Today, the editors of The New York Times Book Review posted their list of 100 Notable Books of 2020 in fiction, poetry, memoir and general nonfiction. If you're looking for gift ideas this holiday season, you may find what you need here! (www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/books/notable-books.html)
FICTION
The Aosawa Murders BY RIKU ONDA, translated by Alison Watts.
Onda’s strange, engrossing novel — patched together from
scraps of interviews, letters, newspaper articles and the like — explores the
sweltering day that 17 members of the Aosawa family died after drinking
poisoned sake and soda.
The Beauty of Your Face BY SAHAR MUSTAFAH.
In the Chicago suburbs, a gunman opens fire at a school for
Palestinian girls. Mustafah rewinds from the shooting to the principal’s
childhood as a newly arrived immigrant. Hers is a story of outsiders coming
together in surprising and uplifting ways.
Beheld BY TARASHEA NESBIT
In this plain-spoken and lovingly detailed historical novel,
the story of the Mayflower Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony is refracted through
the prism of female characters. Despite the novel’s quietness of telling, its
currency is the human capacity for cruelty and subjugation, of pretty much
everyone by pretty much everyone.
Blacktop Wasteland BY S. A. COSBY
In this gritty thriller, set in rural Virginia, Beauregard
“Bug” Montage — the owner of a struggling auto shop — is drifting back into his
old life of crime. Cosby has a talent for well-tuned action, raising our heart
rates and filling our nostrils with odors of gun smoke and burned rubber.
The Boy In The Field BY MARGOT LIVESEY
In Livesey’s exquisite new novel, three siblings on their
way home from school find a boy who has been attacked and left for dead in a
field. This discovery leads to a mystery that will change the lives of all
involved.
Breasts and Eggs BY MIEKO KAWAKAMI, translated by Sam Bett
and David Boyd
In supple and casual prose, this celebrated Japanese
novelist follows sisters in Osaka who are considering breast augmentation and
sperm donation, causing two generations of women to reckon with the realities
of their physical bodies and the pressures put on them by society.
A Burning BY MEGHA MAJUMDAR
A brazen act of terrorism in an Indian metropolis sets the
plot of this propulsive debut novel in motion, and lands an innocent young
bystander in jail. With impressive assurance and insight, Majumdar unfolds a
timely story about the ways power is wielded to manipulate and crush the
powerless.
A Children's Bible BY LYDIA MILLET
This superb novel begins as a generational comedy — a pack
of kids and their middle-aged parents coexist in a summer share — and turns
steadily darker, as climate collapse and societal breakdown encroach. But
Millet’s light touch never falters; in this time of great upheaval, she
implies, our foundational myths take on new meaning and hope.
Cleanness BY GARTH GREENWELL
Greenwell’s narrator is a gay American teacher in Sofia,
Bulgaria, who has a series of encounters that are sexually frank and
psychologically complicated; the book achieves an unusual depth of accuracy about
both physical activity and emotional undercurrent.
Deacon King Kong BY JAMES MCBRIDE
At the center of this raucous novel by the National Book
Award-winning author of “The Good Lord Bird” are a hard-drinking church deacon
and a sudden, inexplicable act of violence. But that’s just one strand of
McBride’s tour de force, a book resounding with madcap characters and sly
commentary on race, crime and inequality.
The Death of Jesus BY J. M. COETZEE
With the pared-down quality of a fable, the final novel in
Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy makes a case for the fantastical worldview of Don
Quixote. Young David enters an orphanage, finds followers and imparts wisdom
before falling terminally ill — a Christ figure, sure, but not one with easy or
predictable parallels.
The Death of Vivek Oji
BY AKWAEKE EMEZI
This steamroller of a story, about coming of age and coming
out in Nigeria, centers on what a family doesn’t see — or doesn’t want to see —
and whether that blindness contributes to a son’s death.
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line BY DEEPA ANAPPARA
This first novel by an Indian journalist probes the secrets
of a big-city shantytown as a 9-year-old boy tries to solve the mystery of a
classmate’s disappearance. Anappara impressively inhabits the inner worlds of children
lost to their families, and of others who escape by a thread.
