamalainen’s is the first complete account of the Lakotas, the tribe of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse that long dominated the American interior and thwarted Western expansion with charm, shrewd diplomacy and sheer might. “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval” by Saidiya

Hartman (W.W. Norton & Co.). Hartman’s book is a rich resurrection of a forgotten history: the revolution in intimate life at the cusp of the 20th century, led by young black women, two or three generations removed from slavery. They discovered city life in New York and Philadelphia and tossed out the narrow scripts they had been given. “Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, Volumes 1 and 2” by Uwe Johnson. Translated by Damion Searls. (New York Review of Books). Johnson’s novel was first published in Germany, in four volumes between 1970 and 1983. The story takes the form of a yearlong diary by enigmatic Gesine Cresspahl, who was born in Germany the year Hitler came to power and has escaped to New York along with her young daughter. “The Man Who Saw Everything” by Deborah

Levy (Bloomsbury). Levy’s noirish novels have long examined the wages of traditional femininity. Her latest, a brilliantly twisty story, looks at masculinity and its constraints through the character of Saul, a dandyish young scholar who travels to East Berlin in 1988 and begins to experience strange premonitions. “Where Reasons End”

by Yiyun Li (Random House). Li’s 16-year-old son killed himself in 2017, and her devastating new book imagines a dialogue between a mother and her teenager lost to suicide. The narrator searches for the language to understand her son’s actions without condemnation or cliché. “Lost Children Archive” by Valeria Luiselli

(Alfred A. Knopf ). Luiselli’s novel follows a narrator who travels to the southern border with her family to search for the missing undocumented daughters of a friend. The book revisits questions that have long preoccupied Luiselli — how can language be an agent of both violence and repair? — but this time, they are nested into a story with a heartstopping climax. T “In the Dream House: A Memoir” by Carmen

Maria Machado (Graywolf Press). In a form-shattering memoir, Machado recounts her abusive relationship with another woman by borrowing from dozens of genres. Each chapter is told in a different style: road trip, romance novel, stoner comedy. “No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us,” by

Rachel Louise Snyder (Bloomsbury). Domestic violence cuts across lines of class, race and religion. Snyder takes apart the myths that surround domestic violence, many of which she herself once believed, embedding analysis and actionable steps in deeply reported case studies.

“Women Talking” by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury). In 2005, Mennonite women living in a colony in Bolivia reported waking up bleeding with frayed rope around their wrists. The elders dismissed their complaints until it was discovered that men from the community had been creeping through windows at night, sedating and raping the women. Toews sets her philosophical, innovative novel over the course of two days as women gather in a hayloft and debate what to do. Jennifer Szalai “American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump” by Tim Alberta (Harper/ Harpercollins Publishers). This isn’t just another drop in the deluge of Trump books; in fact, it isn’t really a Trump book at all. Instead it’s a fascinating look at a Republican Party that initially scoffed at the incursion of a philandering reality-tv star with zero political experience and now readily accommodates him. “The Undying”: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care” by Anne Boyer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Boyer’s extraordinary and furious book is partly a memoir of her illness, diagnosed five years ago; she was 41 when she learned that the lump in her breast was triplenegative cancer, one of the deadliest kinds. But her story, told with searing specificity, is just one narrative thread in a book that reflects on the possibility — or necessity — of finding common cause in individual suffering. “What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance” by Carolyn Forché (Penguin Press). In 1977, a mysterious stranger showed up on Forché’s doorstep in Southern California; he introduced himself as a coffee farmer from El Salvador, and within a few days he had persuaded her to make her first trip to his country, just as it was on the verge of civil war. “Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter” by Kerri K. Greenidge (Liveright). William Monroe Trotter, who edited the Boston-based black weekly newspaper The Guardian in the first three decades of the 20th century, shows up in the biographies of contemporaries like Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois as a gadfly: radical, outspoken and indefatigable. Greenidge’s account of Trotter’s life is ardent and mostly approving but nevertheless conveys the more vexing elements of his personality. “Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster” by Adam

Higginbotham (Simon & Schuster). Higginbotham shows how an almost fanatical compulsion for secrecy among the Soviet Union’s governing elite was part of what made the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion of 1986 not just cataclysmic but so likely in the first place. He reconstructs the disaster from the ground up, recounting the prelude to it as well as its aftermath. The result is superb, enthralling and necessarily terrifying. “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States” by Daniel Immerwahr (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Critics of American foreign policy have long accused the country of imperialism in a general sense but Immerwahr wants to draw attention to actual territory, to those islands and archipelagos, like the Philippines and Puerto Rico, too often sidelined in the mainland imagination. “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland” by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday). Keefe’s narrative account of the Troubles in Ireland is an architectural feat, expertly constructed out of complex and contentious material, arranged and balanced just so. His sensitive and judicious book raises some unsettling, and perhaps unanswerable, questions. Does moving forward from an anguished past require some sort of revisitation and reckoning? “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation” by Andrew Marantz (Viking). Marantz writes about “web-savvy bigots,” “soft-brained conspiracists” and “mere grifters or opportunists,” but this book is also about his searching attempt to understand people he describes as truly deplorable without letting his moral compass get wrecked. This is a book that’s trenchant and intelligent; wry but not glib; humane but never indulgent. “The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century” by Thant Myint-u (W.W. Norton & Co.). Writing about Burma, Thant Myint-u’s focus is on convulsions of the last 15 years, from a seemingly unshakable military dictatorship to the beginnings of democratic rule. But examining the legacy of the country’s colonial past is crucial to grasping what’s happened more recently. “The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation” by Brenda Wineapple (Random House). Wineapple’s depiction of President Andrew Johnson is so vivid and perceptive that his standoff with Congress arrives with a doomed inevitability. He had been goading legislators with his accelerating attempts to rule by decree, daring them to “go ahead” and impeach him — which the House voted to do in 1868 by an overwhelming majority. The relevance of this riveting book is clear enough.