all my little sorrows
by miriam toews (mcsweeney’s)
You are reading: Top fiction books of 2014
This sad and incredibly witty novel is about two loving sisters: one who wants to live and the other who wants to die. toews draws out the frustration of caring for someone bent on self-destruction, offering a nuanced look at harrowing end-of-life questions. — ron charles
all our names
by dinaw mengestu (knopf)
Mengestu, who left his native Ethiopia as a child and now teaches in Georgetown, tells the sad and mysterious story of an African man who arrives in the Midwest on a student visa. he beautifully captures the conflicting emotions of someone who has survived the loss of his family, his country and his identity. — r.c.
all the light we can’t see
by anthony doerr (editor)
At the center of this gripping novel, a national book award finalist, are two children: a blind French girl who flees to the countryside when her father disappears from Nazi-occupied Paris, and a German orphaned child prodigy whose scientific skills win. his entry into the Hitler Youth. — amanda vaill
the murder of margaret thatcher
by hilary mantel (henry holt)
mantel wins the draw for deliberate provocation with the lead story, which imagines the assassination attempt on the former prime minister. is a fine example in a collection that evokes a shadowy region where boundaries blur and alternate realities seem possible. — wendy blacksmith
the world on fire
by siri hustvedt (simon & schuster)
This electrifying work stars an enraged artist hell-bent on exposing sexism and other prejudices in the art world. his tactic: have three male artists exhibit their installations as their own. — w.s.
child, snow, bird
by helenoyeyemi (riverhead)
In this whimsical reimagining of “Snow White” transposed to 1950s Massachusetts, Oyeyemi explores the alchemy of racism and the strange ways identity can be transmuted in an instant, from beauty to beast, or vice versa. . — r.c.
the book of unknown americans
by cristina henríquez (knopf)
After being seriously injured in an accident, a teenage girl and her family emigrate from Mexico to Delaware. Quiet and unassuming, Henríquez’s novel unfolds slowly and surprisingly, and without an iota of sentiment, offers an original story of arrival in America. — Maria Arana
children act
by ian mcewan (talese/doubleday)
This lean tale tells the story of a British Supreme Court judge who is faced with a particularly difficult case: a teenager who refuses life-saving medical treatment. McEwan focuses not only on the conflict between faith and science, but also on how one woman’s ordered life is rocked by a confluence of youthful passion and ancient betrayal. — r.c.
porcelain dolls
by lisa see (random house)
Set in San Francisco in the late 1930s, this heartwarming novel tells the story of three distinctive women who meet as dancers in a Chinese nightclub. The women endure precarious careers, rollercoaster romances, and personal conflict, but their precarious bond is tested when the United States declares war on Japan. — Eugenia Zukerman
close your eyes, hold hands
by chris bohjalian (double day)
narrated by a 16-year-old girl in vermont, bohjalian’s provocative, suspenseful novel touches on some hot-button issues (homeless kids, mental illness, nuclear power) while creating one of fiction’s most memorable teen leads recent. — elizabeth’s hand
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
by haruki murakami; translated by philip gabriel (knopf)
Murakami’s thought-provoking novel centers on an engineer haunted by a devastating experience in his teens. his pilgrimage to find answers is not only a coming-of-age story, but also a suspenseful one with deft twists and brilliant jolts of psychological insight. — ma.
derek smith’s bus
by derek howe smith (international closed room)
Smith’s stories, set in 1950s England, are works of subtle complexity and highly imaginative. they test our ability as readers, employing all kinds of distractions in their clues, but at best they leave us satisfied that, had we been a little more astute, we might have caught the truth before the final pages. i> — michael dirda
powder
by yvonne adhiambo owuor (knopf)
“Dust” opens in 2007 with a panicked chase through the streets of Nairobi, moving between the mourning of a single family and the corruption of national politics that swirls around the death of a young man, creating A vortex of pain that draws generations from Kenya’s deception and tumultuous modern history. — r.c.
euphoria
by lily king (monthly atlantic)
This atmospheric novel re-imagines a brief collaboration in New Guinea in the early 1930s involving anthropologist Margaret Mead, her husband and future husband. he is the winner of the first kirkus prize for fiction. — r.c.
frog music
by emma donoghue (small, brunette)
Set in San Francisco in the summer of 1876, Donoghue’s novel is based on the real-life shooting of a stuck-up transvestite who supported herself by supplying restaurants with frog legs. This atmospheric story unfolds like a high-speed murder mystery as the victim’s friend, a celebrity showgirl, tries to track down the killer before he catches her first. — r.c.
high as the bridles of horses
by scott cheshire (henry holt)
Cheshire, a former Jehovah’s Witness, draws from his own experience in this heartwarming novel about a boy preacher who eventually leaves the church but is forced to face its teachings again while caring for his maniacally devoted father. — r.c.
in the mists of time
by antonio muñoz molina; translated by edith grossman (houghton mifflin harcourt)
A labyrinthine and fascinating novel of love and war, this story of a Spanish architect who falls passionately in love with a woman who is not his wife is an elaborate and complicated labyrinth, peppered with historical facts and faces, and one of the most eloquent. monuments to the Spanish civil war never erected in fiction. — ma.
j
by howard jacobson (hogarth)
This chilling novel, a Man Booker Award finalist, imagines an anti-Semitic future where wit and irony, along with jazz and literary fiction, have evaporated in the heat of a second holocaust sometime in the 21st century. — r.c.