Earthlings BY SAYAKA MURATA, translated by Ginny Tapley
Takemori
In the Japanese author's second novel, two cousins agree
that they're aliens, abandoned at birth among humans. After the traumas of
childhood, in adulthood they seek to abandon society -- a.k.a. "the Baby
Factory" -- altogether, in favor of a moral vacuum.
Everywhere You Don't Belong BY GABRIEL BUMP
It’s the rare book that can achieve an appropriate balance
between heaviness and levity. This debut novel — a comically dark coming-of-age
story about growing up on the South Side of Chicago — pulls the feat off not
just generously, but seemingly without effort.
The Glass Kingdom BY LAWRENCE OSBORNE
An American woman is on the lam with a suitcase full of cash
in Osborne’s latest novel, which is set in a Bangkok rattled by monsoons and
social unrest. As chaos grows, her refuge, a modern apartment complex, grows
more prisonlike. Osborne’s command of mood keeps the reader’s pulse racing.
Hamnet BY MAGGIE O'FARRELL
Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, died at 11, a few years before
the playwright wrote “Hamlet.” O’Farrell’s wondrous new novel is at once an
unsparingly eloquent record of love and grief and a vivid imagining of how a
child’s death was transfigured into art.
His Only Wife BY PEACE ADZO MEDIE
This rich, rewarding debut novel follows a Ghanaian
seamstress — forced into an arranged marriage with a wealthy man she has never
met — on her journey of self-discovery. “It wasn’t easy,” she declares, “being
the key to other people’s happiness, their victory and their vindication.”
Homeland Elegies BY AYAD AKHTAR
The latest novel from Akhtar is about the dream of national
belonging that has receded for American Muslims in the years since 9/11. At
once deeply personal and unreservedly political, the book often reads like a
collection of essays illustrating the author’s prismatic identity.
How Much of These Hills Is Gold BY C PAM ZHANG
Zhang’s mesmerizing tale of two Chinese-American siblings
crossing the West during the gold rush, with their father’s corpse in tow,
unfolds in a landscape of desolation and struggle that recalls Steinbeck and
Faulkner, and in a voice that is all her own.
Hurricane Season BY FERNANDA MELCHOR, translated by Sophie
Hughes
This searing novel, the first in English by the Mexican
Melchor, dazzles with fury and beauty. Inspired by the wave of gruesome
femicides in her home state of Veracruz, the author transposes the violence
directed at women to the register of fable.
Writers & Lovers BY LILY KING
A former golf prodigy turned waiter and writer is lonely,
broke, directionless — and grieving for her mother, who has died suddenly.
King’s hopeful novel follows this young woman’s hardscrabble quest for
solvency, peace and passion.
Why I Don't Write: And Other Stories BY SUSAN MINOT
The stories in this collection, Minot’s first since 1989,
are concerned with love, death, estrangement, loss and memory, which means that
they are concerned with time itself.
The Vanishing Half BY BRIT BENNETT
Bennett’s gorgeously written second novel, an ambitious
meditation on race and identity, considers the divergent fates of twin sisters,
born in the Jim Crow South, after one decides to pass for white. Bennett
balances the literary demands of dynamic characterization with the historical
and social realities of her subject matter.
Tokyo Ueno Station BY YU MIRI. Translated by Morgan
Giles
Yu’s glorious modernist novel is narrated by a voice from the
dead: a construction worker doomed to haunt various landmarks near Tokyo’s Ueno
Park.
Sisters BY DAISY JOHNSON
Secluded in a dilapidated country house, their depressed
mother in a room upstairs, the teenage siblings at the center of this
hypnotically macabre novel mull a sinister deed from their past. Johnson
expertly layers the Gothic atmosphere with dread, grief and guilt.
Sharks in the Time of Saviors BY KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN
Washburn has no interest in the Hawaii of resorts and
honeymoons; the characters in his singular debut novel live in a modern yet
mystical version of the archipelago, one whose essence no conqueror can ever
fully eradicate.
Shuggie Bain BY DOUGLAS STUART
Young Shuggie grows up in 1980s Glasgow with a calamitous,
alcoholic mother and punishing reminders that his effeminate manner sets him
apart from his peers. Pain — physical and emotional — is everywhere in this
potent, sure-footed debut, which makes as strong a case as any for love’s
redemptive power.
Saint X BY ALEXIS SCHAITKIN
In 1995, on a nameless Caribbean island, the daughter of an
American family goes missing. This debut novel is hypnotic, delivering acute
social commentary on everything from class and race to familial bonds and
community, and yet its weblike nature never confuses or fails to captivate.
Sea Wife BY AMITY GAIGE
A husband and wife try to escape their problems by packing
up their small children and taking to the open sea on a boat they barely know
how to sail. Trouble follows, but not necessarily the kind you’re expecting.
Gaige’s novel gives readers plenty to discuss, including ethical dilemmas,
complicated family dynamics and the nature of forgiveness.
Real Life BY BRANDON TAYLOR
In this stunning debut novel, a gay Black graduate student
from the South mines hope for some better or different life while he studies
biochemistry in the haunted halls of a white academic space. As in the
modernist novels of Woolf and Tolstoy cited throughout, the true action of
Taylor’s novel exists beneath the surface.
Red Pill BY HARI KUNZRU
A fellowship at a study center in Germany turns sinister and
sets a writer on a possibly paranoid quest to expose a political evil he
believes is loose in the world. Kunzru’s wonderfully weird novel traces a
lineage from German Romanticism to National Socialism to the alt-right, and is
rich with insights on surveillance and power.
The Mercies BY KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE
This unsparing, beautifully written novel takes as its
subject the Vardo witch trials in 17th-century Norway, which even the infamous
hysteria in Salem, Mass., several decades later could not match when it came to
brutality. For such a book to center on a cast of powerful women characters
seems as appropriate to its historical context as it is to our time.
The Mirror & the Light BY HILARY MANTEL
The final novel in Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy (Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies) returns to
the terror of Henry VIII’s court, where falls from grace are sudden and
frequently fatal. For all its political and literary plotting, the book is most
memorable for its portraiture, with Henry’s secretary, Thomas Cromwell, as our
master painter.
Missionaries BY PHIL KLAY
The four converging narratives of this astounding novel
(Klay’s first, after his National Book Award-winning story collection “Redeployment”)
capture the complexities of Colombia’s five-decade war. Klay does not shy away
from the thorny moral questions and psychological impacts of conflict, and the
result is at once terrifying and thought-provoking.
Monogamy BY SUE MILLER
A gregarious bookstore owner dies suddenly, leaving his
widow, children and ex-wife to make sense of the messy and colorful life they
shared together. Sue Miller’s engrossing novel is infused with generosity and
the complicated kind of love readers will recognize from real life.
Memorial BY BRYAN WASHINGTON
A sense of estrangement pervades this assured debut novel,
which opens as a man flies to Osaka to care for his terminally ill father,
leaving his visiting mother and his Black boyfriend to keep each other company.
One of the great themes of “Memorial” is the immense power parents wield over
their children, even well into adulthood.
Luster BY RAVEN LEILANI
This first novel — about a 23-year-old New Yorker who
becomes entangled with a white suburban couple and their Black daughter — feels
like summer: sentences like ice that crackle or melt into a languorous drip;
plot suddenly, wildly flying forward like a bike down a hill.
Man of My Time BY DALIA SOFER
Sofer’s second novel traces a man’s path from “baffled
revolutionary” in Iran to complicit actor in a ruthless regime sure he can
undermine the system from inside. It is a master class in layering together a
character who is essentially unforgivable but no less captivating.
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 BY CHO NAM-JOO. Translated by
Jamie Chang
A sensation when it appeared in South Korea in 2016, this
novel recounts, in the dispassionate language of a case history, the descent
into madness of a young wife and mother — a Korean Everywoman whose plight
illuminates the effects of a sexist society.
The King at the Edge of the World BY ARTHUR PHILLIPS
Intrigue and espionage fuel this delectable novel set during
the twilight of the reign of Elizabeth I and featuring a Muslim Ottoman
physician who is enlisted in the machinations surrounding the choice of the
queen’s successor.
Little Eyes BY SAMANTA SCHWEBLIN. Translated by Megan
McDowell
In this brilliantly creepy novel, surveillance takes the
form of a toylike, camera-equipped pet that becomes a global sensation: Owning
one is like inviting a mute stranger into your home.