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the monsters that laugh
by denis johnson (farrar, straus and giroux)
Set in post-9/11 West Africa, this highly suspenseful story offers a more compelling portrait of amoral intelligence agents and the havoc they wreak than almost any journalistic account of third-world shenanigans. — michael mewshaw
purple
by marilynne robinson (farrar, straus and giroux)
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Gilead” and “Home” returns to the city of Gilead to complete a trilogy about spiritual redemption. In this National Book Award Finalist, Robinson clearly and uncondescendingly captures the mind of an uneducated woman struggling to understand why things happen. — r.c.
a bit of lumpen little novel
by roberto bolaño, translated by natasha wimmer (new directions)
Published in Spanish a few months before Bolaño’s death in 2003, this novella about the struggles of a young orphan is a gripping chronicle of urban youth, anomie, sex, and crime. — ma.
long man
by amy greene (knopf)
This literary thriller unfolds over three dramatic days in the summer of 1936 as a mother searches for her missing 3-year-old daughter in a depressed Tennessee town threatened by flooding. — r.c.
love and treasure
by ayelet waldman (knopf)
Waldman’s multi-generational novel centers on a historical event that has largely faded from memory: the Nazi-run Hungarian Golden Train, which carried a treasure trove of goods stolen from Jews in World War II. Tracing the fate of an iconic jewel from that collection through Budapest, Salzburg and Maine, Waldman demonstrates the curious and tragic ways history brings us together. — r.c.
lovers at the chameleon club, paris 1932
by francine prose (harper)
Inspired by a photo by Brassaï of Violette Morris, a celebrated French athlete who later betrayed her country to Hitler, this saga of Paris at War features raunchy humor, sexual transgression, and military intrigue. — r.c.
good luck
by amy bloom (random house)
Set in World War II and taking place from Ohio to Hollywood to Brooklyn, the novel centers on two orphaned half-sisters who are tasked with reversing their sad fortunes. — ma.
marry me
by dan rhodes (europe)
In 80 or so very short stories, usually one page long, Rhodes navigates a variety of Seinfeldian routines centered on love, marriage, infidelity, divorce and death. as her imagination runs wild, she addresses some of life’s greatest joys and worst traumas in a deadpan, unflappable, understated voice. — m.d.
mr. tall
by tony earley (small, dark)
This collection of captivating stories is capped off by a novella that’s a hilarious experimental riff on “jack and the beanstalk,” featuring a sneering talking dog, a pair of post-feminist maidens, and a Tom. equally sad Dooley, who laments that his famous murder ballad “hasn’t done much since burl ives died.” — michael lindgren
nora webster
by colm tóibín (writer)
Set in the early 1970s in the hometown of Tóibín in County Wexford, Ireland, this autobiographical novel follows the story of a 44-year-old widow and mother of four. Through pages that never succumb to a single melodramatic or sentimental sentence, Nora silently handles her pain and figures out how to get on with her life. — r.c.
nothing is impossible: more problems of dr. sam hawthorne
by edward d. hoch (crippen & landru)
structured like those classic radio soap operas in which dr. watson sipped petri wine and recounted a sherlock holmes adventure, the stories here (mysteries set in new england during the 1930s) offer glimpses into past small-town life.—m.d.
in a sea so full
by chang-rae lee (riverhead)
Lee’s dystopian novel opens in a desolate landscape where the remnants of civilization survive in layered compounds cut off from North America’s lawless junk heap. in some ways, it’s a familiar story: the picaresque journey of a lone radical through a repressive society ripe for revolution. but at every turn, read frustrates our expectations.