Jack BY MARILYNNE ROBINSON
This uplifting addition to Robinson’s numinous Gilead series
centers on an interracial romance in postwar St. Louis that was hinted at but
not amplified in the three books that preceded it. The lovers, Jack and Della,
find hope and truth in each other, even as the world conspires to keep them
apart.
POETRY
Obit: Poems BY VICTORIA CHANG
Chang’s new collection explores her father’s illness and her
mother’s death, treating mortality as a constantly shifting enigma. A serene
acceptance of grief emerges from these poems.
Feed BY TOMMY PICO
The title of Pico’s restless, intimate and exhilarating new
volume of poetry, his fourth, covers varieties of appetite: for sex, for
nutrition, for fame, for news, for gossip, for simple companionship. “Feed”
lets sympathetic readers pretend to live, for almost 80 pages, inside Pico’s
charismatic, uneasy mind.
Felon: Poems BY REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS
Betts’s searing third collection surveys the underworlds of
incarceration and its aftermath. “There is no name for this thing that you’ve
become,” he writes: “Convict, prisoner, inmate, lifer, yardbird, all fail.”
What does not fail is the language Betts sends prismatically through his
experience to refract the prison-industrial complex.
MEMOIR
The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir BY MICHELE HARPER
When Harper was a teenager, she drove her brother to the
hospital to get treated for a bite her father had inflicted. There, she
glimpsed a world she wanted to join. “The Beauty in Breaking” is her memoir of
becoming an emergency room physician. It’s also a profound statement on the
inequities in medical care today.
The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, MasterMyself, and Win BY MARIA KONNIKOVA
Konnikova, a writer for The New Yorker with a Ph.D. in
psychology, decided to study poker for its interplay between luck and
determination. This is an account of her journey, which took her much further
into the world of high-stakes gambling than she ever imagined.
The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination With the MostMysterious Creature in the Natural World BY PATRIK SVENSSON
Svensson follows those slithery beings in every direction
they take him, producing a book that moves from Aristotle to Freud to the
fishing trips of his youth.
Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time BY BEN
EHRENREICH
The author, a columnist for The Nation, divides his book
into two strands: a journal-like description of his life in desert America, in
a cabin near Joshua Tree National Park, and his move to Las Vegas, where his world
shrinks. Months into lockdown, it feels creepily prescient: We are all in the
desert now.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist BY ADRIAN
TOMINE
Tomine, now considered a master of the graphic novel form,
returns in an autobiographical mode, in a book that lets vent the rage and
fragility that are always just beneath the surface of his pristine drawings.
Memorial Drive: A Memoir BY NATASHA TRETHEWEY
At the center of Trethewey’s memoir is the wrenching story
of her mother’s murder, by her ex-husband, in 1985. But this haunting elegy by
the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet is also a work of great beauty and tenderness,
an atmospheric evocation of innocence and loss.
Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir BY LACY CRAWFORD
This devastating and erudite memoir chronicles the author’s
experience of sexual assault while she was a student at St. Paul’s, an elite
boarding school in Concord, N.H. — followed by a decades-long cover-up at the
hands of an esteemed institution with money, power and connections, and her own
complicated journey of recovery.
A Promised Land BY BARACK OBAMA
The former president’s memoir — the first of two volumes —
is a pleasure to read, the prose gorgeous, the detail granular and vivid. From
Southeast Asia to a forgotten school in South Carolina, he evokes the sense of
place with a light but sure hand. His focus is more political than personal,
but when he does write about his family it is with a beauty close to nostalgia.
Uncanny Valley: A Memoir BY ANNA WIENER
At 25, Wiener left a low-paying publishing job and wound up
in San Francisco, in the hypercompetitive, male-dominated, morally obtuse world
of tech start-ups. Her splendid memoir, stylish and unsparing, is a vital
reckoning with an industry awash in self-delusion.
The Undocumented Americans BY KARLA CORNEJO VILLAVICENCIO
Cornejo Villavicencio was one of the first undocumented
students to be accepted into Harvard University. In her captivating and
evocative first book, she tells “the full story” of what that means — relying
not just on her own experience but on interviews with immigrants across the
country.
GENERAL NONFICTION
Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, CreateBeauty, and Achieve Peace BY CARL SAFINA
Safina, the ecologist and author of many books about animal
behavior, here delves into the world of chimpanzees, sperm whales and macaws to
make a convincing argument that animals learn from one another and pass down culture
in a way that will feel very familiar to us.
Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year RivalryThat Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East BY
KIM GHATTAS
A Lebanese-born journalist and scholar takes a sweeping look
at the unrest in the Middle East, arguing that much of it is the result of the
competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of aSpeaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party BY JULIAN E. ZELIZER
As Zelizer recounts, Gingrich brought a new slash-and-burn
style to Congress in the late 1980s that disrupted old ways and led to repeated
Republican successes.
Caste: The Origins of our Discontents BY ISABEL WILKERSON
The Pulitzer-winning author advances a sweeping argument for
regarding American racial bias through the lens of caste. Drawing analogies
with the social orders of modern India and Nazi Germany, she frames barriers to
equality in a provocative new light.
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X BY LES PAYNE AND
TAMARA PAYNE
Thirty years in the making and encompassing hundreds of
original interviews, this magisterial biography of Malcolm X was completed by
Les Payne’s daughter after his death in 2018. Its strengths lie in its finely
shaded, penetrating portrait of the Black activist and thinker, whose legacy
continues to find fresh resonance today.
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism BY ANNE CASE
AND ANGUS DEATON
This highly important book examines the pain and despair
among white blue-collar workers and suggests that the hopelessness they are
experiencing may eventually extend to the entire American work force.
Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town BY BARBARA
DEMICK
Demick tells a decades-long story about Ngaba, a small
Sichuan town that has become the center of resistance to Chinese authority.
Lately this activism has taken the form of self-immolation — an act of
desperation, as Demick’s panoramic reporting comprehensively shows.
The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking) BY KATIE
MACK
Many books have been written about the creation of the
universe 13.8 billion years ago. But Mack, a theoretical cosmologist, is
interested in how it all ends. She guides us along a cosmic timeline studded
with scientific esoterica and mystery.
Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a NewPath Forward in the Post-Cold War World BY ROBERT M. GATES
With decades of experience at the highest levels of
government, Gates presents a critique of past mistakes in American foreign
policy and provides a guide for policymakers in the future.
Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter WhoRevealed It to the World BY LESLEY M. M. BLUME
For months after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Americans were told little about the devastating effects on survivors. Blume’s
magisterial account of how John Hersey broke the story in The New Yorker is
also a warning about the ever-present dangers of nuclear war.
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family BY
ROBERT KOLKER
It reads like a Greek tragedy: Six of the Galvins’ 12
children developed schizophrenia. This book is much more than a narrative of
despair, though; its most compelling chapters involve the scientists who
studied the family, looking for genetic clues about the origins of this
unfathomable disease.
The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World BY
BARRY GEWEN
In this magisterial account, Gewen, a longtime editor at the
Book Review, traces the historical and philosophical roots of Kissinger’s
famous realism, situating him in the context of Hannah Arendt and a cohort of
other Jewish intellectuals who escaped Nazi Germany.
Just Us: An American Conversation BY CLAUDIA RANKINE
As she did in her acclaimed 2014 collection “Citizen,”
Rankine here combines essays, poetry and visual art to interrogate the ways
race haunts her imagination, and America’s. “Fantasies cost lives,” she writes.
The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A.Baker III BY PETER BAKER AND SUSAN GLASSER
This fascinating biography of the former secretary of state
and consummate insider, who was once called “the most important unelected
official since World War II,” reveals both Baker’s accomplishments and the
compromises he had to make.
97,196 Words: Essays BY EMMANUEL CARRÈRE. Translated by
John Lambert
This collection of short pieces by an author widely
considered to be France’s leading nonfiction writer underscores Carrère’s
incisive style and moral stance; whether he’s writing about a murderer or a
movie star, he is also investigating himself, part of a deeply empathetic quest
to understand our species.
Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of BlackTravel in America BY BY CANDACY TAYLOR
Taylor, a cultural documentarian, traveled to thousands of
sites mentioned in the Green Book, the essential guidebook for Black travelers
braving American roads during Jim Crow. Highlighting threats such travelers
faced, her lively, illustrated history is mindful of the ongoing struggle for
Black social mobility today.
A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence onBlack America BY ELLIOTT CURRIE
This essential book by a veteran legal scholar argues that
the extraordinary violence against Black lives is a result of the nation’s
refusal to address the structural roots of the problem.
A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Searchof a Faith BY TIMOTHY EGAN
In his ninth book, this self-described “lapsed but
listening” Irish Catholic travels 1,200 miles from Canterbury to Rome along the
Via Francigena and tries to decide what he believes. If this book doesn’t
settle the question, it will at least fortify faith in scrupulous reporting and
captivating storytelling.
The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the ColdWar — a Tragedy in Three Acts BY SCOTT ANDERSON
Covering the years 1944 to 1956, Anderson’s enthralling
history of the early years of the Cold War follows four C.I.A. operatives as
their initial idealism eventually turns into betrayal and disillusionment,
fueled by creeping right-wing hysteria at home and cynical maneuvering abroad.
Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980 BY RICK
PERLSTEIN
More than a book about Ronald Reagan, the conclusion of
Perlstein’s four-volume saga on the rise of conservatism in America is
absorbing political and social history, with sharp insights into the human
quirks and foibles that were so much a part of the late 1970s.
The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison EDITED BY JOHN F.
CALLAHAN AND MARC C. CONNER
In his lifetime Ellison’s only novel was the masterpiece
“Invisible Man,” but for six decades he corresponded with some of the greatest
writers of his day. This magnificent collection captures his wit, style,
ambition and personal travails, as well as his powerful insights into Black
artistic expression.
Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell UsAbout Our Past and Future BY JAMES SHAPIRO
Shapiro has long created Shakespeare treats for the common
reader, but this time he outdoes himself. From John Quincy Adams’s racist
attacks on “Othello” to the notorious Trump-as-Julius-Caesar Central Park
production in 2017, he reminds us how divided we’ve been since our very
beginnings, with the historical-tragical constantly muscling out the
pastoral-comical.
The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World BY
SARAH STEWART JOHNSON
Johnson, a Georgetown planetary scientist, oscillates
between a history of Mars science and an account of her own journey seeking
sparks of life in the immensity. In prose that swirls with lyrical wonder, she
recalls formative moments in her life and career.
Soul Full of Coal Dust: A Fight for Breath and Justice inAppalachia BY CHRIS HAMBY
Hamby powerfully recounts two stories, both miserable: the
effect that working in coal mines has had on the health of miners, and the
decades-long battle for federal help to force companies to pay for their
medical care.
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, andDefiance During the Blitz BY ERIK LARSON
Larson’s account of Winston Churchill’s leadership during
the 12 turbulent months from May 1940 to May 1941, when Britain stood alone and
on the brink of defeat, is fresh, fast and deeply moving.
The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder inAppalachia BY EMMA COPLEY EISENBERG
Decades after two young women were murdered there, a small
town continues to grapple with the crime. This evocative and elegantly paced
examination of the murders takes a prism-like view.
Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search forMeaning in an Evolving Universe BY BRIAN GREENE
Few humans share Greene’s mastery of both the latest
cosmological science and English prose. Here the best-selling physicist takes
on our deepest mysteries: consciousness, creativity and the end of time.
The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and theRise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice BY DAVID HILL
Hill grew up in Hot Springs, Ark., decades after its
20th-century heyday as the boozy, freewheeling hangout of choice for gamblers,
mobsters and crooked politicians; his book recreates the giddy era with a
delightfully light touch and a focus on the nightclub of the title.
Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music BY ALEX
ROSS
With enormous intellectual range and subtle artistic
judgment, Ross’s history of ideas probes the nerve endings of Western society
as they are mirrored in more than a century of reaction to Richard Wagner’s
oeuvre, from George Eliot to “Apocalypse Now.”
War: How Conflict Shaped Us BY MARGARET MACMILLAN
This is a short book but a rich one with a profound theme.