— r.c.
orpheus
by richard powers (w. w. norton)
A riveting novel about the allure and power of music, “Orpheus” centers on an avant-garde composer in his 70s living alone in a Pennsylvania college town. he has taken up an alarming hobby: DIY genetic engineering. — r.c.
panic in a suitcase
by yelena akhtiorskaya (riverhead)
Equal parts borscht soup and upstate New York borscht belt, this first novel replaces the inspirational hype of the great immigrant story with a broad comedy about a collection of Ukrainian émigrés making their way in brighton beach, brooklyn. — r.c.
the peripheral
by william gibson (putnam)
No one writes better about the near future than Gibson, and in this surprisingly optimistic novel, he launches us into two futures, one near and recognizable, the other more distant. As the two imagined realities make contact, great and malevolent forces converge. — robin sloan
redistribution
by phil klay (penguin press)
In this collection of short stories, National Book Award winner Klay draws on his experience as an American writer. marine captain to give us one of the most compelling written representations of the iraq war. he explores what it really means to not only train youngsters to kill strangers, but to encourage those youngsters to whoop for joy and high-five each other while doing so. — Jeff Turrentino
rebirth
by stephen king (writer)
King’s sweeping story, spanning five decades, is told by a man whose life is profoundly affected by a chance encounter with a preacher as a boy in rural New England. — e.h.
shirley
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susan’s merrell scarf (blue rider)
A tribute to horror story master Shirley Jackson, this novel weaves events from the writer’s life into a mesmerizing tale that will please Jackson fans, as well as anyone looking for a solidly written literary thriller.
— carol memmott
some luck
by jane smiley (knopf)
In this compelling first volume of his planned trilogy, a sweeping tale spanning three decades, three continents, and a generation of children on an Iowa farm, Smiley delivers a wry, old-fashioned tale of rural family life in changing times. — Valeria
deciders
the temporal knight
by sebastian barry (viking)
Jack McNulty, a beleaguered Irish soldier, has just returned from World War II. going back and forth in time, he recounts the ups and downs of his life in a narrative as harrowing as an Irish ballad. — ma.
dumbfounded
by elizabeth mccracken (dial)
The calm and terrifying “thunderstruck” stories have the edgy emotional valence of fairy tales, where to name the dangers (the wicked witch, the hungry wolf) is to somehow subdue them. The result is like a series of forgotten Brothers Grimm tales translated into the shocking anomie of modern life. — m.l.
weretiger
by nick harkaway (knopf)
As a mad scientist from Marvel Comics, Harkaway has crossed the tensions of a modern-day environmental crisis with the sweet story of an Afghanistan war veteran trying to adopt a young child on a doomed island. — r.c.
get back up at a decent hour
by joshua ferris (small, dark)
This man booker award finalist stars a red sox-loving, misanthropic dentist in a midlife crisis. Ferris tells a witty story that explores internet scams, relationship killers, crackpot theology, baseball mania, and the desperate loneliness of modern life. — r.c.
the transcriber
by amy rowland (algonquin)
Set in a newspaper that resembles the New York Times, this first novel by a former transcriber there, stars, fittingly, a timid transcriber who, unraveling the mystery of a baffling death, is forced out of her shell. and form a tentative engagement with the city around it. — m.l.
under the wide and starry sky
by nancy horan (ballantine)
From the author of “Loving Frank,” this novel reimagines the story of Robert Louis Stevenson and his American wife, Fanny van de Grift Osbourne. Horan infuses these two portraits with color, passion, and intellectual spark, creating an operatic story that hits the nail on the head in its depiction of pre-feminist women and their limited opportunities. — cm
an unnecessary woman
by rabih alameddine (grove)
This novel’s erudite narrator, a national book award finalist, unfolds her personal story within the 20th-century history of her beloved Beirut. with her, alameddine has given us a wonderfully moody heroine, abruptly vulnerable and endearingly self-mocking. — w.s.
a wild state
gay considers class issues, parental responsibility and sex as a weapon of terror in a fantastically exciting story about a lawyer kidnapped while visiting her wealthy parents in port-au-prince, haiti. — r.c.
us
by david nicholls (harper)
Nicholls’ dark comedy takes a family in shambles on a European tour, with the trip likely to solve the problems of its middle-aged narrator, his artist wife, and their defiant teenage son. As the family teeters on the brink of breakdown, Nicholls offers a poignant look at how a marriage ages, how parents go wrong, and what survives despite those challenges. — r.c.
the vacationers
by emma straub (riverhead)
A dysfunctional family tries, and fails, to find joy on a summer vacation in Straub’s wise and humorous novel. Set on an island in the Mediterranean Sea, much of the comedy stems from the tension between having to have the best time in the world and wanting to stab someone with an ice pick. — r.c.
we are all completely beside ourselves
by karen joy fowler (marian wood/putnam)
fowler has created a scenario that is extremely unusual: a family of five in which the youngest daughter is a chimpanzee. The pen/faulkner award winner and man booker award finalist tells a haunting and emotionally complex story that explores the mystery of our relationship with the animal kingdom, including kin. — r.c.
we are not ourselves
by matthew thomas (simon & schuster)
At the center of this multi-generational novel is Eileen Leary, caring for her alcoholic mother, falling in love with an eccentric neuroscientist, raising a son, and working a demanding nursing career before Alzheimer’s threatens her husband and her family. the very structure of his family. — alice laplanta
young people want it
by kenneth mackenzie (text classics)
First published in Australia in 1937, this novel, a beautiful depiction of school life, loneliness and sexual longing, sits alongside Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”—M.D.
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