MacMillan argues that war — fighting and killing — is so intimately bound up
with what it means to be human that viewing it as an aberration misses the
point. War has led to many of civilization’s great disasters but also to many
of civilization’s greatest achievements.
Who Gets in and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions BY
JEFFREY SELINGO
Selingo challenges the facade of meritocracy in his
absorbing examination of America’s obsession with getting into college.
Schools, he argues persuasively, are looking out for their own interests, not
yours.
Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justicein Indian Country BY SIERRA CRANE MURDOCH
This painstakingly reported and beautifully written book,
Murdoch’s first, examines the effects of fracking on a North Dakota reservation
through the eyes of a remarkable Native American woman who, determined to solve
a murder related to the oil boom, exposes the greed and corruption that fueled
it.
THE FOLLOWING TITLES FROM THE LIST ARE NOT CURRENLTY AVAILABLE IN THE JEFFERSON COUNTY LIBRARY SYSTEM
The Duke Who Didn't BY COURTNEY MILAN
By turns consciously tender and fiercely witty, this is an unalloyed charmer about Chloe Fong, a stubborn Chinese-British sauce maker, and Jeremy Yu, the half-Chinese Duke of Lansing, who’s head over heels for her, but can’t seem to say so.
The Tunnel BY A. B. YEHOSHUA. Translated by Stuart Schoffman
In this novel, Zvi Luria, a retired engineer in Tel Aviv, is in the early stages of dementia and takes a job in the desert to keep his mind sharp. The project involves building a road through an area where a Palestinian family lives, hiding out amid ancient ruins. Yehoshua masterfully entwines social commentary with a portrait of a mind in decline.
The Memory Monster BY YISHAI SARID, translated by Yardenne Greenspan
This brilliant short novel serves as a brave, sharp-toothed brief against letting the past devour the present. Sarid tells the story of a tour guide to the Nazi death camps and how his mind begins to slowly unravel as his knowledge of the mechanics of genocide becomes an obsession.
Minor Detail BY ADANIA SHIBLI translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
This slim, haunting novel begins with the rape and murder of a Palestinian girl in 1949, then shifts to present-day Ramallah, where a young woman tries to piece together what happened. Shibli turns her astonishing command of sensory detail into a rich study of memory and violence.
The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir BY WAYÉTU MOOR
Following her magical realist debut novel, “She Would Be King,” Moore’s immersive, exhilarating memoir also has elements of the fantastical — framed by her family’s harrowing escape from civil war in Liberia.
A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane BY SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN
Haldane, the British biologist and ardent communist who helped synthesize Darwinian evolution with Mendelian genetics, was once as famous as Einstein. Subramanian’s elegant biography doubles as a timely allegory of the fraught relationship between science and politics.
The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution BY DAVID PAUL KUHN
Kuhn highlights one day, May 8, 1970, when blue-collar workers went on a rampage against antiwar protesters, noting that the country’s politics have never been the same.
Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl BY JONATHAN C. SLAGHT
Slaght is a wildlife biologist with a singular mission, to conserve an elusive and enormous raptor in the eastern wilds of Russia. The book is an ode to the rigors and pleasures of fieldwork in hard conditions.
The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War BY MICHAEL GORRA
Gorra’s complex and thought-provoking meditation on Faulkner is rich in insight, making the case for the novelist’s literary achievement and his historical value — as an unparalleled chronicler of slavery’s aftermath, and its damage to America’s psyche.
This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home BY LAUREN SANDLER
In 2015, Sandler was volunteering at a homeless shelter when she met Camila, a pregnant resident who was determined to find a permanent, safe place to raise her child. This book charts her path through red tape, educational challenges, family crises and moments of joy amid unimaginable struggle.
The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous BY JOSEPH HENRICH
Henrich combines evidence from his own lab with the work of dozens of collaborators across multiple fields to make an ambitious case for the distinctiveness of Western psychology.
A Woman Like Her: The Story Behind the Honor Killing of a Social Media Star BY SANAM MAHER
This fascinating portrait of Qandeel Baloch, Pakistan’s first big female internet sensation, is also a skillfully reported account of a country in which conservative mores conflict with the pace of social change, and in which women all too often pay the price.
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